Kate’s 2¢: “The Hand Maid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood

“The Hand Maid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood

Kate’s 2¢: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as,     describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ merely shares my thoughts about what I read.  I’m just saying…

   As I continued to read “The Hand Maid’s Tale”, I began to recognize parts of it.  I kept reading, because I couldn’t remember many of the details from decades ago.

   Given the state of recent events (November, 2020, election voting fraud, rioters breaking into the U.S. capitol Building on January 6, 2021, and the nearly police state surrounding the January 20, 2021 swearing in of the new President and his eclectic cabinet), this story might have been a blueprint.  I’ve never felt comfortable with everyone doing on-line banking. This story shows what can happen with just a stroke of the right computer key.

   I liked the creative use of the craft of writing, by telling the tale, then attributing it to the researching of the hand maid’s taped narratives.

From the WEB:

   Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa, and grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec, and in Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master’s degree from Radcliffe College.

   Atwood is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. Her latest book of short stories is Stone Mattress: Nine Tales (2014). Her MaddAddam trilogy the Giller and Booker prize-nominated Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013) is currently being adapted for HBO. The Door is her latest volume of poetry (2007). Her most recent non-fiction books are Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008) and In Other Worlds: SF and th…

From   NLS/BARD/LOC:

The handmaid’s tale DB24695

Atwood, Margaret. Reading time: 10 hours, 48 minutes.

Read by Laura Giannarelli. A production of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress.

Science Fiction

Bestsellers

Set in the future, the United States of America is now the Republic of Gilead, a fundamentalist Christian theocracy that arose after fanatics shot the president, machine-gunned the Congress and forced the army to declare a state of emergency. To reverse the declining birthrate, women are forcibly recruited into the ranks of Handmaids and are assigned to the Commanders of the Faithful, whose wives are barren. Some strong language and explicit descriptions of sex. Bestseller 1986.