Boston.com | link ›
By Diane White

Albert Brooks is a keen and critical social observer, attested by his work as screenwriter, director, actor, and comedian. His first novel, “Twenty Thirty: The Real Story of What Happens to America’’ is an inspired work of social science fiction, thoughtful and ambitiously conceived, both serious and seriously funny.

In the year 2030 the United States is trillions of dollars in debt to China. Cancer has been cured, so more people are living longer, draining the Treasury with health care and other entitlements, while remaining youthful due to various medical and cosmetic breakthroughs. Millions of insensible people are kept alive, hooked up at great cost to expensive machines to appease powerful religious lobbies, and the influential nursing home industry. Young people feel they have no future and resent the “olds’’ for gobbling up their tax dollars. “He never even sent me a birthday present,’’ says one young man of his grandfather. “and now I have to pay for his wheelchair.’’ Read whole article ›

Los Angeles Times | link ›
By Patrick Goldstein

New York Times | link ›
By Dave Itzkoff

LOS ANGELES — For a guy who just wrote a whole book about the myriad catastrophes that could befall the United States in the next 20 years, Albert Brooks says he’s not interested in end-of-the-world scenarios and, more to the point, he’s too nervous to contemplate them.

“We’ve seen those stories where three people are left, and Denzel Washington’s wearing tattered clothes,” a spirited Mr. Brooks said recently at his Beverly Hills office. “It’s a great possibility, but I don’t want to imagine it. I try to keep it out of my imagination.”

Yet when he peers into the near future in his comic debut novel, “2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America,” which St. Martin’s Press will release next Tuesday, Mr. Brooks, the comedian and filmmaker, doesn’t necessarily find a lot to laugh about.

The good news is that cancer has been cured; the bad news is that this and other innovations have prolonged people’s lives to untenable lengths, draining the resources of a broke and broken United States, and polarizing relations between the young and the old, and between the merely old and the superannuated. With the economy and the American dream in shambles, a huge earthquake hits Los Angeles, testing the administration of the country’s first Jewish president. Read whole article ›