Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing & Terrifying, 21 Mar 2005
This is a fantastic book. It takes an interesting premise (Charles Lindbergh defeating FDR in the 1940 US presidential election running on an anti-war & only slightly masked anti-Semitic agenda) and extrapolates the consequences.The book is absolutely captivating from the start; it is beautifully written, the characterisation is amazing and the basic premise is handled consistently all the way through. It is a triumph. Roth concentrates on a single family mainly through the eyes of youngest son Philip and examines the impact of this alternate history. He focuses on the small things (in a nod to Primo Levi?) rather than the wider political context; this is very effective as the tension and the horror build slowly but inexorably. Things start small: a cousin goes to Canada and enlists (and returns having lost a leg), a family holiday is disrupted, the aunt and older brother effectively join the pro-Lindbergh movement and there is a Jewish resettlement program before the violence starts to escalate... Throughout, the sense of paranoia and fear is almost tangible, as is the misery and pain of a family being torn apart by conflicting allegiances. A wonderful book, altogether plausible and all the more chilling for it.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A mature novel by a celebrated American writer, 11 Nov 2004
This perceptive novel by a highly educated man of letters and preeminent American writer is based on what in eighteenth-century England was known as a "conceit" - i.e., a concept, a hypothesis, fully developed and logically pursued - to wit, that the famed and idolized aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, who was also known as a Republican, a pacifist, an appeaser, and an Aryan supremacist, won the U.S. presidency after Franklin D. Roosevelt's second term in office and became a puppet and eventually (it was rumored) a captive of Nazi Germany. The elaboration of this conceit not only caricatures Lindbergh as a reticent stoic who "every few months summoned the gregariousness to address his ten favorite platitudes to the nation" (does this sound familiar?) but extends to such anomalies as a Jewish woman from the slums of New Jersey dancing with Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, at a White House reception; or a learned rabbi running the Office of American Absorption, which - abetted by companies like Metropolitan Life Insurance Company that in the 1930's and 1940's were hardly known as equal opportunity employers - resettled suburban American Jews in rural hamlets where there was neither demand for their skills nor tolerance for their religious beliefs; or the murder of radio newsman Walter Winchell for his diatribes against the Lindbergh administration. In sum, this novel persuasively and memorably depicts what might have occurred had the Henry Fords, Father Coughlins, and other Nazi sympathizers of the era prevailed.
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A mature novel by a celebrated American writer, 9 Nov 2004
This perceptive novel by a highly educated man of letters and preeminent American writer is based on what in eighteenth-century England was known as a "conceit" - i.e., a concept, a hypothesis, fully developed and logically pursued - to wit, that the famed and idolized aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, who was also known as a Republican, a pacifist, an appeaser, and an Aryan supremacist, won the U.S. presidency after Franklin D. Roosevelt's second term in office and became a puppet and eventually (it was rumored) a captive of Nazi Germany. The elaboration of this conceit not only caricatures Lindbergh as a reticent stoic who "every few months summoned the gregariousness to address his ten favorite platitudes to the nation" (does this sound familiar?) but extends to such anomalies as a Jewish woman from the slums of New Jersey dancing with Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, at a White House reception; or a learned rabbi running the Office of American Absorption, which - abetted by companies like Metropolitan Life Insurance Company that in the 1930's and 1940's were hardly known as equal opportunity employers - resettled suburban American Jews in rural hamlets where there was neither demand for their skills nor tolerance for their religious beliefs; or the murder of radio newsman Walter Winchell for his diatribes against the Lindbergh administration. In sum, this novel persuasively and memorably depicts what might have occurred had the Henry Fords, Father Coughlins, and other Nazi sympathizers of the era.
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by Margaret Atwood
by Alice Munro
by Chuck Palahniuk
