Weary, battle-hardened reflections on growing older
infuse this latest collection of essays by novelist and former New York
Times columnist Quindlen (Every Last One). Having chimed in copiously in
previous memoirs on now familiar talking points such as raising
children, finding life’s balance as a working mother, achieving marital
harmony and doling out feminist lessons to three grown children,
Quindlen has found one nut to polish in a gratifying sense of survival
on her own terms. Now in her late 50s, having lived much longer than her
mother, who died when Quindlen was 19, the author finds herself shocked
to hear herself referred to as elderly, and no longer troubled by the
realization that her sense of control over events is illusory. In essays
such as “Generations” and “Expectations,” she is careful to pay homage
to the women like her mother who grew up before the women’s movement and
thus had fewer choices. Yet Quindlen sees much work still to be done,
especially in breaking glass ceilings and in assumptions about women’s
looks—including her own. Cocooned in her comfortable lifestyle between a
New York City apartment and her country house, surrounded by
accumulated “stuff” that is beginning to feel stifling, certain of her
marriage-until-death and support of her BFFs, Quindlen holds for the
most part a blithe, benign view of growing older. Yet in moments when
she dares to peer deeper, such as at her Catholic faith or within the
chasm of solitude left by children having left home, she bats away her
platitudinous reassurances and approaches a near-searing honesty. (May)
--Staff (Reviewed April 2, 2012) (Publishers Weekly, vol 259, issue 14,
p)
Library Journal:
Before she published six best-selling novels (e.g.,
Every Last One ); wrote her million-copy best seller, A Short Guide to
the Happy Life ; and won a Pulitzer Prize for her New York Times column
"Public and Private," Quindlen attracted eager readers with her Times
column "Life in the 30s." Now she's in her fifties and ready to talk
about women's lives as a whole. With an eight-city tour and lotsof
promotion. --Barbara Hoffert (Reviewed December 1, 2011) (Library
Journal, vol 136, issue 20, p94)
Kirkus:
A humorous, sage memoir from the Pulitzer winner and
acclaimed novelist. Like having an older, wiser sister or favorite aunt
over for a cup of tea, Quindlen's (Every Last One, 2010, etc.) latest
book is full of the counsel and ruminations many of us wish we could
learn young. The death of her mother from cancer when she was 19 had a
profound effect on the author, instilling in her the certainty that
"life was short, and therefore it made [her] both driven and joyful" and
happy to have "the privilege of aging." In her sincere and amusing
style, the author reflects on feminism, raising her children, marriage
and menopause. She muses on the perception of youth and her own changing
body image--one of the "greatest gifts [for women] of growing older is
trusting your own sense of yourself." Having women friends, writes
Quindlen, is important for women of all ages, for they are "what we have
in addition to, or in lieu of, therapists. And when we reach a certain
age, they may be who is left." More threads on which the author
meditates in this purposeful book: childbirth, gender issues, the joy of
solitude, the difference between being alone and being lonely,
retirement and religion. For her, "one of the greatest glories of
growing older is the willingness to ask why, and getting no good answer,
deciding to follow my own inclinations and desires. Asking why is the
way to wisdom." A graceful look at growing older from a wise and
accomplished writer--sure to appeal to her many fans, women over 50 and
readers of Nora Ephron and similar authors.(Kirkus Reviews, April 1,
2012)
Monday November 12 at 1:00 PM Discussion Leader: Candace Plotsker-Herman When Charlotte Rainsford is accosted by a petty thief on a London street, the consequences ripple across the lives of acquaintances and strangers alike....Through a richly conceived and colorful cast of characters, Penelope Lively explores the powerful role of chance in people's lives and deftly illustrates how our paths can be altered irrevocably by someone we will never even meet. (Penguin Group USA)
/* Starred Review */ The ruling vision of master
British novelist Lively’s latest delectably tart and agile novel is the
Butterfly Effect, which stipulates that “a very small perturbation” can
radically alter the course of events. The catalyst here is a London
mugging that leaves Charlotte, a passionate reader and former English
teacher become adult literacy tutor, with a broken hip. She moves in
with her married daughter, Rose, to recuperate. Rose works for Henry, a
lord and once-prominent historian, whose ego is as robust as ever but
whose mind is faltering as he attempts to launch a BBC documentary to
hilarious effect. With Rose out helping her mother, Henry prevails upon
his daughter, Marion, an interior designer, to accompany him out of
