The Devil and Daniel Silverman (Paperback)

by Theodore Roszak (Author) "Danny, what're you, crazy?..." (more)
Key Phrases: San Francisco, North Fork, Grandpa Zvi (more...)

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

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Leapfrog Press; 1 edition (January 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0967952077
• ISBN-13: 978-0967952079
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,266,824 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Book Is Dynamite!, April 19, 2003

By	"drwspoon" (Garner, NC USA) - See all my reviews

Be careful of picking up this book-- it might just make your head explode. Although it is a droll, well-paced farce there are passages that did indeed set my heart pounding. I can only recommend this book to you if you believe:

1) You have an open mind
2) Homosexuality is acceptable between consenting adults
3) Women should have control over their own bodies
4) Evolution is an incontrovertible, scientific theory
5) The Bible was written by men

If you are not comfortable with these ideas as well as the idea that men and women should lead joyful, spirited lives filled with compassion with others, then I am afraid this book will disturb and anger you. As for me, it is good to know that I am not the only secular humanist left in this country.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Beating down straw men can be fun . . ., March 10, 2003

By A Customer

In Mr. Roszak's book there is no question who the good guy is, and there is no moral confusion to challenge the reader. He sets up a series of reprehensible, cardboard characters and smacks them about with sarcastic glee.

However, that's okay. In fact, that's more than okay, it's necessary. We "liberals" spend too much time worrying about the gray areas in between. Sometimes a person has to simply react, and this book is clearly Mr. Roszak's visceral reaction to religious intolerance. Bravo, I say. Many on the right revel in savaging straw men, there's nothing wrong with giving it back to them now and again.

I found this book fun much the same way "Ditto Heads" find Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly fun. It offered me a few hours of unadulterated fascist bashing unburdened by an opposing viewpoint. I didn't come away from it with a more nuanced view of the various sides of the "culture war." Rather, I got some laughs and, I'll admit, a few moments of smug satisfaction. Like chocolate, it can't be your main source of sustenance, but it's a nice treat every now and then.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Make mine droll, but real, March 10, 2003

By	O. J. King "ojking" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Having lived on both coasts and in the upper Midwest, my view of this novel was from understanding the blinders both groups walk around with in viewing their realities. Roszak captured them perfectly. While Publishers Weakly is correct in their viewing "broad, predictable sendups of the American religious right," they fail to understand that such predictable tensions are really critiques of the elitist left humanist, the ones finding it necessary to feel morally and ethically superior to those narrow-minded Midwesterners. If that was not the case then why, at one point in his defense of humanism, does Silverman question his own motive to proselytize, knowing his stated belief in accepting others and their points of view in a multi-valued society?

No, this book is a gem, both in humor and in social thought. What Thomas Kuhn calls normal science and Foucault calls normalizing, Roszak captures in the somewhat cowardly thoughts of Daniel Silverman. Only in the courage Silverman shows in drawing context [or, should I say, a grammar of motives] does the paradigm shift and take on what Kenneth Burke would call the comedy of life.

It can be read on both levels and I enjoyed it on both levels, the metaphysical and the social satire.