|
Flowers
Chocolates & Gifts
Vases & Plants
|
|
|
|
| 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Chabon
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
Buy Used: $3.49
You Save: $12.46 (78%)
New (63) Used (58) Collectible (2) from $3.49
Avg. Customer Rating:  306 reviews
Sales Rank: 1915
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5 x 1.3
ISBN: 0007149832
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780007149834
ASIN: 0007149832
Publication Date: May 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Alternate fun December 28, 2008
Remember in the old Star Trek episode City on the Edge of Forever? Kirk saves Edith Keeler and some how Earth's timeline is altered. It's not until Spock discovers that Edith was a sort of lynch pin in time, that she had to die so Earth could go on its normal way. In The Yiddish Policeman's Union, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the always entertaining Michael Chabon, takes a real historical idea - a-pie-in-the-sky proposal in 1940 to open up the Alaska Territory to European Jews.
While Congress killed the real plan and in the book, a character named Anthony Dimond is the divergence point, Chabon takes on the classic What if scenario and spins a wonderful tale of alternate Jewish history. Added on is a glorious, hilarious Raymond Chandler style detective story.
We are introduced to Meyer Landsman, an alcoholic homicide detective with the Sitka police department, examining the murder of a man named Emmanuel Lasker in the Zamenhof, a fleabag hotel where Landsman also happens to live. Landsman notes how professional the murder looks; the man was shot in the back of the head execution-style, the gunshot silenced by a pillow. Landsman notices syringes, packets of heroin, an open cardboard chess board in mid-game, and a beat-up copy of Siegbert Tarrasch's book, Three Hundred Chess Games.
From there the novel unfolds like a flower, as Meyer navigates his way through red herrings and his failed marriage with fellow officer Bina, who is no his superior. Chabon takes us down this brilliant alternate history filled with appealing -and not so appealing -characters right out of the golden age of film noir.
A triumph.
Please....ignore the bad reviews... December 28, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
With mouth agape, I just read those negative reviews. I can't believe it, no, wait, I can. The book isn't easy, it isn't full of trashy scenes of greed, sex, easily understood 4th grade vocabulary or vampires. That must be it. The minute you tell me you read it for your book club, that's the minute I know why you trashed this book. Book clubs. Can't choose your own reading or need group validation so you know what's good? Can't discern that otherwise?
O.K...now for less vitriolic verbiage. This is a great novel. I used the glossary, and I used a dictionary of Yiddish terms. I am not Jewish, Alaskan or a huge fan of alternate history, but I am a huge fan of Michael Chabon! If he writes it I will come. His mind is not the usual mind, his pen is not the usual pen, and his wildly intricate thought processes fascinate.
Great Read December 28, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A terrific read, super fiction and mystery that could have happened. Jews in Alaska...why not.
A Coen brothers Movie,for sure.
 a strange time December 25, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The key phrase 'It's a strange time to be a Jews' repeats itself in the words and minds of several characters of Chabon's book. It's a time of challenge for Jews again, at the start of the 3rd millenium and 50 years after the State of Israel was destroyed in it's failed war of independence in 1948.
As with Philip Roth's 'The Plot Against America' this apparently detective story that proposes an alternate historical world starting from historical premises. In 1940 some politician and Jewish circles considered creating a heaven for the imperiled European Jews in Alaska. The plan never became true but in Chabon's book where following the imaginary loss of the war of Independence by Jews in Palestine the US government lends for half a century a part of Alaska for the Jewish refugees of Palestine and Europe, in an environment dominated by the yidish language and customs of Eastern Europe shtetls. However this loan is temporary and the crime story imagined by Chabon takes place in the last months before the Reversion of the sovereignty of the area to full American control. Jews seem again destined to start wandering over the planet as a people without home.
The Jewish home in Alaska is a desert of another kind, a frozen one. The main character is a yid policeman named Meyer Landsman, who may look like a Chandler character if his gun was not called a 'sholem', if his mobile phone did not bear the Shoyfer brand and if his after work drinks were not shlibowitz sipped at the Polar Shtern. It is in this realistic to detail rendition of an imaginary word weaved from Chandler and Bashevis-Singer materials were much of the charm of this book is to be found. Yet, the serious undertones of the book are all over, in the questions asked about Jewish identity and the fate of Jews in the modern world and in the too many similarities between the Frozen Chosen country and Israel - difficult accomodation up to conflict with a native population sharing the land, internal disputes between religious and secular Jews and the tendency of solving the political problems through violence.
I will not say much more about the story. Chabon succeeded to write a good book, satisfactory for the crime stories readers but also for people who do not want to leave apart the current problems of importance when choosing their readings, or who are looking in literature for characters to care about or identify with. Chabon's book just shows once again that good literature does not fit well into rules or genres categorizations.
alternate crime novel of my people in alaska December 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Chabon is one of those authors that will get my business each time they publish a new book. Chabon combines the best elements of a hard-boiled murder mystery with a history that may have unfolded if my people would have been helped to flee to Alaska in the 1930s. At one point Yiddish was spoken quite a bit by relations I never new, in New York City apartments I never saw, but reading this novel made me feel close to my kin. Grade: A
|
|
|
| |
