I finished reading Omar El Akkad’s post-apocalyptic novel American War (Vintage Books, 2017) this week. Rather than w...

I finished reading Omar El Akkad’s post-apocalyptic novel American War (Vintage Books, 2017) this week. Rather than write about its brilliance, I’ll quote from the narrator’s portentous prologue. My favorite postcards are from the 2030s and 2040s, the last decades before the planet turned on the country and the country turned on itself. They featured pictures of the great ocean beaches before rising waters took them; images of the Southwest before it turned to embers; photographs of the Midwestern plains, endless and empty under bluest sky, before the Inland Exodus filled them with the coastal displaced. A visual reminder of America as it existed in the first half of the twenty-first century: soaring, roaring, oblivious.