Two Brandeis students have published a new book, “Blueprints for a Sparkling Tomorrow: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream,” that argues for the creation of a “futuropolis” to solve society’s many flaws.
The decision to write together formed when Oren Nimni ’11 and Nathan Robinson ’11 discovered they shared “precisely the same vision of human affairs” while taking a politics course at the university, the pair wrote in an e-mail to The Hoot.
“Rejecting both our professors and our classmates, we realized that we were the last remaining sane citizens in a nation built upon sovereign madness,” Nimni and Robinson wrote.
“Blueprints for a Sparkling Tomorrow,” available for purchase on Amazon.com is “about the human condition and its prospects,” the two wrote. Not only does the book analyze the problems of today’s society, it projects the authors’ images of a “Futuropolis” or “a Sparkling Tomorrow.” The second portion of the book’s title, “Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream,” references Barack Obama’s use of this phrase. “We wished to expose Mr. Obama as the academic charlatan he has become,” they wrote, referencing “The Audacity of Hope” as “a work filled with demi-truths, libelations, and birds of rhetorical paradise.”
While Nimni and Robinson originally targeted their book towards a general audience, they later found that “some sections do require a level of graduate study in the areas under discussion.” However, should the general reader decide to pursue “a rudimentary understanding of botanical psychology and narco-feminism,” their’s is the book for you.
Although “Blueprints for a Sparkling Tomorrow” addresses societal flaws much like “thousands of others published annually under that plastic-coated umbrella, it is distinguishable [from other books because the authors] subscribe to the Anarcho-Physicist notion of a human disease, pervasive and universal,” Nimni and Robinson wrote.
Nimni and Robinson say that they were inspired to write by the “universal misery that encircles us.” They “aim to probe at the most damaging limbs of civilization, to sever them and replace them with shimmering lemonade-utopias.”
Both Nimni and Robinson consider themselves to be perpetual authors, and while “Blueprints for a Sparkling Tomorrow” was written between the months of April and September, the book has been “gestating since birth.” Additionally, the entire writing process was a team effort. With the exception of one footnote titled “The Nimni Corollary,” and “a single chapter written as a Platonic dialogue between [the authors], no parts of the book are distinguishable as a single man’s voice,” they wrote.
And the book will not be their last. Nimni and Robinson plan to write a series, from which two more volumes are expected. The upcoming books are to be titled “Dimensions of Communitopia: An Exercise in Sane Living” and “The Human Disease: Its Diagnosis and Its Cure.”
“Blueprints for a Sparkling Tomorrow” is available on Amazon.com and locally at Boston’s Brattle Book Shop.
