I haven't yet finished reading The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth, but I will finish it probably this weekend. Before I started reading it, I heard some negative things about the book, but the alternate world predicated by the book was too intriguing to pass up.
Here are a few things that I think are great about this book:
It doesn't let any political position slip freely through. The anti-war folks (with whom I've always counted myself) are given an argument for war that is quite impossible to oppose, while the pro-war folks are given the stance of the isolationists and anti-semites all in the name of a unified America.
The blend of (anti)-history with history, fiction and memoir allows a very peculiar relationship to the author. Like Roth saying, this could have been my family.
Finally, in a book about anti-semitic America under President Charles Lindbergh, it both scares one to think about the correlations to today's political situation (gasp), but on further contemplation, that does not actually seem tobe a connection at all, other than,our government is scary, like this fictional one. They actually seem to be quite opposite situations.
Also, the book has plenty of problems.
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I know this blog focuses mainly on fiction, but for whatever reason I haven't been reading much fiction at all. Therefore I shall present a nonfiction book for some to read: "The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece" by Victor Davis Hanson.
It's a fancinating book that addresses how Greeks fought, and how that fighting has created a Western Way of War. The book argues that the Western Way of War has left us with a "burdensome legacy: a presumption that battle under any guise other than a no-nonsense, head-to-head confrontation between sober enemies is or should be unpalatable." Thus War is the battle on the field by hostile powers subscribing to the rules of war. Unfortunately we, the West, have become so good at this type of war that no power is willing to fight us in the Western Way. Instead our success has created an enemy who chooses irregular war--the guerrilla, the terrorist. And we have perhaps ended war as we like it.
If you decide to read this book. Reader beware. You will spend 200 pages reading about the terrifying experience of hoplite battles.
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