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The Captain and the Glory
A savage satire of the United States in the throes of insanity, this blisteringly funny novel tells the story of a noble ship, the Glory, and the loud, clownish, and foul Captain who steers it to the brink of disaster.
When the decorated Captain of a great ship descends the gangplank for the final time, a new leader, a man with a yellow feather in his hair, vows to step forward. Though he has no experience, no knowledge of nautical navigation or maritime law, and though he has often remarked he doesn't much like boats, he solemnly swears to shake things up. Together with his band of petty thieves and confidence men known as the Upskirt Boys, the Captain thrills his passengers, writing his dreams and notions on the cafeteria wipe-away board, boasting of his exemplary anatomy, devouring cheeseburgers, and tossing overboard anyone who displeases him. Until one day a famous pirate, long feared by passengers of the Glory but revered by the Captain for how phenomenally masculine he looked without a shirt while riding a horse, appears on the horizon . . . Absurd, hilarious, and all too recognizable, The Captain and the Glory is a wicked farce of contemporary America only Dave Eggers could dream up.
When the decorated Captain of a great ship descends the gangplank for the final time, a new leader, a man with a yellow feather in his hair, vows to step forward. Though he has no experience, no knowledge of nautical navigation or maritime law, and though he has often remarked he doesn't much like boats, he solemnly swears to shake things up. Together with his band of petty thieves and confidence men known as the Upskirt Boys, the Captain thrills his passengers, writing his dreams and notions on the cafeteria wipe-away board, boasting of his exemplary anatomy, devouring cheeseburgers, and tossing overboard anyone who displeases him. Until one day a famous pirate, long feared by passengers of the Glory but revered by the Captain for how phenomenally masculine he looked without a shirt while riding a horse, appears on the horizon . . . Absurd, hilarious, and all too recognizable, The Captain and the Glory is a wicked farce of contemporary America only Dave Eggers could dream up.
114 pages, Hardcover
First published November 19, 2019
153 people are currently reading
4028 people want to read
About the author
Dave Eggers
338 books9,473 followersDave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is best known for his 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Eggers is also the founder of several notable literary and philanthropic ventures, including the literary journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the literacy project 826 Valencia, and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness. Additionally, he founded ScholarMatch, a program that connects donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in numerous prestigious publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 588 reviews
December 5, 2019
This story represents the United States as a ship taken over by a vulgar captain and his “coterie of petty thieves and confidence men” known as “the Upskirt Boys.” Their real-life identities are not obscure, e.g. “Paul the Manafort oversaw the ship’s office of ethics and accountability.” The captain, a TV-obsessed narcissist referred to as “the man with the yellow feather,” brags about his “p-nus” and leers at his own daughter. He communicates with passengers by scrawling messages on the cafeteria wipe-board: “Everything better now — your welcome!!” Eggers writes, “It was clear to him that he was the greatest captain that had ever captained.” As the deadly voyage drifts out to sea, a Putin-like character boards the ship on his horse: “The Captain almost fainted, for, as he hoped, the Pale One was shirtless.” Angry as this parody of Trump is, Eggers reserves his hottest ire for the passengers who love “watching a lunatic speak his mind without filter.” But is the book “hilarious” and “hysterical,” as its blurbs claim? At first, there’s some wicked delight in matching up the captain’s perverse antics with the degradations that Trump has subjected our nation to, but soon the story sounds shrill and superfluous given that the president's failings are already so well documented. Like other polemical books published in this era — including Don Jr’s new No. 1 bestseller “Triggered” — it doesn’t feel like something anyone would actually read. Instead, these “books” are like sardonic refrigerator magnets to display one’s allegiance or snarky greeting cards to send to fellow travelers.
October 12, 2020
Dave Eggers reimagines Trump as a captain of a ship called Glory (America) in this boring satirical novella, The Captain and the Glory.
Eggers doesn’t put much effort into his satire - a lot of it is him simply describing reality. Trump is the “man with the yellow feather” (meaning his much-mocked hair) who fancies his daughter, loves junk food, and “tweets” out nonsense (here Twitter is depicted as the cafeteria’s wipe-away board). His cronies are uncreatively named, ie. Paul the Manafort, Michael the Cohen, while Putin is the “Pale One” and Kim Jong-un is “Man So Soft”.
I suppose there’s some mild inspiration in calling his supporters the “Most Foul” (a riff on Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment) and having them dress up in chicken suits. I guess the voice in the vent, assuring the captain, is Fox News, aka the propaganda wing of the Republican Party?
