Doctorow, E. L. - Joseph Catinella (review date 17 July 1971)
Joseph Catinella (review date 17 July 1971)
SOURCE: A review of The Book of Daniel, in Saturday Review, Vol. 54, No. 29, July 17, 1971, pp. 32, 61.
[In the following review, Catinella comments on the devices and concerns of The Book of Daniel.]
A dozen years after Paul and Rochelle Isaacson have been electrocuted for passing atomic secrets to the Russians, their son, Daniel, sits in the library at Columbia University, ostensibly working on his Ph.D. thesis. But he's actually jotting down notes about life in the Fifties and early Sixties, recalling how he and his sister, Susan, reacted to their parents' fate, wondering where the reckless course of late twentieth-century history is plunging America and the world.
To E. L. Doctorow politics is clearly a matter of life and death if men can be executed for their beliefs and actions. His third novel, more than a mere paraphrase of the Rosenberg Case, begins by evoking the cold-war...
[The entire page is 920 words long]
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