Intergalactic alien hijackers have stolen Earth's moon! SUPERMAN may be an alien himself, but he's not about to sit back and watch his adopted planet be torn asunder by terrible tidal waves. The MAN OF STEEL zooms into space to recover the straying satellite, but he's quickly overwhelmed the horde of angry aliens. LEX LUTHOR, SUPERMAN'S archenemy, offers his help, but can SUPERMAN trust him?
The Daily Planet reporter CLARK KENT is having a bad day. Unfortunately, so is the rest of METROPOLIS. The evil imp MISTER MXYZPLTLK is on the loose and causing magical mayhem throughout the city. To stop him, the MAN OF STEEL will need a few tricks of his own.
A solar flare suddenly erupts near astronaut HANK HENSHAW'S space shuttle, killing him. But that wasn't the end for HENSHAW he survived, and in the process, developed the ability to fuse his consciousness with machines. HANK blames SUPERMAN for his tragic fate, and is dead set on unleashing all the powers of technology in his bid to break the MAN OF STEEL.
Intergalactic alien hijackers have stolen Earths moon! SUPERMAN may be an alien himself, but hes not about to sit back and watch his adopted planet be torn asunder by terrible tidal waves. The MAN OF STEEL zooms into space to recover the straying satellite, but hes quickly overwhelmed the horde of angry aliens. LEX LUTHOR, SUPERMAN'S archenemy, offers his help, but can SUPERMAN trust him?
This is a book about how it feels to be alive in America at century's end - the Edens and the wastelands, the psychic heft of it all, our ghosts, hopes, myths, and heroes. It's about who we are, who we think we are, and how we'll remember the way we were. Henry Southworth Allen, prizewinning culture critic for the Washington Post, finds his characters for this drama in latterday demigods: Jack Kennedy, Miss America, Ralph Lauren, Mickey Mouse, Ingrid Bergman, the yeoman farmer (as seen in Rhonda Long, 15, grooming a black Angus at a state fair), physicist Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair, three generations of Wyeths painting elegies to an age when the Anglo-Saxon ruled, and the ageless Zsa Zsa Gabor sidling across a hotel room in satin mules. With elegance, energy, and wit, Allen describes an era when "heaven is a dream of endless second chances and everything else bristles with doom". Americans strive endlessly, he says, to be saved from that doom - sweating in aerobics classes and shivering in forests primeval. We believe in the redeeming powers of summer houses, the FBI, the common many, the good war, journeys into space, "the sacramental power of guns, the sanctity of little white towns in New Hampshire, and the proposition that the secret of success is knowing how to go precisely too far enough". He sees with an anthropological eye, which is to say he sees meaning - the meaning of our periodic fits of national gloom, of an Age of Consumption, of wilderness, Vietnam, innocence, and all the other symbols that float through the national psyche "like one of those mammoth American flags waving over a Cadillac dealership...proudly hailed by a country that rarely stops to think aboutthem at all".
