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Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State
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About This Book
A wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America--from the acclaimed author of Thrown Who are you? You are data about data. You are a map of connections--a culmination of everything you have ever posted, searched, emailed, liked, and followed. In this groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction, Kerry Howley investigates the curious implications of living in the age of the indelible. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs tells the true story of intelligence specialist Reality Winner, a lone young woman who stuffs a state secret under her skirt and trusts the wrong people to help. After printing five pages of dangerous information she was never supposed to see, Winner finds herself at the mercy of forces more invasive than she could have possibly imagined. Following Winner's unlikely journey from rural Texas to a federal courtroom, Howley maps a hidden world, drawing in John Walker Lindh, Lady Gaga, Edward Snowden, a rescue dog named Outlaw Babyface Nelson, and a mother who will do whatever it takes to get her daughter out of jail. Howley's subjects face a challenge new to history: they are imprisoned by their past selves, trapped for as long as the Internet endures. A soap opera set in the deep state, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is a free fall into a world where everything is recorded and nothing is sacred, from a singular writer unafraid to ask essential questions about the strangeness of modern life.
Reviews
"The book is full of suggestive swerves and leaps of association, Howley's attempts at getting us to look again at subjects and stories that might have been shocking once upon a time, but which we've grown used to living with ..."
"A literate, readable meditation on the surveillance state and its discontents."
"Witty, humane, and fiercely intelligent, this is a striking critique of a world intent on 'burying itself' in information."
"Bottoms Up returns information to its context, capturing as much as possible the texture of reality, showing us how bewildering it often is ..."
"Howley manages to push beyond partisan hack work to lay bare the flaws or biases in everyone's read on Reality ..."
"Wide-ranging, often chilling ..."
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