Feed (Newflesh #1) by Mira Grant

I once read a Mira Grant book called Into the Drowning Deep and I talked about it incessantly for weeks and weeks. It was so great and even now I sort of want to read it again. So when I was in Seattle and the friend I was staying with, Jason, had Feed by Mira Grant on his table, I got very excited and immediately ordered it from my library. He was excited to talk about it, but I have to admit I didn't want any spoilers, so I didn't ask any questions.

YOU GUYS!! Do you want to know what this book is about? If you don't want to know, stop reading now.

It's about bloggers in the zombie apocalypse!! Bloggers! Zombies!

Can you even think of a book that would appeal to me more?

Okay, well, this book was amazing. Yes, it's almost 600 pages long, but it reads like it's 200. Mira Grant writes in such a compelling way and I did the staying up way too late to read just one more chapter thing. 

We have a brother and sister pair who were born after the Rising. They have only known a life with zombies. They blog and are chosen to follow an up and coming presidential nominee. What's going to happen on the campaign trail?  I think you know that it's going to be hijinks. Another excellent thing to recommend this book is that Grant does not veer off into romantic storylines. There's no sex, no thinking about sex, and remarkably little mention of romantic relationships. That is PERFECT in a zombie book, as far as I'm concerned. 

I think everybody knows where this is going. 5/5 stars

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Lines of note:

Fear justifies everything. Fear makes it okay to have surrendered freedom after freedom, until our every move is tracked and recorded in a dozen databases the average man will never have access to. Fear creates, defines, and shapes our world, and without it, most of us would have no idea what to do with ourselves. (page 428)

This book was written in 2010 and you can sort of feel the backlash to the PATRIOT Act in it, can't you? 

Someday, we'd be cardboard boxes at the back of somebody's closet, and there wasn't a thing we could do about it. (page 493)

Ugh. Maybe this just hit me because of my mom's recent death, but it was like a kick to the solar plexus. 

Hat mentions:

None

All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall

All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall was a recommendation from Catherine on the podcast Sarah's Bookshelves Live. 

If you read this book, along with The Light Pirate, and Alas, Babylon, I think you'd be all set in the world of dystopian fiction. In this one, really strong hurricanes called hypercanes are common, the glaciers have melted, and a small group of human survivors have taken to living on the roof the American Natural History Museum in New York City, including Nonie and her family. But when a storm surge takes down the building, they must leave and survive without shelter. 

Cli-fi is so scary, right? Because this is not implausible. At some point, humans are going to have to figure out how to live when coastal cities are no longer viable. At some point, will the true danger be nature or other people? 

I found this book engrossing. The chapters are short - two to four pages each - so you always feel like you're making real progress. I found the writing hard to parse at first. Consider the following sentence. It came early on in the book and I'm still not sure what it's supposed to mean, to be honest. 

We were on the fourth floor, Astor Turret was, too, had a good view out the city, big windows. (page 21)

But then once I got into Nonie's voice and her tendency to let her mind wander to the past just as big events were happening, I liked the rhythms of this book. It is clear that Nonie is an expert at dissociation because she just cuts out when things get scary. I appreciated that it was a character trait that lasted throughout the entire book.

Anyway, I liked this. I read it on the drive to and from Iowa on Easter and it made the time go by quickly. 4/5 stars (there were some writing quirks I did not care for)

Lines of note:

"Sometimes you have to remember that The World As It Is changed things, but we can change them back." (page 166)

I think I needed this reminder in April 2025. 

Hat mentions (why hats?):

"Nonie, can you see if my hat is in the pack?" (page 61)

Keller found his straw hat, veteran of rainforests. (page 62)

Keller's had matches, boxers, a roll of bandage, a tin cup, a baggie of seeds, the latest of his notebooks, a pen he took from the Amen gift show that wrote wet or upside down, second socks, a wool hat, a compass, a brass watch. (page 62)

He pulled his field hat lower and dug into his stroke. (page 140)

A sign said MASSPIKE, a black hat next to the worlds. (page 221)

If, like me, you had no idea what that line meant. 

Darling knocked softly on the door, then slid in, drenched, his wool hat back on, his cheeks still bright. (page 269)

Angelfall (Penryn & the End of Days #1) by Susan Ee

I must have checked out Angelfall by Susan Ee at least three times from the library and I just kept sending it back unread, but I needed it for the "book by a self-published author" Pop Sugar Reading Challenge prompt and I told myself I would read it this time. 

