About this title: Philip Roth creates a startling premise: Charles Lindbergh beats out Franklin Roosevelt and is elected president of the US in 1940, inaugurating an atmosphere of anti-Semitism and bigotry that turns the country into a nightmare for Jews. Among them are the Roths: Herman, Bess, and the two boys, Philip and Sandy. Philip is undergoing a typically hilarious and sex-obsessed Rothian adolescence, Sandy flirts with anti-Semitism himself, and the national blight threatens the existence of the entire family. As the plot travels along, Walter Winchell runs for president, President Lindberg heads into ...
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Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 391 p. read more
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 391 p. read more
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 391 p. read more
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 391 p. read more
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 391 p. read more
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 391 p. read more
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 391 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Date Published: 2004
ISBN-13:9780618509287ISBN:0618509283
Description: New. SLIGHT SHELF WEAR GoodwillnyBooks is committed to providing each customer with the highest standard of customer service. You may return new items within 30 days of delivery for a full refund. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9781400079490ISBN:1400079497
Description: Very Good. Slight shelf wear with small curl to font cover. GoodwillnyBooks is committed to providing each customer with the highest standard of customer service. You may return new items within 30 days of delivery for a full refund. read more
Description: Very Good. 0618509283 *HCDJ * SHIPPING WITHIN 24 HOURS! ** QUESTIONS ANSWERED QUICKLY ** THANKS ** HARDCOVER BOOK WITH DUST JACKET. read more
"Very interesting book from a youngster's POV about what might have happened in America if President Roosevelt had not been re-elected in the 1940 general election. Re-confirmed my progressive outlook toward politics and government."
"What a brilliant novel. Well thought out, based on enough historical facts to feel very real and uses its characters very well. What would have happened had isolationist won the presidential election in 1940 and not Roosevelt? How would his anti-Semitic politics influenced the life of a Jewish-American family? Roth tries to answer this from the viewpoint of 8 year old namesake (I don't know whether family, etc. depict autobiographical elements).
Roth's writing is astounding in that it delivers the atmosphere of fear in a bone chilling manner. The Roth family is totally unprepared for the changes in their lives brought about by the Lindbergh presidency and the political rift goes right through the family, which makes the political climate that much more real. What do you do in a situation that endangers the life of your family? Do you run? Do you stay because you believe in the inherent good of people and the country that is your home? Do you try to get by as invisible as possible? When is enough enough?
I was especially impressed by how the beginning and end of the manipulated period fall in line with the historical facts they connect to."
"I'm not really sure how to describe this book. It's an "alternative history," book in which FDR didn't win a third nomination, and somehow Charles Lindbergh got elected instead.
It was fascinating to read the book and compare/contrast and think very deeply about our political situation today: Unpopular war, pro-war president, charismatic presidential candidate and so forth. (And before anyone gets carried away and upset, I said compare and CONTRAST. Some things are clearly very different, but it is a fun intellectual exercise). It was also a cautionary tale against voting for someone simply because he is charismatic and has a way with airplanes.
The tale is told from the viewpoint of a nine-year-old Jewish boy in Newark. The author is wonderfully skillful at making the events of the book seem eminently plausible, and in translating how a nine-year-old feels fear and perceives panic. I'm not sure whether this book is well-written or just very emotionally accessible (or, secret option C, that I just have an imagination easily open to suggestion) but Roth conveys the emotional sense of his eponymous character with startling clarity. This makes for a good, if somewhat tense, read. I had to keep putting down the book to remind myself that, it was OK, FDR did win the election, and we did not launch a pogrom against the Jews. The tragedy, of course, is that it did happen somewhere else. And I think that is the true genius of this book is allowing us to see how easily we could become the bad guys, instead of allowing us to feel comfortably superior to those did."
"Philip Roth's re-imagining of history reminds me of the old What If? comic books, wherein they take a specific point in history and change an event or the choice someone makes. The narrative then follows this alternate reality to demonstrate how different the world would have become. It's like Clarence the angel in It's A Wonderful Life when he shows George how different his entire town would be had he never been born.
But in The Plot Against America, Roth chooses to ask What if Charles Lindbergh had run in the 1940 presidential election and defeated Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Lindbergh was in real life an anti-semite and Nazi sympathizer, and so Roth chooses to study the impact such a world altering event would have on a single Jewish family in Newark, which is presumably closely patterned after his own-since he names his protagonist, a 7-year old boy, Philip Roth.
I really liked the pervasive feeling of creepiness woven into the first two-thirds of the book, where there's no outright evidence of anything but a presidency trying to keep its country out of war. But under the guise of emphasizing Americanness, government programs slowly start to attack the solidarity of predominantly Jewish neighborhoods, as large companies cooperate with a redistribution plan. It all starts to feel very nefarious, and eventually a tipping point is reached.
The only real problem I had with it was the end, which seemed much more improbable, as it managed to set everything back to roughly the way it would have been had Lindbergh not won the election. I'd have been far more interested in finding out what the rest of the 20th century would have been like if, for instance, the United States had joined the Axis and fought Canada."
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