Nemesis (Vintage International) - Softcover

Roth, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 030747500X ISBN 13: 9780307475008

Publisher: Vintage, 2011

Synopsis

Set in a Newark neighborhood during a terrifying polio outbreak, Nemesis is a wrenching examination of the forces of circumstance on our lives.
 
Bucky Cantor is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director during the summer of 1944. A javelin thrower and weightlifter, he is disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As the devastating disease begins to ravage Bucky’s playground, Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain. Moving between the streets of Newark and a pristine summer camp high in the Poconos, Nemesis tenderly and startlingly depicts Cantor’s passage into personal disaster, the condition of childhood, and the painful effect that the wartime polio epidemic has on a closely-knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children. 

About this title

From the Back Cover:

A terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, life-long disability, and even death. This is the startling theme of Roth's wrenching new book: a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and its effect on a closely knit community and its children. At the center of Nemesis is twenty-three year old playground director Bucky Cantor, an athlete who is devoted to his charges and disappointed that his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war. Focusing on Cantor's dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground -- and on the everyday realities he faces -- Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain.

Moving between the smoldering streets of Newark and Indian Hill, a pristine children's summer camp high in the Poconos -- whose "mountain air was purified of all contaminants" -- 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 Cantor's passage into personal disaster and no less exact about the condition of childhood

About the Author:

In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.” Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 030747500X
• ISBN 13: 9780307475008
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304