And so I did on one cold November afternoon. 

Penryn is trying to keep her family together. Six weeks after the angels of the apocalypse arrived, it's tough out there for humans and Penryn's mom is battling with mental health issues and her seven-year-old sister is in a wheelchair. Penryn finds an allyship with an angel after her sister is kidnapped by other angels and they try to find her sister.

I don't know, friends. This was readable, but I suspect that there's going to be angel/human romance happening later in this series and I am not here for it. 

The writing was fine. The story was fine if a tiny bit predictable. Maybe I don't want to read about the apocalypse right now. Maybe I don't want to think about biological warfare. Maybe I don't want my fantasy to be so serious. It's me, not the book.

It was fine! Fine! 3.5/5 stars

Hat mentions (why hats?): 

I tip my bag of frozen peas at them like a hat as I try to step between them. (page 119)

Several of the angels going into the club are in old-fashioned gangster zoot suits complete with felt hats and jaunty feathers. (page 177)

Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen

Forget horror novels, forget the horror that is the parental abuse and incest of Flowers in the Attic, forget it all. Do you know what the most terrifying book I've ever read is? Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen.

Jacbosen, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, has spent years researching the threat of nuclear war, and her work is showcased in this terrifying but mesmerizing book in which she details a very plausible scenario of a retaliatory nuclear war that leads to a massive extinction event. Thanks, I hate every bit of it. I assure that you if I am alive during a nuclear war, I want to die in the initial attack. I don't want to be lingering with nuclear winter, radiation poisoning, or starvation afterwards. 

I don't want to scare anyone, but there are THOUSANDS, maybe tens of thousands, of nuclear weapons on the planet, some in the hands of unstable leaders (*ahem* - not casting stones here, January 20 is just around the corner). Also, the people who make decisions about using nuclear weapons will be making decisions with limited information with very little time to decide. 

There's just so much scary information in this book. Jacobsen used FOIA requests to unseal a lot of previously classified documents; interviewed politicians, military leaders, and scientists; and wrote a super scary write-up of what she learned. And what she learned is bad. In less than an hour and a half, hundreds of nuclear warheads could be released onto this planet. 

Should you read this? Probably not during the week of a huge national election in which a madman was elected to lead these United States of America. But maybe if you feel like you want to know how quickly you can die? 

I listened to the audiobook read by the author and man, Jacobsen's voice is calm and soothing and it was such a contrast between how she sounded and the words she was saying. It was bewitching.

I don't know, friends. Great book, but not the book for every reader. 5/5 stars

Lines of note:

...all it takes is one nihilistic madman with a nuclear arsenal to start a nuclear war no one can win. (timestamp 4:17:56)

Ahem.

They are accustomed to traveling deep underwater for 70 days at a time: no texts, no emails, no radio contact, no radar signature. US Ohio-class submariners pride themselves as being the ultimate nuclear deterrent. Only an insane person would want to be on the receiving end of its wrath. (timestamp 6:38:57)

Oh, dear. 

But executive branch people at Site R are fighting over line of succession protocols from Article II, section 1, clause 4 of The Constitution. At issue is the still unresolved, post-9/11 piece of congressional legislation about what to do after a mass decapacitation event. (timestamp 7:48:40)

Egads. Did anyone else watch Battlestar Gallactica? I keep thinking of the scene where Roslin is 43rd in line of succession...

In a time of nuclear crisis, a central question remains: Who will perform their job dutifully and who will ditch their post and run? Will those in the military chain of command choose country over family or family over country? Can anyone predict such things? Will fate and circumstance play a role? (timestamp 8:08:14)

I'm running. No question here. 

The consequences of a paranoid leader's fear of a preemptive decapitation strike are as real as the nuclear weapons themselves. True in this scenario, true in real life. (timestamp 8:25:36)

Ahem. 

...the only way nuclear war ends is in nuclear holocaust...(page 8:49:51)

Oh, dear AGAIN.