town, where she meets a too-good-to-be-true client. When she texts her
lover, who deals in architectural salvage (tangible history), to
postpone a rendezvous, his wife intercepts the message. Charlotte begins
tutoring Anton, a smart and soulful East European, who affirms her
ardor for language and story and awakens Rose out of her smothering
stoicism. Throughout this brilliantly choreographed and surreptitiously
poignant chain-reaction comedy of chance and change, Lively (Family
Album, 2009) shrewdly elucidates the nature of history, the
tunnel-visioning of pain and age, and the abiding illumination of
reading, which so profoundly nourishes the mind and spirit. -- Seaman,
Donna (Reviewed 12-15-2011) (Booklist, vol 108, number 8, p23)
Publishers Weekly:
Charlotte, who is in her 70s, is mugged, leaving her
injured and without her handbag. This delightful, absorbing novel relies
on a sophisticated and skillfully realized structure to introduce and
then follow its endearingly ordinary characters. Though Charlotte’s
incident proves to be the first domino to fall, she herself recedes into
the background as her daughter, her middle-aged ESL student, her boss,
and her boss’s niece come to the fore, going about the business of their
daily lives and loves, all on a somewhat different path than they would
have, had not Charlotte broken her hip. The interdependency of the
characters’ lives, which they remain largely unaware of, builds
intriguing momentum, and the pace quickens as the novel develops.
Throughout, prolific Booker Prize–winning author Lively (for Moon Tiger)
illustrates her knack for charming familiarity and just the right dash
of surprise. (Jan.) --Staff (Reviewed November 7, 2011) (Publishers
Weekly, vol 258, issue 45, p)
Library Journal:
/* Starred Review */ In her latest title, the Booker
Prize-winning author of Moon Tiger explores the far-reaching effect of
happenstance, as individual circumstances shift, lives change, and the
known is perceived in an altogether new light. The novel opens with the
mugging of retired schoolteacher Charlotte Rainsford on a London street.
Subsequently, a diverse cast of richly embroidered acquaintances and
strangers find their lives irrevocably altered by this event, which many
of them haven't even heard about. We see how the mugging affects
Charlotte's daughter Rose, who works for a historian desperate to return
to the limelight, and the spillover to his niece Marion, a cash-poor
interior designer hunting for a business partner while carrying on an
affair eventually revealed through a stray cell-phone call. Lively
delivers her story about these intertwined lives with faultless
dexterity, sly humor, keen insight, and deft economy. VERDICT Lively's
12th novel is a feel-good masterpiece that will delight faithful fans as
well as those new to the work of this consummate storyteller. [See
Prepub Alert, 8/1/11.]— Joyce Townsend, Pittsburg, CA --Joyce Townsend
(Reviewed December 1, 2011) (Library Journal, vol 136, issue 20, p115)
"London, October 1945. Austrian refugees Georg and Edith await the birth of their first child. Yet how can they celebrate when almost every day brings news of another relative or friend murdered in the Holocaust? Their struggle to rebuild their lives is further threatened by growing anti-Semitism in London's streets; Englishmen want to take homes and jobs from Jewish refugees and give them to returning servicemen....
In The List, [NBC News correspondent ]Fletcher investigates an ignored and painful chapter in London’s history. The novel is both a breathless thriller of postwar sabotage and a heartrending and historically accurate portrait of an almost forgotten era...." (us.macmillan.com)
Reviews
Booklist Reviews
NBC special correspondent Fletcher (Walking Israel,
2010) makes his fiction debut with a moving novel based on his parents'
lives. In London at the end of WWII, the Jewish refugees who settled
there to escape Hitler are facing anti-Semitism in their new home. Edith
and Georg, who are expecting their first child, spend their days
looking for work and trying to learn the fates of the family members
left behind in Vienna. Edith mends nylon stockings, while Georg, a
lawyer, tries to find a suitable position. Battling the prevailing
attitude that Jews are occupying real estate and filling jobs that
should belong to returning British soldiers, they often wonder why they
left Europe. Still, visits to the refugee center to check the lists of
the dead and the missing remind them of their luck. A long-lost cousin,
Anna, who survived the camps, finds them and moves in among the
eccentric occupants of their boardinghouse. She befriends Ismail, an
Arab from Cairo who is involved in mysterious business. The British
occupation of Palestine and the Zionist efforts—including terrorism—to
create a Jewish homeland are cause for both hope and feat. Fletcher has
written a touching story that brings a little-known aspect of Jewish
history to life. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.
