The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

Although America’s political system seems unable to stimulate robust, sustained economic growth, it at least is stimulating consumption of a small but important segment of literature. Dystopian novels are selling briskly -- Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (1932), Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935), George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” (1945) and “1984” (1949), Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” (1953) and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985), all warning about nasty regimes displacing democracy.

There is, however, a more recent and pertin...