
The Plot Against America
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Narrated by:
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Ron Silver
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By:
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Philip Roth
About this listen
In an astonishing feat of empathy and narrative invention, our most ambitious novelist imagines an alternate version of American history.
In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected president. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh's election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America - and with it his mother, his father, and his older brother.
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Story
In 1951, the second year of the Korean War, a studious, law-abiding, and intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, begins his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at a local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hardworking neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad - mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees on every corner for his beloved boy.
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Tight, beautiful and also strange and sad.
- By Darwin8u on 08-22-16
By: Philip Roth
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The Counterlife
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The Counterlife is about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Wherever they may find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate. Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through the book's evocative landscapes, familiar and foreign, is the mind of the novelist Nathan Zuckerman.
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Eros, Thanatos, and the Male Yenta
- By G. Benett on 10-03-19
By: Philip Roth
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Tenth of December
- Stories
- By: George Saunders
- Narrated by: George Saunders
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human.
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Be prepared for something different...but good!
- By Mr. D on 02-21-14
By: George Saunders
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Nemesis
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Bucky Cantor is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director during the summer of 1944. A javelin thrower and weightlifter, he is disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As the devastating disease begins to ravage Bucky’s playground, Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain.
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Something to think about
- By Michael Beilenson on 08-01-24
By: Philip Roth
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Pastoralia
- By: George Saunders
- Narrated by: George Saunders
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Hailed by Thomas Pynchon as "graceful, dark, authentic, and funny," George Saunders gives us, in his inventive and beloved voice, this best-selling collection of stories set against a warped, hilarious, and terrifyingly recognizable American landscape.
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Greatest living short story author reads own work.
- By Spam on 08-25-19
By: George Saunders
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Veronica
- By: Mary Gaitskill
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica: an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal "office kit" and a plaque that reads "Still Anal After All These Years".
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Everything is baroque-en
- By Eric on 12-14-06
By: Mary Gaitskill
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All Aunt Hagar's Children
- Selected Stories
- By: Edward P. Jones
- Narrated by: James Peter Francis
- Length: 14 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Returning to the city that inspired his first prize-winning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens.
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I JUST DON'T KNOW ABOUT THIS!
- By Mimi Routh on 07-05-15
By: Edward P. Jones
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Fatherland
- By: Robert Harris
- Narrated by: Michael Jayston
- Length: 11 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Berlin, 1964. The Greater German Reich stretches from the Rhine to the Urals and keeps an uneasy peace with its nuclear rival, the United States. As the Fatherland prepares for a grand celebration honoring Adolf Hitler's 75th birthday and anticipates a conciliatory visit from US president Joseph Kennedy and ambassador Charles Lindbergh, a detective of the Kriminalpolizei is called out to investigate the discovery of a dead body in a lake near Berlin's most prestigious suburb.
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1960's Nazi Germany comes alive
- By Daniel Black on 10-19-17
By: Robert Harris
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Secondhand Time
- The Last of the Soviets
- By: Svetlana Alexievich, Bela Shayevich - translator
- Narrated by: Amanda Carlin, Mark Bramhall, Cassandra Campbell, and others
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing "a new kind of literary genre", describing her work as "a history of emotions - a history of the soul". Alexievich's distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.
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The Heart, Soul & Iron Fist Of Russia
- By Sara on 02-22-17
By: Svetlana Alexievich, and others
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Pulphead
- Essays
- By: John Jeremiah Sullivan
- Narrated by: John Jeremiah Sullivan
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan shows us - with a laidback, erudite Southern charm that's all his own - how we really (no, really) live now.
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Interesting Perspectives
- By Nancy on 09-05-24
What listeners say about The Plot Against America
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- kwdayboise (Kim Day)
- 04-26-17
Relevant more now than 2004
This book is about 13 years old now but seems to have a particular relevance in today's political climate with "populist" politicians popping up in both the Americas and Europe, candidates supported by the KKK, and a growing sense of a license for violence against "others". One of the last books published by Roth, the author combines Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle in an alternate history about America's delayed entry into WWII. In Dick's alternate America a historical assassination attempt against FDR is successful, leaving the country without his political charisma to lead the country into the war.
Roth's book is written in memoir style. Roth includes himself in this book about living through the late 30s into the early 40s. He uses the names of his own father and mother (I don't know enough about him to say whether the brothers he includes were actual figures in his life) with telling bits of texture from his life growing up in Newark, New Jersey, at the end of the Depression. Snippets from baseball games, living near the plant that made the family's Ipana tooth powder, third-generation Jewish immigrant life in which his family had given up orthodoxy for assimilation.
In this familiar atmosphere there's a single change that alters their lives. During the 1940 Republican Convention, which went through multiple votes trying to find a candidate to run against Franklin D. Roosevelt, (the real convention chose candidate Wendell Willkie who came into the convention polling at 3%) there's a staged moment at 3 in the morning when Charles Lindbergh enters the convention in his flight costume. This stirs the tired conventioneers into a complete shift, nominating Lindbergh as the Republican candidate. Lindbergh flies from city to city through America and, despite the polls, snatches FDR's third term away from him.
