Finished Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America"

"The Plot Against America" – I can’t exactly recommend this. It tells the story of what might have happened if the anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh had run against FDR in 1940, and won.

As a rule I don’t like alternate histories, and I guess this is no exception. I enjoyed the first chapters, told from the POV of Philip Roth, the child. But I didn’t enjoy the last few chapters, which tell the story primarily in a more dry, reportorial manner.

The good thing about a book like this, though, is that it helps to make history come alive. I hated history as a school subject. For the most part, the story is engaging. As an alternate history, it made me more curious about real history than anything I read as a student. I wish I’d been exposed to such interesting approaches to history when in school – it would have helped to make real past events much more interesting and memorable.

So: thumbs up for struggling history students, I guess.

I’ve got to post my favorite quote from the book [p 346 of the hardcover edition]: "I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that, in the long run, nobody is a picnic and that I was no picnic myself."

tag: books