The terrible threes

With offbeat humor and on-target social criticism, Ishmael Reed presents in "The Terrible Threes" a vision of America in the not-too-distant future, a portrait of a fairy tale gone awry. Opening on Thanksgiving Day in the late 1990s--three years after the former fashion-model president was laughed out of office for admitting that Saint Nicholas knew more about the workings of the executive branch than he did--the White House is implicated in a plot to rid America of its surplus people and the Third World of its nuclear weapons.