Describing America’s deeply unsettling politics, at age eighty-one Thomas Farber appraises personal accountability, impending second childhoods, mortality, and the hunger for immortality. Weighing the functions of satire and the meaning of art, his short takes illuminate, debunk, commiserate, and celebrate by rejoinder.
“Framed by two insights—no one chooses to be born and no one can help being what they are—and punctuated by visual images of apocalypse and final judgment, Thomas Farber reckons with the calamitous figure of Donald Trump, democracy in crisis, aging and mortality (his own and Trump’s), his career, the role of the writer, and the fate of books. Reflecting on endings with his distinctive curiosity and honesty, Farber has produced an incisive, witty, satiric, and also compassionate book. Reckonings is the latest in a series of remarkable creative memoirs he’s written over the past decade, coming to terms with life and its limits.”
--Samuel Otter, author of Melville’s Anatomies
