A collision of egos inside and outside the ring, 12 Nov 2007
The Fight is a vivid account of the 1974 world heavyweight boxing match in Zaire, billed as The Rumble in the Jungle, between George Foreman and Mohammad Ali. Mailer writes about Africa with more than a nod to Joseph Conrad, and writes about boxing with all the sweep and authority that Hemingway showed on bullfighting, but this book is about more than boxing. Mailer, a white Jew from New York, confronts his prejudices about blacks and about Africa, and while this seems less than remarkable now, it is easy to forget that mild racism was not only normal then among English-speaking whites, but was in fact the received wisdom of the time. This book was therefore a work of some courage and risk for a writer of Norman Mailer's stature.

The use of the third person to describe the author is strange at first, and it seems possible that Mailer's ego might overshadow even the monstrous ego of Ali. But what emerges is more sensitive than that. Ali is portrayed as an aging prodigy tortured by doubt and surrounded by a retinue of oddballs, and Mailer succeeds in first isolating and then overcoming his buried prejudice and superstition.

This is a powerful and at times moving book, and I would recommend it to all, including those who are uninterested or even repelled by the sport of boxing.


A Classic - although Penquin got the year wrong '74, not '75, 04 Nov 2004
This is a classic piece of sports writing and goes way beyond 'the fight' and into the atmosphere of all the pre hype. It covers one of the most important sporting (shock) events ever to have taken place..."The Rumble in the Jungle" and you get a real sense of this in Mailer's enthusiam. If you're an Ali fan, you should've read it by now....if you're not a fan, you'll still love the detail described in this book. It's one of those books that people remember reading years later. It's a shame that Penquin got the year of the fight wrong in their synopsis...and I've told them!. Rumble in the Jungle was October 1974, not 1975....(which was the "Trilla in Manila", now there's another story!)

Great non-fiction, 14 Mar 2002
One of the greatest sportsmen of our world, and this was possibly one of the greatest moments of his sporting career. This book is not just about a fight but about Africa, the nature of men, race and racism and superhuman achievement.

Mailer is completely honest throughout the book, and sometimes what he says, particularly about race, can be a little shocking. But the author is being honest with us about what he thinks, and his thoughts are interesting and thought-provoking.

The image of Ali, bouncing off the ropes for the first 6 rounds despite promising the world he was going to dance is vividly painted. The description of Foreman's training on the heavy bag, which he hit so hard he left dent in it, is close to mind when in the later chapters ali is absorbing those same punches.

The book also deals with the author's own celebrity, and makes this a very personal account of a great moment.

I left this book with one overpowering feeling - i wish i had been there.

Essential reading, 18 Jun 2001
A superb snapshot of a particular time and place; this is written in typical Norman Mailer style -allowing the reader amazing insight at times and a very personal, distanced view at others. Ali comes across as the great figure his reputation implies -even Mailer is humbly respectful in his presence. I would suggest reading David Remnick's equally impressive 'King of the world' first, as Remnick's book charts the 'back story' of how the heavyweight belt passed from Floyd Patterson to Sonny Liston and finally Ali. Then finish by watching the Oscar-winning documentary 'When we were Kings' -which of course, features Norman Mailer himself (Ideally, get the DVD, which features the entire Rumble In The Jungle fight as a bonus).

A Great follow up to "when we were kings", 17 Sep 2000
If you have seen the oscar winning documentary "When we were kings" and wished for "more" , this is a good book to read. A word of warning though, it is a classic "Mailer", at once written in prosaic, almost sureal style and simultaneously dripping with the man's ego (fans of his other work, especially "Harlot's ghost", will know what I mean).

But why not? the film documented the clash of two titanic egos, Ali & Frasier, so the style of writing mirrors the event anyway.

However, for those of you who are going onto their next Mailer book, I would start with "When we were kings first". Note , its not about the boxing REALLY, as I have never seen any other boxing video or read any such book, but both capture the mood, the zaniness and the spectacle of a great sporting event in the midst of a brutal dictatorship that existed in Zaire at that time. In that sense, the two compliment each other wonderfully, like reading/viewing "The English Patient", or "I Claudius" or "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"

A collision of egos inside and outside the ring, 12 Nov 2007
The Fight is a vivid account of the 1974 world heavyweight boxing match in Zaire, billed as The Rumble in the Jungle, between George Foreman and Mohammad Ali. Mailer writes about Africa with more than a nod to Joseph Conrad, and writes about boxing with all the sweep and authority that Hemingway showed on bullfighting, but this book is about more than boxing. Mailer, a white Jew from New York, confronts his prejudices about blacks and about Africa, and while this seems less than remarkable now, it is easy to forget that mild racism was not only normal then among English-speaking whites, but was in fact the received wisdom of the time. This book was therefore a work of some courage and risk for a writer of Norman Mailer's stature.

The use of the third person to describe the author is strange at first, and it seems possible that Mailer's ego might overshadow even the monstrous ego of Ali. But what emerges is more sensitive than that. Ali is portrayed as an aging prodigy tortured by doubt and surrounded by a retinue of oddballs, and Mailer succeeds in first isolating and then overcoming his buried prejudice and superstition.

