{"product_id":"the-plot-against-america-isbn-9781400079490","title":"The Plot Against America","description":"\u003cb\u003eNATIONAL BESTSELLER • The chilling bestselling alternate history novel of what happens to one family when America elects a charismatic, isolationist president whose government embraces anti-Semitism—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of \u003ci\u003eAmerican Pastoral\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e“A terrific political novel.... Sinister, vivid, dreamlike...You turn the pages, astonished and frightened.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eOne of the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial \"understanding\" with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. | “A terrific political novel.... Sinister, vivid, dreamlike ... creepily plausible.... You turn the pages, astonished and frightened.”\u003cb\u003e —\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Huge, inflammatory, painfully moving.... Far and away the most outward-looking,  expansive ... book Roth has written.”\u003cb\u003e —\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Roth’s  most powerfrul book to date. Confounding and illuminating, enraging and discomfiting,  imaginative and utterly–terrifyingly–believable.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Once  again, Philip Roth has published a novel that you must read–\u003ci\u003enow\u003c\/i\u003e.... A stunning  work.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Christian Science Monitor \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It’s not a prophecy; it’s a nightmare, and  it becomes more nightmarish–and also funnier and more bizarre–as is goes along.... [A] sinuous and brilliant book, with its extreme sweetness, its black pain, and  its low, ceaseless cackle.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Ambitious and chilling ... a breath-taking  leap of imagination.... The writing is brilliant.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eUSA Today\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Intimately observed  characters in situations fraught with society’s deepest, most bitter tensions.... Too ingeniously excruciating to put down.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eNewsweek\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Never has [Roth’s voice]  been more nuanced ... beautifully particularized.... [A] novelist who for 45  years has been continuously reinventing himself, never more notably than in \u003ci\u003eThe Plot  Against America\u003c\/i\u003e.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Ingenious ... Roth’s gorgeous and forceful  prose, which swirls and dances and rages . . . has never seemed more precise and  lucid.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eStar-Telegram\u003c\/i\u003e (Dallas\/Fort Worth) \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Raises the stakes as high as a patriotic  novel can take them.... Effortlessly, it seems, Roth has led us to suspend disbelief;  then he makes us believe; then he suspends this belief and finally removes it.... A fabulous yarn.”\u003cb\u003e —\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eLos Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“A remarkable act of historical  imagination and one of [Roth’s] most moving novels.”\u003cb\u003e —\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003ePeople \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Roth takes readers  on a harrowing safari across interdimensional borders into a bizarre version of his  hometown.... [His] delivery is so matter-of-fact, so documentary deadpan that  when we’re 10 pages into the book our own world starts to seem like a flimsy fantasy.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eTime\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“The most compelling of living writers.... [His] every book is like a dispatch  from the deepest recesses of the national mind.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eNew York Magazine\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A richly terrifying  historical novel.... [Roth is] the greatest fiction writer America has ever produced.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eEsquire\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“The writing is extraordinary, complex but highly readable, evocative,  and colored with a tenderness and affection.... This is one of Roth’s finest books.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eO\u003c\/i\u003e (The Oprah Magazine) \u003c\/b\u003e | PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for \u003ci\u003eAmerican Pastoral\u003c\/i\u003e. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ethe White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eAcademy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction.\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eHe twice won the National Book Award and the National\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eBook Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN\/Faulkner\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eAward three times. In 2005 \u003ci\u003eThe Plot Against America \u003c\/i\u003ereceived\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ethe Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstanding\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ehistorical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.”