Time's Up! ― A Memoir of the American Century

Blending history, essay, travelogue, and autobiography, Time’s Up! is a personal and political saga: luminous, probing, and absorbing. At constant odds with his Boston Brahmin lineage and upbringing, Robert Cabot confronts white privilege, rejects the conventional trappings of wealth and fame, and critiques our American heritage of colonialism, imperialist yearnings, and penchant for perpetual war. In alternating chapters we witness his life and the nation’s, from the sepia-toned ’twenties through the color-drained Great Depression, from World War Two through the disquieting cold war, the rise of the counter-culture, and the decades after. In particular, he tells of his search across fifty years for a place in the world. “It was my century too,” he writes. “I return to it, to my memories of my world and my life, the swirls of attitudes and events and people around a long, privileged, and wildly varied American life.” Whether as a State Department official, co-founder of an intentional community, citizen-ambassador, philanthropist, conservationist, or self-exiled novelist, he recounts his adventures around the world—in Kabul, Kunjerab, Moscow, Andalucia, Peshawar, Chaing Mai, Algiers, L’Île Rousse, Naples, Tuscany, Bastia, Rome, Bésançon, Paris, Thailand, Cambodia, Ceylon, Taiwan, Laos, and many other places—and introduces us to a large and equally diverse cast of characters. Time’s Up!? is a kaleidoscopic self-portrait, and a devastating examination of our nation in slow but almost certain decline. Cabot’s expansive literary gifts are on full display, whether delivering vital strikes against American “exceptionalism” and hypocrisy, or gratefully embracing “whatever beauty and love life has given us.”

A veteran of many of the campaigns of World War II, Robert Cabot fictionalized some of his experiences in his four years as a sergeant in his novel The Isle of Kheria. He received degrees from Harvard College and Yale Law School, served for ten years in the Marshall Plan and foreign aid programs in Italy, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Washington, D.C., and resigned from the foreign service in protest over U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. He has since worked with intentional communities, the citizen diplomacy movement, and environmental and social change projects. He lived for many years in Italy and Greece, returning to the U.S. in a solo transatlantic sail with his thirty-foot sloop in 1976.Writing, however, is his first love. He has written several novels. The most recent, the aforementioned The Isle of Kheria, was published in 2012. Several of his articles are also published. Cabot is a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, the McDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ucross Foundation.Cabot lives on Whidbey Island, Washington, with his wife Penny. Between them, they have six children, and a bevy of children’s children. For several months a year he retreats to a mountain town in Southeastern Arizona where he is working on a new novel, The Mango Tree.