There will be no more fresh water, no more toilets to flush, no sanitation, no street lights, no tunnel lights, no lights at all, only candles until there are none left to burn, no gas pumps, no fuel, no ATMs, no cash withdrawals, no access to money, no cell phones, no landlines, no calling 911, no calls at all, no emergency communication systems, except some high frequency HF radios, no ambulance services, no hospital equipment that works. Sewage spills out everywhere. It takes less than 15 minutes for disease carrying insects to swarm, to feed on piles of human waste, on garbage, on the dead. America's complex system of systems comes to a sudden, apocalyptic halt. (timestamp 10:35:41)

Please let me dead before this comes to pass. 

Hat mentions: 

None

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Can we all admire that I have a tag labelled "apocalypse?" What's an interesting tag on your blog?

6.8 Art - Results

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined themed chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the eighth day of the month is "Art."

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The results of the Wisconsin election are in and the liberal Supreme Court justice did prevail over the conservative, so that's encouraging. I'm not entirely convinced that this configuration of the Court can do anything to deal with the Republican's iron control over the state legislature, but I'm doing my best to keep my optimistic face on.

But the state also passed three ridiculous referendums, and I'm constantly confused about who is splitting their ballot these ways. I cannot worry about that right now, I guess.

Meanwhile, the local elections were a mess. An absolutely crazy person was re-elected to the school board, a brand new crazy person was elected to city council, and a sane person was elected to the city council only to resign the following day. The school funding referendum failed, mostly because the school district did a terrible job of explaining how they were going to use the money.  I honestly read the results of the local elections with my mouth wide open, wondering what kind of community I live in. I love my town, I really do, but these results were a hard pill to swallow.

Golden State, Gibson Byrd, oil on canvas, 1977

I offer up this painting that I saw when I was at the Chazen last month. It's a critique of man's relationship with nature. When I saw this, I was a bit dumbfounded that it was from 1977. I mean, think about how much more trash humans are creating in 2024 than they were fifty years ago. Just such a powerfully prescient painting. 

And I bring it to you in light of the garbage heap of election results for my town. This painting was all I could think of all Wednesday morning when my husband and I were going back and forth about whether or not we should move. (Answer: Probably. Reality: We need to stay here and put up the good fight with our "Public Schools Unite Us" sign in the yard flying a PRIDE flag.)

What's a piece of art you can't get out of your mind?

(You all. I always label my blog posts and while I have hundreds of labels, I also only regularly use a handful. I found that I have an "apocalypse" label and I swear to you that I have no idea why, but it made me laugh and laugh, so I'm using it here. I want you to understand that I know these election results aren't really apocalyptic, but I think this is very bad news for our local school district.)

The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton

In the near future, hurricanes are hitting Florida harder and more often. A young girl is born during the peak of one of those hurricanes and is named after the storm. And that's how we meet Wanda, the titular character in The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton. 

This is a sobering book on many fronts. What happens when municipalities run out of money to keep basic services running? What happens to families when phones stop working? How do you survive in a world with no solid ground? Climate change is real and happening right now and when do these stop being hypothetical questions and start being things we need to grapple with?

It's also beautifully written and the characters seem real and like you should be able to ask them to come over for dinner. I'm particularly fond of the biology professor who takes Wanda in and shows her how to survive. There's a weird magical element to the story I was not a huge fan of, but it doesn't come up all that often and it doesn't detract from the main message of the book, which is that we better start preparing because bad things are going to happen soon.

4.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

The truth is, Kirby's happiest when he's fixing things. Sometimes she worries that this is the reason he married her. (page 10)

Ha. Don't we all have this worry?

Now that she's gone, he allows himself to believe she was good at everything. That they would be unconditionally happy if only she were still here. When she died, he was beginning to think he barely knew her. Now that he's lived with her ghost for ten years, he is an expert. (page 136)

I just thought this paragraph on grief was evocative and moving.

Nursing a dying creature isn't always the kind thing to do. (page 187)

Oh, how it hurts to think about when you need to give up on certain people, places, and things.

In the After duology by Demitria Lunetta

In the After is the first in Lunetta's debut duology. In this young adult dystopian thriller, Amy Harris survives when aliens land on the planet and wipe out most of humanity. Thanks to a combination of a father who is interested in saving the environment and a mother who is paranoid for safety, Amy's house  is a safe haven for her while she learns the rules about how to stay safe from the aliens.

