Blending history, essay, travelogue, and autobiography, Time's Up! is a personal and political saga: luminous, probing, and absorbing. At constant odds with his Boston Brahmin lineage and upbringing, Robert Cabot confronts white privilege, rejects the conventional trappings of wealth and fame, and critiques our American heritage of colonialism, imperialist yearnings, and penchant for perpetual war. In alternating chapters we witness his life and the nation's, from the sepia-toned 'twenties through the color-drained Great Depression, from World War Two through the disquieting cold war, the rise of the counter-culture, and the decades after. In particular, he tells of his search across fifty years for a place in the world. "It was my century too," he writes. "I return to it, to my memories of my world and my life, the swirls of attitudes and events and people around a long, privileged, and wildly varied American life." Whether as a U.S. State Department official, co-founder of an intentional community, citizen-ambassador, philanthropist, conservationist, or self-exiled novelist, he recounts his adventures around the world"€"in Kabul, Kunjerab, Moscow, Andalucia, Peshawar, Chaing Mai, Algiers, L'Žle Rousse, Naples, Tuscany, Bastia, Rome, Bsanon, Paris, Thailand, Cambodia, Ceylon, Taiwan, Laos, and many other places"€"and introduces us to a large and equally diverse cast of characters.
Time's Up! is a kaleidoscopic self-portrait, and a devastating examination of our nation in slow but almost certain decline. Cabot's expansive literary gifts are on full display, whether delivering vital strikes against American "exceptionalism" and hypocrisy, or gratefully embracing "whatever beauty and love life has given us."
