Rating: 
Summary: what is a hero?
Review: This novel is about David Fitzgerald, an above average teacher at New York's Coney Island High School. He is teaching his student's about character's in literature and what being a hero, or being tested is. David becomes a hero and then is tested by becoming a pariah. The media put's him on a pedestal and than cut's the pedestal down in a matter of hour's.
The character's the author creates become people we care about and empathize with, even the mad bomber.
Rating:
Summary: Suprisingly Good
Review: I picked this book up from a second hand book store for something to read on the train into work. Well I could not put this book down until I finished it. The book has the intrigue and action of the film 'Seige' without the marshal Law . The teacher who gets framed, the students blaming him, the FBI being the FBI. Lastly the parents not wanting the teacher in the vicinty of their children. He has to find the real bomber before he loses self control and his own life.
Rating:
Summary: A fun read that never quite fulfills its own promise
Review: I'm going to say right off the top that I plowed through this book. It moves at breakneck speed, and I enjoyed it almost every step of the way (which is why I gave it four stars). But I knew that something was wrong about halfway through when I realized that if I were to lose the book and never finish it, I wouldn't particularly mind. How can a book be so compelling and un-compelling at the same time?I began to think about the question in terms of genre. There is no reasons why thrillers can't be great literature. Sure, there always has been and will be a shortage of these literary thrillers, but that's no reason why readers should not expect a great deal from the thrillers they read. On the other hand, uninspired writing doesn't always have to keep a thriller from being very entertaining, and I've gobbled down my fair share of these, knowing that they were candy and that they were not particularly good for me. "Man of the Hour" is an interesting case because it has a literary thriller plot but pulp thriller writing, and for me that left me feeling a little unsatisfied. The plot concerns a school teacher who rescues a student when a bomb explodes on a school bus. First he becomes a media darling, but then the media turns against him and vilifies him, announcing he is the prime suspect, despite the fact that he has not been charged. This plot seems literary thriller-ish to me because it depends more on tension and character and mood than it does on body count. You have the ordinary person who finds himself dragged into an extra-ordinary, but basically plausible situation, a set-up reminiscent of the better work of Colin Harrison (minus Harrison's endless gratuitous sex scenes). This sort of story can be riveting, the problem with "Man of the Hour" is that the apparatus isn't quite up to snuff. His characters are often caricatures, with lines of dialogue designed not to be plausible but to raise the tension level. The scenes seem to me situation-driven rather than character driven, and frankly so do to the characters. In all fairness, the rude cop, the crazy wife, the out-spoken student, the belligerent lunch-lady make for entertaining reading, but they also leave me feeling like I've got something gritty on my teeth. Somewhat more interesting is Blauner's portrait of the terrorist bomber, who he describes sympathetically and in somewhat more depth than the school-teacher protagonist, Fitzgerald, who comes off as a two-dimensional fantasy of urban pedagogy. The bomber does things, he faces moral crises, he feels confused and angry and belligerent: all very interesting stuff. Fitzgerald, on the other hand - well, I suppose we are told he feels things, but I never quite feel what he feels. These two figures circle each other throughout the book, and any reader familiar with the genre knows there has to be some sort of confrontation, so the climax will be a surprise for absolutely no one, and getting there happens in very un-thriller-like ways. Fitzgerald determines that he is going to track down the real bomber, since the authorities aren't doing it, but his investigative efforts consist mainly of him asking people he runs into if they happen to know who did it. And how he manages to face off against the bomber at the end - well, I won't spoil it, but lets just say that it was tool novelistic even for a die-hard novel-reader. Ultimately, this book is far superior than the sum of its parts. I think anyone picking it up for a long airplane flight will get the kind of compelling entertainment they desire. It is just that I wanted it to be more than what it was: I wanted it to be what it was supposed to be.
Rating: 
Summary: Boy, talk about a bad day at the office!
Review: In MAN OF THE HOUR, the reader is reminded that glory is fleeting, especially when driven by the capricious print and television media. David Fitzgerald is an English teacher, and a darn good one, at the Coney Island High School. (I consider teaching one of the most honorable of professions, more so than even medicine or law. I can still remember the handful of really excellent teachers in my life. But, I digress.) One day, the bus on which David is to take his class on a field trip is destroyed by a bomb. Luckily, only two people were aboard at the time, the driver and a pregnant student. The driver dies, but Fitzgerald risks his life to save the girl. He immediately becomes the media's darling hero of the moment. Unfortunately, because of circumstance, ambiguous evidence, and confused statements David made after the blast, he soon becomes the chief suspect, and the media turns on him with a savage vengeance. We know from the very beginning that the real bomber is limo driver Nasser, an ex-student of Fitzgerald's, who is a 24-year old of Palestinian birth previously imprisoned by the Israelis. This experience leaves him hating Israel and, of course, the pro-Zionist American society and everything for which it stands. Now, in America, Nasser has fallen in with a couple of moth-eaten, sad-to-be-alive Arab terrorists that manage to give even that profession a bad name. Thus, the plot inspired very little suspense in this reader, only a mild curiosity as to how the author would redress the balance in order to achieve the de rigueur happy ending. David is a likable enough character, especially as he's also embroiled in a child custody battle with an ex-wife who, in the technical jargon of psychiatry, is "just plain nuts". As a bombing suspect, he also faces loss of his job and imprisonment. Definitely the makings of a bad hair day. Nonetheless, neither my sympathy for Fitzgerald, nor my esteem for teachers in general, compels me to award this novel anything more than a marginal "thumbs up".