This is a powerful and at times moving book, and I would recommend it to all, including those who are uninterested or even repelled by the sport of boxing.


A Classic - although Penquin got the year wrong '74, not '75, 04 Nov 2004
This is a classic piece of sports writing and goes way beyond 'the fight' and into the atmosphere of all the pre hype. It covers one of the most important sporting (shock) events ever to have taken place..."The Rumble in the Jungle" and you get a real sense of this in Mailer's enthusiam. If you're an Ali fan, you should've read it by now....if you're not a fan, you'll still love the detail described in this book. It's one of those books that people remember reading years later. It's a shame that Penquin got the year of the fight wrong in their synopsis...and I've told them!. Rumble in the Jungle was October 1974, not 1975....(which was the "Trilla in Manila", now there's another story!)

Great non-fiction, 14 Mar 2002
One of the greatest sportsmen of our world, and this was possibly one of the greatest moments of his sporting career. This book is not just about a fight but about Africa, the nature of men, race and racism and superhuman achievement.

Mailer is completely honest throughout the book, and sometimes what he says, particularly about race, can be a little shocking. But the author is being honest with us about what he thinks, and his thoughts are interesting and thought-provoking.

The image of Ali, bouncing off the ropes for the first 6 rounds despite promising the world he was going to dance is vividly painted. The description of Foreman's training on the heavy bag, which he hit so hard he left dent in it, is close to mind when in the later chapters ali is absorbing those same punches.

The book also deals with the author's own celebrity, and makes this a very personal account of a great moment.

I left this book with one overpowering feeling - i wish i had been there.

Essential reading, 18 Jun 2001
A superb snapshot of a particular time and place; this is written in typical Norman Mailer style -allowing the reader amazing insight at times and a very personal, distanced view at others. Ali comes across as the great figure his reputation implies -even Mailer is humbly respectful in his presence. I would suggest reading David Remnick's equally impressive 'King of the world' first, as Remnick's book charts the 'back story' of how the heavyweight belt passed from Floyd Patterson to Sonny Liston and finally Ali. Then finish by watching the Oscar-winning documentary 'When we were Kings' -which of course, features Norman Mailer himself (Ideally, get the DVD, which features the entire Rumble In The Jungle fight as a bonus).

A Great follow up to "when we were kings", 17 Sep 2000
If you have seen the oscar winning documentary "When we were kings" and wished for "more" , this is a good book to read. A word of warning though, it is a classic "Mailer", at once written in prosaic, almost sureal style and simultaneously dripping with the man's ego (fans of his other work, especially "Harlot's ghost", will know what I mean).

But why not? the film documented the clash of two titanic egos, Ali & Frasier, so the style of writing mirrors the event anyway.

However, for those of you who are going onto their next Mailer book, I would start with "When we were kings first". Note , its not about the boxing REALLY, as I have never seen any other boxing video or read any such book, but both capture the mood, the zaniness and the spectacle of a great sporting event in the midst of a brutal dictatorship that existed in Zaire at that time. In that sense, the two compliment each other wonderfully, like reading/viewing "The English Patient", or "I Claudius" or "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"

Earth moving.., 01 Oct 2008
This could have gone on for another 700 pages and i would've been fine.
A great book by a great writer.
Brutal, realistic story-telling.

War for real, 16 Jul 2008
The Naked and the Dead remains the most realistic war novel I have read. It is neither a romance of heroic deeds nor the grinding, dehumanised tragedy that WWI novels tend to be. Showing war as a contrasted field of acts of courage, calculation, treachery and occasionally weakness and cowardice, but mostly as drudgery and sheer blind chance, it feels honest and true to experience.

Norman Mailer, indeed, wrote his account of WWII in the Pacific fresh from returning from the front. His book focuses on one island and tracks the destiny of a platoon, whose 15 or so members, each with their own private life back home, their fears and ambitions, become intimate acquaintances of the reader. The Naked and the Dead encompasses a complete campaign, beginning with the sea landing, building up to a major battle, and including the fighting itself. It then swerves into a wildcat mission to circumvent the Japanese line, turning into a classic nail-biting tale of jungle guerrilla, of ambushes and night-fights and forced marches, where the differences between GIs and NCOs erupt to create as much havoc as the fight with the Japanese. In parallel, the novel follows the general's intrigues among the officer corps, providing a bird's eye view of the campaign, its strategy, and its tactics, as well as their impact on the foot-soldiers.

Mailer's tome combines psychology and character analysis with the excitement of action and the realistic depiction of everyday scenes (the construction of the camp, the long struggle to move an anti-aircraft gun by foot, the night watches). It makes the reader feel present, as close as can be to standing on the actual scene. Of course, this was WWII, and every war is probably unique. Still, this is the closest thing, and it is for sure better than having to fight in one.

