The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia.<br><br>His name is Daniel Isaacson and as the story opens his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted. <br><br>Out of the shambles of his childhood he has constructed a new life-marriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of his own and a career in scholarship. It is a life that enrages him.<br><br>In the silence of the library at Columbia University where he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation Daniel composes something quite different.<br><br>It is a confession of his most intimate relationships-with his wife his foster parents and his kid sister Susan whose own radicalism so reproaches him. <br><br>It is a book of memories: riding a bus with his parents to the ill-fated Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill; watching the FBI take his father away; appearing with Susan at rallies protesting their parents' innocence; visiting his mother and father in the Death House.<br><br>It is a book of investigation: transcribing Daniel's interviews with people who knew his parents or who knew about them; and logging his strange researches and discoveries in the library stacks.<br><br>It is a book of judgments of everyone involved in the case-lawyers police informers friends and the Isaacson family itself.<br><br>It is a book rich in characters from elderly grand- mothers of immigrant culture to covert radicals of the McCarthy era to hippie marchers on the Pen-tagon. It is a book that spans the quarter-century of American life since World War II. It is a book about the nature of Left politics in this country-its sacrificial rites its peculiar cruelties its humility its bitterness. It is a book about some of the beautiful and terrible feelings of childhood. It is about the nature of guilt and innocence and about the relations of people to nations. <br><br>It is <i>The Book of Daniel</i>.<br><br><b>Cover art: Jasper Johns Flag 1954-55. Art ( c ) Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA New York NY.</b>