Kirkus Reviews
Having fled the Nazis, a young Austrian couple in
1945 London discovers that for Jews like them, the war did not end with
VE Day. While they desperately seek word on the possible survival or
whereabouts of family members sent to concentration camps, petitions are
being signed by anti-Semitics in their neighborhood of Hampstead to
"send the aliens home"—ostensibly to clear space and jobs for returning
British soldiers.Veteran NBC correspondent Fletcher's engrossing
first novel, loosely based on his parents' story, captures a neglected
piece of postwar history through the plight of the spirited Edith, who
is seven months pregnant with her first child following a miscarriage,
and Georg, a reserved lawyer reduced to making buttons for a living.
When Edith's first cousin Anna unexpectedly arrives, traumatized by her
time in Auschwitz, she raises hope, however dim, that other relatives
will follow, maybe even Edith's father. It's a time when the horrific
truths of the camps are not yet widely known or understood—and when lies
about Jews, including the notion they have any "home" to return to—are
passed off as truth. Drawn to Ismael, an Egyptian Arab who despite his
seeming antagonism toward Jews has a habit of coming to their rescue,
Anna slowly emerges from her personal darkness. The lightly veiled truth
is that Ismael is actually Israel, part of a secret plot to assassinate
British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin for his part in the blockade to
limit the number of Jews allowed into Palestine. Fletcher (Walking Israel,
2010, etc.) is more convincing as a domestic observer than a
spy/political-thriller writer. As fact-based as this book may be, the
narrative is a bit too neatly tied up and cozy with coincidence for the
novel to gain as much traction as it could have. But this is still a
powerful, affecting work.
A post-Holocaust novel that should be required reading wherever lessons about the plight of modern-day European Jews are taught.
Copyright Kirkus 2011 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.
Publishers Weekly Reviews
In NBC special correspondent Fletcher's
satisfactory first novel, Viennese Jewish refugees Edith and Georg
Fleischer build their new life in 1945 London while Zionist
revolutionaries plot an assassination that could jeopardize all asylum
seekers in Britain. Living in a Hampstead boarding house, the Fleischers
are expecting their first child while waiting to hear news of their
relatives (most of whom perished in concentration or death camps) and
find out whether they can stay in Britain. Edith's cousin Anna arrives,
but her time at Auschwitz has changed her almost beyond recognition.
After Edith makes a speech at a meeting about repatriation petitions,
Georg becomes a target for retribution. The mysterious Ismael, an
Egyptian Arab living at the boarding house, steps in to protect Georg,
beginning an unlikely alliance. Meanwhile, in Palestine, the Lehi—a
group considered to be freedom fighters, or terrorists, take your
pick—plot to force out the British and open the border to any Jews who
wish to enter. There are jarring shifts in point of view and shallow
descriptions, but the novel's warmth and humor will have readers rooting
for the Fleischers and the neighbors who, in the wake of horror, become
their new family. (Oct.)
[Page ]. Copyright 2011 PWxyz LLC
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, longtime New Orleans residents Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun
are cast into an unthinkable struggle with forces beyond wind and
water. In the days after the storm, Abdulrahman traveled the flooded
streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he
could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared-- arrested and accused of being an agent of al Qaeda.
Reviews:
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Eggers burst onto the scene in 2000
with his hugely successful memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering
Genius. Unlike many memoirists, he has resisted the temptation to parcel
out the unpublished parts of his life into yet more memoirs. Instead,
in his most compelling works since his debut, he has told the stories of
others. What Is the What (2006) explored, in novel form, the ordeals of
Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese "lost boy," and now Eggers chronicles,
as nonfiction, the tribulations of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian
American painting contractor who decides to ride out Hurricane Katrina
in New Orleans. Although his wife, Kathy, leaves town with their four
children, Abdulrahman (known as Zeitoun because few locals can pronounce
his first name) stays behind, hoping to protect their home, their job
sites, and their rental properties. After the storm, he paddles the
flooded streets in a canoe, rescuing stranded people, feeding trapped
dogs, and marveling at the sometimes surreal beauty of the devastation.