Very impressive, 25 Oct 2007
There's nothing much to say really: together with James Jones' "The thin red line" this is the best account of WW II combat that I know of. An extremely powerful, shocking & violent book, I had to read this as a university assignment years ago and (exceptionally so) I am still grateful to that particular teacher. The battle scenes are impressive, but the power of the book derives at least as much from the moving descriptions of the pre-war lives of the soldiers involved: all of them ordinary men, suddenly finding themselves caught up in a nightmare.

Much more than just a War Novel, 24 Jan 2006
The mental tussle between Hearn and Cummings provided some great moments of tension, you are never sure how the General will react to Hearns challenges.

Mailer does a great job of impressing upon the reader the extent of physical toil and pain the men are put through, the 'litter detail' in particular. I could literally feel my arms and legs ache as I read it.

He also was not afraid to confront a wide spread resentment of the Jews amongst the men, at a time when, post Holocaust, many would have liked to conviniently forget their previous prejudices.

The Naked and the Dead, 23 Jun 2005
I picked up this book at random and have been hooked on Mailer ever since.

Quite simply the best WWII book I have ever read.

By getting into the minds of his characters and switching between them, Mailer creates a tension and unease that is sustained from cover to cover. With this comes a real insight into war being about individuals rather than a homogenous group with a common cause or aim.

A collision of egos inside and outside the ring, 12 Nov 2007
The Fight is a vivid account of the 1974 world heavyweight boxing match in Zaire, billed as The Rumble in the Jungle, between George Foreman and Mohammad Ali. Mailer writes about Africa with more than a nod to Joseph Conrad, and writes about boxing with all the sweep and authority that Hemingway showed on bullfighting, but this book is about more than boxing. Mailer, a white Jew from New York, confronts his prejudices about blacks and about Africa, and while this seems less than remarkable now, it is easy to forget that mild racism was not only normal then among English-speaking whites, but was in fact the received wisdom of the time. This book was therefore a work of some courage and risk for a writer of Norman Mailer's stature.

The use of the third person to describe the author is strange at first, and it seems possible that Mailer's ego might overshadow even the monstrous ego of Ali. But what emerges is more sensitive than that. Ali is portrayed as an aging prodigy tortured by doubt and surrounded by a retinue of oddballs, and Mailer succeeds in first isolating and then overcoming his buried prejudice and superstition.

This is a powerful and at times moving book, and I would recommend it to all, including those who are uninterested or even repelled by the sport of boxing.


A Classic - although Penquin got the year wrong '74, not '75, 04 Nov 2004
This is a classic piece of sports writing and goes way beyond 'the fight' and into the atmosphere of all the pre hype. It covers one of the most important sporting (shock) events ever to have taken place..."The Rumble in the Jungle" and you get a real sense of this in Mailer's enthusiam. If you're an Ali fan, you should've read it by now....if you're not a fan, you'll still love the detail described in this book. It's one of those books that people remember reading years later. It's a shame that Penquin got the year of the fight wrong in their synopsis...and I've told them!. Rumble in the Jungle was October 1974, not 1975....(which was the "Trilla in Manila", now there's another story!)

Great non-fiction, 14 Mar 2002
One of the greatest sportsmen of our world, and this was possibly one of the greatest moments of his sporting career. This book is not just about a fight but about Africa, the nature of men, race and racism and superhuman achievement.

Mailer is completely honest throughout the book, and sometimes what he says, particularly about race, can be a little shocking. But the author is being honest with us about what he thinks, and his thoughts are interesting and thought-provoking.

The image of Ali, bouncing off the ropes for the first 6 rounds despite promising the world he was going to dance is vividly painted. The description of Foreman's training on the heavy bag, which he hit so hard he left dent in it, is close to mind when in the later chapters ali is absorbing those same punches.

The book also deals with the author's own celebrity, and makes this a very personal account of a great moment.

I left this book with one overpowering feeling - i wish i had been there.

Essential reading, 18 Jun 2001
A superb snapshot of a particular time and place; this is written in typical Norman Mailer style -allowing the reader amazing insight at times and a very personal, distanced view at others. Ali comes across as the great figure his reputation implies -even Mailer is humbly respectful in his presence. I would suggest reading David Remnick's equally impressive 'King of the world' first, as Remnick's book charts the 'back story' of how the heavyweight belt passed from Floyd Patterson to Sonny Liston and finally Ali. Then finish by watching the Oscar-winning documentary 'When we were Kings' -which of course, features Norman Mailer himself (Ideally, get the DVD, which features the entire Rumble In The Jungle fight as a bonus).

A Great follow up to "when we were kings", 17 Sep 2000
If you have seen the oscar winning documentary "When we were kings" and wished for "more" , this is a good book to read. A word of warning though, it is a classic "Mailer", at once written in prosaic, almost sureal style and simultaneously dripping with the man's ego (fans of his other work, especially "Harlot's ghost", will know what I mean).

But why not? the film documented the clash of two titanic egos, Ali & Frasier, so the style of writing mirrors the event anyway.

