[ book tip by Ann Morgan ] What if Franklin Roosevelt hadn't won the 1940 election and been able to lead America to the aid of the allies fighting Fascism in the Second World War? What if, instead, the presidency was won by the isolationist aviation hero Charles A. Lindbergh on the strength of the importance of keeping the United States out of the war? And what if the whole thing turned out to be engineered by the Nazi party itself?

Dovetailing history and fiction, Philip Roth presents a disturbing parallel vision of life in the early 1940s in The Plot Against America. Mining back into his own childhood in the Jewish community in Newark, New Jersey, Roth imagines a world where the erosion of freedoms and the creep of oppression witnessed in Germany in the early 1930s begin to repeat themselves on American soil; where the media is hijacked and limited by the ruling regime; where friends and relatives become distant and untrustworthy as their loyalties are stretched and tested. Demonstrating how the currents of history shape the individuals living through them, and how easily they can be turned awry, Roth presents a deeply personal and moving picture of a family struggling to survive as the nation they know and love teeters on the brink of a political abyss.

A salutary tale, which challenges the comfortable assumptions that hind-sight tends to thrust on history, The Plot Against America is a wake-up call for a world which is too often asleep.

[ book info ] Roth, Philip: The Plot Against America.