Nemesis

Nemesis

In the "stifling heat of equatorial Newark," a terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, lifelong disability, and even death. This is the startling theme of Philip Rothâ€™s wrenching new book: a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children.
At the center of Nemesis is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director, Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower and weightlifter, who is devoted to his charges and disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. Focusing on Cantorâ€™s dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playgroundâ€”and on the everyday realities he facesâ€”Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering, and the pain.
Moving between the smoldering, malodorous streets of besieged Newark and Indian Hill, a pristine childrenâ€™s summer camp high in the Poconosâ€”whose "mountain air was purified of all contaminants"â€”Roth depicts a decent, energetic man with the best intentions struggling in his own private war against the epidemic. Roth is tenderly exact at every point about Cantorâ€™s passage into personal disaster, and no less exact about the condition of childhood.
Through this story runs the dark questions that haunt all four of Rothâ€™s late short novels, Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and now Nemesis: What kind of accidental choices fatally shape a life? How does the individual withstand the onslaught of circumstance?
Country USA
Brand HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT
Manufacturer Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Binding Hardcover
ReleaseDate 2010-10-05
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780547318356

Country	USA
Brand	HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT
Manufacturer	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Binding	Hardcover
ReleaseDate	2010-10-05
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780547318356

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