However, for those of you who are going onto their next Mailer book, I would start with "When we were kings first". Note , its not about the boxing REALLY, as I have never seen any other boxing video or read any such book, but both capture the mood, the zaniness and the spectacle of a great sporting event in the midst of a brutal dictatorship that existed in Zaire at that time. In that sense, the two compliment each other wonderfully, like reading/viewing "The English Patient", or "I Claudius" or "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"

Earth moving.., 01 Oct 2008
This could have gone on for another 700 pages and i would've been fine.
A great book by a great writer.
Brutal, realistic story-telling.

War for real, 16 Jul 2008
The Naked and the Dead remains the most realistic war novel I have read. It is neither a romance of heroic deeds nor the grinding, dehumanised tragedy that WWI novels tend to be. Showing war as a contrasted field of acts of courage, calculation, treachery and occasionally weakness and cowardice, but mostly as drudgery and sheer blind chance, it feels honest and true to experience.

Norman Mailer, indeed, wrote his account of WWII in the Pacific fresh from returning from the front. His book focuses on one island and tracks the destiny of a platoon, whose 15 or so members, each with their own private life back home, their fears and ambitions, become intimate acquaintances of the reader. The Naked and the Dead encompasses a complete campaign, beginning with the sea landing, building up to a major battle, and including the fighting itself. It then swerves into a wildcat mission to circumvent the Japanese line, turning into a classic nail-biting tale of jungle guerrilla, of ambushes and night-fights and forced marches, where the differences between GIs and NCOs erupt to create as much havoc as the fight with the Japanese. In parallel, the novel follows the general's intrigues among the officer corps, providing a bird's eye view of the campaign, its strategy, and its tactics, as well as their impact on the foot-soldiers.

Mailer's tome combines psychology and character analysis with the excitement of action and the realistic depiction of everyday scenes (the construction of the camp, the long struggle to move an anti-aircraft gun by foot, the night watches). It makes the reader feel present, as close as can be to standing on the actual scene. Of course, this was WWII, and every war is probably unique. Still, this is the closest thing, and it is for sure better than having to fight in one.

Very impressive, 25 Oct 2007
There's nothing much to say really: together with James Jones' "The thin red line" this is the best account of WW II combat that I know of. An extremely powerful, shocking & violent book, I had to read this as a university assignment years ago and (exceptionally so) I am still grateful to that particular teacher. The battle scenes are impressive, but the power of the book derives at least as much from the moving descriptions of the pre-war lives of the soldiers involved: all of them ordinary men, suddenly finding themselves caught up in a nightmare.

Much more than just a War Novel, 24 Jan 2006
The mental tussle between Hearn and Cummings provided some great moments of tension, you are never sure how the General will react to Hearns challenges.

Mailer does a great job of impressing upon the reader the extent of physical toil and pain the men are put through, the 'litter detail' in particular. I could literally feel my arms and legs ache as I read it.

He also was not afraid to confront a wide spread resentment of the Jews amongst the men, at a time when, post Holocaust, many would have liked to conviniently forget their previous prejudices.

The Naked and the Dead, 23 Jun 2005
I picked up this book at random and have been hooked on Mailer ever since.

Quite simply the best WWII book I have ever read.

By getting into the minds of his characters and switching between them, Mailer creates a tension and unease that is sustained from cover to cover. With this comes a real insight into war being about individuals rather than a homogenous group with a common cause or aim.

Typical mailer, 05 Oct 2008
If one chooses to strangle one's wife in her New York apartment, what is the best way to make the murder look like a suicide?

Throw the bitch out the window and claim she jumped!

Mailer out-does himself with this one. This is violent - both physically and sexualy - drunken, drugged up, immoral and dirty. Fantastic.

A narrow canvas; only a few days pass by during the novel, but the lead manages to screw and drink his way around the city after killing the whore, and has some worthy adventures.

Provocative stuff. Not for Feminists, thank god.

Mailer is dead: Long live Norman mailer!

Incredible., 01 Oct 2008
Man, this shook my world, and loosened some anchors. Brutal, brutal writing, shocking and nerve-wracking. Well written and more than a book.
had to take a break after reading 4 of his books in a row - this being the last - to recover from the beating.
What a talent.

In response to the previous review, 21 Apr 2008
Just quickly responding to the previous review (entitled If you read one book by Mailer...make it this one), which I enjoyed and mostly agree with. In it, the reviewer described the ending as perhaps "a final loss of courage" on the part of Mailer. [Possible spoilers ahead for those who haven't read the book]. It would occur to me that this term (final loss of courage) is actually quite apt for the character of Rojak and for the themes of the book, and is in fact a fitting characterisation for the final chapters.

In the first chapter, Rojak describes his 'heroic' killing of a company of German soldiers during the war, and his bottling it before finishing off the last wounded man, thus empting the victory of any glory for him. The one night described in the rest of the book shares a similar trajectory of relentlessness, but in the final chapters Rojak again bottles it and bargains with the moon, choosing personal safety over the yin and yang of the monumental forces guiding him. In the end he is outside the moon's pull, in the limbo of that metaphysical space.