The captain is an incompetent, insecure, unintelligent fat joke of a man who divides people, leans increasingly authoritarian, and generally makes life worse for everyone. Sounds like Trump to me - so what? So nothing, really. Eggers doesn’t have anything to say besides Trump = bad.
The impression I’ve got of Eggers over the years of reading him is that he’s very left-wing and, like a lot of people on the far left, he too is suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. He imagines the Captain literally handing power over to the Russians and the North Koreans and that is just coconuts. As loathsome as the stupid orange baby is (hey look, the cover is bright orange too!), he’s not a traitor who has the ability to cede America over to its enemies. Russia’s such a paper tiger - I wish the left would shut up about it and move on.
And what Eggers and a lot of the left fail to acknowledge is that Trump didn’t just happen - he’s the end result of decades of warped policies. This idea that things in America suddenly got bad because Trump was elected is such nonsense. Things have been bad in America for years. Obama wasn’t some shining example of a great president. He didn’t close Gitmo or end the wars, he continued them, even starting one, and became the president who used the most drone strikes than any other president - and this guy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize!!
The police (the “snowmen” in this book) haven’t been over-militarized, racist and corrupt under Trump only, they’ve been that way for several administrations, Republican and Democratic, and if Trump’s reach has been felt too strongly it’s because the powers of the office of president have been increasing for decades now.
Critiquing Trump is fine - he deserves it, he really is such a pathetic cretin - but let’s not pretend that the alternative, the Democrats (laughably described here as the “Kindly Mutineers”) are any better. Pelosi and her ilk are just as corrupt and uncaring as he is, serving corporate masters for personal gain to the detriment of the majority of US citizens. That’s why I think Eggers’ satire is so toothless - he takes the easy position of saying Trump is bad and mumbling about democracy and the old days as if the entire system itself doesn’t need reviewing and overhauling.
Some of the pseudo-tweets made me chuckle “Cheeseburgers are the Greatest! About half of people on ship = motherfuckers. If you didn’t vote for me, maybe you will be killed? And let’s hear it for the firefighters. They are the real heros. Also I am a firefighter.” And Jared Kushner does look like a doll, but it’s not enough to recommend this book in the least.
The subtitle is “An entertainment” and it isn’t at all. Dave Eggers’ The Captain and the Glory is a dreary, forgettable and obvious portrait of Trump and his administration that fails to compel in the slightest.
Eggers doesn’t put much effort into his satire - a lot of it is him simply describing reality. Trump is the “man with the yellow feather” (meaning his much-mocked hair) who fancies his daughter, loves junk food, and “tweets” out nonsense (here Twitter is depicted as the cafeteria’s wipe-away board). His cronies are uncreatively named, ie. Paul the Manafort, Michael the Cohen, while Putin is the “Pale One” and Kim Jong-un is “Man So Soft”.
I suppose there’s some mild inspiration in calling his supporters the “Most Foul” (a riff on Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment) and having them dress up in chicken suits. I guess the voice in the vent, assuring the captain, is Fox News, aka the propaganda wing of the Republican Party?
The captain is an incompetent, insecure, unintelligent fat joke of a man who divides people, leans increasingly authoritarian, and generally makes life worse for everyone. Sounds like Trump to me - so what? So nothing, really. Eggers doesn’t have anything to say besides Trump = bad.
The impression I’ve got of Eggers over the years of reading him is that he’s very left-wing and, like a lot of people on the far left, he too is suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. He imagines the Captain literally handing power over to the Russians and the North Koreans and that is just coconuts. As loathsome as the stupid orange baby is (hey look, the cover is bright orange too!), he’s not a traitor who has the ability to cede America over to its enemies. Russia’s such a paper tiger - I wish the left would shut up about it and move on.
And what Eggers and a lot of the left fail to acknowledge is that Trump didn’t just happen - he’s the end result of decades of warped policies. This idea that things in America suddenly got bad because Trump was elected is such nonsense. Things have been bad in America for years. Obama wasn’t some shining example of a great president. He didn’t close Gitmo or end the wars, he continued them, even starting one, and became the president who used the most drone strikes than any other president - and this guy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize!!
The police (the “snowmen” in this book) haven’t been over-militarized, racist and corrupt under Trump only, they’ve been that way for several administrations, Republican and Democratic, and if Trump’s reach has been felt too strongly it’s because the powers of the office of president have been increasing for decades now.