\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eRoth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards:\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ein 2006 the PEN\/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN\/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eMedal at the White House, and was later named the fourth\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003erecipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018. | June 1940–October 1940\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eVote for Lindbergh or Vote for War\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFEAR PRESIDES  over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course no childhood  is without its terrors,  yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened  boy if Lindbergh hadn't been  president or if I hadn't been the offspring of  Jews.\u003cbr\u003e When the first shock came  in June of 1940--the nomination for the presidency  of Charles A. Lindbergh, America's  international aviation hero, by the  Republican Convention at Philadelphia--my father  was thirty-nine, an  insurance agent with a grade school education, earning a little  under fifty  dollars a week, enough for the basic bills to be paid on time but for  little  more. My mother--who'd wanted to go to teachers' college but couldn't  because  of the expense, who'd lived at home working as an office secretary  after finishing  high school, who'd kept us from feeling poor during the  worst of the Depression  by budgeting the earnings my father turned over to  her each Friday as efficiently  as she ran the household--was thirty-six. My  brother, Sandy, a seventh-grader with  a prodigy's talent for drawing, was  twelve, and I, a third-grader a term ahead of  himself--and an embryonic  stamp collector inspired like millions of kids by the  country's foremost  philatelist, President Roosevelt--was seven.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe lived in  the second-floor flat of a small two-and-a-half-family house on  a tree-lined street  of frame wooden houses with red-brick stoops, each stoop  topped with a gable roof  and fronted by a tiny yard boxed in with a low-cut  hedge. The Weequahic neighborhood  had been built on farm lots at the  undeveloped southwest edge of Newark just after  World War One, some half  dozen of the streets named, imperially, for victorious  naval commanders in  the Spanish-American War and the local movie house called, after  FDR's fifth  cousin--and the country's twenty-sixth president--the Roosevelt. Our  street,  Summit Avenue, sat at the crest of the neighborhood hill, an elevation as   high as any in a port city that rarely rises a hundred feet above the level  of  the tidal salt marsh to the city's north and east and the deep bay due  east of the  airport that bends around the oil tanks of the Bayonne peninsula  and merges there  with New York Bay to flow past the Statue of Liberty and  into the Atlantic. Looking  west from our bedroom's rear window we could  sometimes see inland as far as the  dark treeline of the Watchungs, a  low-lying mountain range fringed by great estates  and affluent, sparsely  populated suburbs, the extreme edge of the known world--and  about eight  miles from our house. A block to the south was the working-class town  of  Hillside, whose population was predominantly Gentile. The boundary with  Hillside  marked the beginning of Union County, another New Jersey entirely.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe were a  happy family in 1940. My parents were outgoing, hospitable people,  their friends  culled from among my father's associates at the office and  from the women who along  with my mother had helped to organize the  Parent-Teacher Association at newly built  Chancellor Avenue School, where my  brother and I were pupils. All were Jews. The  neighborhood men either were  in business for themselves--the owners of the local  candy store, grocery  store, jewelry store, dress shop, furniture shop, service station,  and  delicatessen, or the proprietors of tiny industrial job shops over by the  Newark-Irvington  line, or self-employed plumbers, electricians,  housepainters, and boilermen--or  were foot-soldier salesmen like my father,  out every day in the city streets and  in people's houses, peddling their  wares on commission. The Jewish doctors and lawyers  and the successful  merchants who owned big stores downtown lived in one-family houses  on  streets branching off the eastern slope of the Chancellor Avenue hill,  closer  to grassy, wooded Weequahic Park, a landscaped three hundred acres  whose boating  lake, golf course, and harness-racing track separated the  Weequahic section from  the industrial plants and shipping terminals lining  Route 27 and the Pennsylvania  Railroad viaduct east of that and the  burgeoning airport east of that and the very  edge of America east of  that--the depots and docks of Newark Bay, where they unloaded  cargo from  around the world. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt the western end of the neighborhood, the parkless  end  where we lived, there resided an occasional schoolteacher or pharmacist but   otherwise few professionals were among our immediate neighbors and certainly  none  of the prosperous entrepreneurial or manufacturing families. The men  worked fifty,  sixty, even seventy or more hours a week; the women worked all  the time, with little  assistance from labor-saving devices, washing laundry,  ironing shirts, mending socks,  turning collars, sewing on buttons,  mothproofing woolens, polishing furniture, sweeping  and washing floors,  washing windows, cleaning sinks, tubs, toilets, and stoves,  vacuuming rugs,  nursing the sick, shopping for food, cooking meals, feeding relatives,   tidying closets and drawers, overseeing paint jobs and household repairs,  arranging  for religious observances, paying bills and keeping the family's  books while simultaneously  attending to their children's health, clothing,  cleanliness, schooling, nutrition,  conduct, birthdays, discipline, and  morale. A few women labored alongside their  husbands in the family-owned  stores on the nearby shopping streets, assisted after  school and on  Saturdays by their older children, who delivered orders and tended  stock and  did the cleaning up.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was work that identified and distinguished  our neighbors for me far more  than religion. Nobody in the neighborhood had a beard  or dressed in the  antiquated Old World style or wore a skullcap either outdoors  or in the  houses I routinely floated through with my boyhood friends. The adults  were  no longer observant in the outward, recognizable ways, if they were  seriously  observant at all, and aside from older shopkeepers like the tailor  and the kosher  butcher--and the ailing or decrepit grandparents living of  necessity with their  adult offspring--hardly anyone in the vicinity spoke  with an accent. By 1940 Jewish  parents and their children at the  southwestern corner of New Jersey's largest city  talked to one another in an  American English that sounded more like the language  spoken in Altoona or  Binghamton than like the dialects famously spoken across the  Hudson by our  Jewish counterparts in the five boroughs. Hebrew lettering was stenciled  on  the butcher shop window and engraved on the lintels of the small  neighborhood  synagogues, but nowhere else (other than at the cemetery) did  one's eye chance to  land on the alphabet of the prayer book rather than on  the familiar letters of the  native tongue employed all the time by  practically everyone for every conceivable  purpose, high or low. At the  newsstand out front of the corner candy store, ten  times more customers  bought the Racing Form than the Yiddish daily, the Forvertz.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIsrael didn't yet exist, six million European Jews hadn't yet ceased to  exist,  and the local relevance of distant Palestine (under British mandate  since the 1918  dissolution by the victorious Allies of the last far-flung  provinces of the defunct  Ottoman Empire) was a mystery to me. When a  stranger who did wear a beard and who  never once was seen hatless appeared  every few months after dark to ask in broken  English for a contribution  toward the establishment of a Jewish national homeland  in Palestine, I, who  wasn't an ignorant child, didn't quite know what he was doing  on our  landing. My parents would give me or Sandy a couple of coins to drop into   his collection box, largess, I always thought, dispensed out of kindness so  as  not to hurt the feelings of a poor old man who, from one year to the  next, seemed  unable to get it through his head that we'd already had a  homeland for three generations.  I pledged allegiance to the flag of our  homeland every morning at school. I sang  of its marvels with my classmates  at assembly programs. I eagerly observed its national  holidays, and without  giving a second thought to my affinity for the Fourth of July  fireworks or  the Thanksgiving turkey or the Decoration Day double-header. Our homeland   was America. Then the Republicans nominated Lindbergh and everything changed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor nearly a decade Lindbergh was as great a hero in our neighborhood  as he  was everywhere else. The completion of his thirty-three-and-a-half-hour  nonstop  solo flight from Long Island to Paris in the tiny monoplane the  Spirit of St. Louis  even happened to coincide with the day in the spring of  1927 that my mother discovered  herself to be pregnant with my older brother.  