Challenging and rewarding., 08 Nov 2001
Bought on a whim and the only Norman Mailer book I have read, An American Dream is a very very good book indeed. Mailer's prose is as sharp (jagged in places) as I have ever read - if you thought Bret Easton Ellis could be unforgiving, then the first chapter of this will give you something to consider! This is not to say that this book is to be thought of along the same lines as say 'American Psycho' (although there are similarities). The plot itself is rich, with many threads interweaving elegantly around eachother, a fantastic ending. Truly excellent if you are willing to put the effort in.

If you read one book by Mailer...make it this one, 06 Nov 1999
Despite the outwardly satirical connotations behind the title of An American Dream, this novel is far less a political or intellectual attack on his homeland as it is a foray into the existential limits of Mailer's own mind.

The core of the book is a simple tale of the battle between the good and bad forces within a man's soul. The lead character and narrator of the story, Stephen Rojack, is not for the most part a bad person, and yet his actions are occasionally very bad indeed. By the end of the very first chapter, Rojack has already committed a single brutal act which will propel him forward into a life of deceit and fear and eventual tragedy.

From that moment onwards he becomes a victim of his own defiant temerity before his nation's laws and the morality of a culture he does not particularly value. His lack of conformity and his intelligence combine to destroy him, and at the end of the book it his only his primitive courage, the quintessence of his being as a man, that he is expected to rely on. The fates, angered by his gall, are left to exact their revenge via another to whom he has grown close during the whole ordeal. Thus eventually he receives his comeuppance, albeit indirectly.

Here we see Mailer depicting with great enthusiasm and earnestness the criminal elements of New York, and combining this grim setting with the inner thoughts and meditations of a man open to new interpretations of the world. The influence of writers such as Burroughs and Henry Miller are clearly visible in the incredible wealth of metaphors and the very obliqueness of the perspective which he takes on so many subjects.

It is here that the author excels, producing an extraordinarily rich prose, absolutely overflowing with ideas and confirming Mailer as one of the most resourceful and perspicacious voices in literature. But, unlike many of the novel's most patently obvious influences, An American Dream is written with such skill as to enable the philosophical, moral, and spiritual dimensions to run quite seamlessly alongside a thriller; a story with strong, believable characters.

An American Dream is not perfect. Against it can be levelled accusations of misogyny (two major female characters are murdered), dadaism (particularly in one rather dated and ill-conceived section involving anal intercourse) and, most significantly, it can be argued that the ending is perhaps a little too contrived, a little too symmetrical in relation to the novel's start.

One can imagine the author, after 200 pages of genius - after writing chapters which he might not have believed himself capable of writing - alone before his unfinished manuscript and utterly at a loss as to how to complete the work. I cannot say with conviction if there is any truth to this, but the book certainly reads like a final loss of courage. To be made to find an ending for a book like An American Dream is an unenviable task. It is so strong, it is so unmanageable in its scope.... Perhaps it should have been a longer novel. Perhaps if any of Mailer's novels needed to be 500 words-plus to be entirely complete, this was the one. But then it might have lost much of its immediacy and precision.

However, do not allow the nit-pickings of this humble reader put you off. Mailer himself once wrote it was his opinion that An American Dream was, sentence-for-sentence, one of the best books of the century. He wrote that some years ago and he may well have changed his mind since then, although I sincerely hope that he hasn't for he was right first time. As a demonstration of literary prowess - or in more Mailer-like terms, as a flexing of the author's intellectual muscles - the novel has few peers.

And if that's not sufficient to convince you to take a look, it's also a cracking good read!

Compiling an anthology of one's own work can be a tricky business. Norman Mailer, of course, first committed this act of literary cannibalism back in 1959, when he assembled a brilliant collage of stories, journalism, essays, and poetry, Advertisements for Myself . Now, 50 years after the publication of his first novel, Gore Vidal's favourite sparring partner has put together another, more massive anthology, advertising not only himself but what we might call (paraphrasing Frost) his lover's quarrel with American life. "Over the course of years," Mailer writes in his foreword, "most of us compose in the privacy of our minds a social and cultural history of the years through which we have passed." True enough. But Mailer's history of the American Imperium has always been public-- extremely public--and in The Time of Our Time he attempts to get it all into a single book.

Surely this sense of himself as the republic's recording angel accounts for the structure of Mailer's anthology: rather than arranging the excerpts by date of composition, he groups them by the historical era they describe. His 1963 polemic about the Bay of Pigs fiasco, for example, appears alongside his cloak-and-dagger reconstruction of the same event from Harlot's Ghost (1991). Fiction and fact lie cheek-by-jowl and eventually become impossible to tell apart. Here is the fulfilment of a project that Mailer began decades ago with such cunning hybrids as Armies of the Night. Yet this enormous volume shouldn't be read merely as a hand-tooled work of history. It is also the record of a phenomenal literary career, documenting Mailer's initial triumphs, his adrenaline-infused masterpieces of the late 1960s, hyperbolic stinkers like Marilyn and Ancient Evenings, and the astringent sorrow and awe of The Executioner's Song, which marked his return to form in 1979 after a long fallow period. Who but this loudmouthed, elegant, shrewd and invariably excessive author would claim that his time--that is, his accounting of it--is essentially our time? And who else could even begin to make such a claim stick? The list is short indeed.

