The Education of Arnold Hitler - Paperback

by Marc Estrin (Author)

Marc Estrin's second novel is the story of a young man who stumbles through the second half of the 20th century bearing a most unfortunate name. At once a chess master, a linguist, an athlete and an innocent in love, Arnold passes through the racial tensions of Mansfield, Texas (home of the author of Black Like Me) in the 1950's, the anti-war movement at Harvard, and both the Upper East Side and the Bowery, meeting Noam Chomsky, Al Gore, and Leonard Bernstein in the process, and finally learning the meaning of meaning.

Front Jacket

Marc Estrin's illustrious debut, Insect Dreams -- The Half-Life of Gregor Samsa, traced a most improbable and unfortunate innocent through the first half of the 20th Century from pre-Nazi Austria to the explosion of the first nuclear bomb. With the same galloping humor, the same fear and loathing, and a touch of the Dickensian, The Education of Arnold Hitler introduces Gregor's human successor, a baby-boomer unfortunately named, who must navigate an absurd world of activists, academics, warriors, and their meaningless words. Like the greatest works of Don Delillo, Richard Powers, and Jonathan Franzen, Arnold Hitler turns a powerful humor and a compassionate and cutting satire on the darkest issues of the age: the persistence of war and racism, the intractable force of history and culture, and the lies that words conceal.