Our Gang: Starring Trick and His Friends
About this ebook
A ferocious political satire in the great tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, Our Gang is Philip Roth's brilliantly acerbic response to the phenomenon of Richard M. Nixon.
In the character of Trick E. Dixon, Roth portrays an American president who outdoes the severest cynic; a peace-loving Quaker and believer in the sanctity of human life who doesn't have a problem with killing unarmed women and children. A master politician with an honest sneer, he finds himself battling the Boy Scouts, declaring war on pro-pornography Denmark, all the time trusting in the basic indifference of the voting public.
Tricky is the unprincipled self-seeker who hides his heartlessness behind the anaesthetising clichés of high office, whose public language is a merciless parody of that 'candid' Presidential prose which is merely double-talk, or as Orwell put it, 'pure wind'.
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About the author
Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933, to second-generation Americans Bess and Herman. He grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood his writing returned to time and again.
Roth received the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), but it was his fourth, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) which secured his reputation as one of America’s finest writers, and American Pastoral (1997) which won the Pulitzer Prize. Roth wrote thirty-one books in all, winning the International Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice. He was presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively.
Roth died aged eighty-five on 22 May 2018, six years after retiring from writing.