A collision of egos inside and outside the ring, 12 Nov 2007
The Fight is a vivid account of the 1974 world heavyweight boxing match in Zaire, billed as The Rumble in the Jungle, between George Foreman and Mohammad Ali. Mailer writes about Africa with more than a nod to Joseph Conrad, and writes about boxing with all the sweep and authority that Hemingway showed on bullfighting, but this book is about more than boxing. Mailer, a white Jew from New York, confronts his prejudices about blacks and about Africa, and while this seems less than remarkable now, it is easy to forget that mild racism was not only normal then among English-speaking whites, but was in fact the received wisdom of the time. This book was therefore a work of some courage and risk for a writer of Norman Mailer's stature.

The use of the third person to describe the author is strange at first, and it seems possible that Mailer's ego might overshadow even the monstrous ego of Ali. But what emerges is more sensitive than that. Ali is portrayed as an aging prodigy tortured by doubt and surrounded by a retinue of oddballs, and Mailer succeeds in first isolating and then overcoming his buried prejudice and superstition.

This is a powerful and at times moving book, and I would recommend it to all, including those who are uninterested or even repelled by the sport of boxing.


A Classic - although Penquin got the year wrong '74, not '75, 04 Nov 2004
This is a classic piece of sports writing and goes way beyond 'the fight' and into the atmosphere of all the pre hype. It covers one of the most important sporting (shock) events ever to have taken place..."The Rumble in the Jungle" and you get a real sense of this in Mailer's enthusiam. If you're an Ali fan, you should've read it by now....if you're not a fan, you'll still love the detail described in this book. It's one of those books that people remember reading years later. It's a shame that Penquin got the year of the fight wrong in their synopsis...and I've told them!. Rumble in the Jungle was October 1974, not 1975....(which was the "Trilla in Manila", now there's another story!)

Great non-fiction, 14 Mar 2002
One of the greatest sportsmen of our world, and this was possibly one of the greatest moments of his sporting career. This book is not just about a fight but about Africa, the nature of men, race and racism and superhuman achievement.

Mailer is completely honest throughout the book, and sometimes what he says, particularly about race, can be a little shocking. But the author is being honest with us about what he thinks, and his thoughts are interesting and thought-provoking.

The image of Ali, bouncing off the ropes for the first 6 rounds despite promising the world he was going to dance is vividly painted. The description of Foreman's training on the heavy bag, which he hit so hard he left dent in it, is close to mind when in the later chapters ali is absorbing those same punches.

The book also deals with the author's own celebrity, and makes this a very personal account of a great moment.

I left this book with one overpowering feeling - i wish i had been there.

Essential reading, 18 Jun 2001
A superb snapshot of a particular time and place; this is written in typical Norman Mailer style -allowing the reader amazing insight at times and a very personal, distanced view at others. Ali comes across as the great figure his reputation implies -even Mailer is humbly respectful in his presence. I would suggest reading David Remnick's equally impressive 'King of the world' first, as Remnick's book charts the 'back story' of how the heavyweight belt passed from Floyd Patterson to Sonny Liston and finally Ali. Then finish by watching the Oscar-winning documentary 'When we were Kings' -which of course, features Norman Mailer himself (Ideally, get the DVD, which features the entire Rumble In The Jungle fight as a bonus).

A Great follow up to "when we were kings", 17 Sep 2000
If you have seen the oscar winning documentary "When we were kings" and wished for "more" , this is a good book to read. A word of warning though, it is a classic "Mailer", at once written in prosaic, almost sureal style and simultaneously dripping with the man's ego (fans of his other work, especially "Harlot's ghost", will know what I mean).

But why not? the film documented the clash of two titanic egos, Ali & Frasier, so the style of writing mirrors the event anyway.

However, for those of you who are going onto their next Mailer book, I would start with "When we were kings first". Note , its not about the boxing REALLY, as I have never seen any other boxing video or read any such book, but both capture the mood, the zaniness and the spectacle of a great sporting event in the midst of a brutal dictatorship that existed in Zaire at that time. In that sense, the two compliment each other wonderfully, like reading/viewing "The English Patient", or "I Claudius" or "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"

Earth moving.., 01 Oct 2008
This could have gone on for another 700 pages and i would've been fine.
A great book by a great writer.
Brutal, realistic story-telling.

War for real, 16 Jul 2008
The Naked and the Dead remains the most realistic war novel I have read. It is neither a romance of heroic deeds nor the grinding, dehumanised tragedy that WWI novels tend to be. Showing war as a contrasted field of acts of courage, calculation, treachery and occasionally weakness and cowardice, but mostly as drudgery and sheer blind chance, it feels honest and true to experience.