This creates an immediate panic within the Jewish community, particularly for Roth's father Herman. Some powerful rabbinic leaders in the community support Lindbergh despite his many anti-Jewish comments at various America First rallies. Some, including Roth's mother, begin sending savings to Canadian banks with the plan to escape to Canada should pogroms begin in America. Walter Winchell, jewish and the most prominent columnist of his day, begins a campaign against the new president on his radio broadcast and newspaper columns.
The changes to the family's life are slow and subtle. Herman Roth, an insurance salesman, is nearly transferred from Newark to an almost entirely gentile city by his company. The family takes a vacation to Washington, DC, where the family faces regular acts of anti-semitism. Violence continues throughout the country, jewish families are migrated to places like Kentucky as part of a new "homesteading" program where they meet with the violence of the KKK, politicians are assassinated or arrested for their "protection".
It isn't until Lindbergh's real motives are revealed that the progression of horrors ends, finally leaving an opening for FDR to return to political life and fulfill his historical third term.
The book serves to offer several important lessons. There will often be populations in the US (as there have been throughout its history) who will be vilified for problems in the country and slandered with half-truths or outright fictions (blood libel comes up in this book). To stop oppressive changes before they become systemic it's important to stop them in small things within your grasp: nonsensical statements, small incidents of discrimination or racism, small changes to laws that take away freedoms, a focus on all freedoms for all people rather than pet interests or personal freedoms. Voting isn't a chore, it's an essential and important act.
The book, while it centers on Roth as observer and narrator, features a broad range of characters, heroic and horrible, who weave through the book with their own perceptions and motives about what is happening in this alternate nation. The ultimate plot against Lindbergh is a bit hard to swallow. Lindbergh was a strange mixture at that time in history. He was a renowned expert in aviation at a time when this was beginning to become an important part of war machinery. Much of his pacifism was actually a pragmatism over whether the allied powers could overcome the sudden rise of the German war machine. At the same time he was an ardent anti-communist and anti-semite. None of the quotes in the book from his speeches are Roth's invention. On the other hand these things were strong enough to make him the foil in this book without the strange plot twist that Roth introduces to bring the book to a close.
Still, it's a compelling and observant book, still in print, that may resonate with a reader more now than when it was first released.
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- nathan boling
- 11-14-20
Wow!
There was moments that I would forget this is a fictional story. The near ration was awesome the story awesome so glad I took the time to listen to this book.
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2 people found this helpful
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- M. S. Cohen
- 01-31-17
Weak ending
Roth sets up a very interesting premise with characters fully formed. But it's like he got tired towards the end and needed to wrap up the story quickly. And without good reasons.
But it's uncanny how close the events are to what is happening in 2016.
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- june compton
- 03-18-22
Wonderful novel
Philip Roth was one of those significant 20th century authors who has managed to retreat into the multiple worlds that existed in the now almost mythical mid-1900s. Re-read or just-read, his is a voice we must not lose.
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- Kevin
- 10-02-17
Horrifically Relevant
This is a tale of the degradation of American ideals after voters elect a President with anti-semetic views. While it is fiction, there are horrific parallels that can be draws with current events. The story is told from a child's point of view and it extremely well written. I highly recommend this book.
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- Voula
- 02-28-17
Loved book and narration!
I loved the book, Philip Roth 's writing makes it really easy for the reader to get absorbed in the story. I was also very impressed by the narration. I have little experience with audiobooks, but this one was the best so far and it got me hooked on audiobooks.
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- robyn farris
- 10-04-18
What if Charles Lindbergh was president during WWII?
Gotta love Roth. As always he nails it. In a story about one nine year old Jewish boy making sense of his world in 1940’s New York Roth throws him into an America which has just made “Lucky Lindy” Lindbergh it’s first Nazi loving President.
Roth using his own name for the boy and his family name for his relatives. Thus we find ourselves in the middle of Phillip Roth’s own young developing and confused psyche as well as his view of his parents, brother, relatives and the small world of his neighborhood all while having to deal with the added hardships arbitrarily beset upon him by a authoritarian government experimenting with the “Jewish Question”.
Poignant, irreverent and funny as only Roth can do.
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- Daniel
- 09-29-20
Had me going!
Lindbergh, president? really? But with all that is happening in 2020, it might be possible. I personally do not understand why one set of people think they are better than another or one is "owed"more than another. you decide.
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- kilo178
- 01-12-21
Sadly apt for our times
Incredible book with an incredible narrator. I wish Ron Silver had narrated all of Roth’s books before his passing. This was an absolute pleasure to listen to.
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- Alex
- 08-05-18
Reading it second time
Excellent book. Had a profound effect on me. Remember every episode. Re-read it. Comparing what is in the book with reality
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