My Cold War: A Novel [Hardcover]

Tom Piazza (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 16, 2003

John Delano is in trouble. A professor of Cold War Studies at a small New England college, hetraffics in what others call "History McNuggets" -- gimmicky, easily digestible glimpses of ourcollective past. But as he struggles with his magnum opus -- a major new book on the "surfaces" of the Cold War era -- Delano's life begins to fall apart. In a series of dazzlingly rendered and escalating encounters, he revisits the treeless vistas of 1950s suburbia, the streets of Dallas and the JFK assassination, the Summer of Love, and other landmark moments, and finally travels into the heartland to reconnect with his estranged brother. What he finds there, and what he makes of it, forms this novel's poignant climax.

Bob Dylan has said that Tom Piazza's "stories pulsate with nervous electrical tension -- reveal the emotions that we can't define." Now, in a breakout novel of power, subtlety, and range, Piazza braids together the inner and outer life of our times, in a story that will leave readers both shaken and exhilarated.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This richly textured but uneven first novel by Piazza (Blues and Trouble) opens with John Delano, a Connecticut college professor of Cold War Studies, trying, unsuccessfully, to pen John Delano's Cold War, an unorthodox opus that looks at events as "pure phenomena." Analyzing surface and image (instead of "boring history stuff," as a former student puts it) has earned John popularity in the classroom, but some disdain in the faculty lounge for his "History McNuggets." When his father, from whom he was estranged, dies, John's concentration fails him; instead of writing, he recollects his turbulent childhood: his father's steady decline into mental illness, his mother's struggles and love affairs, the growing despondency of his brother, Chris. John narrates his youth with spot-on 1960s details-Johnny Carson hosting Don Rickles, the Summer of Love, the pot fumes-and poignant personal memories, from meeting his wife, Val, at a labor conference, to the pain of his mother's death. Struggling to free himself from writer's "limbo," John calls Chris, to whom he has not spoken in years, proposing to visit him in Iowa; he imagines that he will scrap his Cold War book and instead write a memoir about their reunion. Their time together is awkward, poignant-and might have been the start of a renewed relationship. But John's discovery that Chris is involved in a racist group sparks another conflict, and John's subsequent decision to visit the house he grew up in provides the novel's heartbreaking final pages. The academic play of the novel's opening feels flat in comparison to the powerful longing at its end, but this is an incisive portrait of a man, his troubled family and their place in history.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

In his thought-provoking first novel, Piazza takes his readers on a nostalgic tour that includes his own version of growing up in Long Island's postwar suburbia. John Delano is the sole faculty member in the department of cold war studies at Hollister College, and his classes are wildly popular, focusing on personalities and big moments, what his critics call "History McNuggets." John is writing a book on these themes, but after his father dies he is stuck in "a big mishmash of history, myth, my own personal experience." He decides that to write about the Kennedy and King assassinations, Castro, fallout shelters, Kent State, even Bob Dylan going electric, he must first confront his own past, starting with his estranged brother. John returns to his hometown, where they grew up with a bitter, anticommunist father, and, surprisingly, finds some positive memories lingering among all the sad ones. Piazza's journey down memory lane is enlivened by his witty take on competitive academia, and deepened by his poignant tale of a family broken, it may be, beyond repair. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1st edition (September 16, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060533404
• ISBN-13: 978-0060533403
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,364,113 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Tom Piazza is the author of ten books, the most recent of which is "Devil Sent The Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America," a collection of essays and journalism on music, literature and politics.

His other books include the novel "City Of Refuge," which won the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction, and the post-Katrina classic "Why New Orleans Matters." His novel "My Cold War" won the Faulkner Society Award for the Novel, and his short-story collection "Blues and Trouble," won the James Michener Award for Fiction. He is currently a writer for the HBO series "Treme" and is at work on a new novel.

No less a literary critic than Bob Dylan has said, "Tom Piazza's writing pulsates with nervous electrical tension - reveals the emotions that we can't define." A well known writer on American music as well, Tom won a Grammy Award for his album notes to "Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey" and is a three-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Music Writing. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Bookforum, The Oxford American, Columbia Journalism Review, and many other periodicals. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and he lives in New Orleans.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars MY Cold War, October 12, 2003

By 

Richard O. Haight - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Cold War: A Novel (Hardcover)

Tom Piazza's long-awaited first novel does not disappoint. A New Yorker, MFA grad of Iowa's Writers Workshop, a jazz scholar and critic, a student of Frank Conner, and a writer with a keen sense of socio-anthrpology, Piazza has written a sensitive and substantive piece of fiction that reveals a sense of intimacy with all the above. He weaves strips of his own experience into a sad patchwork tale of a man seeking his place in the present and his relationship to the past. As a troubled professor of history, John Delano begins an odessy to find his own place only to discover that history and our perceptions of it are not static, but rather fluid like a blues riff that can set the band on an entire new course. Piazza challenges us to read slowly and contemplate while his descriptions permeate and lift the soul like the muted sound of Gordon Brown's trumpet. Read this book on a rainy afternoon when time has no meaning.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A strong debut novel, June 9, 2009

By 

Jack Wolf - See all my reviews
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This review is from: My Cold War: A Novel (Paperback)

I just finished reading "My Cold War" this morning. Piazza came to my attention because his novel about Hurricane Katrina, "City of Refuge", nearly won the annual Tournament of Books fiction contest this year.

