A review by betiana
Killing Time by Caleb Carr

3.0

Carr's historical fiction books are fantastic. I picked this one up browsing in the library, thinking it was akin to the wonderful "The Alienist." A large part of my disappointment stems from living very close in time to the future (2023) imagined by Carr, and noticing that we have managed not to destroy everything completely yet. I did feel that he was prescient in his selection of 2007 as a year for a financial crisis, and Afghanistan as a place for great conflict. However, information overload has not made us into an amorphous mass, and there is plenty of hope for our civilization using information wisely. By and large, a mildly entertaining window on the fears we had at the turn of the century, and the alleviating realization that we have not fulfilled them -- at least not yet.