Genre:
Political Thriller
Description:
“Could
the Holocaust repeat itself in America? Harvey Schwartz, a leading
civil rights lawyer, returned from representing two Saudi detainees
at Guantanamo Bay and wondered what it would take for America to turn
on her Jewish citizens, as had happened historically in Spain, in
England, in France, in Germany. His novel, The
Reluctant Terrorist,
resulted.
An
atomic bomb destroys Tel Aviv, severing Israel. Surviving Israeli
Jews are herded into refugee camps managed by Palestinians as Arab
armies take over the country. The United States, demoralized by years
of futile military actions in the Middle East, lacks the will to
intervene. Two ships carrying thousands of Jewish refugees limp into
Boston harbor, only to be turned away by the United States. As the
ships are to be returned to the new nation of Palestine, Boston Jews
are forced to decide whether they will use violence to prevent a
repetition of America's rejection of German Jews before World War II.
Primo Levi's plea of 'if not now, when' suddenly becomes an immediate
decision for Jews to make, and for America's non-Jewish majority to
react to. This sets the stage for increasingly severe hostilities
between the government and American Jews, including bombings of
shopping malls, a Million Jew March on Washington and the
establishment of detention camps for hundreds of thousands of Jewish
'enemy combatants.'
The
Reluctant Terrorist
presents a plausible future in which the groundwork laid by the
Patriot Act, Homeland Security, color-coded terror alerts and
compromises on civil liberties blossoms against America's Jews.”
Author:
“Harvey
A. Schwartz is a leading Boston civil rights lawyer. He has tried
hundreds of civil rights and free speech cases in the state and
federal courts and before the United States Supreme Court, with
clients including neo-Nazis, drug reform organizations, hundreds of
wrongfully-terminated employees and two detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
He has taught at Boston University School of Law and Syracuse
University School of Journalism. He was a founding partner in the
Boston law firm of Rodgers, Powers & Schwartz LLP.”
Appraisal:
If you
finish reading this review and it leaves you feeling ambiguous, it's
done its job. I feel the same way.
I'll
start with the not so good part first. It's an epic story using
whatever definition of epic you choose. There are a lot of characters
and multiple interwoven story threads. That makes for a long
(approaching 190,000 words) book. While that might rule it out due to
reading tastes for some, in itself this isn't a problem However, many
of those words are wasted, giving extraneous detail that does nothing
to move the story along or help in other ways (characterization,
setting a tone, atmosphere, etc). Some of those wasted words are
telling us thoughts or feelings of the characters when their words
and actions should, and usually have, already established what
they're thinking.
Another
problem was getting unimportant facts wrong. For example, a tropical
storm that split into two that were “so
close to one another that they were named Hurricane Jack and
Hurricane Jill.” Clever idea, but not the way this would work. (For
the uninitiated, tropical storms and the hurricanes
that they sometimes become are named alphabetically starting with an
A name and then a name starting with a B and so on in the order they
form, alternating between male and female names. What the names will
be is established in advance of the storm season.)
My
last issue was with two small things done by Levi, one of the main
characters, that while seemingly innocuous
in real life terms, they were too obviously setups for a major twist
to come later in the story. In both instances I read what Levi had
done and made a note that this was going to come back to haunt him,
even picturing why it was going to be an issue. It telegraphed what
was going to happen, in one instance way too far ahead.
Having
said all of that, the overall story is both timely and important.
Much of it, apparently informed by the author's experience as an
attorney who represented two detainees at Guantanamo Bay, rings true.
Too true for comfort. The current political rhetoric from some, while
aimed at a different subset of US citizens, isn't much different from
what the author imagines here. I was surprised to see this book was
released in late 2008. I sure hope Schwartz's imaginings don't
continue to come true.
FYI:
Adult
language and situations.
Format/Typo
Issues:
A
small number of typos and copyediting misses.
Rating:
*** Three Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate word count:
185-190,000 words
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