A sharp, searching novel of an American son and the family he left behind å¦rom a writer of rare breadth and human insight.
My Cold War is a critically acclaimed debut novel of extraordinary depth and range : the story of a man's alienation and attempts at reconnection with his family, and a rich exploration of the thorny implications of American popular culture.
At its center is John Delano, a professor of Cold War Studies and successful mass - market historian a la Stephen Ambrose or Ken Burns. Raised by an awkward, embittered father and a frustrated mother in a Levittown - style suburb on Long Island, Delano has made a name for himself as a gimmicky interpreter of Cold War America, a controversial but popular repackager of events like the JFK assassination for those who lived through them without noticing.
And yet, as the novel opens, Delano has reached an impasse: during a crisis of confidence, he shelves a major new book project in favor of a quest to drive to the Midwest and seek out his estranged younger brother. But when the trip ends in a sobering discovery that his brother has led a life of desperate transience, grasping at straws and scapegoats å¨e undergoes an epiphany that propels him back to the newly sacred ground where he and his brother were raised.
Long recognized as a writer of exceptional vision and unflinching candor, Tom Piazza has crafted a novel full of incident and argument, a book that speaks with depth and range about what it has meant to be American in our time.
Genre: General Fiction
My Cold War is a critically acclaimed debut novel of extraordinary depth and range : the story of a man's alienation and attempts at reconnection with his family, and a rich exploration of the thorny implications of American popular culture.
At its center is John Delano, a professor of Cold War Studies and successful mass - market historian a la Stephen Ambrose or Ken Burns. Raised by an awkward, embittered father and a frustrated mother in a Levittown - style suburb on Long Island, Delano has made a name for himself as a gimmicky interpreter of Cold War America, a controversial but popular repackager of events like the JFK assassination for those who lived through them without noticing.
And yet, as the novel opens, Delano has reached an impasse: during a crisis of confidence, he shelves a major new book project in favor of a quest to drive to the Midwest and seek out his estranged younger brother. But when the trip ends in a sobering discovery that his brother has led a life of desperate transience, grasping at straws and scapegoats å¨e undergoes an epiphany that propels him back to the newly sacred ground where he and his brother were raised.
Long recognized as a writer of exceptional vision and unflinching candor, Tom Piazza has crafted a novel full of incident and argument, a book that speaks with depth and range about what it has meant to be American in our time.
Genre: General Fiction
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