Critiquing Trump is fine - he deserves it, he really is such a pathetic cretin - but let’s not pretend that the alternative, the Democrats (laughably described here as the “Kindly Mutineers”) are any better. Pelosi and her ilk are just as corrupt and uncaring as he is, serving corporate masters for personal gain to the detriment of the majority of US citizens. That’s why I think Eggers’ satire is so toothless - he takes the easy position of saying Trump is bad and mumbling about democracy and the old days as if the entire system itself doesn’t need reviewing and overhauling.
Some of the pseudo-tweets made me chuckle “Cheeseburgers are the Greatest! About half of people on ship = motherfuckers. If you didn’t vote for me, maybe you will be killed? And let’s hear it for the firefighters. They are the real heros. Also I am a firefighter.” And Jared Kushner does look like a doll, but it’s not enough to recommend this book in the least.
The subtitle is “An entertainment” and it isn’t at all. Dave Eggers’ The Captain and the Glory is a dreary, forgettable and obvious portrait of Trump and his administration that fails to compel in the slightest.
November 30, 2019
I'll read anything Eggers writes, and he does classify this one as "an entertainment." Which is to say, don't approach it with the same degree of expectation as his more serious works, in particular, his ongoing series of telling a larger story through a more focussed lens. Here he unleashes his feelings about the current atrocity in the White House, and he doesn't mean for it to be anything but a satire or, as he puts it, an Entertainment about a dangerous, destructive situation. There are other prominent authors who have thrust out books on the subject, so much so that there's practically an entire shelf of them (i.e., Rushdie, McEwan, Coe, Lethem). He had to say something, and this is it.
January 19, 2020
A couple funny lines but not really deserving of the subtitle "an entertainment." Suggestion for the new title:
The Captain and the Glory: An Attempt at Satire That You'll Want to Like But Will Find Pedantic and Facile Except for a Few Fleeting Jokes
The Captain and the Glory: An Attempt at Satire That You'll Want to Like But Will Find Pedantic and Facile Except for a Few Fleeting Jokes
November 29, 2019
The Captain and the Glory is a satire of the current political environment in the United States. The story has characters that resemble Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump, and even less subtly named characters, such as Paul the Manafort or David the Cohen. The Captain writes odd, nonsensical things on a white board during the night for citizens of the ship to see. The Captain fires everyone and appoints all his friends to important roles. He views people who are not from the boat as dangerous. As he steers the boat, he turns left and right suddenly, just to surprise people and change things up. His supporters talk about how great it is that he says whatever comes to mind. Is all of this sounding familiar?
I laughed a lot reading this book. However, this book also caused me to reflect on the strange and terrifying situation that the current president has created and how much it really feels like we have a captain (president) guiding our boat (country) who has no experience in doing so and makes extremely irrational decisions.
Thank you @aaknopf for sending me a copy of The Captain and the Glory!
I laughed a lot reading this book. However, this book also caused me to reflect on the strange and terrifying situation that the current president has created and how much it really feels like we have a captain (president) guiding our boat (country) who has no experience in doing so and makes extremely irrational decisions.
Thank you @aaknopf for sending me a copy of The Captain and the Glory!
July 12, 2020
Absolutely embarrassing. Amounts to shameless boomerposting, but in book-form -- Eggers' new book is every ounce as exciting as reading your liberal aunt's tweets.
You can imagine Eggers writing this while intoning to himself "I'm going to be the next Jonathan Swift!" but he winds up landing somewhere closer to Patrick Chappatte.
You can imagine Eggers writing this while intoning to himself "I'm going to be the next Jonathan Swift!" but he winds up landing somewhere closer to Patrick Chappatte.
March 8, 2020
More like an article than a book, this satire on the Trump administration can be read in a sitting. With the retirement of a beloved admiral, the passengers elect a new captain because he “can shake things up”.
The new captain, after throwing manuals and rule books into the sea, proves his reputation for crudity by posting on the white board each morning. His supporters embrace his foul mouth by dressing a chickens (fowls). One woman is surprised to see her father in a chicken costume.
Dave Eggars takes the reader through all of this and representations of the Mueller Report, Vladimir Putin (in a pirate ship), Fox News or perhaps Stephen Miller (a voice that comes to him through a vent), the beating back of the shipwrecked and/or refugees who attempt to board for their lives, the denigration of the hero who saved the ship in a recent war (while this captain hid and read pornography) and more.
This was not a laugh out loud book for me, but it was a clever parody.
The new captain, after throwing manuals and rule books into the sea, proves his reputation for crudity by posting on the white board each morning. His supporters embrace his foul mouth by dressing a chickens (fowls). One woman is surprised to see her father in a chicken costume.
