About this title: During the time of President Clinton's impeachment hearings, Coleman Silk--a classics professor at a small New England college--is undergoing a trial of his own: he has been accused of racism, and his job is in jeopardy. Silk is innocent of the charge, but he is, in fact, guilty of something else--a fact about himself he has kept completely secret ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Date Published: 2001
ISBN-13:9780375726347ISBN:0375726349
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Gently used softcover edition. Bent lower right corner of cover. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 361 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 2001-05-08
ISBN-13:9780099422136ISBN:0099422131
Description: Good. Minimal damage to the cover, dust jacket not necessarily included minimal wear to binding, majority of pages undamaged, minimal to no highlighting/underlining of text, no missing p. read more
Description: Acceptable. Book is in good reading condition. Cover has wear at edges and corners, and may have creases. Spine has wear at edges. read more
Description: Acceptable. Book is in good reading condition. Cover has wear at edges and corners, and may have creases. Spine has wear at edges and may have creases. read more
Description: Acceptable. Book is in good reading condition. Cover has wear at edges and corners, and may have creases. Spine has wear at edges. Cover has heavy wear. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Date Published: 2000
ISBN-13:9780618059454ISBN:0618059458
Description: Acceptable. Well used. Still readable but not for the collector. Dust jacket is ripped, and the binding is a little worn. All orders processed within 2 business days. Ships from Foxboro MA. read more
Description: Good. 0618059458 Former library item may have library binding and show stamps, stickers or other marks. Items not meeting quality expectations may be returned. Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. read more
Description: Good. 0618059458 Former library item may have library binding and show stamps, stickers or other marks. Items not meeting quality expectations may be returned. Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. read more
"I don't remember much of this book other than that it annoyed me a bit. But I just found a whole file from Cornell days with some favorite book quotes and one passage from this novel made the list. It's grim, but I still like it nonetheless:
"As the audience filed back in, I began, cartoonishly, to envisage the fatal malady that, without anyone's recognizing it, was working away inside us, within each and every one of us: to visualize the blood vessels occluding under the baseball caps, the malignancies growing beneath the permed white hair, the organs misfiring, atrophying, shutting down, the hundreds of billions of murderous cells surreptitiously marching this entire audience toward the improbable disaster ahead. I couldn't stop myself. The stupendous decimation that is death sweeping us all away. Orchestra, audience, conductor, technicians, swallows, wrens - think of the numbers for Tanglewood alone just between now and the year 4000. Then multiply that times everything. The ceaseless perishing. What an idea! What maniac conceived it?" (p 209)"
"For sheer power of narrative Philip Roth is exceptional. I don't think I've read a writer, since I read William Styron's novels many years ago, that literally picks you up by the scruff of the neck and drags you along. You can kick and scream against the intensity and speed that you are travelling but somehow you just can't put the book down. This is an amazing look at the ridiculous, hypocritical society that is small town America, brilliantly done. Thank you, Cat. I hope to read Deception soon."
"Philip Roth appears to be a decent writer and I'm going to trying reading something else by him, but unfortunately after a good start this book makes a sudden postmodernist turn and disappears up its own backside.
We start out thinking this is a book about the relationships and secrets of four people surrounding a New England college. Then after a third of the way into the book, surprise, this is actually a book about a fifth character who is writing about the other four characters. Except the fifth character barely knows anything about the others so it is, I'm guessing, actually a book about the fifth character as he projects his worldview on to the others. But this puzzle does not pull me in in the least. For example we get a scene where Roth has his fictional narrator imagine one of the "main" characters overhearing a conversion between three unknown other people. What is the reader to make of this? Like the schoolchild asked to define the difference between ignorance and apathy, my response is "I don't know and I don't care"."
"If "Election" perfectly captured the "why me worry?" side of post-Reagan Washington, "The Human Stain" was a snapshot of the ultimate outcome of the Culture Wars playing out between the New Right and the remnants of the New Left. Unlike Roth's other political works, there is something approaching nihilism at the end of this work; the systems destroy people, but those individuals are not tragic heroes brought low by their goodness, or even their idealism, they are simply victims of human choice (even David Simon let his characters find personal fulfillment outside of institutions). Much of the America Trilogy was concerned with the fall of American liberalism, but not in the context of Big Ideas doing Big Things, but in the individual and interpersonal sense. Unlike many old leftists, Roth did not drift into neo-conservative politics, but he never made peace with a New Left that opened up the social space to explore sexual politics but also found it distasteful that he failed to embrace their doctrinal rules of exploration. The America books are a bitter comic record of liberalisms decline, from McCarthy discrediting populist leftist, to the radical individualism of the New Left, until finally ending in the attrition heavy battles of the campus wars; battle lines drawn, colors soon to be embraced, one America, slightly divisible."
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