When I started reading the book I felt it was very absurd imagining US of Air where air is the only thing to eat. But as you go on reading the book grows on you and then it starts bombarding you with a lot of poo-poo and wee-wee jokes. But below all this the author beautifully hides the sarcasm showing a flawed and corrupt government of today and it is because of this that criminals roam free in broad daylight mocking the world. You have to 'see the change you wish to be.' ( )

The War on Drugs.
The War on Terror.
The War on Fat.

So we're talking satire, with as much subtlety as a politician on the election campaign. Which is not my favourite sort of satire I've got to admit. So THE UNITED STATES OF AIR and I struggled to come to an understanding from the beginning.

You can see the point it's trying to make - the willingness of people to believe any old garbage spouted at them from "on high" - whether the "on high" is religious, political, some combination of both or just some bat-shit crazy loony from down the street.

I can also remember Breatharians (or whatever they call themselves) actually going to the extreme of dying because they didn't believe they needed to eat (or something ... when we're talking that bat-shit crazy I tend to be looking for an exit rather than closely playing attention).

From that standpoint, the lack of subtlety probably makes some sense - there's no point in standing up to a battalion armed with an icepick and an attitude after all.... but at some point the exaggerations got so over the top and the humour attempting to choke me to death if I didn't agree got to me ... and not only did I find myself not agreeing, I couldn't for the life of me work out why I was bothering.

Which was a pity as the climax has some important points to make, but I'd worked so hard to get there, it took me a while to recognise the skewering that the consequences of blind adherence will get you.

It's decidedly possible that this was simply the wrong book for me. Maybe if you're a strong believer in the power of the icepick then you will get it in spades, but for me, THE UNITED STATES OF AIR laid the lampooning on so thick the poor little message at it's core drowned.

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/united-states-air-jm-porup ( )

I received this book as a LibraryThing give away in return for a review.
Don't believe the blurb that the book is a satire on the so called War on Terror, it goes much further than that. I like my satire subtle and pointed whereas The United States Of Air is in your face, lampooning everything which smacks of zealous, centralised, control and the willingness of a populace to suck up fear and propoganda on the basis that it must be good for them and that dissenters must therefore be an enemy.
Where the book wins is that it makes one appreciate that so many aspects of what we may loosely refer to as 'Western' life are touched by the madness we perceive only to exist in alien cultures or dictatorial regimes. The author delivers his punches with outrageous exaggeration, which can be ridiculous but then you remember it is after all satire not intended to be realistic in detail only in principle.
So exaggerated in fact that it can be easy to miss the subtleties which abound and exist on almost every page, and one can only wonder at the author's tendency to labour a joke repeatedly, not least in an obsessive use of scatological humour bordering on the obscene at times which drowns out the more enjoyable and wry prose.
The climax of the book leaves the reader open mouthed at the almost casual revelation of the hideous, familiar, consequences of evangelical zeal and centralised power in a democratic society yielding division, hatred and dehumanising of your enemy, in the pursuit of some higher ideal, even as the evangelists themselves manipulate the populace while wildly abusing their own sacred principles.
The final sentiment is that the author uses absurdity to prove that the unimaginable is actually happening right here, right now, and that the ultimate consequences can be precisely what we believe we are fighting to protect.
The United States Of Air is an easy read with the subtle satire well buried beneath the absurd lampooning and overuse of the ridiculous yet whilst the characters fade quickly from the mind after the reading is done, the messages stay vividly imprinted.
The book would benefit from being shorter, and from being less reliant on scatology; the author clearly has it in him to do better so it will be worth keeping an eye out for J.M. Porup. ( )

I won this book in a LibraryThing giveaway, and I don't want to give it stars because it just wasn't my kind of book. The writing was good, however just not my kind of story. Seemed too sci-fi for me. Thank you for the opportunity!

Received this through LT Member Giveaway

After the first few pages I found it hard to continue. But in all fairness, you cannot judge a book either by it's cover or by it's first pages. So I persevered through half the book and then really had to stop. I will state the reasons below. I like humoristic books and as such the subject for this book; the war on food has many possibilities. From that perspective it should be good.

But it isn't. Maybe it is that I'm accustomed to English humor and not to this type of American satire but overall I found the writing style to be so simplistic that it was more embarrassing than entertaining. No subtility; after the first chapter you have a good clue where the story will lead you (although as said, I never managed to go that far). Every page is a confirmation of that, so why is there a need for 200 pages of this. The story could have been done in at most half that if not much shorter.

All in all I cannot rate this book more than a single star for the effort of coming up with a novel idea. ( )