Picked up a copy of Checkpoint yet?
suntimes.com
'Checkpoint' takes anti-Bush sentiment to murderous territory
July 5, 2004
NEW YORK -- Get ready for the next anti-Bush book of the summer. This time, it's fiction. And this time, the subject is murder.
Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker, the author of the best-selling Vox, imagines a conversation between two old high school friends. One of them is so angry about the war in Iraq that he wants to kill President Bush. His friend tries to talk him out of it.
"I wrote Checkpoint because a lot of people felt a kind of powerless seething fury when President Bush took the country to war," Baker said in a statement. "I wanted to capture the specificity of that rage. How do you react to something that you think is hideously wrong? How do you keep it from driving you nuts?"
Baker's publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, said it had received no official complaints about the book, which comes out Aug. 10 with a printing of 75,000 to 100,000 copies.
"Of course I recognize that this is a troubling premise for a novel," Baker said in his statement. "But Checkpoint is an argument against violence, not for it."
Vox has its own political history. The Starr Report mentioned it as a book given to President Clinton by Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern with whom he had an affair.
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