Was it God's plan that he help others? he wonders. Then people in
uniforms take him at gunpoint and incarcerate him. There are no charges,
only the guards' insistence that he is "al Qaeda" and "Taliban."
Zeitoun's odyssey—23 days of grueling imprisonment, held incommunicado
and deprived of all due process—is but one nightmare of many lived after
Katrina. But it is exceptionally well told: here, as in What Is the
What, Eggers employs a poetic, declarative style, shaping the narrative
with subtlety and grace. More importantly, it is exceptionally well
chosen. In the wake of disaster, we often cling to stories reassuring us
that we respond to trials heroically. But Zeitoun reminds us that we
are just as capable of responding to fear fearfully, forgetting the very
things we claim to value most. Heartbreaking and haunting. Copyright
2010 Booklist Reviews.
In the 1970's, a group of idealists set out to live off the land. They find themselves living in a decrepit mansion called Arcadia House and the land surrounding it. Handy, a musician and the group's leader; Astrid, a midwife; Abe, a master carpenter; Hannah, a baker and historian; and Abe and Hannah's only child Bit, who is born soon after the commune is created are the main characters in the book. While Arcadia rises and falls, Bit, too, ages and changes. Can he remain connected to the peaceful homestead life of Arcadia and its inhabitants and yet become his own man, venturing out into the world he must learn to live in?
/* Starred Review */ This beautifully crafted novel
follows Bit Stone, the first child to be born in the late 1960s on an
upstate New York commune called Arcadia, from childhood through the year
2018. An introspective youngster who can often go months without
speaking, Bit “watches life from a distance.” He can see how hard his
parents work to make Arcadia successful, but he can also see that the
self-indulgent commune leader frequently fails to live up to his own
ideals. As the backbreaking work, continual poverty, and near-constant
hunger work to undermine the once-flourishing sense of community, Bit’s
family leaves the commune to make their way in the outside world. Bit
becomes a photographer and teacher but is always anchored to the place
of his childhood, even marrying the emotionally damaged daughter of
Arcadia’s guru, but happiness proves elusive, both for him and for the
greater world, as a flu pandemic sweeps the globe. Groff’s second novel,
after the well-received The Monsters of Templeton (2008), gives full
rein to her formidable descriptive powers, as she summons both the
beauty of striving for perfection and the inevitable devastation of
failing so miserably to achieve it. -- Wilkinson, Joanne (Reviewed
01-01-2012) (Booklist, vol 108, number 9, p35)
Publishers Weekly:
/* Starred Review */ Groff’s dark, lyrical examination
of life on a commune follows Bit, aka Little Bit, aka Ridley Sorrel
Stone, born in the late ’60s in a spot that will become Arcadia, a
utopian community his parents help to form. Despite their idealistic
goals, the family’s attempts at sustainability bring hunger, cold,
illness, and injury. Bit’s vibrant mother retreats into herself each
winter; caring for the community literally breaks his father’s back. The
small, sensitive child whose purposeful lack of speech is sometimes
mistaken for slowness finds comfort in Grimms’ fairy tales and is lost
in the outside world once Arcadia’s increasingly entitled spiritual
leader falls from grace and the community crumbles. Split between utopia
and its aftermath, the book’s second half tracks the ways in which Bit,
now an adult (he’s 50 when this all ends, in 2018), has been shaped by
Arcadia; a career in photography was the perfect choice for a man who
“watches life from a good distance.” Bit’s painful experiences as a
husband, father, and son grow more harrowing as humanity becomes
increasingly imperiled. The effective juxtaposition of past and future
and Groff’s (Delicate Edible Birds) beautiful prose make this an
unforgettable read. Agent: William Morris Endeavor. (Mar.) --Staff
(Reviewed November 21, 2011) (Publishers Weekly, vol 258, issue 47, p)
Library Journal:
/* Starred Review */ Bit Stone was born in the early
1960s to a devoted couple living in a secluded hippie commune in western
New York. He was a mostly happy boy, if quietly unnerved (his mother
struggles with seasonal depression), who loves Arcadia and his parents
and all the people there who lead hard, pure lives, living off the land.
