Summary: Rose Zimmer, an unreconstructed Communist and mercurial tyrant, terrorizes her neighborhood and her family with her personality and absolute beliefs. Her brilliant and willful daughter, Miriam, is equally passionate in her activism and flees Rose's influence for Greenwich Village's Age of Aquarius counterculture. The women and the men in Miriam and Rose's lives struggle to follow their own utopian dreams. From 1930s communism to McCarthyism, the civil rights movement to the Occupy movement: the reader and the book's characters come to understand that the personal may be political, but the political -even more so - is personal. "A righteous, stupendously involving novel about the personal toll of failed political movements and the perplexing obstacles to doing good." - Booklist starred review. Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of nine novels, including "Chronic City," "The Fortress of Solitude," "Motherless Brooklyn" and "The Ecstasy of Influence." A MacArthur Fellow and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Lethem's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Rolling Stone, The New York Times and other publications.
