The book of daniel e.l. doctorow11/14/2022 My favorite part of the book is when Daniel, who becomes a politically active adult, travels to California to find the old friend and accomplice of his parents in an attempt to tie a loose end. If you are interested in history the case of the Rosenbergs is a fascinating story. Reading this novel got me interested in learning about who the Rosenberg's were. The story is told through the eyes of Daniel with flashbacks. They are loosely based on the lives of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were tried, convicted, and executed for working as spies for the Soviet Union. Rochelle and Paul Isaacsons are members of the Communist party during the time of the Red Scare. Daniel is the story of the two children of political activists who in the 1950s are accused of being spies for the Soviet Union. This is the third novel I have read by EL Doctorow, the first was "Ragtime" which was made into a very good film (James Cagney's last film) and "Billy Bathgate" which I picked up after seeing the film adaptation starring Dustin Hoffman in the role of the gangster Dutch Shultz. I guess what I'm trying to say that while I enjoyed parts of this book, it wasn't really my cup of tea. It reminded me of Wolf Hall, another book whose subject matter I found very interesting but was stylistically inaccessible. Sometimes it's in third person and sometimes first, for no particular reason I could see. In The Book of Daniel, the author often switches time frames (no problem with that) but tenses within the same paragraph. It helped the flow and made the story lyrical (the author was a poet). For example, I once read a lengthy book without much punctuation. I'm also somewhat of a conformist as a reader so I want stylistic choices to be meaningful. It's taken me a long time to get through it the style is not something I really appreciate and I found a lot of the story inaccessible. This is the first book of his that I've read and I'm interested in the subject matter, so I gave it a try. The Book of Daniel is Doctorow's highly regarded fictional story of the Rosenbergs who were executed for spying in the 1950s. It is about the nature of guilt and innocence, and about the relations of people to nations. It is a book about some of the beautiful and terrible feelings of childhood. 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 that spans the quarter-century of American life since World War II. It is a book rich in characters, from elderly grandmothers of immigrant culture, to covert radicals of the McCarthy era, to hippie marchers on the Pen-tagon. 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 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 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 confession of his most intimate relationships-with his wife, his foster parents, and his kid sister Susan, whose own radicalism so reproaches him. dissertation, Daniel composes something quite different. In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. 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. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia.
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