His parents, Hannah and Adam, are at the center of the loose Arcadia
administration whose acknowledged leader, Handy, increasingly butts
heads with Adam. It is no surprise that as the population of Arcadia
grows and drugs become more prevalent, the community, set upon by
political events that move the narrative into the near future, falls
apart. Bit and the other core members go out into the real world with a
wildly fluctuating level of success. VERDICT Groff, author of 2008's
magnificent The Monsters of Templeton , eschews counterculture
stereotypes to bring Bit's interior and exterior worlds to life. Her
exquisite writing makes the reader question whether to hurry up to read
the next beautiful sentence or slow down and savor each passage. Highly
recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 9/19/11.]— Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor
Dist. Lib., MI --Beth E. Andersen (Reviewed December 1, 2011) (Library
Journal, vol 136, issue 20, p114)
Kirkus:
/* Starred Review */ An astonishing novel, both in
ambition and achievement, filled with revelations that appear inevitable
in retrospect, amid the cycle of life and death. As a follow-up to
Groff's well-received debut (The Monsters of Templeton, 2008), this
novel is a structural conundrum, ending in a very different place than
it begins while returning full circle. At the outset, it appears to be a
novel of the Utopian, communal 1960s, of a charismatic leader, possibly
a charlatan, and an Arcadia that grows according to his belief that
"the Universe will provide." It concludes a half-century later in a
futuristic apocalypse of worldwide plague and quarantine. To reveal too
much of what transpires in between would undermine the reader's rich
experience of discovery: "The page of a book can stay cohesive in the
eyes: one sentence can lead to the next. He can crack a paragraph and
eat it. Now a story. Now a novel, one full life enclosed in covers." The
"he" is Bit Stone, introduced as a 5-year-old child of that commune,
and it is his life that is enclosed in these covers. Following a brief
prologue, representing a pre-natal memory, the novel comprises four
parts, with leaps of a decade or more between them, leaving memory and
conjecture to fill in the blanks. At an exhibition of Bit's photography,
a passion since his childhood (documented in some shots), those who had
known him all his life realized, "What they found most moving, they
told him later, were the blanks between the frames, the leaps that
happened invisibly between the then and the now." The cumulative impact
of this novel is similar, as the boy leaps from the commune and
subsequently his parents, becomes a parent himself, deals with the
decline of his parents and finds his perspective both constant and
constantly changing: "He can't understand what the once-upon-a-time Bit
is saying to the current version of himself or to the one who will stand
here in the future...worn a little more by time and loss." A novel of
"the invisible tissue of civilization," of "community or freedom," and
of the precious fragility of lives in the balance.(Kirkus Reviews,
January 15, 2012)
Biography of Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia
Lauren Groff was born in 1978 in
Cooperstown, N.Y. She graduated from Amherst College and has an MFA in fiction
from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Her short stories have appeared in a
number of journals, including the New Yorker, The Atlantic
Monthly, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, One Story, and Subtropics,
and in the anthologies Best American Short Stories 2007 and Best
American Short Stories 2010, Pushcart Prize XXXII, and Best
New American Voices 2008. A story will be included in the 2012 edition
of PEN/ O. Henry Prize Stories.
She was awarded the Axton Fellowship
in Fiction at the University of Louisville, and has had residencies and
fellowships at Yaddo, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Vermont Studio Center
and Ragdale.
Lauren's first novel, The
Monsters of Templeton, published in February 2008, was a New York Times
Editors’ Choice selection and bestseller and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize
for New Writers. Her second book, Delicate Edible Birds, is a
collection of stories. Her second novel, Arcadia, was published in March
2012.
She lives in Gainesville, Florida
with her husband and two sons.
Selected for a jury that must choose an appropriate memorial for September 11 victims, Claire Burwell struggles to navigate a media firestorm when the winning designer is revealed as an enigmatic Muslim-American.
