NA

A shallow political rant from Bush Jr's first term, done up as a fictional dialogue. I suppose Baker would argue it's a portrayal of the despair and confusion felt by many Americans (and me) at the time, but neither character has nearly enough depth to make that work. There's a brief discussion of conspiracy theories which is perhaps prescient, but really the whole thing seems especially juvenile in light of the Trump era's manifold monstrosities.

Mercifully short but still one of the more pointless ways of spending an hour and a half. ( )

eBook

I thought that I would find reading this book to be a lot more cathartic than it actually was. Baker's decision to set his book in the real world with a character discussing his plan to assassinate George W. Bush, rather than just some nameless President, however, seems like just a cheap ploy for attention.

Of course, had he elected to use a nameless target rather than a real person, this book would have perilously little to recommend it. The characters are not nearly interesting enough to sustain the narrative (short as it is), leaving the book bereft of anything to attract a reader's interest, short of one's particular feeling about the current administration.

Even that, however, feels lacking. Modern political discourse, sadly, doesn't progress much past calls for assassination, although those calls are couched in metaphor and abstracted. But conservatives just want liberals to just run away to their hippy communes and leave the man's work of running the country to the "real patriots," while liberals just want the conservatives to be locked away for their fascist war crimes.

So reading Checkpoint doesn't feel like anything new or even shocking. Oh, look, people hate the President and wish he was dead; frankly, that's not even yesterday's news. ( )

More than just an anti-Bush dialogue, although if true, it was way worse than I even knew. What I found interesting, if subtle, was the interplay between the two not-very-close friends, one wanting to assassinate the President and the other trying to convince him not to. Different attempts, different strategies, positions reversing, food discussions, links to the past. The politics are there, but so are the characterizations. ( )

One wonders how Baker got this story through his agent and his editor and into print in August of 2004. It's pretty clear that this is simply the author ranting about the political situation of 2004; framing it as a dialog turns a rant into a "novel" just like putting a handle on the side of a building makes that "portable".
But even bad Baker remains interesting. ( )