The Book of Daniel, E.L. Doctorow
The Book of Daniel, E.L. Doctorow
List: $20.00 | Sale: $14.00
Club: $10.00

The Book of Daniel

Author: E.L. Doctorow

Narrator: Mark Deakins

Unabridged: 11 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/17/2013


Synopsis

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 life—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 relationships—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 parents’ innocence; visiting his mother and father in the Death House.

It is a book of investigation: transcribing Daniel’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 case—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 country—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.

Cover art: Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55. Art ( c ) Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

About The Author

E. L. Doctorow’s works of fiction include Homer & Langley, The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, The Waterworks, and All the Time in the World. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to an author whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career [places] him . . . in the highest rank of American literature.” In 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Gold Medal for Fiction.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Vit on September 08, 2022

To hunt hunters need game… And witch hunters need witches… If there are no real witches then ordinary people may always be dyed as the ones. It’s too fucking hot. This fucking city is like an oven. You want to know what was wrong with the old American Communists? They were into the system. They wore......more

Goodreads review by Paul on October 02, 2010

Governing emotion : white-hot anger Underneath that : confusion (for the characters, for the reader) Style : I’m EL Doctorow and it’s 1971 and society is caving in and I’m gonna put anything I like in my novel, chunks of political analysis, satires of hippy revolution, childhood memoir, denunciations......more

Goodreads review by Fabian on September 15, 2020

This is GREAT! One TRUE Original American Classic. (Is there something to denote just how close to the perfect full five stars this work truly is?) The type of novel Europeans, Latin Americans, & all other form of world Masters tremble at. One can say this novel is absolutely magical... Devastating......more

Goodreads review by Derek on October 29, 2015

***SIGH*** Damn. Wow. What a novel. What a work of genius. Wow. Without a doubt this must be one of the greatest literary masterpieces ever written. The Book of Daniel is a work of genius like no other. It's sad and harrowing and breaks your heart with its sincerity cruelty, and deft perception and......more

Goodreads review by Το on June 30, 2020

This book is mediocre with some strong moments and some fundamental weaknesses. Not a bad book. On the contrary. But the author of this book makes some choices that I find unacceptable. His arguments do not convince me, the result tired, bothered and disappointed me. Doctorow attempts to make a postm......more


Quotes

“A ferocious feat of the imagination . . . Every scene is perfectly realized and feeds into the whole–the themes and symbols echoing and reverberating.”
Newsweek

“A nearly perfect work of art, and art on this level can only be a cause for rejoicing.”
Joyce Carol Oates

“This is an extraordinary contemporary novel, a stunning work.”
San Francisco Chronicle

“The political novel of our age . . . the best work of its kind.”
New Republic

“Remarkable . . . One of the finest works of fiction.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Stirring, brilliant, very moving.”
Houston Post