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    After America
    After America
    After America
    Audiobook20 hours

    After America

    Written by John Birmingham

    Narrated by Kevin Foley

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    March 14, 2003, was the day the world changed forever. A wave of energy slammed into North America and devastated the continent. The U.S. military, poised to invade Baghdad, was left without a commander in chief. Global order spiraled into chaos. Now, three years later, a skeleton U.S. government headquartered in Seattle directs the reconstruction of an entire nation-and the battle for New York City has begun.

    Pirates and foreign militias are swarming the East Coast, taking everything they can. The president comes to the Declared Security Zone of New York and barely survives the visit. The enemy-whoever they are-controls Manhattan's concrete canyons and the abandoned flatlands of Long Island. The U.S. military, struggling with sketchy communications and a lack of supplies, is mired in a nightmare of urban combat.

    Caught up in the violence is a Polish-born sergeant who watches the carnage through the eyes of an intellectual and with the heart of a warrior. Two smugglers, the highborn Lady Julianne Balwyn and her brawny partner, Rhino, search for a treasure whose key lies inside an Upper East Side Manhattan apartment. Thousands of miles away, a rogue general leads the secession of Texas and a brutal campaign against immigrants, while Miguel Pieraro, a Mexican-born rancher, fights back. And in England, a U.S. special ops agent is called into a violent shadow war against an enemy that has come after her and her family.

    The president is a stranger to the military mindset, but now this mild-mannered city engineer from the Pacific Northwest needs to make a soldier's choice. With New York clutched in the grip of thousands of heavily armed predators, is an all-out attack on the city the only way to save it?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 24, 2010
    ISBN9781400188581
    After America
    Author

    John Birmingham

    John Birmingham was born in Liverpool, United Kingdom, but grew up in Ipswich, Queensland, Australia. Between writing books he contributes to a wide range of newspapers and magazines on topics as diverse as biotechnology and national security. He lives at the beach with his wife, daughter, son, and two cats.

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    Reviews for After America

    3.5/5

    84 ratings8 reviews

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    • 4/5
      OK so reading the second book of a series without reading the first one isn't the best choice--it's what I did. On its own, it is a fine techno/political thriller. Nothing too memorable, but a fine read.
    • 2/5
      A long winded actionless story. I have put it aside for the time being. Any book in which there is over fifty percent narrative is not for me.
    • 4/5
      Good story with lots of surprises and interesting characters.
    • 3/5
      Exciting book. Continues the story started with the last book. Several story lines/characters continue, and continue, and continue. The end is not really an end, just another transition which I can't wait to listen to in the next volume.
    • 3/5
      After America by John Birmingham is about the US after an unexplained mass casualty event that wiped out large portions of the eastern and central US. There are several parallel plots that are only loosely tied together. One is about a battle to retake New York City from foreign looters and an Arab group trying to form a new homeland after devastation by the Israelis. One is about a group of Mormons and Mexican family trying to escape persecution by a rogue general who is running Texas. Another is about a spy/special ops agent on the trail of an enemy of the US.It took a while to understand several of the plots. There must have been an earlier novel(s) that covered the immediate period after the mass casualty event. This made the novel a slow start while you figured out what was going on.The end of the novel is a little bit anti-climatic. The three stories reach a conclusion, but it feels like there is a lot more story to be told. This probably the setup for a sequel to continue the story.
    • 2/5
      way behind on notes -finished this weeks ago.

      Ok, post apocalyptic fiction (most of population of North America suddenly dissolves and so do people who try to go there for a couple of years, then the effect disappears.

      Kind of disappointing stereotyping of the Muslim world and some coincidences that are pretty WTF, but still a page turner. Birmingham's a guilty pleasure and this is very much a middle book sagging too.

      I buy Birmingham for the cool ideas and the excellent initial book carrying out the premise but he gets a bit too into "the world is ending" apocalyptic results of his premises.

      He also goes a little too far in having this ensemble cast and some of his characterizations of women annoy me.

    • 2/5
      It took me ages to get into this book and remember who's who in the zoo. This meant that the read was a bit of a drag.

      I thought there were too many story lines and they didn’t come together. Large parts of this book could have been completely excluded and it would have helped to make it a tighter more coherent read.

      Plus there is the issue of it being part of series. I think all books, part of series or not, should stand on their own and this one doesn’t. It’s clearly leading to another book as there are many story lines that did not have a conclusion. The only good point is that the next book is not that far away so it might not be so hard to get into.
    • 3/5
      Reading this, I kept thinking about Rudyard Kipling. Birmingham is an excellent adventure writer with a great sfnal imagination who has totally bought into the Huntington “Clash of Civilizations” thesis. This is the second book in a series, which begins when an unknown force wipes out every living soul in a great teardrop shape covering most of the continental U.S. and significant portions of Mexico and Canada, so that what is spared of the U.S. is only Portland and surrounds, Hawai’i, Alaska, and Americans overseas including a large portion of the military. Among other things, this results in an Israeli nuclear first strike, an Indo-Pakistani nuclear conflict, and the expulsion of many dark-skinned immigrants (and second- and third-generation citizens) from the UK, all of which are background.The narrative focuses on the President (a former civil engineer), a retired assassin brought back into active duty when someone tries to kill her husband and baby daughter, a South American immigrant trying to take advantage of the new U.S. settlement rules which award land to people willing to homestead, and a couple of other characters, including a Polish army officer gaining U.S. citizenship via military service and a child soldier brought to the U.S. to engage in jihad in the hotly contested/pirated/looted ruins of NYC. Basic message: the American dream is the right one; a lot of the people who epitomize the American dream are immigrants. Main bad guys: Muslims (there is one progressive Muslim character who helps the assassin). Secondary bad guys: white supremacist Americans from the breakaway Texas Republic. The President even says that they lost sight of the true American dream, so we know it’s true. Greens (a powerful party, given that Portland’s citizenry now represents a substantial percentage of America’s) take a whupping too—they ought to know that genetically engineered crops are the only hope now that the heartland is a wasteland. And Americans in the military are too politically correct, according to the Polish officer, uncomfortable with racial slurs even when they have no problems killing a group of African Muslims. I have the feeling that Birmingham, an Australian, is working through some sort of “I love humanity; it’s people I hate” thing with America/Americans.On the one hand, Birmingham recognizes that every character has reasons for his (or occasionally her) beliefs and actions. Almost everyone does brutal things in order to survive; there are no innocents. On the other, Muslims are piratical rapists determined to wipe out all non-Muslims, so it’s pretty clear which non-innocents Birmingham thinks have the better claims. It was just hard for me to follow the adventures of the protagonists, which had plenty of drama, without thinking about all the other people—mostly from Africa and Asia—dying from nuclear fallout, uprooted from the lands of their birth, or otherwise devastated, and wondering about how their stories would have gone.