The Company You Keep

Rating:
Summary: Powerful Contemporary Novel
Review: This book should be read by anyone interested in recent American progressive politics and history. The book is wonderful summer read utilizing many great hooks that keeps the book fascinating until the last page. It is obvious that the author engaged in extensive research to recapture a time of a few decades ago. The novel captures a time when America's young political activists were willing to take serious personal risks in response to an endless and destructive war. This novel provides important insights into the motivations, fears and consequences of those activists who went underground beginning in the late 1960's.

Rating:
Summary: Powerful Contemporary Novel
Review: This is the kind of book that appears far too seldom: it's smart, it's funny, it's emotionally authentic, and once you get started it's almost impossible to put down. Told by five or so equally engaging narrators, it manages to put the mystery of good parenting AND the moral complexity of America's involvement in the Viet Nam war under the same magnifying lens.

At the heart of the book is the story of Jason Sinai, a man forced to relinquish the underground identity that gave him refuge from prosecution for actions as a member of Weatherman (the SDS faction that sought to "bring the war home" by bombing various U.S. locations). His story is told as a series of emails to his daughter Isabel, who he abandoned (had to abandon?) when she was about six. The emails narrate the events of her father's escape and pursuit, as well as key events during his Weather phase.

Because the various narrators range in age and (to some extent) ideological vantage, the major themes don't lumber in and loom--the way you might anticipate from this short description--but glimmer through in changing guises. "All parents are bad parents," Sinai tells his daughter and though this at first seems like a glib rationale from a probably unreconstructed baby revolutionary, the book ultimately allows us to understand the pain of bad parenting from the parent's point of view as well as the child's. What more do you want from a novel? There are a couple of good twists that you may see coming but which are nevertheless satisfying, and there is great material about the legacy of the sixties at the family level as well as at the level of country, culture, nation, etc.

Obviously, a few paralells with current events also emerge, and make the story more complex and interesting--especially for anyone who grew up in the shadow of hippiedom.

Rating:
Summary: A page turner that makes you think
Review: This is the kind of book that appears far too seldom: it's smart, it's funny, it's emotionally authentic, and once you get started it's almost impossible to put down. Told by five or so equally engaging narrators, it manages to put the mystery of good parenting AND the moral complexity of America's involvement in the Viet Nam war under the same magnifying lens. At the heart of the book is the story of Jason Sinai, a man forced to relinquish the underground identity that gave him refuge from prosecution for actions as a member of Weatherman (the SDS faction that sought to "bring the war home" by bombing various U.S. locations). His story is told as a series of emails to his daughter Isabel, who he abandoned (had to abandon?) when she was about six. The emails narrate the events of her father's escape and pursuit, as well as key events during his Weather phase. Because the various narrators range in age and (to some extent) ideological vantage, the major themes don't lumber in and loom--the way you might anticipate from this short description--but glimmer through in changing guises. "All parents are bad parents," Sinai tells his daughter and though this at first seems like a glib rationale from a probably unreconstructed baby revolutionary, the book ultimately allows us to understand the pain of bad parenting from the parent's point of view as well as the child's. What more do you want from a novel? There are a couple of good twists that you may see coming but which are nevertheless satisfying, and there is great material about the legacy of the sixties at the family level as well as at the level of country, culture, nation, etc. Obviously, a few paralells with current events also emerge, and make the story more complex and interesting--especially for anyone who grew up in the shadow of hippiedom.