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Loading... The Plot Against America (2004)by Philip Roth
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» 24 more Best Dystopias (122) Books Read in 2020 (146) Unread books (156) Top Five Books of 2013 (522) Top Five Books of 2022 (215) Books Read in 2021 (1,319) 2000s decade (58) No current Talk conversations about this book. I went through this weird phase where I read a lot of books about Nazis, including this extremely disturbing book. It's based on a really big What If: FDR isn't reelected and in his place the US gets the Lone Eagle/Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh. (BTW, reading this, you can't help but think that today we're actually living in some version of Roth's hypothetical "what if the wrong guy was president during a crucial time in human history" setting.) Though this is fiction (or as Nathan shelves it, "lies") you learn a lot about WWII in the reading. There's a lengthy postscript following the narrative wherein Roth backs up a lot of his claims with facts. Spooky.
Philip Roth has written a terrific political novel, though in a style his readers might never have predicted — a fable of an alternative universe, in which America has gone fascist and ordinary life has been flattened under a steamroller of national politics and mass hatreds. Young Philip's greatest epiphany is to recognise the difference between history as taught in school - harmless and inevitable - and history as it's lived through, "the relentless unforeseen". His novel is a different kind of history again, an imagined past which, if we learn from it, might save us from a calamitous future. It's not Roth's funniest novel (and there's hardly any sex). But in its sweep and chutzpah, it ranks with his great trilogy of the late-90s. Isn't it time they gave him the Nobel? Philip Roth's huge, inflammatory, painfully moving new novel draws upon a persistent theme in American life: "It can't happen here." That's how we express our longing to believe that our ideals are too strong to be shoved aside by some cruder impulse, and our nagging fear that our democracy is too fragile to withstand assault by the muscle of fascism... Belongs to Publisher SeriesIs contained inHas as a commentary on the textAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML: Philip Roth's bestselling alternate history�the chilling story of what happens to one family when America elects a charismatic, isolationist president�is soon to be an HBO limited series. No library descriptions found. |
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