Dave Eggars takes the reader through all of this and representations of the Mueller Report, Vladimir Putin (in a pirate ship), Fox News or perhaps Stephen Miller (a voice that comes to him through a vent), the beating back of the shipwrecked and/or refugees who attempt to board for their lives, the denigration of the hero who saved the ship in a recent war (while this captain hid and read pornography) and more.
This was not a laugh out loud book for me, but it was a clever parody.
December 13, 2019
I'd just read The Circle by Eggers and thought it'd be interesting to read something humorous by the author who put out that dystopic tale. I didn't find it the least bit funny and abandoned ship about five pages in. Humor, especially of the satirical kind, needs to be subtle or sly for me to enjoy it. This was as subtle as being beaten with a sack of hammers.
December 10, 2019
I'm an Eggers fan generally, but this reminded me of the sort of puerile satire I wrote when I was a junior high school student.
August 30, 2021
Una novella satirica che paragona un'enorme nave, la Gloria appunto, all’America dei giorni nostri, e il Capitano, il peggior capitano della storia del mare e delle navi, a Trump. È un libro facile (a volte la sensazione è che lo sia fin troppo), che scorre velocemente, in cui è facile leggere tra le righe la critica feroce di Dave Eggers all’amministrazione trumpiana e al suo fallimento ultimo.
Probabilmente indirizzato ai bambini (futuri elettori) o agli americani medi (elettori oggi), Eggers si rifà a un genere letterario “farsesco” molto incisivo e desideroso di far riflettere il lettore. Quello che a mio avviso tuttavia manca, è l’incisività che un’opera di questo tipo dovrebbe avere per essere davvero corrosiva.
Nota tutta mia: ormai è chiaro che Eggers ha sposato un tipo di scrittura che non ha più nulla a che fare con quella degli esordi, penso a L’opera struggente di un formidabile genio o a Conoscerete la nostra velocitàà. Di sicuro è apprezzabile negli intenti, e probabilmente non smetterò di leggerlo, ma quando ho visto che Il Capitano e la Gloria inizia con “Uno scherzo di Dave Eggers…” ammetto che la voglia mi stesse già passando.
Probabilmente indirizzato ai bambini (futuri elettori) o agli americani medi (elettori oggi), Eggers si rifà a un genere letterario “farsesco” molto incisivo e desideroso di far riflettere il lettore. Quello che a mio avviso tuttavia manca, è l’incisività che un’opera di questo tipo dovrebbe avere per essere davvero corrosiva.
Nota tutta mia: ormai è chiaro che Eggers ha sposato un tipo di scrittura che non ha più nulla a che fare con quella degli esordi, penso a L’opera struggente di un formidabile genio o a Conoscerete la nostra velocitàà. Di sicuro è apprezzabile negli intenti, e probabilmente non smetterò di leggerlo, ma quando ho visto che Il Capitano e la Gloria inizia con “Uno scherzo di Dave Eggers…” ammetto che la voglia mi stesse già passando.
November 13, 2019
Literature, no matter if it's fantasy, memoir, cultural criticism, short stories, whatever, always offers a portal, or maybe shines a light on, the time it is created in. Maybe it isn't always obvious at the time, but time does leave a stamp on a book. And literature also has a duty to shine that light, to show to future generations and readers what it was like to live back when the book was created, to leave an impression that's more than just history books or news articles.
Literature also lets us examine and pick apart and reimagine the world we live in. Sometimes it lets us slip away for a while and dream of a different world, and sometimes it helps us put concrete images and words to the spilling of thoughts and emotions we have about a certain topic.
Eggers, ever a concise and thoughtful cultural critic in his work, brings us a cuttingly witty and keen-eyed look at America's current political moment through the story of a self-centered man who, though he has no experience, is made the captain of a ship and all the chaos that ensues.
This novella is a necessary breath of fresh air. This satirical story allows us to process the current social and political state of America with a bit of humor instead of constant anger and depression. I think we all might need that. It gives a bit of catharsis to a situation that we don't have a lot of control over.
It also serves as a call to action, one we can't afford to ignore any longer.
My thanks to Knopf for my copy of this one to read and review.
Literature also lets us examine and pick apart and reimagine the world we live in. Sometimes it lets us slip away for a while and dream of a different world, and sometimes it helps us put concrete images and words to the spilling of thoughts and emotions we have about a certain topic.
Eggers, ever a concise and thoughtful cultural critic in his work, brings us a cuttingly witty and keen-eyed look at America's current political moment through the story of a self-centered man who, though he has no experience, is made the captain of a ship and all the chaos that ensues.
