Nemesis

A New Yorker and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year Set in a Newark neighborhood during a terrifying polio outbreak in the summer of 1944, Nemesis is a wrenching examination of the forces of circumstance on our lives. Bucky Cantor, a twenty-three-year-old playground director, is disappointed that his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war. As polio begins to ravage Bucky's playground, we are led through every emotion such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain. Moving between the streets of Newark and a pristine Poconos summer camp, Nemesis tenderly and startlingly depicts Cantor's passage into personal disaster, the condition of childhood, and the painful effect that the wartime polio epidemic has on a close-knit community. Praise: "Suffused with precise and painful tenderness.... The architecture of Roth's sentences is almost invisibly elegant." --The New York Times Book Review "Yet another small triumph from one of our native artists largest in spirit. And by small I mean in length of the book. . . . This dual portrait, of a neighborhood and of a man quite representative of the times when trouble struck his neighborhood with lethal force, gives this new novel a singular appeal." --Chicago Tribune "Grippingly and with documentary expertise, it tells a story set in the devastating 1944 polio epidemic. . . . Roth writes vividly of heat-choked streets and cramped houses." --Boston Globe "Roth has always been terrific at rendering the times and places close to his own youth. And in Nemesis, he masterly contrasts the sweaty, close world of all-day ball games and nights spent on front stoops with affluence and young love developing in the cool countryside. . . . A quick, propulsive read full of chiseled storytelling." --Chicago Sun-Times "Roth writes a lean, vigorous prose that burns with the intensity of his purpose. It flows smoothly even when he wrestles with the knottiest of philosophical problems." --Plain Dealer "Painful and powerful. . . . Somberly but vividly, [Roth