Norman Mailer, indeed, wrote his account of WWII in the Pacific fresh from returning from the front. His book focuses on one island and tracks the destiny of a platoon, whose 15 or so members, each with their own private life back home, their fears and ambitions, become intimate acquaintances of the reader. The Naked and the Dead encompasses a complete campaign, beginning with the sea landing, building up to a major battle, and including the fighting itself. It then swerves into a wildcat mission to circumvent the Japanese line, turning into a classic nail-biting tale of jungle guerrilla, of ambushes and night-fights and forced marches, where the differences between GIs and NCOs erupt to create as much havoc as the fight with the Japanese. In parallel, the novel follows the general's intrigues among the officer corps, providing a bird's eye view of the campaign, its strategy, and its tactics, as well as their impact on the foot-soldiers.

Mailer's tome combines psychology and character analysis with the excitement of action and the realistic depiction of everyday scenes (the construction of the camp, the long struggle to move an anti-aircraft gun by foot, the night watches). It makes the reader feel present, as close as can be to standing on the actual scene. Of course, this was WWII, and every war is probably unique. Still, this is the closest thing, and it is for sure better than having to fight in one.

Very impressive, 25 Oct 2007
There's nothing much to say really: together with James Jones' "The thin red line" this is the best account of WW II combat that I know of. An extremely powerful, shocking & violent book, I had to read this as a university assignment years ago and (exceptionally so) I am still grateful to that particular teacher. The battle scenes are impressive, but the power of the book derives at least as much from the moving descriptions of the pre-war lives of the soldiers involved: all of them ordinary men, suddenly finding themselves caught up in a nightmare.

Much more than just a War Novel, 24 Jan 2006
The mental tussle between Hearn and Cummings provided some great moments of tension, you are never sure how the General will react to Hearns challenges.

Mailer does a great job of impressing upon the reader the extent of physical toil and pain the men are put through, the 'litter detail' in particular. I could literally feel my arms and legs ache as I read it.

He also was not afraid to confront a wide spread resentment of the Jews amongst the men, at a time when, post Holocaust, many would have liked to conviniently forget their previous prejudices.

The Naked and the Dead, 23 Jun 2005
I picked up this book at random and have been hooked on Mailer ever since.

Quite simply the best WWII book I have ever read.

By getting into the minds of his characters and switching between them, Mailer creates a tension and unease that is sustained from cover to cover. With this comes a real insight into war being about individuals rather than a homogenous group with a common cause or aim.

Typical mailer, 05 Oct 2008
If one chooses to strangle one's wife in her New York apartment, what is the best way to make the murder look like a suicide?

Throw the bitch out the window and claim she jumped!

Mailer out-does himself with this one. This is violent - both physically and sexualy - drunken, drugged up, immoral and dirty. Fantastic.

A narrow canvas; only a few days pass by during the novel, but the lead manages to screw and drink his way around the city after killing the whore, and has some worthy adventures.

Provocative stuff. Not for Feminists, thank god.

Mailer is dead: Long live Norman mailer!

Incredible., 01 Oct 2008
Man, this shook my world, and loosened some anchors. Brutal, brutal writing, shocking and nerve-wracking. Well written and more than a book.
had to take a break after reading 4 of his books in a row - this being the last - to recover from the beating.
What a talent.

In response to the previous review, 21 Apr 2008
Just quickly responding to the previous review (entitled If you read one book by Mailer...make it this one), which I enjoyed and mostly agree with. In it, the reviewer described the ending as perhaps "a final loss of courage" on the part of Mailer. [Possible spoilers ahead for those who haven't read the book]. It would occur to me that this term (final loss of courage) is actually quite apt for the character of Rojak and for the themes of the book, and is in fact a fitting characterisation for the final chapters.

In the first chapter, Rojak describes his 'heroic' killing of a company of German soldiers during the war, and his bottling it before finishing off the last wounded man, thus empting the victory of any glory for him. The one night described in the rest of the book shares a similar trajectory of relentlessness, but in the final chapters Rojak again bottles it and bargains with the moon, choosing personal safety over the yin and yang of the monumental forces guiding him. In the end he is outside the moon's pull, in the limbo of that metaphysical space.


Challenging and rewarding., 08 Nov 2001
Bought on a whim and the only Norman Mailer book I have read, An American Dream is a very very good book indeed. Mailer's prose is as sharp (jagged in places) as I have ever read - if you thought Bret Easton Ellis could be unforgiving, then the first chapter of this will give you something to consider! This is not to say that this book is to be thought of along the same lines as say 'American Psycho' (although there are similarities). The plot itself is rich, with many threads interweaving elegantly around eachother, a fantastic ending. Truly excellent if you are willing to put the effort in.

If you read one book by Mailer...make it this one, 06 Nov 1999
Despite the outwardly satirical connotations behind the title of An American Dream, this novel is far less a political or intellectual attack on his homeland as it is a foray into the existential limits of Mailer's own mind.

