Rules of '48

Starred review from August 18, 2008
The final work from novelist Cady (1933-2004) immerses readers in Southern city life just as it emerges from the suffering and shortfalls of WWII, a chronicle of seven summer weeks in 1948 that irrevocably change a handful of ordinary Louisville, Ken. residents. Facing the local ramifications of growing issues in the world-at-large-shock over the Holocaust, the specter of impending communism, mounting unrest in black America-are successful auctioneer Wade, a white man with "a mouth on him that could stun horseflies"; personable black day laborer Lester, a veteran of war and auctioneering; Jewish pawnbroker Lucky; and Lucky's young employee Howard, a determined black teenager. As the summer roils, rising racial tensions ensnare all the characters, leading to violence and unexpected redemption. A fittingly personal farewell (it began as a memoir), Cady's novel showcases (as in Ghosts of Yesterday and others) a skill for story-telling that rivals Mark Twain's, rich with lived-in details of the way things were.

January 1, 2010
Cadys fictionalized memoir offers a close-up view of the dramatic social changes facing the U.S. in the postWorld War II era by zeroing in on Louisville, Kentucky, during seven hot and deadly weeks in 1948, when relations between rednecks, blue-collar whites, blacks, and Jews were in a process of uneasy realignment. The lives of three menWade, an auctioneer and the son of a religious bigot; Lucky, the Jewish owner of a hockshop, who also shops auctions; and Lester, a strapping black man with a joy of lifebecome intertwined and inexorably altered. Lucky is the linchpin as he helps Lester, Wade, and two young boys (one white, one black) solve their problems of business and race. Each main character becomes very real as the third-person narrative alternates between them, looking at their pasts, presents, and, at the end, futures. Cady has nailed the ambience of the era, conjuring a definite sense of time and place in all their nuances, including the accuracy of the racial terms in use at the time.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)