"Refuge" took second place in a field of sixteen, losing out to Toni Morrison's "A Mercy." The Tournament of Books is an online annual event, it's a total hoot, if you love reading fiction. It's sponsored by the blog/online magazine "The Morning News" and also affiliated with Powell's Books. [I have no affiliation with either; I'm just a fan.]

I'd hoped to find "City of Refuge" -- but, while browsing a local used bookstore, I came across "My Cold War" by Piazza instead. I'm a child of the 50's and 60's myself, so in that sense, I lived through a lot of the events, the political and social turmoil of the Cold War -- but then it's been almost 20 years since it ended.

I'd hoped to be reading about more recent history -- the Katrina catastrophe. But I read the first several pages of "My Cold War" there in the bookstore and got hooked. Hey, this guy writes pretty well -- why not give this one a try? If it's not half-bad, then I'll know that "City of Refuge" stands a chance to be a great read, too -- that's the decision I made.

And "My Cold War" turns out to be surprisingly lively -- although it's not exactly a thriller. It's an engaging fictional memoir. I'll confess that things happen pretty fast in the final two or three chapters. It becomes much more personal -- and suspenseful -- when the protagonist, Delano, decides to find and reconnect with his long lost younger brother.

That might have been a good place to begin the book -- and then flesh out the difficult road ahead as the two brothers struggle with the vast distance which now separates their views of the world and of each other. Granted, once the brothers meet, the older brother, Delano, a history professor, brings his own inner Cold War to an end. So, in that way, it fits as an ending, but it also feels like at last the seeds of this struggle are sprouting -- only to have the author clip these green shoots before they have a chance to mature.

In his lectures, in all aspects of his life, he presented the Cold War as spectacle, a crazy mural of images or an engagement with music of the period. Delano, for instance, focuses on the moment when Bob Dylan chose to play with an electric guitar in the mid 1960's -- thereby betraying, in the eyes of many of his followers, the humanitarian idealism of folk music.

He intuits the surrender to commercialism, the yielding to the marketplace which Dylan's act signals -- yet cannot see how his own approach to history amounts to the same thing. He's making a living, his income from books and teaching, and both of these come from the way he sells the frenzy and the flash of the Cold War. He does so without getting wet -- he's sailing over the surface -- his teaching, his vision of the times -- it's a cruise, not a crusade.

The grit and brutality of the battle for Civil Rights, the carnage and hubris of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the terror and tragedy of the assassinations of JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, the killing of students at Kent State and in Mississippi -- he doesn't probe these topics. In his own blood and bones, he feels none of it.

This detachment arose from the dynamic, yet painful events of his upbringing with his father and mother. And throughout it's the frequent recalling of Delano's youth -- old family spats, outings, and rare happy moments -- which keep the novel breathing. It never succumbs to the shallowness Delano's Cold War history lectures, however bright and breezy, suffer from. These are the faults of the character, not those of our author, Piazza.

Ultimately, it's well worth reading -- especially if you came into this world during the Cold War, as I did.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars uneven throughout but strong close, November 19, 2003

By 

B. Capossere (Rochester, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: My Cold War: A Novel (Hardcover)

My Cold War follows John Delano, a college professor of Cold War Studies whose focus is "surface and image" rather than what lies beneath--the "boring history stuff". We come across Delano shortly after his father's death, which has precipitated a crisis of career and family for Delano. He is on sabbatical for a book he cannot write, its cold war history meshing too muddily with his own more personal recollections of growing up in Long Island, his father's slide into mental illness, his eight-year estrangement from his younger brother Chris. Finally, Delano decides to drop the book and head out to Iowa to see his brother, whom he last spoke to when he told him to basically "get a life" after Chris called desperate for a place to stay.
The book has its uneven moments but they are outweighed by the long stretches of good moments. Piazza's post-war descriptions of Long Island suburbia are vividly sharp: the cookie-cutter houses, Johnny Carson on the TV, smoking pot, a long digression on Bob Dylan's shift to electric guitar. Delano's crisis of faith in his philosophy that image is all-important is handled well internally if brought out a bit obviously through a conversation with another faculty member. Several of the side characters, in fact, seem a bit weak as characters: his colleague, his wife, an old college friend, his brothers' friends in Iowa. They often seem as if they were created to fill a role--say a few lines, spark a plot action or a memory--then made to disappear. We see so little of them though that despite this being a pretty consistent weakness it ends up relatively minor in the novel as a whole.
The heart of the book belongs to Delano's memories of his family and his new-found desire to make contact with his brother, the former handled better than the later. The memory scenes and Delano's present-time responses to the memories are the strength of the book both in terms of evoking an emotional response from the reader and in the language which seems to sparkle in those scenes. The scene with the brother is handled a bit too quickly and too much through internal monologue-there was so much potential there that I would have liked to have seen more. The awkwardness, the pain, the mixture of anger and nostalgia are captured perfectly, just too glancingly. All of that, however, is made up for by the closing scene where Delano visits his hometown. The images and the language jump up to another level and lead to a beautifully written and heartachingly poignant close. The book is worth it I'd say just for the last few pages alone, though there is much to recommend it before one gets there. This is a quiet book, quietly moving, quietly captivating. It won't grab you with flashy writing or big action or larger-than-life or quirkier-than-real-life characters. And as mentioned, it has its weaknesses of character and plot. But what it does is hold your attention through voice and some beautifully precise images. A strong recommendation.