Subscribe to Read | $0.00
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Read Anywhere and on Any Device!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
Movers and shakers never cease to move and shake…Be pleased to meet Ike Eisenhower:His clumsiness, I thought, is part of his disguise, part of his armor, a kind of self-defense mechanism – he seems most sincere just when he makes the least sense.Now enjoy meeting Dick Nixon:Let the best man win so long as it’s me… I wanted it to be played with rhetoric and industry, yet down deep I knew that even at its most trivial, politics flirted with murder and mayhem, theft and cannibalism.An at last, here...
A Tale of Two Atrocities"The Public Burning” is a fast and loose fictionalization of the three days leading up to the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on the evening of Friday, June 19, 1953.They were convicted of a charge of conspiracy to commit espionage, relating to passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.Neither directly stole the information, nor passed it on to a Soviet agent. If anything, they both had quite insignificant roles, compared to those who gave evid...
I read this as part of a Thomas Pynchon group on yahoo in the late 90s. Apparently I was the only one in the group who braved this wicked ride. I recall calling my grandmother and verifying historical details, particularly about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg . This was such a wild endeavor, one devoured at a very open point in my life. I am far from certain how I would receive this now, some twenty years later.
This Is a Job for Uncle Sam!A very exciting way to write history, at least political history, which is simultaneously personal and public, psychological and strategic, irrationally rational and therefore so dense with meaning it defies conventional narrative. As Richard Nixon says in The Public Burning, “... just as a nation has neither friends nor enemies, only interests, so there are no enduring loyalties in politics except where they are tied up in personal interests.” And personal interests
A full-toothed pell-mell assault on the American political class rendered in scimitar-sharp prose, rammed into the intestines of the Establishment with merciless force. Split between a rumbustious third-person satirical voice, making full use of Coover’s insane linguistic skill in the phonetic bile of Uncle Sam—a monstrous American Devil pulling the puppet strings—and a section narrated by Dick Nixon (who has his intestines removed and served up on a plate of steaming poop four times per para),
Furious, scatological, enflamed, visionary, razor sharp, scabrous, detailed, lengthy, outraged, overindulgent, pioneering, vicious, vivacious, cynical, black humored, radical, cartoonish, incandescent, hauntingI can see why this book was banned but that's only for the reasons that testify to its power and vision. This is a cultural link to South Park, The Simpsons, etc. Over the top satire that is just too dead-on to be neglected. The problem is, its tragicomic vision of a charismatically rapaci...
And now I have a video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB2MX...Older Text Review: Richard Nixon isn’t as bad as you think he is, pleads his Presidential Library’s Twitter account. Firing an FBI director is not Nixonian. Welcome to Trumpland, where one of the worst Presidents in history doesn’t want to be associated with the chaos that sits in the chair. For those like me, who follow the news closer than ever these days, reality feels like a heavy-handed morality lesson in an overly-caric...
The Public Burning is a curious mix of fact and fiction whose characters include: Betty Crocker, Jack Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, the Marx Brothers, Mamie and Ike Eisenhower, Billy Graham, and starring Dick Nixon, Uncle Sam, The Phantom and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The story of America’s extreme fear of communism during the 50s and the execution of the Rosenberg’s (the only American civilians to be put to death for espionage) is told primarily through Vice President Nixon, (who is depicted to be...
For those with an interest in the Rosenberg trials, Richard Nixon, McCarthyism, and the entire 1953 milieu, The Public Burning provides a wild and entertaining view of what might otherwise be a dry subject. Coover’s fictional Nixon is fascinating with Nixon’s reflections on himself as the pragmatic political workman misunderstood by an aloof Eisenhower who both uses and looks askance at him. Some knowledge of this period is required to get the most from the book. Every celebrity and well-known
This is an extraordinary novel, and contains some of the most sustained, inventive, furious satire I have ever read. So why only 4 stars? Well, while there are sections that would fully deserve the full-fathom-five, it was just too much rage to be sustained over a 500 page, tiny-type, novel. Writing in fury is hard, it has a tendency to take over the prose, and it can become a little baggy and unfocused as a result. Some judicious editing might have made this work better for me, though I cannot
Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon, summarily pantsed. Yeehaw. And that ain't the least of it. Robert Coover is a monster, and his bigger, brasher books are themselves humbling (and generally gleefully appalling) monsters. THE PUBLIC BURNING may be the mother of them all. This is the quintessential American novel of the carnivalesque. Mikhail Bakhtin originally conceptualized the carnivalesque as a subset of literature (and culture at large) that takes from the carnival its gleeful and mocking...
