Nemesis Book

Exceptionally well written by Philip Roth, winner of the International PEN Literary Award.
A really interesting story in a dramatic period in US history. It is difficult to review this book without giving away too much of the plot. Cantor has been raised by his grandparents to be a responsible person. During the summer of 1944 he takes up a job working with teenagers in a playground following being rejected for wartime services overseas on account of his poor eyesight. Athletic and committed to his job, he is hero worshipped by the kids at the facility, especially when he stands up to a group of young men who arrive at the playground and begin to spit with the threat of spreading Polio. At that time Polio had no vacccination and was a summer menace, leaving young people with dreadful disabilities, commited to an iron lung for breathing or dead within a few days of catching the virus. The fear amongst communities where outbreaks occur was paralysing in its own right too.

Cantor's enormous sense of responsibility and the ignorance about how the disease is spread has a profound effect on his life at the time of the outbreak and repercussions for the rest of his life, which are desperately sad given that it was only 10 more years before a vaccine is manufactured.

This is a beautifully written, simple story about one mans values and beliefts and the effects of them on the narrative of his life. I couldnt put it down and highly recommend it to people interested in history as well as emotional and physical health.

In 'the stifling heat of equatorial Newark' a terrifying epidemic is raging threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming paralysis life-long disability even death. This is the startling and surprising theme of Roth's wrenching new book: a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely-knit family-oriented Newark community and its children. At the centre of Nemesis is a vigorous dutiful twenty-three-year old playground director Bucky Cantor a javelin thrower and a weightlifter who is devoted to his charges and disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. Focusing on Cantor's dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground - and on the everyday realities he faces - Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear the panic the anger the bewilderment the suffering and the pain.Moving between the smouldering malodorous streets of besieged Newark and Indian Hill a pristine children's summer camp high in the Poconos - whose 'mountain air was purified of all contaminants' - Roth depicts a decent energetic man with the best intentions struggling in his own private war against the epidemic. Roth is tenderly exact at every point about Cantor's passage into personal disaster and no less exact about the condition of childhood. Through this story runs the dark question that haunts all four of Roth's late short novels "Everyman" "Indignation" "The Humbling" and now "Nemesis": what choices fatally shape a life? How powerless is each of us up against the force of circumstances?