Scott Turow’s latest novel, Ordinary Heroes focuses this time on retired newspaperman Stewart Dubinsky, whom readers met in Turrow’s 1987 novel, Presumed Innocent. Coming upon a bundle of his late father’s letters, he is shocked to discover that his staid and boring father had been once been court-martialed at the end of WWII for assisting in the escape of a suspected spy, had a fiancée that no one ever knew about, and had written a lengthy manuscript detailing the atrocities of war and its heavy emotional toll upon Dubinsky’s father, Dubinsky himself, and the reader.
A reader’s initial reaction to Ordinary Heroes.
I have read this book three times, it is that good. It is deceptive, in that it seems at first to be a basic war book, when it is actually profound in the extreme. The characters are vivid and evoke emotions even in me. A profound anti war statement, with reason and documentation, all put in perspective by warriors who had actually been there and do not wish this horror on their children. I also cried at the concentration camp.
Thank you, Mr Turrow!
Comment by Tom Bloom — July 8, 2006 @ 11:18 pm