The Book of Daniel: A Novel

The Book of Daniel: A Novel

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 lifeâ€”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 relationshipsâ€”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 parentsâ€™ innocence; visiting his mother and father in the Death House.

It is a book of investigation: transcribing Danielâ€™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 caseâ€”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 Pen-tagon. 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 countryâ€”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.

It is The Book of Daniel.
Country USA
Brand Random House Trade Paperbacks
Manufacturer Random House Publishing Group
Binding Paperback
Color Multicolor
ReleaseDate 2007-07-10
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780812978179

Country	USA
Brand	Random House Trade Paperbacks
Manufacturer	Random House Publishing Group
Binding	Paperback
Color	Multicolor
ReleaseDate	2007-07-10
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780812978179

The Book of Daniel: A Novel

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