Identify Books Concering The Public Burning
| Original Title: | The Public Burning |
| ISBN: | 0802135277 (ISBN13: 9780802135278) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Characters: | Richard M. Nixon |
| Literary Awards: | National Book Award Finalist for Fiction (1978) |
Robert Coover
Paperback | Pages: 544 pages Rating: 4.02 | 1150 Users | 109 Reviews
Itemize About Books The Public Burning
| Title | : | The Public Burning |
| Author | : | Robert Coover |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 544 pages |
| Published | : | April 2nd 1998 by Grove Press (first published 1977) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Historical. Historical Fiction. Novels |
Narration Conducive To Books The Public Burning
A controversial best-seller in 1977, The Public Burning has since emerged as one of the most influential novels of our time. The first major work of contemporary fiction ever to use living historical figures as characters, the novel reimagines the three fateful days in 1953 that culminated with the execution of alleged atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Vice-President Richard Nixon - the voraciously ambitious bad boy of the Eisenhower regime - is the dominant narrator in an enormous cast that includes Betty Crocker, Joe McCarthy, the Marx Brothers, Walter Winchell, Uncle Sam, his adversary The Phantom, and Time magazine incarnated as the National Poet Laureate. All of these and thousands more converge in Times Square for the carnivalesque auto-da-fe at which the Rosenbergs are put to death. And not a person present escapes implication in Cold War America's ruthless "public burning."Rating About Books The Public Burning
Ratings: 4.02 From 1150 Users | 109 ReviewsWrite-Up About Books The Public Burning
HOLY COW, this is a crazed, carnivalesque masterpiece. Coover brilliantly recreates the Rosenberg execution and the Red Scare of the early 50's, zooming in on both the major and minor players in the case with a level of exuberance and intense detail that usually only someone like Thomas Pynchon is capable of. And at the center of it all is then vice-president Richard Nixon, weirdly humanized but still impossibly self absorbed and self-pitying, his mind running at a paranoid, invective filledThis Is a Job for Uncle Sam!A very exciting way to write history, at least political history, which is simultaneously personal and public, psychological and strategic, irrationally rational and therefore so dense with meaning it defies conventional narrative. As Richard Nixon says in The Public Burning, ... just as a nation has neither friends nor enemies, only interests, so there are no enduring loyalties in politics except where they are tied up in personal interests. And personal interests
This Review is on strike.Something someday will be added to this Review Box. Meanwhile it is observing my peculiar tradition of not successfully reviewing my Bestest Books.....
Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon, summarily pantsed. Yeehaw. And that ain't the least of it. Robert Coover is a monster, and his bigger, brasher books are themselves humbling (and generally gleefully appalling) monsters. THE PUBLIC BURNING may be the mother of them all. This is the quintessential American novel of the carnivalesque. Mikhail Bakhtin originally conceptualized the carnivalesque as a subset of literature (and culture at large) that takes from the carnival its gleeful and mocking
Where to begin? A high-wire act written with stylistic precision and variety? One of the first attempts in serious fiction to utilize a still-living figure? Still fresh 36 years after publication?It's the first year of the new Eisenhower Administration. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are due to be executed amidst a public spectacle in Times Square (they were electrocuted at Sing Sing). Then there's Veep Richard Nixon who keeps having fantasies about Ethel and carries on an interior monologue through
His clumsiness, I thought, is part of his disguise, part of his armor, a kind of self-defense mechanismhe seems most sincere just when he makes the least sense.Thats Ike Eisenhower.Let the best man win so long as its me I wanted it to be played with rhetoric and industry, yet down deep I knew that even at its most trivial, politics flirted with murder and mayhem, theft and cannibalism.Thats Dick Nixon.He parades through like a peacock, sporting all his medals, and jabbing his stubby fingers in
A full-toothed pell-mell assault on the American political class rendered in scimitar-sharp prose, rammed into the intestines of the Establishment with merciless force. Split between a rumbustious third-person satirical voice, making full use of Coovers insane linguistic skill in the phonetic bile of Uncle Sama monstrous American Devil pulling the puppet stringsand a section narrated by Dick Nixon (who has his intestines removed and served up on a plate of steaming poop four times per para), The
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