She soon adopts a child, teaching her how to be stealthy and silent, scavenge for necessities, and live in this strange normal. But, as happens so often in dystopian novels like this, the real enemy turns out to be the humans Amy meets along the way. I liked the first part of the book, when Amy was surviving out there, figuring out how things worked, using her skills and cleverness to get her way out of potential problems. Once she arrives at the new place, though, all of the things that made Amy so compelling on her own just started to annoy me. Also, all the adults were so annoying. 

But. A lot of that is on me because young adult literature is not always my jam. I thought Lunetta set Amy up as a smart badass and then took it all away from her. But then the ending happened and now I'm excited to see what else Amy can do in this world.  

3.5/5 stars and I'm excited for the next book.

In the End is the second part of this duology and while it started with the same promise as In the After, with Amy out in the world by herself trying to survive, the whole thing came to a fizzling end. Amy manages to find her way to Fort Black, where she tries to find a researcher who can help her sister. But Fort Black was a prison in the before times and is filled with angry, violent men. All the available women must have a man to protect them. Amy is obviously not on board with this plan and all sorts of terrible things happen to her as she seems to ignore this basic fact about Fort Black over and over again. Anyway, she eventually finds the researcher and just when you think things are going to get good...the book ends. 3/5 stars.

I don't know that I'd recommend these two books all that strongly. They're fine.  But if you miss them, you're not missing out on much. 

Woman World by Aminder Dhaliwal

Woman World by Aminder Dhaliwal is a humorous graphic novel based on the supposition that male humans have gone extinct and only women are left on the planet. It's 250 pages that you can get through in 45 minutes, so you really feel like you're making progress on something in the world!

The Good:

Dhaliwal pulls off something really challenging to do here. She manages to write a humorous post-apocalyptical world. Nearly every page has a joke on it, but there's also a message about the fact that a lot of problems women have are exacerbated by men, but wouldn't just go away without men around. 

The art is beautiful. It's a strangely realistic version of living in a small town, where your lives intersect with everyone else's. I do regular (Zoom) fitness classes through our local healthcare consortium and the woman who does most of those classes is named Tiffany. The same 12-15 of us regularly attend these classes, so you get to know your fellow students pretty well.  I'm also on the board of directors for our local community center and a woman named Rachel used to be on this board and she recruited me (I still text her questions about once a month - ha! - she's never really going to "leave" the board).  Rachel was at one of our Zoom classes yesterday and I'd never seen her before, so in the minute or two before class started, I took myself off mute and said hi to her. Tiffany was so EXCITED that someone knew Rachel. But it became clear within thirty seconds that EVERYONE who was on the call knew Rachel from one thing or another except Tiffany. Small town life, yo. 

It starts off serious... (page 253)

...and then there's the joke. (page 254)

The Bad:

It's still quite a binary-based book. Trans-women are accepted as women in this world, but non-binary people are not really present. It wasn't a dealbreaker for me, but if I had someone in my life who was sensitive to these types of things, this probably wouldn't be the book for them.

Despite the humor and the art and the absolute charm of this book, I closed the book feeling slightly unsatisfied.  I think there were deeper themes to be realized from this topic, but those themes were shied away from in the service of humor. I guess that's fine and not everything needs to be a meditation on life and the meaning of it all, but it's not the kind of thing you'll be thinking about once you return the book to the library.  

Overall:

It was a fun diversion for a bit on the couch. I thought it was funny and touching at times and I deeply admire Dhaliwal's art and vision.  3/5 stars

Year One by Nora Roberts

 

Most of the time, I begin books with no knowledge of them at all.  I may know a brief blurb, but in general I like to go in with a blank slate. But this year I have learned that I do need a primer or I will accidentally end up reading books about pandemics when you're not quite ready to do so, and I've been just making sure that I'm not about to dive into a book about mask-wearing and people dying in mass numbers.  But guess what I didn't do when this Nora Roberts book came across my radar?  Year One by Nora Roberts was published in 2017. 

The Doom strikes (for mythical reasons that I'm sure will be important in later books) and the vast majority of humankind is dead. Meanwhile, a lucky few are immune. Some of these immune have special powers - witches, fairies, telekinetics, and a seemingly endless supply of other powers.  We mostly follow Arlys, a reporter who managed to get out of New York City and Lana, a chef who ends up pregnant.  