As a consequence, the young aviator  whose daring had thrilled America and  the world and whose achievement bespoke a  future of unimaginable  aeronautical progress came to occupy a special niche in the  gallery of  family anecdotes that generate a child's first cohesive mythology. The   mystery of pregnancy and the heroism of Lindbergh combined to give a  distinction  bordering on the divine to my very own mother, for whom nothing  less than a global  annunciation had accompanied the incarnation of her first  child. Sandy would later  record this moment with a drawing illustrating the  juxtaposition of those two splendid  events. In the drawing--completed at the  age of nine and smacking inadvertently  of Soviet poster art--Sandy  envisioned her miles from our house, amid a joyous crowd  on the corner of  Broad and Market. A slender young woman of twenty-three with dark  hair and a  smile that is all robust delight, she is surprisingly on her own and  wearing  her floral-patterned kitchen apron at the intersection of the city's two   busiest thoroughfares, one hand spread wide across the front of the apron,  where  the span of her hips is still deceptively girlish, while with the  other she alone  in the crowd is pointing skyward to the Spirit of St. Louis,  passing visibly above  downtown Newark at precisely the moment she comes to  realize that, in a feat no  less triumphant for a mortal than Lindbergh's,  she has conceived Sanford Roth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSandy was four and I, Philip, wasn't yet born when in March 1932, Charles  and  Anne Morrow Lindbergh's own first child, a boy whose arrival twenty  months earlier  had been an occasion for national rejoicing, was kidnapped  from his family's secluded  new house in rural Hopewell, New Jersey. Some ten  weeks later the decomposing body  of the baby was discovered by chance in  woods a few miles away. The baby had been  either murdered or killed  accidentally after being snatched from his crib and, in  the dark, still in  bedclothes, carried out a window of the second-story nursery  and down a  makeshift ladder to the ground while the nurse and mother were occupied  in  their ordinary evening activities in another part of the house. By the time   the kidnapping and murder trial in Flemington, New Jersey, concluded in  February  1935 with the conviction of Bruno Hauptmann--a German ex-con of  thirty-five living  in the Bronx with his German wife--the boldness of the  world's first transatlantic  solo pilot had been permeated with a pathos that  transformed him into a martyred  titan comparable to Lincoln.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFollowing the trial, the Lindberghs left America,  hoping through a temporary  expatriation to protect a new Lindbergh infant from harm  and to recover some  measure of the privacy they coveted. The family moved to a small  village in  England, and from there, as a private citizen, Lindbergh began taking  the  trips to Nazi Germany that would transform him into a villain for most  American  Jews. In the course of five visits, during which he was able to  familiarize himself  at first hand with the magnitude of the German war  machine, he was ostentatiously  entertained by Air Marshal Göring, he was  ceremoniously decorated in the name of  the Führer, and he expressed quite  openly his high regard for Hitler, calling Germany  the world's \"most  interesting nation\" and its leader \"a great man.\" And all this  interest and  admiration after Hitler's 1935 racial laws had denied Germany's Jews  their  civil, social, and property rights, nullified their citizenship, and  forbidden  intermarriage with Aryans.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBy the time I began school in 1938, Lindbergh's was  a name that provoked the  same sort of indignation in our house as did the weekly  Sunday radio  broadcasts of Father Coughlin, the Detroit-area priest who edited a   right-wing weekly called Social Justice and whose anti-Semitic virulence  aroused  the passions of a sizable audience during the country's hard times.  It was in November  1938--the darkest, most ominous year for the Jews of  Europe in eighteen centuries--that  the worst pogrom in modern history,  Kristallnacht, was instigated by the Nazis all  across Germany: synagogues  incinerated, the residences and businesses of Jews destroyed,  and,  throughout a night presaging the monstrous future, Jews by the thousands  forcibly  taken from their homes and transported to concentration camps. When  it was suggested  to Lindbergh that in response to this unprecedented  savagery, perpetrated by a state  on its own native-born, he might consider  returning the gold cross decorated with  four swastikas bestowed on him in  behalf of the Führer by Air Marshal Göring, he  declined on the grounds that  for him to publicly surrender the Service Cross of  the German Eagle would  constitute \"an unnecessary insult\" to the Nazi leadership.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLindbergh was the first famous living American whom I learned to hate--just   as President Roosevelt was the first famous living American whom I was  taught to  love--and so his nomination by the Republicans to run against  Roosevelt in 1940  assaulted, as nothing ever had before, that huge endowment  of personal security  that I had taken for granted as an American child of  American parents in an American  school in an American city in an America at  peace with the world. | A Novel","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301405839589,"sku":"NP9781400079490","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400079490.jpg?v=1767740980","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-plot-against-america-isbn-9781400079490","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}