Amy Waldman was a reporter for The New York Times for eight years, including three as co-chief of the New Delhi bureau. She was also a national correspondent for the Atlantic. The Submission is her debut novel and was named a New York Times Notable Book for 2011, one of NPR's Ten Best Novels, Esquire's Book of the Year, Entertainment Weekly's #1 Novel for the Year, a Washington Post Notable Fiction Book, and one of Amazon's Top 100 Books and top ten debut fiction. It was a finalist for the Guardian (UK) First Book Award. Waldman's fiction has appeared in the Atlantic, the Boston Review and the Financial Times, and was anthologized in "The Best American Non-Required Reading 2010."
Waldman graduated from Yale University and has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and at the American Academy in Berlin. She lives with her family in Brooklyn.
/* Starred Review */ After venomous deliberations over anonymous design submissions for a 9/11 memorial at ground zero, the jury selects an elegant garden as the ideal embodiment of remembrance and rebirth. But when the identity of the architect is revealed—Mohammad Khan, the American son of Muslim immigrants from India—the dream of national healing warps into a hysterical nightmare. As public outrage ignites, entangled characters struggle with anger, fear, conscience, and ambition. Mohammad, called Mo, is stubborn and aloof. Journalist Alyssa is desperate to capitalize on the excoriating scandal. Down-and-out Sean, who lost his firefighter brother, flounders as spokesperson for the victims’ families, while two young 9/11 widows—Claire, wealthy and glamorous, and Asma, an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh—push through grief to try to do the right thing. In her magnetizing first novel, replete with searing insights and exquisite metaphors, Waldman, formerly a New York Times reporter and co-chief of the South Asia bureau, maps shadowy psychological terrain and a vast social minefield as conflicted men and women confront life-and-death moral quandaries within the glare and din of a media carnival. Waldman brilliantly delineates the legacy of 9/11; the confluence of art, religion, and politics; the plexus between the individual and the group; and the glory of transcendent empathy in The Bonfire of the Vanities for our time. -- Seaman, Donna (Reviewed 07-01-2011) (Booklist /* Starred Review */ After venomous deliberations over anonymous design submissions for a 9/11 memorial at ground zero, the jury selects an elegant garden as the ideal embodiment of remembrance and rebirth. But when the identity of the architect is revealed—Mohammad Khan, the American son of Muslim immigrants from India—the dream of national healing warps into a hysterical nightmare. As public outrage ignites, entangled characters struggle with anger, fear, conscience, and ambition. Mohammad, called Mo, is stubborn and aloof. Journalist Alyssa is desperate to capitalize on the excoriating scandal. Down-and-out Sean, who lost his firefighter brother, flounders as spokesperson for the victims’ families, while two young 9/11 widows—Claire, wealthy and glamorous, and Asma, an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh—push through grief to try to do the right thing. In her magnetizing first novel, replete with searing insights and exquisite metaphors, Waldman, formerly a New York Times reporter and co-chief of the South Asia bureau, maps shadowy psychological terrain and a vast social minefield as conflicted men and women confront life-and-death moral quandaries within the glare and din of a media carnival. Waldman brilliantly delineates the legacy of 9/11; the confluence of art, religion, and politics; the plexus between the individual and the group; and the glory of transcendent empathy in The Bonfire of the Vanities for our time. -- Seaman, Donna (Reviewed 07-01-2011) (Booklist, vol 107, number 21, p28)
Publishers Weekly:
/* Starred Review */ Waldman imagines a toxic brew of bigotry in conflict with idealism in this frighteningly plausible and tightly wound account of what might happen if a Muslim architect had won a contest to design a memorial at the World Trade Center site. Jury member and 9/11 widow Claire Burwell presses for the winning garden design both before and after its creator is revealed as Mohammed "Mo" Khan, an American-born and raised architect who becomes embroiled in the growing furor between those who see the garden as a symbol of tolerance and peace, and various activists who claim patriotism as they spew anti-Islamic diatribes. Waldman keenly focuses on political and social variables, including an opportunistic governor who abets the outbreak of xenophobia; the wealthy chairman of the contest, maneuvering for social cachet; a group of zealots whose obsession with radical Islam foments violence; a beautiful Iranian-American lawyer who becomes Mo's lover until he refuses to become a mouthpiece; and a trouble-sowing tabloid reporter. Meanwhile, Mo refuses to demean himself by explaining the source of his design, seen by some as an Islamic martyr's paradise. As misguided outrage flows from all corners, Waldman addresses with a refreshing frankness thorny moral questions and ethical ironies without resorting to breathless hyperbole. True, there are more blowhards than heroes, but that just makes it all the more real. (Aug.) --Staff (Reviewed May 23, 2011) (Publishers Weekly, vol 258, issue 21, p)
