I got through over half the book before giving up--it just wasn't holding me and I didn't find the base premises credible. The book, published in 1977 is titled "a novel of the near future" and is set in 1997. In the time of the novel, the United States is at the brink of collapse and a totalitarian coup because of scarce resources. I suppose the scenario had credibility in the age of President Carter and the "national malaise" but I immediately thought of the Simon-Ehrlich bet. As the Wiki put it, the two men "entered in a famous scientific wager in 1980, betting on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990." Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, which predicated a "Age of Scarcity" lost the bet.
It's not just that the book depends on what I consider a flawed premise. I can ignore that for a good yarn, but it's just nothing in the characters, plot or writing pulled me in. It's not a bad book mind you--the prose style is competent, the characterizations believable, and the protagonists Lisa and Michael are likeable, but there just wasn't anything distinctive enough, compelling enough, to make me read those last hundred pages. It is, a novel that I found, at best, just OK.
