Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs - Kerry Howley - 2023
A Journey Through the Deep State
By: Kerry Howley
Narrated by: Nikki Massoud
Length: 7 hrs
Unabridged Audiobook
Release date: 03-21-23
Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Professionals & Academics, Science & Technology
Language: English
Publisher: Random House Audio
Format: mp3 64/48 stereo
A wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America—from the acclaimed author of Thrown
"Howley meditates on freedom, privacy, storytelling, and the state, carefully following the threads of the War on Terror to the political upheavals of the present day...A beautiful, stylish, nuanced, and empathetic work of art, unlike any I've read before."—Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State
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.
©2023 Kerry Howley (P)2023 Random House Audio
Critic Reviews
"A taut and riveting tour behind the curtain of an America that is unknown to us, but in which we all live. Kerry Howley is an astute, funny, contemplative, and relentless guide whose eye misses nothing. I would follow her anywhere."
—Melissa Febos, bestselling author of Girlhood and Body Work
“I love this book because I can't quite describe what it is. It bristles with the precise kind of strangeness that we live in but cannot name. Howley is one of the very best nonfiction writers working today and she is in peak form here. I'm jealous of her prose.” —Chris Hayes, bestselling author of A Colony in a Nation
"This is a work of profound moral and political importance, and an exhilarating evolution of an art form by one of our great contemporary writers. Howley meditates on freedom, privacy, storytelling, and the state, carefully following the threads of the War on Terror to the political upheavals of the present day. Not only is Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs a necessary expansion and corrective to established narratives of decades of American overreach and cruelty, it is a beautiful, stylish, nuanced, and empathetic work of art, unlike any I've read before." —Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State
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