Library Journal:
/* Starred Review */ After four months of wrangling, the jury commissioned to choose from the 5000 anonymous submissions for New York City's 9/11 memorial acceded to the affecting widow's steely determination. The Garden, entry #4879, would be a place, Claire opined, where families could "stumble on joy." But jury chair Paul Rubin sees his ambitious plans for elite fund-raising soirees evaporate when the architect's name is revealed. Mohammed Khan's Muslim moniker hits the news like an explosion, reopening still raw wounds. The volatile Sean Gallagher of the Memorial Support Committee is apoplectic, politicians pander to their constituents, lawyers salivate at perceived opportunities, and the Muslim American Coordinating Council sees the besieged Mo Khan as a tool to advance its own agenda. Can he be pressured into walking away from his finest artistic achievement? From this cacophony of intolerance, the single voice calling for reason emanates from Asma Anwar, a non-English speaking Bangladeshi widow whose husband also perished in the burning towers. VERDICT Waldman fluidly blends her reporter's skill (New York Times ) at rapid-fire storytelling with a novelist's gift for nuanced characterization. She dares readers to confront their own complicated prejudices steeped in faith, culture, and class. This is an insightful, courageous, heartbreaking work that should be read, discussed, then read again. [See Prepub Alert, 2/7/11.]— Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL --Sally Bissell (Reviewed July 1, 2011) (LibraryJournal, vol 136, issue 12, p75)
/* Starred Review */ The selection of a Muslim architect for a 9/11 memorial stirs a media circus in Waldman's poised and commanding debut novel.The jury assembled to select a design for a memorial in Manhattan represented every important interest group: a 9/11 widow, an art critic, a governor's representative and other major stakeholders. They considered blind submissions before arriving at a garden-themed design. The one contingency they didn't plan for was that the winner would be a Muslim, Mohammad Khan. Though he's not especially religious and his bona fides as an architect are impeccable, Khan still becomes a target for anti-Islam firebrands, and even his defenders are left wringing their hands. Waldman skillfully presents the perspectives of a handful of major characters, including Claire, a 9/11 widow; Sean, a pugnacious victims' activist who lost his brother in the attacks; and Mohammad, who vacillates between gloomy isolation and outspoken defiance at attempts to reject or tweak his design. Waldman shrewdly, subtly reveals the class and race divisions that spark arguments about who "owns" the design; it's no accident that wealthy Claire played a leading role on the jury while Asma, a working-class Bangladeshi woman who lost her husband in the attacks as well, is all but unheard. Waldman, a former NewYork Times reporter, discusses 9/11 victims, memorial gardens and Muslim-American life, but her keenest observations are of the media. She has a canny understanding of how a New York Post front page can stoke right-wing rage, or how a New York Times article can muddy the waters. There's a slight cartoonishness to her characterizations of cub reporters and radio hosts, but overall this is a remarkably assured portrait of how a populace grows maddened and confused when ideology trumps empathy.A stellar debut. Waldman's book reflects a much-needed understanding of American paranoia in the post-9/11 world. (Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2011)
/* Starred Review */ The fourth in the great and undiminished Roth’s recent cycle of short novels follows Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), and The Humbug (2009), and as exceptional as those novels are, this latest in the series far exceeds its predecessors in both emotion and intellect. In general terms, the novel is a staggering visit to a time and place when a monumental health crisis dominated the way people led their day-to-day lives. Newark, New Jersey, in the early 1940s (a common setting for this author) experienced, as the war in Europe was looking better for the Allies, a scare as deadly as warfare. The city has been hit by an epidemic of polio. Of course, at that time, how the disease spread and its cure were unknown. The city is in a panic, with residents so suspicious of other individuals and ethnic groups that emotions quickly escalate into hostility and even rage. Our hero, and he proves truly heroic, is Bucky Canter, playground director in the Jewish neighborhood of Newark. As the summer progresses, Bucky sees more and more of his teenage charges succumb to the disease. When an opportunity presents itself to leave the city for work in a Catskills summer camp, Bucky is torn between personal safety and personal duty. What happens is heartbreaking, but the joy of having met Bucky redeems any residual sadness. -- Hooper, Brad (Reviewed 07-01-2010) (Booklist, vol 106, number 21, p8)
