- Save $10 when you spend $50 and pay with Bill Me Later. The fast and convenient way to buy without using your credit card. Offer limited to items purchased from Amazon.com between July 14, 2008 and July 21, 2008. One per customer account. Enter code BMLSAVES at checkout. Here's how (restrictions apply)
Join Amazon Prime and ship Two-Day for free and Overnight for $3.99. Already a member? Sign in.
Special Offers and Product Promotions
Better Together
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
This story of a gay Jewish novelist's trip from San Francisco to a small religious college in the Midwest is an uneven, fitfully entertaining satire. Roszak, a social historian (The Making of a Counter Culture) and novelist (Flicker), begins with some witty jabs at the publishing industry. Daniel Silverman is a writer whose last success was nearly 20 years ago, when Analyzing Anna ("solid middle-brow exercises in mordant but good-humored social satire") spent one week at number 10 on the New York Times bestseller list. Now his job teaching university extension courses isn't paying the bills, and his agent has long since dumped him. When Minnesota's Faith College invites him to speak on humanism, he can hardly refuse-they're offering $12,000. When he arrives, he finds that the faculty members believe, among other things, that homosexuals are unclean and humanists are going to hell. To make matters worse, he is trapped by a ferocious blizzard for several days. At this point, the book becomes bogged down in broad, predictable sendups of the American religious right. Silverman has heated arguments with his bigoted hosts, who talk about "the nearly monopolistic influence your people hold over the mass media" and insist that evidence for the Holocaust is "exaggerated." Roszak does some damage control by turning to farce, as a liquor-soaked Silverman begins to suspect that his hosts are planning to kill him before the end of the storm. But the novel's intermittent pleasures are weighed down by the clumsy social critique.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
What happens when worlds collide? Especially when a "secular humanist" is stranded in a group of Far Right Christian evangelicals? Roszak confronts these issues in his new novel. Daniel Silverman is a once successful--now failing--writer, gay, a secular Jew, and an overall ornery person. Living in San Francisco, he is booked as a speaker at a tiny Christian college in northern Minnesota, and he doesn't know why. He hasn't had work or speaking engagements in years. Once he arrives, to give a lecture on "Religious Humanism," he is immediately confronted with a cloistered community of like-minded Christians who doubt everything Silverman says, and he ends up defending his very way of life--much of which he privately despises. Trapped on campus in a blizzard, Silverman himself eventually becomes a Christ figure--persecuted, almost unto death, by righteous "believers" who can't stand his tolerance. Despite the smug viewpoints Roszak puts into Silverman's mouth and the unbearable characters he creates the evangelicals to be, he tells a good story about believing in yourself and your lifestyle. Michael Spinella
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
See all Editorial Reviews
This story of a gay Jewish novelist's trip from San Francisco to a small religious college in the Midwest is an uneven, fitfully entertaining satire. Roszak, a social historian (The Making of a Counter Culture) and novelist (Flicker), begins with some witty jabs at the publishing industry. Daniel Silverman is a writer whose last success was nearly 20 years ago, when Analyzing Anna ("solid middle-brow exercises in mordant but good-humored social satire") spent one week at number 10 on the New York Times bestseller list. Now his job teaching university extension courses isn't paying the bills, and his agent has long since dumped him. When Minnesota's Faith College invites him to speak on humanism, he can hardly refuse-they're offering $12,000. When he arrives, he finds that the faculty members believe, among other things, that homosexuals are unclean and humanists are going to hell. To make matters worse, he is trapped by a ferocious blizzard for several days. At this point, the book becomes bogged down in broad, predictable sendups of the American religious right. Silverman has heated arguments with his bigoted hosts, who talk about "the nearly monopolistic influence your people hold over the mass media" and insist that evidence for the Holocaust is "exaggerated." Roszak does some damage control by turning to farce, as a liquor-soaked Silverman begins to suspect that his hosts are planning to kill him before the end of the storm. But the novel's intermittent pleasures are weighed down by the clumsy social critique.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
What happens when worlds collide? Especially when a "secular humanist" is stranded in a group of Far Right Christian evangelicals? Roszak confronts these issues in his new novel. Daniel Silverman is a once successful--now failing--writer, gay, a secular Jew, and an overall ornery person. Living in San Francisco, he is booked as a speaker at a tiny Christian college in northern Minnesota, and he doesn't know why. He hasn't had work or speaking engagements in years. Once he arrives, to give a lecture on "Religious Humanism," he is immediately confronted with a cloistered community of like-minded Christians who doubt everything Silverman says, and he ends up defending his very way of life--much of which he privately despises. Trapped on campus in a blizzard, Silverman himself eventually becomes a Christ figure--persecuted, almost unto death, by righteous "believers" who can't stand his tolerance. Despite the smug viewpoints Roszak puts into Silverman's mouth and the unbearable characters he creates the evangelicals to be, he tells a good story about believing in yourself and your lifestyle. Michael Spinella
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
|
Inside This Book Citations: This book cites 19 books | 2 books that cite this book Explore: Citations | Concordance | Text Stats Key Phrases - CAPs: San Francisco, North Fork, Grandpa Zvi, Faith College, Daniel Silverman (more) Browse Sample Pages: Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover | Surprise Me! |
||