onegoodmove

I've finally finished reading a few books in the last couple of weeks.

The Plot Against America is Philip Roth's latest novel. This is the best effort by Roth that I've read in a long time. It has the added bonus of letting you relive the feelings you had just a month ago when George Bush was elected president. The book is a fictional history of World War II America It is 1940 and Franklin Roosevelt is running for re-elction against the isolationist Charles Lindberg who gets the nomination when the Republican convention is deadlocked. Lindberg is elected and the country begins its decent into a fundamentalist christian hell. The story traces the impact of the election on a Jewish New Jersey family. Great characters and a compelling plot line make this a must read.

Chance is the book on statistics I posted links to a review earlier. I recently finished reading it and must say that it exceeded my expectations. It was not too simple and it was not too complicated. Goldilocks says it was just right. Highly recommended.

The Final Solution is Chabon's latest offering. The story is a homage to Sherlock Holmes but doesn't quite work. The irascible old man would have been better without the Holmsian overtones, but the writing was superb. Take these two paragraphs where Chabon describes a bombed-out London, and the old man's feelings about it.

They were across the river now, and found themselves caught between and towered over by two high red trams.  Rows of staring faces gazing down at them with inquisitorial indifference.  Then the trams split off east and west respectively and, as if a pair of water gates had been lifted, the flood of inner London rushed over them.  They had bombed it; they had burned it; but they had not killed it, and now it was sending forth growths and tendrils of some strange new life...

After his long absence from the city over which had once exercised his quiet brand of domination, he had seemed to expect that it would, like the world when we depart it, would stop changing, would somehow cease to exist.  After us, the Blitz!  And now here he was confronted by not simply the continued existence of the city but, amid the smoking piles of brick and jagged windowpanes, by the irrepressible, inhuman force of its expansion.

Wait for the paperback on this one.