This novella is a necessary breath of fresh air. This satirical story allows us to process the current social and political state of America with a bit of humor instead of constant anger and depression. I think we all might need that. It gives a bit of catharsis to a situation that we don't have a lot of control over.
It also serves as a call to action, one we can't afford to ignore any longer.
My thanks to Knopf for my copy of this one to read and review.
November 18, 2024
4 stars. OMG. Wow!
This was a satirical take on a certain person who's going to be our leader again.
This book was simultaneously disturbing, entertaining, and anxiety producing. I laughed, cringed repeatedly, and was horrified several times.
I listened to the audiobook and found it highly entertaining.
Holy cow, I'm speechless. I need time to think before I finish this review.
This was a satirical take on a certain person who's going to be our leader again.
This book was simultaneously disturbing, entertaining, and anxiety producing. I laughed, cringed repeatedly, and was horrified several times.
I listened to the audiobook and found it highly entertaining.
Holy cow, I'm speechless. I need time to think before I finish this review.
December 4, 2023
honestly, i went into this book not knowing what it was even about, but 5 pages in i said, “…wait a second,” and ran to the reviews. i agree with most of them because this book really was just one eye roll after another. don’t get me wrong, i am not a fan of trump and what he’s done, but this wasn’t even satire. it was just renaming everyone and setting it on a boat rather than the US, and exaggerating what actually happened. i laughed maybe once, but i just couldn’t get past how overtly obvious each aspect of reality was that Eggers attempted to disguise. it was all very immature in a bad way. if you want good satire, you should head Kurt Vonnegut’s way.
August 20, 2020
I believe that good satire is a bit of a lost art so I very much appreciate this bit of “entertainment” as Eggers describes his own work. Fair warning, it’s VERY politically incorrect and a true skewering of Donald Trump so it’s not for everyone. But I laughed.
May 8, 2025
la biografía de donald trump
March 12, 2022
Silly satire of TFG
September 13, 2024
OUTSTANDING!
January 15, 2020
I'd never heard of Dave Eggers, but while browsing the new release list on Overdrive, the cover and title caught my eye. After reading the publisher's summary, I expected to find a smart, funny satire similar to Voltaire or Swift, but The Captain and the Glory doesn't quite meet that level.
One problem is the book's unevenness. While there are some clever touches (the "Kindly Mutineers" who can't seem bring themselves to actually rebel, for example), it's undercut by the author's confused narrative. The book reads like a children's story...until the gruesome details of mass murder are related. Similarly, it mimics the sing-song vocabulary of the best-known fables...until f-bombs appear. I assume this was all done to be shocking, but it actually feels uninspired and undermines the books's prior creativity and quiet subversiveness. And when most real-life characters are hidden beneath cleverly drawn caricatures (such as the "Sheriff of the Seas" who pretends to be mute in order to increase his mystique as he goes about his fact-finding), it's then jarring to suddenly come across characters named "Paul the Manafort" and "Michael the Cohen."
I appreciated that the author tried to relay that there are some sensible people amongst the "Captain's" followers (something that, judging by some of the reviews here, seems to have been missed by many readers): “I declare,” said the grandfather of nine who in every way was sensible and true, “that we need someone like this to shake things up.” However, there's not enough of this kind of nuance.
Ultimately, the real problem with The Captain and the Glory is that it's difficult to satirize the already satirical nature of the world in which we currently live. How can you make absurdist what's already absurd? You really can't, and so the book falls flat. Goodreads calls three-stars "I liked it." For me, it just means "meh." You can read this or skip it; it really won't matter much either way.
One problem is the book's unevenness. While there are some clever touches (the "Kindly Mutineers" who can't seem bring themselves to actually rebel, for example), it's undercut by the author's confused narrative. The book reads like a children's story...until the gruesome details of mass murder are related. Similarly, it mimics the sing-song vocabulary of the best-known fables...until f-bombs appear. I assume this was all done to be shocking, but it actually feels uninspired and undermines the books's prior creativity and quiet subversiveness. And when most real-life characters are hidden beneath cleverly drawn caricatures (such as the "Sheriff of the Seas" who pretends to be mute in order to increase his mystique as he goes about his fact-finding), it's then jarring to suddenly come across characters named "Paul the Manafort" and "Michael the Cohen."
I appreciated that the author tried to relay that there are some sensible people amongst the "Captain's" followers (something that, judging by some of the reviews here, seems to have been missed by many readers): “I declare,” said the grandfather of nine who in every way was sensible and true, “that we need someone like this to shake things up.” However, there's not enough of this kind of nuance.
