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The Book of Daniel, April 1996
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The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia.
Plume
April 1996
320 pages ISBN: 0452275660 Trade Size (reprint)
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Historical
The central figure of this novel is a young man whose
parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic
secrets for Russia. His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his
parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long
time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted. Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a
new life--marriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son
of his own, and a career in scholarship. It is a life that
enrages him. In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where
he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel
composes something quite different. It is a confession of his most intimate relationships--with
his wife, his foster parents, and his kid sister Susan,
whose own radicalism so reproaches him. It is a book of memories: riding a bus with his parents to
the ill-fated Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill; watching
the FBI take his father away; appearing with Susan at
rallies protesting their parents’ innocence; visiting his
mother and father in the Death House. It is a book of investigation: transcribing Daniel’s
interviews with people who knew his parents, or who knew
about them; and logging his strange researches and
discoveries in the library stacks. It is a book of judgments of everyone involved in the case--
lawyers, police, informers, friends, and the Isaacson
family itself. It is a book rich in characters, from elderly grand-mothers
of immigrant culture, to covert radicals of the McCarthy
era, to hippie marchers on the Pentagon. It is a book that
spans the quarter-century of American life since World War
II. It is a book about the nature of Left politics in this
country--its sacrificial rites, its peculiar cruelties, its
humility, its bitterness. It is a book about some of the
beautiful and terrible feelings of childhood. It is about
the nature of guilt and innocence, and about the relations
of people to nations.
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