Rating: 
Summary: A Great Novel!!
Review: In these jaded times it sounds corny and false to say that a writer just keeps getting better and better, but in Peter Blauner's case, it's the absolute truth. Although his novels have the pacing of thrillers, I consider them to be the very best urban fiction of our age. From "Slow Motion Riot" to "Man of the Hour", Blauner has brilliantly dramatized the perils and rewards of life in urban America in a way that makes the territory his alone. If you dig a great story...if characters you'll never forget are your thing, make "Man of the Hour" the next book you read.
Rating:
Summary: Man of the Hour
Review: Peter Blauner did a great job in writing MAN OF THE HOUR because he took a fictional story and mixed it with reality. Blauner sends the message that our lives are not set because you could be going on with your normal life and then one act can change your life forever. He shows us this through David Fitzgerald, a teacher, who begins by getting everything ready for a field trip before all of the kids get on the bus, but one girl who was pregnant. The next thing you know the bus is in flames and he is saving his student's lives.
The character that sticks in my mind is Dave Fitzgerald, because he is going through a troublesome time in his life and then the bus blows up and and makes everything worse. The way he handled the problems at first showed that he was a weak man and then later he starts to handle the situation like he has been through it before.
I expected this book to be about a building blowing up and Dave Fitzgerald saving someone. As I was reading, things that I thought wouldn't happen did happen. I believe that this book should be made into a movie because the plot was always changing and it was extremly vivid. I would recommend this book to people who like suspense, action, and thrillers book because MAN OF THE HOUR has it all.
Rating:
Summary: Decent Audiobook Fare...
Review: There was a lot more to this tape than it seemed at first "reading." At first, I found myself a little wary of a terrorist plot, given how the very subject is super-charged with anxiety. The plot, however, was more about a young man caught in very conflicting societies and belief systems, a teacher who wants to be better than he believes he is, and a sister's love of her brother making it near impossible to do the right things. The plot is basically itself quite straightforward: a teacher is catapulted to fame when a school bus bombing gives him an opportunity to shine through with courage: he saves one person from the bus. It doesn't last, however, as he is soon the key suspect in the bombing. As the real terrorists plan a new assault, the teacher's life falls apart, and the sister to the man who planted the bomb starts to realize what is going on, the tension jacks up, notch by notch. Joe Mantegna has a good voice for this tale, moving from the voices of a Moslem teen to a Brookyn teacher with ease, and without sounding overmuch like a bad stereotype. His pacing is excellent. It's a strong enough story to entertain, and it did make me think a little about the nature of courage and sacrifice. 'Nathan
Rating:
Summary: Decent Audiobook Fare...
Review: There was a lot more to this tape than it seemed at first "reading." At first, I found myself a little wary of a terrorist plot, given how the very subject is super-charged with anxiety. The plot, however, was more about a young man caught in very conflicting societies and belief systems, a teacher who wants to be better than he believes he is, and a sister's love of her brother making it near impossible to do the right things. The plot is basically itself quite straightforward: a teacher is catapulted to fame when a school bus bombing gives him an opportunity to shine through with courage: he saves one person from the bus. It doesn't last, however, as he is soon the key suspect in the bombing. As the real terrorists plan a new assault, the teacher's life falls apart, and the sister to the man who planted the bomb starts to realize what is going on, the tension jacks up, notch by notch. Joe Mantegna has a good voice for this tale, moving from the voices of a Moslem teen to a Brookyn teacher with ease, and without sounding overmuch like a bad stereotype. His pacing is excellent. It's a strong enough story to entertain, and it did make me think a little about the nature of courage and sacrifice. 'Nathan
Rating:
Summary: Exciting
Review: This book is a well written and fast paced narrative. It brings many social issues into the story, such as teachers effects on their students. It also combines the "hate USA" and Arab terrorism to make for a great story. This is the first book I have read by the author and I am very impressed. He is able to combine a few different plots together to create the whole picture. The characters are described in such great detail, you will have an excellent mental picture.
Rating:
Summary: I don't know why, but I liked this book
Review: This book was compelling from the first page. The relationship between the main character Fitgerald and his flawed wife showed that heroes in books don't always have perfect lives. The terrorists lives were interesting but, only because I wanted to find out what they would do at the end. There was nothing spectacular about this book, but for some reason I kept reading and reading. I think it is because anytime you see a tragedy happen on the news, you wonder how you would have reacted in that situation. You wonder if you could have been a hero. In this book, a boring average guy becomes a hero and has to deal with the resulting publicity. Then he becomes a suspect and has to overcome the adversity to get his life back. I think the plot is what kept me reading, and not the characters or the style of the author. I don't think I'll read any more books by Blauner unless they have a great sounding plot, because I don't think he can carry a story on his own.
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