Ultimately, the real problem with The Captain and the Glory is that it's difficult to satirize the already satirical nature of the world in which we currently live. How can you make absurdist what's already absurd? You really can't, and so the book falls flat. Goodreads calls three-stars "I liked it." For me, it just means "meh." You can read this or skip it; it really won't matter much either way.
February 27, 2020
The Captain and the Glory is a satirical novel about Donald Trump.
It’s a little hard to believe that anyone could write a satirical story about Donald Trump, whose behavior is so far over the top that he would seem immune to satire. Yet that’s exactly what San Francisco literary phenomenon Dave Eggers has done in The Captain and the Glory. Unlike Christopher Buckley and other well-established political satirists, Eggers doesn’t pretend to create believable characters. Somehow, “the Captain” of this satirical novel about Donald Trump manages to be even more outrageous than the man himself.
When the beloved Admiral who commands the ship Glory retires from the scene, there’s an election to replace him. Many of the passengers decide to shake things up by voting for a ne’er-do-well who has volunteered for the job without any discernible qualifications. “In their eyes . . . this new captain was candid and unvarnished. And because he didn’t know how to spell, and had no taste or manners or filter or shame or sense of what was true and what was false — because he was unscripted and when he told lies — he was the most honest captain they’d ever known.”
Of course, the new captain does shake things up. He and the gorgeous daughter he lusts after methodically fire the crew and toss ever-larger numbers of “Certain People” overboard. All of which proves only a prelude to a visit by the “Pale One,” who no doubt speaks Russian, who boards the ship with his gang and proceeds to loot everything not nailed down as well as many things that were. In the end, the Glory is left literally rudderless and dead in the water. Which, of course, should have been no surprise to those who elected him, but wasn’t.
About the author
Dave Eggers has written five books of nonfiction, eleven novels, four short story collections, five books of humor, five screenplays, and four books for young readers, and he’s won a slew of awards for his efforts. Somehow, though, he’s also found time to establish and run a publishing house (McSweeney’s) that issues several periodicals and start 826 Valencia, a now-national nonprofit that tutors kids 8-18 in writing. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, novelist Vendela Vida, and their two children. Oh, and the multi-talented Eggers has also distinguished himself as both an artist and a musician.
It’s a little hard to believe that anyone could write a satirical story about Donald Trump, whose behavior is so far over the top that he would seem immune to satire. Yet that’s exactly what San Francisco literary phenomenon Dave Eggers has done in The Captain and the Glory. Unlike Christopher Buckley and other well-established political satirists, Eggers doesn’t pretend to create believable characters. Somehow, “the Captain” of this satirical novel about Donald Trump manages to be even more outrageous than the man himself.
When the beloved Admiral who commands the ship Glory retires from the scene, there’s an election to replace him. Many of the passengers decide to shake things up by voting for a ne’er-do-well who has volunteered for the job without any discernible qualifications. “In their eyes . . . this new captain was candid and unvarnished. And because he didn’t know how to spell, and had no taste or manners or filter or shame or sense of what was true and what was false — because he was unscripted and when he told lies — he was the most honest captain they’d ever known.”
Of course, the new captain does shake things up. He and the gorgeous daughter he lusts after methodically fire the crew and toss ever-larger numbers of “Certain People” overboard. All of which proves only a prelude to a visit by the “Pale One,” who no doubt speaks Russian, who boards the ship with his gang and proceeds to loot everything not nailed down as well as many things that were. In the end, the Glory is left literally rudderless and dead in the water. Which, of course, should have been no surprise to those who elected him, but wasn’t.
About the author
Dave Eggers has written five books of nonfiction, eleven novels, four short story collections, five books of humor, five screenplays, and four books for young readers, and he’s won a slew of awards for his efforts. Somehow, though, he’s also found time to establish and run a publishing house (McSweeney’s) that issues several periodicals and start 826 Valencia, a now-national nonprofit that tutors kids 8-18 in writing. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, novelist Vendela Vida, and their two children. Oh, and the multi-talented Eggers has also distinguished himself as both an artist and a musician.
January 22, 2020
A satire about our country under the current Trump administration. And it was good for a smile or a crack in my lips. But as an entertainment piece it left a good bit to be desired. I imagine it’s hard to tie together a piece of literature with a purpose and a story that’s meant to entertain. So while it was steering the reader toward a certain view of the topic, I didn’t find it all that entertaining. Overall just an average/okay rating.
