Finished: The Man in the High Castle (Dick) A pretty good page-turner about the world in 1962 as it would be if the Axis powers had won World War II instead of the Allies! The book follows several characters as they survive in either the German controlled east part of the former United States...or the Japan controlled Pacific states. Only in the Rocky Mountain states is there some semblance of the United States, but even that is controlled by the Reich. The book is set in San Francisco, where the Japanese are the elite, and the white people the menial workers. Hitler has since died of syphilis and German chancellor Bormann rules the Reich. The Germans have plugged up and drained the Mediterranean Sea, turning it into farmland, and have also managed to see to the genocide of almost all the Africans in Africa. One character is a German spy posing as a Swedish businessman who meets with the Japanese higher-ups in San Francisco to let them know that a certain faction of the Germans in power is planning to drop a bomb on the Japanese islands and wipe out their co-existing, cold-warring "allies". While the meeting between the German spy and the Japanese is taking place, Bormann dies, setting off an immediate political turmoil while Nazis Hermann Goring, Joseph Goebbels, and Reinhard Heydrich jockey to become the next leader. In a book within a book, an author, Hawthorne Abendsen, has written a novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which is the fictional story of what the world would be like if the Allies had won the war and America and Great Britain thrived! This book is forbidden in the German controlled east, but many copies are floating around in the Pacific states. Many Americans read the book secretly and wish that history could have turned out that way. There are, of course, alot more details and in depth character stories, but I'm not going to do a total recap on this one. The book is really intriguing and scary at the same time. Imagine if it had really happened??