/* Starred Review */ During the summer of 1944, young men like Bucky Cantor needed good reason not to be fighting overseas. Though he had bad eyesight, was the sole support of his grandmother, and was the best phys ed teacher Newark's Chancellor Avenue School ever saw, Bucky's guilt informed his life that long, hot summer and forever changed its trajectory. With an incredible eye for historical detail, Roth paints a vivid picture of the polio epidemic that hit the Jewish neighborhood of Weequahic on the Fourth of July weekend, pitting ignorance against science, neighbor against neighbor, and fear against common sense. Bucky excels at his job, keeping the kids active and naively believing that he can personally hold the disease at bay. But as one child after another falls ill, he loses faith in God even as he obsesses over the chance to join his girlfriend, Marcia, in the Poconos. VERDICT Roth, one of our greatest American writers, is unrivaled in his mastery at evoking mid-20th-century New Jersey, but it's the thoughtful examination of the toll guilt takes on the psyche, the futility of raging against God or Fate, and the danger of turning blame inward that give this short novel its power. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/10.]— Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib., Ft. Myers, FL --Sally Bissell (Reviewed August 1, 2010) (Library Journal, vol 135, issue 13, p74)
Kirkus:
/* Starred Review */ For those who monitor the growing list of books by Philip Roth, his forthcoming, Nemesis, presents a revelation as startling as the discovery of a planet or the alignment of a new constellation.The top of the list remains reassuringly familiar: "Zuckerman Books" (those featuring Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's alter ego), "Roth Books" (another alter ego, "Philip Roth," in a category that includes fiction and nonfiction alike) and "Kepesh Books" (another serial protagonist who may or may not be an alter ego).But then there is an emergent category: "Nemeses: Short Fiction," which encompasses four recent novels, including the new one. What this means to the ardent Roth reader is that three works previously considered unrelated—Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008) and The Humbling (2009), formerly scattered at the list's bottom with some of his earliest efforts as "Other Books," are now connected. And Nemesis provides the key to that connection.A little longer than the other three, Nemesis could be the darkest novel Roth has written and ranks with the most provocative. It's a parable of innocence lost in the author's native Newark, where polio threatens a neighborhood that is already sacrificing young men to World War II. The protagonist is Bucky Cantor, a 23-year-old playground director, who has seen his best friends enlist in the war while he was rejected for poor eyesight.Instead, "Mr. Cantor" (as his charges call him) finds himself facing a more insidious enemy. "No medicine existed to treat the disease and no vaccine to produce immunity...(it) could befall anyone, for no apparent reason," writes Roth. It arrives without warning, and it changes everything. If anything, it was scarier than cancer or AIDS is now.Narrating the story is one of polio's victims, though he barely emerges as a character until the novel's epiphany. Until then, Roth lets the reader wonder how a narrator named only in passing could penetrate the protagonist's mind and relate a series of incidents that the narrator couldn't have witnessed.As Bucky's boys succumb to the disease, temptation lures him from the city to what appears to be a safe oasis, an idyllic summer camp where his girlfriend works. Yet his conscience (already plagued by his 4-F status) pays the price for his escape, an escape that might prove illusory.What is Bucky's nemesis? Maybe polio. Maybe God, "who made the virus," who kills children with "lunatic cruelty." Maybe mortality—death and the decay that precedes it, the ravages of time that distinguish man from God.But maybe Bucky's nemeses include Bucky himself—a layer of meaning that makes this novel something other than another retelling of Job and forces the reader to reconsider the previously published "Nemeses" in fresh light. For it is within these short novels that Roth tackles nothing less than the human condition, which finds its nemesis in the mirror.(Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2010)