January 25, 2020
Een verhaal dat tegelijk grappig en uiterst beangstigend is, en dat mij zeer verward achterliet na het dichtklappen van de achterflap. We weten allemaal naar wie en wat de personages en gebeurtenissen verwijzen en dat besef maakt het net zo griezelig. Hopelijk blijkt Dave Eggers geen profeet te zijn, want een dergelijke afloop in de realiteit bezorgt me nu al nachtmerries. Een boek dat even zal blijven hangen, dat voel ik nu al.
March 30, 2020
Ik vind dit zo'n vreemd boekje. Het is wel duidelijk dat het over de huidige Amerikaanse president gaat maar het is echt vreemd. Geen idee wat ik erover moet denken.
April 1, 2020
Nope - too soon, still too painful. Not an entertainment for me.
June 19, 2021
The idea of shaking things up – anything from one’s toothpaste to one’s shoes – held a certain inherent appeal to most of the ship’s citizens. To them, shaking things up held the promise, however irrational and unproven, that everything shaken, or tossed randomly into the air, might come down better. Somehow, in the flying and falling, steel might become gold, sadness might become triumph, what had been good might become great.
---
To underline the point, one thoughtful man stepped forward, a pedagogical index finger in the air. “If we truly believe that anyone can grow up to be captain,” he said, “we should prove it by electing the least qualified, least respected person on the ship – a man who has never done anything for anyone but himself, a man who has palpable disdain for all previous captains, and no respect at all for the builders of the ship, its history, or anything it stands for.”
To many of the passengers, this made a wonderful kind of sense. To prove they were all equal, they should, the logic followed, be led by a known moron.
---
He decided he needed some help. Immediately his mind turned to a woman he’d been seeing around the ship. He’d been watching her for as long as he could remember, admiring her comely heart-shaped face and her glorious figure and her hair, which was silky and straight and as yellow as his feather. He often talked to other men about how attractive she was, and how good she smelled, and how much he’d like to date her. He wanted such a gorgeous creature near him always, so he asked her if she would help him steer the ship.
“Okay, Dad,” she said.
---
With his daughter by his side, the Captain felt much better. His daughter had brought her doll, though, and the sight of it, a limp boy-doll with rosy cheeks and black, vacant eyes, always gave him pause. There was something at once vacuous and sinister about the lifeless faux-boy, but his daughter loved that doll, so the Captain had no choice but to accept the two of them as a package.
---
“I find it refreshing,” one woman said. “He speaks his mind.”
“He writes like I speak when I’m drunk,” another man said, “and I find that comforting.”
---
The Most Foul were surprised and crestfallen for many minutes, finding it hard to believe that a man who had baldly stated, every day of his life, that no one was more important than himself, had in the end put himself above the rest of the passengers. He had led them to great harm and great shame, had ransacked half the ship and had allowed the ransacking of the rest, and had then escaped in a golden lifeboat without a goodbye or thank you or sorry. For the Most Foul, it did not add up.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 24, 2020
A satire about politics.
Amusing, gritty, and to the point without being too blunt or pointing fingers or naming names.
However, you still get the idea.
I would compare this to Monty Python, just to give somewhat of an idea of what you are getting yourself into.
Funny and horrible at the same time.
Kind of like watching a train wreck, you know what is coming and still can't look away.
Amusing, gritty, and to the point without being too blunt or pointing fingers or naming names.
However, you still get the idea.
I would compare this to Monty Python, just to give somewhat of an idea of what you are getting yourself into.
Funny and horrible at the same time.
Kind of like watching a train wreck, you know what is coming and still can't look away.
February 17, 2023
A thinly disguised fable about the presidency of Donald Trump, but only up to 2019. Had Eggers waited until 2020, it would have been a completely different story.
January 28, 2020
Oh, boy! I really had no idea what this was about until about two paragraphs in. Then I couldn't stop laughing. Sad laughing and real laughing. A good read and eerily not far off base.
December 6, 2019
Wry, if not a little heavy-handed, which is no particular knock against Mr. Eggers as he navigates the Captain and his crew's rancorous arrogance and bemusing ineptitude. This is a breezy enough read, an evergreen distillation of the last three or so years. There is fun in searching for real-world parallels to the satire's characters. Eggers is relentless in depicting the harrowing fallouts from many of the characters decisions; the fun is short-lived. The folks that permeate the ship's operational echelon are insidious, brute, oafish and myopic. They are concerned with everything except for maintaining the Glory's course, standing by as the Captain ransacks the ship's library and tossing all operating manuals overboard. At night an omnipresent voice feeds advice and policy to the Captain, who goes to sleep comforted while much of the ship lay awake feeling increasingly the opposite.
