A beautiful, elegiac novel of a father, a son, and the secrets that divide generations.
In the seventy-fifth year of his life, on a sweltering August afternoon, Chester Garland, the distinguished psychiatrist, author, and campaigner for human rights, is struck by a subway train and dies. Soon after, his son Paul receives a thoroughly unexpected inheritance: three diaries written decades earlier, in the year when Garland, on a trip to France,unaccountably walked out on his family and his profession.
As cool, detached Paul, a cyberspace cartoonist, reads the diaries, he finally faces the event that has shadowed his life since childhood. He embarks, as his father had a quarter century earlier, on a pilgrimage of love and grief, of passions-religious, erotic, and intellectual-and of discovery that is as unexpected as it is moving.
With grace and precision, Gitlin takes us on a journey not just across an ocean or across decades, but into the secret depths of two men's lives, which were forever changed in the aftermath of that tumultuous decade now known as "the sixties." A memorable portrait of a father and son locked in a biblical embrace, Sacrifice builds with quiet elegance to its shocking conclusion.
You can't swing a (metaphorical) cat without hitting an issue in Todd Gitlin's second novel, Sacrifice. Feminism, human rights, adultery, and suicide are just a few of the topics touched on in this tale of tangled familial relations. The story revolves around Chester Garland, a psychiatrist whose death at the start of the novel is the catalyst for what follows. It's not clear whether he jumped or simply fell in front of the New York subway train that killed him; in the aftermath, his estranged son, Paul, receives a journal that Garland had kept--one that explains the central mystery of what had caused him to leave Paul's mother many years before and change his focus from psychiatry to human rights activism.
Once Paul begins to read the journal, the narrative shifts from his perspective to that of his father's as he details the events that changed his life. The journal begins with a trip Garland took to Europe in the 1960s, ostensibly to participate in a conference but really as an escape from both a barren marriage and a professional failure that continues to haunt him. While on a day trip to Chartres, he meets Milena, a Czechoslovakian political exile, and soon the two are involved in a passionate affair. A tragic mishap eventually divides them, but Milena's involvement in human rights rubs off and Garland returns from Europe a changed man.
Though Sacrifice has all the elements of a compelling tale, Gitlin's prose style, unfortunately, smacks more of the social scientist than the novelist, riddled as it is with sentiments such as "My superego is mine alone with its whips, its blisters and white heat. I myself am the flames of hell" or "Guilt is my bondage, my shrine, and my lollipop." Yes, the character is a psychiatrist, but all too often he speaks like a parody of one. Too bad, because underneath this turgid rendering is a good story struggling to get free. --Alix Wilber
From Library Journal
In the wake of his psychiatrist father's apparent suicide, Paul Gurevitch (n? Michael Garland) sifts through the evidence of Dr. Garland's life. He reads from his father's book on the father-son relationships suffered by the biblical Abraham, Isaac, and Esau, a book Paul resisted opening during his father's life. He also reads through three journals that his father's lawyer bestows upon him after Dr. Garland's funeral. Cultural critic and novelist Gitlin (The Twilight of Common Dreams, Holt, 1996) gives readers a surprisingly cerebral, not-quite-failed cartoonist for a central character and lets Paul discover for us, as well as for himself, what made his father into the emotionally unavailable man he became when Paul was a young child. The interwoven texts of Paul's present, Dr. Garland's published biblical gloss, and his secret journals cohere nicely. Only the changes in Gitlin's female characters seem unrealisticAbut perhaps we see them too completely through Dr. Garland's and Paul's eyes. For all collections where serious fiction is popular.AFrancisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., CA Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Todd Gitlin is the author of fourteen books, including, most recently, The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election (with Liel Leibovitz); The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals; other titles include The Intellectuals and the Flag; Letters to a Young Activist; Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives; The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars; The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage; Inside Prime Time; The Whole World Is Watching; Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago (co-author); two novels, Sacrifice and The Murder of Albert Einstein; and a book of poetry, Busy Being Born. These books have been translated into Japanese, Korean, Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. He also edited Watching Television and Campfires of the Resistance.
In February 2011, Counterpoint will publish his novel, Undying.
He has contributed to many books and published widely in general periodicals (The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, Boston Globe, Dissent, The New Republic, The Nation, Wilson Quarterly, Harper's, American Journalism Review, Columbia Journalism Review, The American Prospect, et al.), online magazines (tnr.com, prospect.org, openDemocracy.net), and scholarly journals (Theory and Society, Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, et al.). He is on the editorial boards of Dissent and the Progressive Book Club, and a contributing writer to Mother Jones.
He is a regular contributor to the blog TPMcafe.com and the "Entanglements" and "The Book" blogs at The New Republic online.
He has been a columnist at the New York Observer and the San Francisco Examiner. During the 2008 campaign he is wrote a weekly "Sunday Watch" column for Columbia Journalism Review online and the Huffington Post. His poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Yale Review, and The New Republic.
In 2000, Sacrifice won the Harold U. Ribalow Prize for books on Jewish themes. The Sixties and The Twilight of Common Dreams were Notable Books in the New York Times Book Review. Inside Prime Time received the nonfiction award of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association; The Sixties was a finalist for that award and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.
He holds degrees from Harvard University (mathematics), the University of Michigan (political science), and the University of California, Berkeley (sociology). He was the third president of Students for a Democratic Society, in 1963-64, and coordinator of the SDS Peace Research and Education Project in 1964-65, during which time he helped organize the first national demonstration against the Vietnam War and the first American demonstrations against corporate aid to the apartheid regime in South Africa. During 1968-69, he was an editor and writer for the San Francisco Express Times, and through 1970 wrote widely for the underground press. In 2003-06, he was a member of the Board of Directors of Greenpeace USA.
He is a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph. D. program in Communications at Columbia University. Earlier, he was for sixteen years a professor of sociology and director of the mass communications program at the University of California, Berkeley, and then for seven years a professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University. During 1994-95, he held the chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has been a resident at the Bellagio Study Center in Italy and the Djerassi Foundation in Woodside, California, a fellow at the Media Studies Center in New York, and a visiting professor at Yale University, the University of Oslo, the University of Toronto, East China Normal University in Shanghai, and the Institut Supérieur des Langues de Tunis in Tunisia.
He lectures frequently on culture and politics in the United States and abroad (Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Russia, Greece, Turkey, India, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Canada, Mexico, Morocco). He has appeared on many National Public Radio programs including Fresh Air as well as PBS, ABC, CBS and CNN. He lives in New York City with his wife, Laurel Cook.
