The Plot Against America by Philip Roth – A Visionary Fiction Alliance Book Review by Victor Smith
Fiction too close to fact to be ignored
Philip Roth may have written The Plot Against America back in 2004, and it may be about an alternate rendering of American history in the early 1940’s that found the pro-Nazi Charles Lindbergh in the White House instead of FDR, but every American who cares about the future of this nation and its democracy should be acutely aware of the possibilities posed in this book.
How Adolph Hitler managed to seduce the nation that produced so geniuses like Goethe and Beethoven always baffled me. I could not fathom why the Nazis found it worth their while to capture and kill my blind old great-grandmother in their concentration camp.
A writer myself, I wrote my own novel about the era, and I went to a couple of those camps (Dachau and Buchenwald) and let the horror of them sear my soul so that I would never forget, nor would I allow anyone else, who let me, forget. And so I highly recommend this work by Philip Roth–who happens to be a damned great writer as well as a passionate advocate against fascism.
