Great Neck

Cantor, Jay

ISBN 10: 0375413944 / ISBN 13: 9780375413940

Published by Knopf, 2003

About this Item

Shelf wear to binding on corners, edges & spine. Light wear and soiling to edges of text block. Text is unmarked. The dust jacket shows some light handling, in a mylar cover.

Seller Inventory # SPIROcanGRE

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Great Neck
• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375413944
• ISBN 13: 9780375413940
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Weight: 51 ounces

About this title

Synopsis

From the much-praised author of Krazy Kat and The Death of Che Guevara, the tumultuous story of a group of friends growing up idealistic, radical, and romantic in the sixties and seventies.

We enter their lives in 1960 as a sixth-grade class of Great Neck kids—most of them Jewish—learns for the first time, in horrifying detail, about the Holocaust, with its moral imperative to “make justice” in the world. When the older brother of one of the students is murdered in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, they think they have found their mission, and when they receive letters from him seemingly written after his death, a heady mystical dimension is added that impels them into the civil rights and peace movements, joining their lives to a multitude of others.

Among the huge cast of characters: a boy-genius comic-book artist, who transforms their gang into Superheroes. The lovely long-legged sister of the boy who was murdered and the brilliant kid brother of the black activist killed with him. The gay son of a wealthy art collector, who introduces his friends
to the wild and sometimes dangerous New York art scene. The beautiful daughter of a Holocaust survivor, who joins the ultraradical Weathermen; the quantum physics whiz and Christian mystic who becomes her bomb-maker; and a Black Power leader, who will accompany her and others into their last and most extreme act.

Great Neck brings us inside privileged Long Island childhoods and into the churches and juke joints
and jails of Mississippi, into underground meetings and protest marches fueled by a potent mix of sex, politics, and drugs. It reminds us of the optimism, courage, and dangerous dreams of a generation who sometimes seemed to think they must be superheroes. Above all, Great Neck is the compelling portrait of complex, appealing young men and women shaping and being shaped by the momentous events of their time.

About the Author

Jay Cantor is the author of two previous novels, The Death of Che Guevara and Krazy Kat, and two books of essays, The Space Between: Literature and Politics and On Giving Birth to One’s Own Mother. A MacArthur Prize Fellow, Cantor teaches at Tufts University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Melinda Marble, and their daughter, Grace.