The Global War on Morris
Steve Israel, 2014
Simon & Schuster
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476772233
Summary
A witty political satire ripped from the headlines and written by Congressman Steve Israel, who’s met the characters, heard the conversations, and seen the plot twists firsthand.
Meet Morris Feldstein, a pharmaceutical salesman living and working in western Long Island who loves the Mets, loves his wife Rona, and loves things just the way they are. He doesn’t enjoy the news; he doesn’t like to argue. Rona may want to change the world; Morris wants the world to leave him alone. Morris does not make waves.
But one day Morris is seduced by a lonely, lovesick receptionist at one of the doctors’ offices along his sales route, and in a moment of weakness charges a non-business expense to his company credit card. No big deal, you might think. Easy mistake. But the government’s top-secret surveillance program, anchored by a giant, complex supercomputer known as NICK, thinks differently. Eventually NICK begins to thread together the largely disparate and tenuously connected strands of Morris’s life—his friends, family, friends’ friends, his traffic violations, his daughter’s political leanings, his wife’s new patients, and even his failed romantic endeavors—and Morris becomes the US government’s new public enemy number one.
A hilarious, debut novel from a charismatic author, The Global War on Morris toes the line between recent breaking headlines and a future that is not that difficult to imagine. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 30, 1958
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, New York, USA
• Raised—Wantagh, Long Island, New York
• Education—B.A., George Washington University
• Currently—lives on Long Island, New York, and Washington, D.C.
Steven Israel is the United States Representative for New York's 3rd congressional district, serving in the United States Congress since 2001. The district, numbered as the 2nd district from 2001 to 2013, includes portions of northern Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island, as well as a tiny portion of Queens in New York City. He is a member of the Democratic Party and was head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee until November 2014. Before serving in Congress, he served on the Huntington, New York town board. He is a native of New York.
Early life, education, and career
Israel was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Wantagh, on Long Island. He graduated from Nassau Community College and George Washington University. At George Washington University, he worked as an aide for Robert Matsui and then Richard Ottinger. Israel went on to become Suffok County director of the American Jewish Congress. In 1987 he unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the county legislature. After this defeat, he spent three years working as an aide to the Suffolk County executive and founded a PR and marketing firm.[2]
He was elected to the town council in Huntington, New York, in 1993. While there, he reportedly convinced the Republican supervisor to switch parties. A town official said that he persuaded colleagues to move for pay raises while opposing them himself, which was seen as a politically safer move.
U.S. House of Representatives
After Rick Lazio left his House seat to run for the United States Senate in 2001, Israel was elected to his seat, receiving 48% of the vote, defeating Republican Joan Jonhson, who received 34%, and four independent candidates. He has been reelected six times with relatively little difficulty, despite representing a district that is a swing district on paper.
—Committee on Appropriations
Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development
Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs
Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies
—Caucus membership
Co-chair and founder of Congressional Center Aisle Caucus
House Cancer Caucus (Co-chair)
Long Island Sound Caucus (Co-chair)
—Party leadership
Assistant Democratic Whip
House Democratic Caucus Task Force On Defense and the Military (Chair)
House Democratic Study Group on National Security Policy (Co-chair)
(From Wikipedia. Retrieved 12/29/14.)
Book Reviews
[I]t’s an unexpected delight to find The Global War on Morris, a political satire by Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), so spirited and funny.... [A]t the center of a network of sycophants, [Vice President] Cheney stirs the cauldron of our nation’s anxieties about “terrorists, jihadists, liberals.” He whines about how soft Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has gone, snickers at constitutional rights and calculates how best to manipulate the terror alert system before the Republican convention.... a perfect storm of ineptitude, fervency and technophilia.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
[A] laugh-out-loud funny book. I don’t mean a chuckle here or there. This yarn by Congressman Steve Israel is downright hilarious....a race between laughter and absurdity with you as the referee.
Chris Matthews - Hardball
When he's not debuting as a novelist, Israel represents New York's third Congressional District. Naturally, his book has a political bent. After unassuming pharmaceutical salesman Morris Feldstein makes a hasty decision to charge a nonbusiness expense to his company credit card, he's tracked by the government's top-secret surveillance program, which manages to turn him into the new public enemy number one.
Library Journal
When he's not debuting as a novelist, Israel represents New York's third Congressional District. Naturally, his book has a political bent. After unassuming pharmaceutical salesman Morris Feldstein makes a hasty decision to charge a nonbusiness expense to his company credit card, he's tracked by the government's top-secret surveillance program, which manages to turn him into the new public enemy number one.
Booklist
Israel has fun with the bureaucratic side of national security but offers few surprises, while his political jabs are rather flat and facile, and, after all, a decade late....[and] at a time when refugees, casualties and decapitations can make it hard to see the lighter side of any aspect of the war on terror.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
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