It was actually a pretty good book. I've read that it's similar to Stephen King's The Stand, but with many fewer pages.  I was just a bit surprised by the story because this Roberts absolutely breaking form. This not a romance novel at all.  You think there's a romance, but it doesn't last. In some ways it was interesting because every page was unexpected.  It was rape-y and violent, but just not what I expect from the same author who wrote the adorable, sweet Bride Quartet.  I just wasn't expecting anything that happened in this book and while that was a compelling narrative, I also just kept putting off reading more pages because it was such a downer.

So, as it turns out, I'm not ready for this just yet. The idea of burning bodies in Central Park, hospitals with only one doctor, and people dying days after contracting a virus just didn't sit well with me. The idea of government collapse and raiders taking control of neighborhoods is horrifyingly real. I think I'm doing all the right things to get over the trauma of the last year and I'm slowly reintegrating. But at the same time, there's a constant voice chirping in my head *should I be wearing a mask here?* *is it safe to do yoga in the studio?* *is going to work the best option for you today since you had a sniffle yesterday?* and this book just made that voice stop chirping and start to become louder. I question every decision I make now much more than before I picked up this book.

So.  Beware, my friends. It's not a traditional romance novel.  I wish I'd read it closer to its release date so I could give you more of a general review, but for me, in this particular moment, I'd say give it a good skip until 2026.

Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton

Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton is the book I was supposed to get when I accidentally got the not-great book The Hollow Kingdom by Clare B. Dunkle, so I kept putting off reading it because I had already formed an impression of what it would be about. I have to apologize to Buxton for this because I was way wrong.

S.T. (Shit Turd) is a crow who was raised by a MoFo (human) named Big Jim.  When an illness strikes all of humankind, including his beloved Big Jim, S.T. and his bloodhound brother Dennis take to the streets of Seattle where they have to battle local murders of crows, escaped animals from the zoo, and the zombified remains of MoFos.  This book is irreverent, hilarious, and I wished I had read it in 2019 and not 2021 because the whole time I just kept thinking about how horribly realistic this illness was, rather than focusing on the lighthearted nature of a dystopian novel told from the point of view of animals.  

It's a funny book. I love the observational writing told from the point of view of a crow. Humans do weird things sometimes if you stop to think about them and I love that Buxton's writing focuses on that.  I thought the characters of S.T. and Dennis were well-fleshed out and I loved that the Pomeranian named Cinnamon was a hero, not a useless puffball.  I even thought that Big Jim and Tiffany S., who Big Jim met on Tinder, were interesting human characters, even though we never met them in person and only read about them in flashbacks.  I found Buxton's ability to create full-fledged characters in relatively few words with just a few well-chosen anecdotes and personal possessions to be incredibly admirable. It's an interesting writing exercise, really. Write one powerful anecdote and describe a handful of your possessions and see if that does a good job of illustrating who you are. Bonus points if you can do it from the POV of an animal.

I watched the boy and girl human from the window. They have an obsession with moving the cold, white frozen water from one place in my yard to another place. Today they were working on the place where the yard meets the street.  The boy was pounding the frozen water with sticks and the girl was using these sliding things with ropes around them to move the frozen water away from the street to the yard right outside my window. She would wave to me when she walked by the window and she said something to me, but I couldn't hear. I assume she said, "Good girl, Hannah," because that's what she always says to me. Sometimes she would sit down on the sliding thing and ride it down to meet the boy human, who mostly just kept pounding. 

Once, she tried to pick up the sliding thing to pour the white water into the yard, but the white water just spilled all over her. She laughed and went to get one of the sticks.  I growled because the stick came close to my window and I wanted it to know that it could not come near me.  She looked happy out there in her purple coat and purple hat with a pompom on the top. Her nose was red and drippy, though, and I thought she was silly for moving around the white water.  She could be inside with me, all warm and toasty.  More white water would come tomorrow anyway.

Eh. I'm no Buxton. 

I'm not entirely sure what the big theme was, to be fair. Is it a warning about climate change?  Our addiction to technology?  Biological warfare?  Because the illness that struck the humans was not explained particularly well (I mean, why would it?  Why would animals have this knowledge?), the message of the book was a bit muddled, which is a definite criticism. But, on the other hand, it's not really a book about what happened to the humans. It's a book that imagines one scenario of what would happen to wild and domesticated animals if humans were suddenly out of the picture. Again, I'm not sure what the theme of the book really is in that case ("teamwork makes the dream work"?), but I don't want to analyze the book too much. It's funny, it's creative, Buxton can work a sentence like a dream, and S.T. is a character for the ages.

