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A Few Book Reviews
Jan. 18th, 2005 05:32 pmPhilip Roth, The Plot Against America
The premise of the Plot Against America is that instead of FDR being elected to a second term as president, Charles Lindbergh is nominated by the Republican Party and wins on an isolationist platform. He then perpetrates the meme that WWII is a "Jewish War" and begins a campaign of relocating Jews to rural communities where they will be easily assimilated. He is aided in this by a Rabbi Bengelsdorf, who he places in charge of the Office of Assimilation Services.
The story is very compelling, told through the eyes of the young Phillip Roth and tinged with that vaguely surreal haze that accompanies a young boy's discovery of the world. It touches very nicely on the theme of the moral choices we make as individuals and as a nation, and how no choice, regardless of how positive it might seem, is not without negative consequences.
Roth's writing is not quite up to the demands of his story. He frequently pens lengthy sentences which turn vicious on him and bite him in the ass. He also stops the movement of the story every time a new character is introduced to give a synopsis of that character's existence up to that point, rather than revealing it within the narrative. The result is that large blocks of the text are given over to lengthy expositions as Roth blithely ignores the first law of Narrative: "Show, don't tell."
Recommendation: Despite the problems presented by Roth's prose, the story is sufficiently compelling, the world-building sufficiently deep, and the themes sufficiently profound to justify reading it in spite of that fact.
Terry Pratchett: Going Postal
This latest of Pratchett's Discworld novels shows Pratchett at the very top of his form. He takes on the entire telecommunications industry, from the people who created the technology through the Worldcoms of the world, and wrestles very intelligently with the problems of public and private ownership of information delivery systems.
The narrative itself is brisk and will keep the reader turning pages. Exposition is integral to the story, and is accomplished in a manner that seems like a good striptease, slowly revealing what was not known before only as the plot demands that it become known.
In many ways this is, perhaps, one of the most complex of Pratchett's works and I would recommend it very highly. It helps to have read The Fifth Elephant, which introduces the Clacks, and Monstrous Regiment, which introduces cryptography and compression to the Clacks, but neither is strictly necessary for taking Going Postal on its own.
The premise of the Plot Against America is that instead of FDR being elected to a second term as president, Charles Lindbergh is nominated by the Republican Party and wins on an isolationist platform. He then perpetrates the meme that WWII is a "Jewish War" and begins a campaign of relocating Jews to rural communities where they will be easily assimilated. He is aided in this by a Rabbi Bengelsdorf, who he places in charge of the Office of Assimilation Services.
The story is very compelling, told through the eyes of the young Phillip Roth and tinged with that vaguely surreal haze that accompanies a young boy's discovery of the world. It touches very nicely on the theme of the moral choices we make as individuals and as a nation, and how no choice, regardless of how positive it might seem, is not without negative consequences.
Roth's writing is not quite up to the demands of his story. He frequently pens lengthy sentences which turn vicious on him and bite him in the ass. He also stops the movement of the story every time a new character is introduced to give a synopsis of that character's existence up to that point, rather than revealing it within the narrative. The result is that large blocks of the text are given over to lengthy expositions as Roth blithely ignores the first law of Narrative: "Show, don't tell."
Recommendation: Despite the problems presented by Roth's prose, the story is sufficiently compelling, the world-building sufficiently deep, and the themes sufficiently profound to justify reading it in spite of that fact.
Terry Pratchett: Going Postal
This latest of Pratchett's Discworld novels shows Pratchett at the very top of his form. He takes on the entire telecommunications industry, from the people who created the technology through the Worldcoms of the world, and wrestles very intelligently with the problems of public and private ownership of information delivery systems.
The narrative itself is brisk and will keep the reader turning pages. Exposition is integral to the story, and is accomplished in a manner that seems like a good striptease, slowly revealing what was not known before only as the plot demands that it become known.
In many ways this is, perhaps, one of the most complex of Pratchett's works and I would recommend it very highly. It helps to have read The Fifth Elephant, which introduces the Clacks, and Monstrous Regiment, which introduces cryptography and compression to the Clacks, but neither is strictly necessary for taking Going Postal on its own.
