Being Polite To Hitler

(Paperback)

---

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

After teaching and raising her family for most of her life, Agnes Scofield is tired of the routine. But how, at 51, can she establish an identity apart from what has so long defined her Often eloquent, sometimes blunt, and always full of fire, the Scofield family is not one to keep its opinions quiet. As much as Agnes would like to, she can no more sidestep their adamant advice than she can step down as their matriarch. But, despite her reluctance to become even more entangled in the family web, Agnes is amazed to feel her life grow because of it.

In Being Polite to Hitler, Robb Forman Dew intricately details personal and family life in a moving, frank, and surprising portrait of post-World War II America.

Reviews

"A remarkable achievement, a vividly detailed and deeply textured mural of a century of American life....

StartFragmentThroughout

the novel, Dew renders the political personal and the personal incandescent....She

StartFragmentzooms

into the hearts and minds of her characters with the kind of acuity that

reminds us why we read."EndFragmentEndFragment - Rachel Basch - Washington Post

Robb Forman Dew is a master at delineating the way the mundane and profound are joined at the hip, and Being Polite to Hitler in its portrait of midcentury America shuttles us smoothly from the most intimate heartbreak to events of interest worldwide, reminding us of the nearly infinite variations of grief, and solace, and how even the most conscientious and compassionate can leave emotional havoc in their wake. - Jim Shepard, author of Like You'd Understand, Anyway

Robb Forman Dew is one of our great national treasures: a novelist whose keen and sympathetic understanding of human nature is matched by her elegant, beautiful prose. Being Polite to Hitler is an absorbing story in which many readers will find their own families, and their own selves. - Dani Shapiro, author of Family History and Devotion: A Memoir

National Book Award winner Dew (for Dale Loves Sophie to Death) uses her signature elegant and often delightfully funny style to move seamlessly back and forth between the macro- and microcosm of the new America. Her latest should generate demand for the first two series titles as well. - Beth E. Andersen - Library Journal

National Book Award-winner Dew wraps up the trilogy she began with The Evidence Against Her by considering, in ways both joyful and elegiac, the juxtaposition of the profound and the mundane through the years 1953 to 1973 in smalltown Washburn, Ohio.... Agnes is clearly a literary heir of Mrs. Ramsay, and the narrative, ranging freely not only among Agnes's sprawling family but also throughout her political and cultural milieu, owes a debt to Woolf. Particularly when read in conjunction with her other novels about Washburn, Dew's latest is an impressionistic portrait of a family and an age striving for clarity and understanding. - Publishers Weekly

A winning, quietly lyrical account of a simpler time. - Lisa Kay Greissinger - People

Author Bio

Robb Forman Dew was born in Mount Vernon, Ohio, and grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For the past thirty years she has lived in Williamstown, MA, where she lives with her husband, who is professor of history at Williams College. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Dew is the author of the novels Dale Loves Sophie to Death, for which she received the National Book Award; The Time of Her Life; Fortunate Lives; The Evidence Against Her; and, most recently, The Truth of the Matter; as well as a memoir, The Family Heart.