Notable lines:
1. From the POV of a cat - "I made my decision to leave the home. It's true that I shall miss the toasty laps and the dehydrated fish blobs and ambushing their bulbous toes under the bed blanket and how they used to worship me. Most especially, I will miss the cheese. But not as much as they will miss me. I am incredible." (page 23)
Cats are incredible. 

2. From the POV of S.T. the crow - "I felt a powerful pang of relief that I wasn't female. It seemed that being female meant to be prey, even among your own species." (page 79)
This felt like Buxton was speaking from a deep well of experience. I want to hug her.  Also, truthbombs hurt sometimes.

3. From the POV of S.T. the crow - "One of those insidious inspirational posters that said LEADERSHIP was barely hanging on to its place on the wall. It had a bald eagle on it. Irksome. What do bald eagles know about leadership?" (page 146)
One of the best parts of this book was the rivalries between animals, including entire species. Also, those inspirational posters are absolutely ubiquitous and insipid.

4. From the POV of S.T. the crow - "And everyone on earth knows that if you have the respect of a cat, it means your soul is one worth being around." (page 268)
I want Zelda the Cat to respect me, but I do think she thinks of me as mostly a way to get warmth and food.  

Things I looked up:
Tippi Hedren (page 16, among others) - An old-school American actress who starred in Hitchcock's The Birds.  She was also an animal activist.

Maasai tribe (page 162) - An African tribe of Kenya and Tanzania known for body modification, especially pierced and stretched earlobes.

Kwakwaka'wakw (page 162, among others) - Traditional inhabitants of the coastal areas of northeastern Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia - in the 2016 census, fewer than 4000 people self-identified as having Kwakwaka-wakw ancestry

Brazilian Satare- Mawe (page 162) - Indigenous people of Brazil known for their initiation rites in which they repeatedly use bullet ant stings paralyze the hand and arm of young intiates. 

Monkey Buffet Festival (page 162) - Annual celebration in Thailand to mark centuries of respect for monkeys.

Volitant (page 201) - Flying or capable of flying (in this case referring to a parrot who was flying)

Voltaic (page 259) - Relating to electricity produced by chemical action in a battery (in this case referring to a parrot's memory)

 

 

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank

At some point, I heard about Alas, Babylon as a follow-up to all the people who wanted more apocalyptic drama after the fervor of The Handmaid's Tale and its television revival died down. I recommended it to my book club and the next thing I knew we were reading a Cold War exemplum about nuclear holocaust just as one unpredictable world leader was leading a Twitter rampage against another unpredictable world leader and I was posting apologetic messages to our Facebook group about how I could never have anticipated just how much the book was resonate with us.

Anyway.

It was a pretty good read. I think I took away a number of disaster preparedness lessons from it.  Number one: I am not prepared for an actual disaster. Number two: If Next to Nowhere is not directly impacted by a disaster, the area is probably okay in terms of natural resources (water and food), but is not okay in terms of a communication plan.  Number three:  Maybe we do need a gun in the house, if only as an option for suicide in a real disaster. Number four: If there is a nuclear explosion, don't look directly at it unless you want damaged eyes. Number five: Times have certainly changed in terms of trust in government. The people in this novel really and truly believed that the government would come and save them at some point. I'm pretty sure that if an actual disaster struck me right here and right now, I'd figure we were on our own.

Anyway, many people in my book club said this was an optimistic take on the impact of nuclear war and I guess that it could be read that way.  For the characters we followed, it honestly could not have turned out any better. The on his way to becoming a drunk guy finds meaning in his life, couples continue to get married, have kids (in a nuclear war! - WTF? seriously, people, this biological urge to procreate has clearly skipped me entirely), and the community adapts.  Old hierarchies are adapted to the new realities and, at least for our main characters, life is not actually that bad.  I pondered whether or not it was purposeful government propaganda (copyright 1959 - it's not too out of line, right?).

Or you could read it as morality tale about how humans destroy everything they touch and we can never have a civilization that won't attempt to annihilate another civilization.

I'll leave it to you to determine how I read the situation.