True Believers

May 14, 2012
Try as he might, author, journalist, and radio host Andersen (Reset) never quite captures the female voice of law professor Karen Hollaender, who, in the process of publishing her memoirs, makes a stunning revelation about her past. Anderson does, however, successfully depict the political and social turmoil of the mid 1960s as Karen revisits the radicalizing angst that led her and her trio of male friends to devise a plan that would indelibly alter the course of history. As teenagers in their Chicago suburb, Karen, Alex Macallister, and Chuck Levy spent hours staging James Bond fantasies. Tracing their transformation into budding ’60s student radicals, Andersen credibly shows why so many smart young privileged people became passionate about social justice, embraced anarchy and insurrection, and in many cases ended up snitching for the U.S. government. The author’s observations from a baby boomer’s perspective, about differences between the post-9/11 world and the 1960s, along with an intriguing behind-the-scenes look at intelligence and its role in both the past and present adds pizzazz to a tale that falters because of an unconvincing narrator. Agent: Suzanne Gluck, WME Entertainment.

July 15, 2012
A deliberately paced look back at the tumultuous 1960s, that era of free love, beads and bombs. Karen Hollander, 64 years old and counting, has been working very hard for the last four decades, immersed in social issues and legal battles. Now, having withdrawn her candidacy for the U.S. Supreme Court, she's embarked upon writing a memoir that's bound to upset more than one apple cart. Step one, the reader being tougher at vetting than any Senate committee, she needs to establish her credentials: "I am a reliable narrator. Unusually reliable. Trust me." Any survivor of the '60s will tell you that anyone who begs to be trusted is probably a narc, but not Karen, who is "old enough to forgo the self-protective fibs and lies but still young enough to get the memoir nailed down before the memories begin disintegrating." It would spoil Studio 360 host Andersen's (Turn of the Century, 1999, etc.) fun to give too much away, but suffice it to say that Karen is about to tell some tales out of school that involve intelligence agencies, plots to kill prominent politicians and other hijinks that definitively do not befit peace-and-love types. Naturally, there are people from the time who do not wish her to reveal such things, and so the plot thickens--as indeed it must, given Karen's lifelong love of James Bond. ("The world must be crawling with make-believe secret agents," she thinks.) Andersen's tone is smart and sometimes rueful: "During high school," he has Karen recall, "we never discussed and weren't even quite aware of the straddle we were attempting, studying hard and participating in extracurriculars even while we reimagined ourselves as existential renegades driven by contempt for conventional ambition and hypocrisy." The grown-up attitude suits the novel, which lacks the exuberance of Andersen's Heyday (2007), a tale of the revolutionary year of 1848. Neither is it reserved, though. About its only flaw is its title, which, absent the plural marker, already belongs to a 1989 film about, yes, a '60s survivor and lawyer battling for truth and justice, all a little too close for comfort. Those who remember the '60s, at least from one side of the culture wars, will like this yarn.

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February 1, 2012

Cofounder of Spy, former editor in chief of New York magazine, and cocreator and host of the award-winning Public Radio program Studio 360, Andersen knows his way around the zeitgeist; just take a look at his two novels, Turn of the Century (which drew comparisons to Bonfire of the Vanities) and the New York Times best-selling Heyday. Here he returns with another cultural study, this one featuring an eminent sixtyish judge who withdraws from consideration for a Supreme Court seat because of events in her youth. Revelations about those events will tell us as much about the country as they do about the judge. With a six-city tour, an NPR campaign, a custom Facebook page, early pitches to Goodreads and LibraryThing, book club outreach, and even a thriller platform (that says something); this will be big.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2012
I am a reliable narrator. Unusually reliable. Trust me. Composing her memoirs, onetime Supreme Court nominee Karen Hollander tells us up front that she is going to reveal the truth about a deadly incident from her radical past. But despite that irresistible beginning, she doesn't actually remember or know everything she wants to put in her book. She interviews old friends and even has herself investigated by a CIA-operative lover, but her old compatriots don't share her eagerness to have their dark secret come to light. As Andersen creates spellbinding suspense through a careful dissemination of information, spy games, real and imagined, thread the plot together. A child of privilege on Chicago's wealthy North Shore, Hollander acted out James Bond novels with friends. The missions grew in seriousness when she became a college student outraged by Vietnam. In the present, a trip to a G20 summit as her granddaughter's chaperone provides both contemporary context and a comparison of protest movements separated by half a century. This is an ambitious and remarkable novel, wonderfully voiced, about memory, secrets, guilt, and the dangers of certitude. Moreover, it asks essential questions about what it means to be an American and, in a sense, what it means to be America. Andersen's best yet.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)