American Hero
From AwardAnnals
| This creative work has a long or truncated description. Please review the creative work guidelines concerning descriptions and edit down or replace the description. |
 | |
| Author(s) | Larry Beinhart |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | A Novel |
| Publisher | Ballantine Books |
| Lee Atwater is on his deathbed. He isn’t thinking death. He’s thinking king-making. And he’s thinking that it wasn’t enough to have raised up the king…now he has to protect him—even from beyond the grave. It means entrusting his last—his greatest—reelection scam to Jim Baker, and when he hands it over, he wraps it in a warning: “Don’t show it to Georgie, now. Don’t even look, now. Wait until you’re in trouble.” Think of Lot’s wife. Think of Orpheus. Think of Pandora. Think of Baker opening Atwater’s memo the minute he steps out of the hospital room. And think of… | |
Lee Atwater is on his deathbed. He isn’t thinking death. He’s thinking king-making. And he’s thinking that it wasn’t enough to have raised up the king…now he has to protect him—even from beyond the grave. It means entrusting his last—his greatest—reelection scam to Jim Baker, and when he hands it over, he wraps it in a warning: “Don’t show it to Georgie, now. Don’t even look, now. Wait until you’re in trouble.” Think of Lot’s wife. Think of Orpheus. Think of Pandora. Think of Baker opening Atwater’s memo the minute he steps out of the hospital room. And think of him reading a plan so mad, so potentially destructive, and so utterly logical (in a particularly Atwateresquely cynical kind of way) that it just might work…. Not since Catch-22 has there been a novel so brutal in its satire, so lethal in its aim, and so powerfully compelling and caustic in its effect.
Find this book
Related works
Not only was Barry Levinson’s comedy shot in a relatively fast period of 29 days, the satire of politics and show business feels as if it were made yesterday. There’s a fresh spin quite evident here, a nervy satire of a presidential crisis and the people who whitewash the facts. The main players are a mysterious Mr. Fix-It (Robert De Niro), veteran Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman), and a White House aide (Anne Heche). Can the president’s molesting of a young girl be buried in the two weeks before an election? A war in Albania just might do the trick. In the…
