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Outstanding
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Booklist Brad Hooper
This magnificent novel is both appropriate to today's headlines and timeless for its undermining of the blind sentiment that "it can't happen here." [Aug 2004, p.1874]
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Outstanding
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Boston Globe William H. Pritchard
As always with a novel by Roth, we must resort to the indefinable but essential term ''voice" to indicate the animating force that drives the narrative. Never has it been more nuanced nor less a matter of flamboyant performance than in ''The Plot Against America."
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Outstanding
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Chicago Tribune Alan Cheuse
It turns theories into history and obsession into art and makes for some of the most fascinating reading of the season.
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Outstanding
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Christian Science Monitor Ron Charles
Once again, Philip Roth has published a novel that you must read - now.
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Outstanding
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London Review Of Books Michael Wood
I called the book 'astonishing', but what astonishes is not this wild counter-history - it is presented too plausibly for that - or any fireworks in the prose, which is uncommonly sober, though always elegant. What's astonishing is the way Roth puts together the stories of the shaken Jewish family and an America that can't see what's happening to it, that isn't shaken enough.
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
Hilarious and terrifying by turns, it's a sumptuous interweaving of narrative, characterization, speculation, and argument that joins The Ghost Writer (1979) and Operation Shylock (1993) at the summit of Roth's achievement. [15 Jul 2004, p.655]
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
In the balance of personal, domestic and national events, the novel is one of Roth's most deft creations. [12 Jul 2004, p.44]
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Outstanding
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The Guardian Blake Morrison
Ranks with his great trilogy of the late-90s.
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Book Review Paul Berman
A terrific political novel... sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous and, at the same time, creepily plausible.
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Outstanding
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The New Yorker Joan Acocella
It's not a prophecy; it's a nightmare, and it becomes more nightmarish—and also funnier and more bizarre—as it goes along.
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Outstanding
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San Francisco Chronicle Daniel Handler
Roth's most powerful work to date.... As crucial as history, it is also as ferocious.
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Outstanding
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Washington Post Jonathan Yardley
It may well be his best.... The Plot Against America is far and away the most outward-looking, expansive, least narcissistic book Roth has written.
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Favorable
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The Economist
One of his finest.
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Favorable
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Lee Henderson
A humane and anxious novel about the dangers of political extremism.
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Favorable
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The Onion A.V. Club Andy Battaglia
A surprisingly subtle and stirring novel about family.
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Favorable
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USA Today Bob Minzesheimer
The writing is brilliant when the focus is on the Roths and their neighborhood.... But Roth lapses into melodrama when he tries to tie up all the loose ends.
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Favorable
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Village Voice Gabriel Brownstein
The book is empowered by its personal nature; its force lies in its emotional proximity, these super-real recollections of the child as he discovers himself to be persecuted.
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Favorable
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The Independent Johann Hari
Like all Roth's fiction, this novel is dazzling but flawed.
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Favorable
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The Independent Clive Sinclair
For some reason the novel never quite sustains the intensity of those early scenes in Washington.
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Favorable
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The Nation James Wolcott
A cautionary tale about how easily the country could slide into fascism, slipping into it until the black waters bury our heads, the novel doesn't seem so much intricately plotted (though it is--at the end, too much so) as anxiously daydreamed into being.
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Favorable
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Salon Laura Miller
By setting it in a wholly imaginary history, Roth has paradoxically managed to write his most believable book in years.
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Favorable
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LA Weekly Brendan Bernhard
The Plot Against America's real strength, though, lies in its portrait of a family on the verge of disintegration and a nation in the grip of hysteria.
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Favorable
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Los Angeles Times Greil Marcus
Whatever else it is, it is a fabulous yarn.[22 Sep 2004]
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Favorable
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New York Observer Adam Begley
A daring imaginative exercise, it's a way to see both the country and the Roth family more clearly by making everything thrillingly strange.
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Favorable
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New York Review Of Books J. M. Coetzee
What it offers in place of tragedy is pathos of a heart-wrenching kind saved from sentimentality by a sharp humor, a risky, knife-edge performance that Roth brings off without a slip.
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Favorable
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Chicago Sun-Times Henry Kisor
Rich as it is, it has one important flaw: As we read along, Roth cannot quite make us forget that this book is a fantasy, that the things related in it never happened.
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Christopher Tayler
Better put together than The Human Stain, The Plot Against America is another frighteningly intense performance.
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Favorable
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Houston Chronicle Fritz Lanham
Written in clean, straightforward prose, it solidifies Roth's reputation, earned in such novels as American Pastoral and I Married a Communist, as our greatest living anatomist of ordinary people caught up in America's periodic eruptions of collective madness.
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Mixed
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Atlantic Monthly Clive James
Roth does a pretty good job of spoiling the story himself, by dishing out improbabilities with shameless haste; if it were not for the quality of the writing, you could be reading The Da Vinci Code. Luckily for the reader's mental health, Roth is no more capable of an uninteresting sentence than Dan Brown is capable of an interesting one.
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Mixed
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Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
With this fascinating, fertile material, Roth has spun an unconvincing fantasy that falls far short of his finest work.
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Mixed
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Daily Telegraph David Flusfeder
Roth is superb as ever on the ferocious, kitchen-table disputes and the half-lies of family life. But the "history" wears us down.
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Mixed
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The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
If the telescope turned on America in this novel sorely lacks the verisimilitude and keen social observation found in ''American Pastoral'' and ''The Human Stain,'' the microscope it turns on the Roths still provides an intimate glimpse of one family's harrowing encounter with history.
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Unfavorable
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Wall Street Journal Thomas Fleming
What does this all add up to? Less than one would have hoped.
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