Doctorow sticks closest to the Isaacsons. The writing is most poignant, most alive, when E. Instead of clearing away the mysteries of the Isaacson trial, Mindish kisses Daniel on the head in the middle of Disneyland. When Susan is hospitalized after a suicide attempt, Daniel breaks out of his lethargy for a moment, leaves the library and flies to California in order to confront Selig Mindish, a former Bronx dentist and friend of the Isaacsons, who testified against them. $6.95.īecause he has bumped up against his country so outrageously, Daniel discovers that he cannot keep his own past out of his dissertation filled with his obsessions and visions, it has become “Daniel's Book.” Like his Biblical namesake, Daniel finds himself a shaman in hostile territory, his insights growing “diffuse, apoca lyptic, hysterical.” At odds with his foster parents and his wife, Daniel grows a beard, wears his hair long, scrounges through his past and myth ologizes the rude details of his life: Daniel and his younger sister Susan escaping from a Bronx shelter be come “ALONE IN THE COLD WAR (with Franny and Zooey).” Crazed by the memory of his parents elec trocution, he starts to tell us how he burned his wife's rump with an auto mobile cigarette lighter (or is this image only another one of Daniel's “pathetic demons”?) With his parents still in mind, he prepares a definitive catalogue of torture and execution devices, and writes his own history of American post‐war diplomacy.
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If I were to assassinate the President, the criminality of my fam ily, its genetic criminality, would be established.”īy E. I will never be drafted.I am totally deprived of the right to be dan gerous.
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The son of Paul and Ro chelle Isaacson, who were convicted and executed for attempting to pass on atomic secrets to the Soviet Union (read Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, if you wish), Daniel learns to appreciate his own tentative, dangling status: “I live in constant and degrading re lationship to the society that has de stroyed my mother and father. Daniel Isaacson Lewin, a “spe cialist” on the 20th century, is com pleting his Ph.D. The novel begins and ends in a library stall. “The Book of Daniel” is an am bitious, felt reconstruction of the lit tle agonies, paranoias, obscenities, totems, murders, frauds and taboos of post‐World War II America.