Perhaps Eggers' most compelling satirized group are the folks quietly dismayed by this all, who do everything in their power to rise up against the Captain except actually rising up. In a standout scene, these "Kindly Mutineers" do a squeamish dance around a much anticipated pseudo-Muller Report, baying and preening around it and near it but never opening it. It's a sobering reminder that by being upset, by being aware and staying informed through news and arts and culture, may not be enough.
Perhaps Eggers' most compelling satirized group are the folks quietly dismayed by this all, who do everything in their power to rise up against the Captain except actually rising up. In a standout scene, these "Kindly Mutineers" do a squeamish dance around a much anticipated pseudo-Muller Report, baying and preening around it and near it but never opening it. It's a sobering reminder that by being upset, by being aware and staying informed through news and arts and culture, may not be enough.
Read
November 20, 2019The Captain and the Glory (Knopf) is a quick Dave Eggers, a slim stopgap of a novel between The Parade (which we reviewed here) and whatever’s up next. While that novel is a sparse farce populated by short, punchy sentences and minimal set pieces, this one is a direct and wordy parody of the Trump presidency featuring not-so-subtle stand-ins for major players in Trump’s life from Ivanka to Putin to Kim Jong-un.
The setup: The Captain is a brash, stupid, loathsome narcissist who falls ass-backward into the highest leadership position on a ship called the Glory.
What follows is a spoof of certain lowlights in 45’s White House: “Certain People” are either thrown off the ship or placed in crab cages. A Robert Mueller-type investigates the Captain and presents his findings in a bound book that nobody aboard the Glory reads. Meanwhile, the Captain scrawls incoherent messages that everybody on board reads.
The Trump presidency is such a bizarre and nonsensical event in American history that it almost seems beyond parody. Often spoofs of this charade feel needless, as electing somebody like Trump was such an obviously poor decision that a cautionary tale would ring hollow and a straight-up spoof could never live up to the absurdity of the real thing.
The rest of the review: https://booktrib.com/2019/11/the-capt...
The setup: The Captain is a brash, stupid, loathsome narcissist who falls ass-backward into the highest leadership position on a ship called the Glory.
What follows is a spoof of certain lowlights in 45’s White House: “Certain People” are either thrown off the ship or placed in crab cages. A Robert Mueller-type investigates the Captain and presents his findings in a bound book that nobody aboard the Glory reads. Meanwhile, the Captain scrawls incoherent messages that everybody on board reads.
The Trump presidency is such a bizarre and nonsensical event in American history that it almost seems beyond parody. Often spoofs of this charade feel needless, as electing somebody like Trump was such an obviously poor decision that a cautionary tale would ring hollow and a straight-up spoof could never live up to the absurdity of the real thing.
The rest of the review: https://booktrib.com/2019/11/the-capt...
May 16, 2022
If and when a novelist chooses Satire, the hope is that he/she would be elegant about it. (Can think of Hari Kunzu's Red Pill from Last year) Else, if it just about demeaning and foul mouthing, with no disrespect, it is better off a comic strip. This book declares itself a metaphor and then dives deep into dissecting the Trump administration through a man who takes up the mantle as captain of a decorated ship called "Glory" without any experience, qualification or common sense.
The absurdity (strangely close to the truth) that he hopes to push us to laugh includes repetitive themes of the captain's senseless babble, his childish handwriting, his fear of women not in bikinis and a crush on his daughter. This was, though an author's creative license, is actually as imbecile as the subject matter. Throwing away the ship's operating manual and then firing anybody who knows something about running a ship - more palatable humor.
After the first few pages - you get the drift. And then comes the last part with the "Pale-one" and "So soft" who make a fool of him and take over the ship - which stretched credibility.
The book is more an angry diatribe than a creative piece. I sympathize with the author, but then I'd recommend a therapist than a publisher.
The absurdity (strangely close to the truth) that he hopes to push us to laugh includes repetitive themes of the captain's senseless babble, his childish handwriting, his fear of women not in bikinis and a crush on his daughter. This was, though an author's creative license, is actually as imbecile as the subject matter. Throwing away the ship's operating manual and then firing anybody who knows something about running a ship - more palatable humor.
After the first few pages - you get the drift. And then comes the last part with the "Pale-one" and "So soft" who make a fool of him and take over the ship - which stretched credibility.
The book is more an angry diatribe than a creative piece. I sympathize with the author, but then I'd recommend a therapist than a publisher.
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