Being Polite To Hitler - Rilegato

Forman Dew, Robb

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0316889504 ISBN 13: 9780316889506

Casa editrice: Little, Brown US, 2011

Riassunto

After teaching and raising her family for most of her life, Agnes Scofield realizes she is truly weary of her routine. But how, at 51, to establish a separate identity?

Her newfound freedom may not sit so well with the rest of the Scofields, who operate strictly within the confines of polite Midwestern values. They'd be polite to Hitler if need be. But underneath the façade, private triumphs and tragedies - including struggles with alcoholism and illicit affairs - simmer, and Agnes finds herself becoming even more entangled in the family web.

BEING POLITE TO HITLER is a richly wrought portrait of a woman coming into her own in the middle of her life and a family that experiences passions, joys, and grief against the backdrop of the post-WWII era.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

"Robb Forman Dew is a master at delineating the way the mundane and profound are joined at the hip, and Being Polite to Hitler in its portrait of midcentury America shuttles us smoothly from the most intimate heartbreak to events of interest worldwide, reminding us of the nearly infinite variations of grief, and solace, and how even the most conscientious and compassionate can leave emotional havoc in their wake." (Jim Shepard, author of Like You'd Understand, Anyway)

"Robb Forman Dew is one of our great national treasures: a novelist whose keen and sympathetic understanding of human nature is matched by her elegant, beautiful prose. Being Polite to Hitler is an absorbing story in which many readers will find their own families, and their own selves." (Dani Shapiro, author of Family History and Devotion: A Memoir)

"Dew's quietly powerful tale is riveting." (Good Housekeeping)

"Dew follows 54-year-old Agnes Scofield through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, as she reinvents herself, navigating both the mine fields of rapidly changing country and family. Every sentence is a rhapsody.'' (The Miami Herald Caroline Leavitt)

"And this is what Being Polite to Hitler is all about: a 20-year sliver of Agnes Scofield's life. Robb Forman Dew, who won a National Book Award in 1982 for Dale Loves Sophie to Death, has captured again, beautifully, the poetry of the everyday. Her narrative flows effortlessly from character to character, from voice to voice, as does her sense of time, from present to future to past and back again.... Dew's elegant words capture personalities so well, as well as setting.... In Being Polite to Hitler, with lush, graceful language, Robb Forman Dew reminds us that much of what we consider to be ordinary in our lives, in the end, turns out to be quite extraordinary." (The Minneapolis Star-Tribune Jim Carmin)

"highly original.... Robb Forman Dew covers both the cosmic and the quotidian as she follows a formidably intermingled group of people in the town of Washburn, Ohio. The novel, which resides mostly in the 1950s until an acceleration near the end yanks everyone all the way up to 1973, beautifully chronicles the experiences of a widowed schoolteacher, Agnes Scofield, and those in her midst.... Dew's novels identify and describe not just a town and its people but the American mind-set at particular moments in time.... Dew also sprinkles her storytelling with inventively apt asides, as when a character explains how a dog's stomach can spontaneously twist, "the way a lemon drop is wrapped." This sort of casual juxtaposition is ingenious and surprising. Being Polite to Hitler is a deeply knowing novel--progressive, certainly, and at times quietly, thrillingly strange." (New York Times Book Review Meg Wolitzer)

"If you've been reading Robb Forman Dew these many years, fiction and nonfiction, you know that she is, like her main character Agnes Scofield, the consummate matriarch. There is beauty and order in her sentences and in the lives of her characters. There is trauma, pain and uncertainty but also a community of spirit beneath all of her books.... This novel shows why history is supplemented and often surpassed by fiction, by the fleshing out, the empathy, the imagining of lives lived and lost in the not-so-distant past." (Los Angeles Times Susan Salter Reynolds)

"a remarkable achievement, a vividly detailed and deeply textured mural of a century of American life.... Dew deploys a dazzling number of narrative perspectives.... Dew zooms into the hearts and minds of her characters with the kind of acuity that reminds us why we read.... Throughout the novel, Dew renders the political personal and the personal incandescent." (The Washington Post Rachel Basch)

Descrizione del libro:

From the National Book Award winning author of Dale Loves Sophie to Death, a gorgeously rendered story about a woman starting anew in the middle of her life

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Little, Brown US
• Data di pubblicazione: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0316889504
• ISBN 13: 9780316889506
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 304