Before the Fall

Before the Fall was my first book club book of 2019. And I have to say that I had some trepidation at the beginning. The book centers on the crash of a private jet. A pair of wealthy, powerful couples are on board, along with one couple's children. And there's a down-on-his-luck artist that one of the wives befriended in the weeks before the crash. The artist and the young son are the only ones to survive the crash, and it sets off a whirlwind of media attention as everyone tries to figure out what happened.

I was worried in the beginning, because the book seemed set to talk about fate and destiny. How did these lives lead to this moment, and was every step inevitable. And that's uncomfortable because when one kid survives and the other dies and you start talking about what's meant to be....well this is a big part of the reason that I don't truck with religion.

But the book pulled through and ended up doing a really elegant job of making a point that I agree with wholeheartedly. To quote Patton Oswalt (quoting his late wife): "It's all chaos. Be kind."

The book spends a lot of time poking at the idea that the crash was a deliberate assassination of one of the powerful men on board. David Bateman is the head of a Fox-News like media empire that had just discovered itself in a sticky legal situation. And Ben Kipling was under investigation for laundering money for America's enemies. But when it's ultimately revealed that the crash had nothing to do with either man, that they were swept up in a different drama entirely, I fell a little bit in love with the book.

The book offers a great commentary on wealth and power and the illusion that everything revolves around people who wield both. It's also very much about survival and privacy how rumors can so quickly turn heroism to something more dastardly.

I think this was my favorite book club pick yet, and I definitely would never have picked it up on my own.

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