The year is 2030, and America has finally collapsed. The former ruling plutocracy has flown the coop, reconstituting themselves in a wealthy residential area of Buenos Aires, their vast wealth withdrawn from America and shuttled off to Zurich and the Cayman Islands. American political progressives undertake the task of rebuilding the country from the ground up. Chief among these is Sam Field, a middle-aged man going back and forth between therapy sessions and political organization. Once a reporter for the Washington Post, he is now consultant to a journalistic consortium. He is also caught between two women, his therapist Suzanne, and the beautiful and love-struck Peggy, with whom he launches a journal called Empire’s End, documenting America’s last days.

Adventures include doing a tantric workshop with the renowned Swami Vaginanda, whom they fly in from India; a visit to a shaman, or curandero, in Mexico; Sam becoming personal assistant to the new president, Forrest Mendoza; a public confession by Tulsi von Schmulsi at Evergreen State College, entitled “I Am a Douchebag” (with which literally everyone agrees); tracking down the plutocrats in Argentina; establishing détente with Russia; and attempting to apply the work of Marcel Proust to international affairs.

As in the case of his two previous novels, Reaching for Utopia and They Took Him Away in a Wagon, Empire’s End is suffused with lots of sex and good humor. “Ideal for reading in the bathroom, or on an airplane,” says the book’s author.

Morris Berman is a poet, novelist, essayist, social critic, and cultural historian. He has written twenty-five books and nearly 200 articles, and has taught at a number of universities in Europe, North America, Chile, and Mexico. He won the Governor’s Writers Award for Washington State in 1990, and was the first recipient of the annual Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies in 1992. In 2000, The Twilight of American Culture was named a “Notable Book” by the New York Times Book Review, and in 2013 he received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association. Dr. Berman lives in Mexico.