Great Neck
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
In 1960, a group of friends are plucked from their sixth grade classroom in privileged Great Neck, Long Island and confronted for the first time with the horrors of the Holocaust. They hear a challenge from the past, a cry from history to set the world on a better course; but it is the murder of a much-loved older brother during Mississippi’s Freedom Summer that makes their mission clear.
From the front line of the civil rights movement to Andy Warhol’s New York art scene, from comic book superheroes to the violent maelstrom of the Weather Underground, Great Neck immerses us in a charged time not so long ago, and illuminates the lives of those who were shaped by its energies and ideals. Vigorous, funny, profound and altogether gripping, it is a masterpiece of contemporary literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Weighing in at nearly 800 pages, Cantor's epic effort to frame the experience of growing up Jewish on Long Island with the radicalism of the '60s and '70s is a chaotic, unfocused sprawl, a book bursting with an overwhelming number of subplots, characters, tangents and the occasional illuminating episode. Cantor introduces his core Long Island peer group in the early chapters, with the most compelling sections exploring the dilemma of Beth Jacobs, an activist who escapes imprisonment after being indicted for a bombing at MIT, only to find herself incarcerated with her African-American counterpart after a robbery goes awry. Cantor then bounces back and forth between the Long Island story lines and those dealing with the African-American group of civil rights activists. Members of the huge cast of characters include Beth's longtime friend Laura, an psychoanalyst with multiple sclerosis; brilliant, scrawny comic book artist Billy Green, who transforms his friends into superheroes; hardcore militant Sugar Cane; and Jacob Battle, a more conflicted revolutionary. Cantor is an accomplished writer who churns up enough material for at least two decent novels here, and both the coming-of-age stories and the race-related material might have worked nicely as either stand-alone books or as part of an ongoing series. But in a single volume, his hyperactive plotting renders parts of the book almost unreadable. The author employed this sort of comprehensive narrative style successfully in The Death of Che Guevara, but given the familiarity of the material, the elliptical, labyrinthine nature of this book will try the patience of even his most avid fans. Author tour.