The core of the book is a simple tale of the battle between the good and bad forces within a man's soul. The lead character and narrator of the story, Stephen Rojack, is not for the most part a bad person, and yet his actions are occasionally very bad indeed. By the end of the very first chapter, Rojack has already committed a single brutal act which will propel him forward into a life of deceit and fear and eventual tragedy.

From that moment onwards he becomes a victim of his own defiant temerity before his nation's laws and the morality of a culture he does not particularly value. His lack of conformity and his intelligence combine to destroy him, and at the end of the book it his only his primitive courage, the quintessence of his being as a man, that he is expected to rely on. The fates, angered by his gall, are left to exact their revenge via another to whom he has grown close during the whole ordeal. Thus eventually he receives his comeuppance, albeit indirectly.

Here we see Mailer depicting with great enthusiasm and earnestness the criminal elements of New York, and combining this grim setting with the inner thoughts and meditations of a man open to new interpretations of the world. The influence of writers such as Burroughs and Henry Miller are clearly visible in the incredible wealth of metaphors and the very obliqueness of the perspective which he takes on so many subjects.

It is here that the author excels, producing an extraordinarily rich prose, absolutely overflowing with ideas and confirming Mailer as one of the most resourceful and perspicacious voices in literature. But, unlike many of the novel's most patently obvious influences, An American Dream is written with such skill as to enable the philosophical, moral, and spiritual dimensions to run quite seamlessly alongside a thriller; a story with strong, believable characters.

An American Dream is not perfect. Against it can be levelled accusations of misogyny (two major female characters are murdered), dadaism (particularly in one rather dated and ill-conceived section involving anal intercourse) and, most significantly, it can be argued that the ending is perhaps a little too contrived, a little too symmetrical in relation to the novel's start.

One can imagine the author, after 200 pages of genius - after writing chapters which he might not have believed himself capable of writing - alone before his unfinished manuscript and utterly at a loss as to how to complete the work. I cannot say with conviction if there is any truth to this, but the book certainly reads like a final loss of courage. To be made to find an ending for a book like An American Dream is an unenviable task. It is so strong, it is so unmanageable in its scope.... Perhaps it should have been a longer novel. Perhaps if any of Mailer's novels needed to be 500 words-plus to be entirely complete, this was the one. But then it might have lost much of its immediacy and precision.

However, do not allow the nit-pickings of this humble reader put you off. Mailer himself once wrote it was his opinion that An American Dream was, sentence-for-sentence, one of the best books of the century. He wrote that some years ago and he may well have changed his mind since then, although I sincerely hope that he hasn't for he was right first time. As a demonstration of literary prowess - or in more Mailer-like terms, as a flexing of the author's intellectual muscles - the novel has few peers.

And if that's not sufficient to convince you to take a look, it's also a cracking good read!

Fascinating but lacking a clear rationale, 11 Oct 2008
I regard Norman Mailer very highly. His prose style is authorative and carefully chosen for affect. One feels the craft of countless hours of reflection and experience as descriptions and human enigmas are etched. However, I often feel at the end of his novels that something is missing or that I have missed the esential ingredient. It is frustrating.

This novel is ambitious in its approach to the near mythical origins of Hitler. Mailer successfully portrays the family as full of the normal frailities that may well have been prevalent in this part of Austria at this time - incest, violence, small ambitions, the heartbreak of infant mortality. Throughout, Alois Hitler, Adolf's father, is uppermost. Through his exploits and musings, we gain more of an insight into the times than we do a putative rationale for the adult Hitler.

The choice of narrator is also fascinating, providing an interesting aside on the battle between good and evil. I recommend this book as long as the reader is not expecting existential truths about Hitler. It is thought provoking and a fitting finale for Mailer's talents.

The Castle in the Forest, 17 Aug 2008
The Castle in the Forest is a book about Adolf Hitler's family. It starts out almost as a documentary, when the narrator, who at first tells us he is an SS-officer, is sent to Spital in Austria in the 1930's to investigate Adolf Hitler's ancestry. Once the story of the family starts, the style shifts to that of a very readable novel, though the first chapters are so full of incest, that it is a bit disgusting.

Even though I enjoyed the book most of the time, I came out feeling a bit disappointed. I picked up this book because I was very curious what Norman Mailer would write about Adolf Hitler and the person he became. It promised to be a revealing novel, but it was only an account of one of the theories about Hitler's ancestry in which the protagonist was Hitler's father Alois.
Also, the hand of the supernatural was ever present in the lives of the Hitlers and it can hardly be plausible to conclude that the interference of the devil was the possible cause for Hitler's hatred and the atrocities he came to commit when he was in power. Perhaps the book has not been correctly presented as the synopsis promises that the author would `respond to these and other crucial aspects of Hitler's personality'. I don't know what Mailer's intention with this book was, but it couldn't possibly be an explanation of Hitler's personality. So what was the point Mailer was trying to make? Whatever that was, I didn't get it.

I also regret that despite the outstanding writing skills of the author, and the fact that I found the novel intriguing, sometimes I found it hard to enjoy it because no matter what I read about the family, I could not set aside my feelings about Hitler and the monstrosities he committed. I could not seem to overcome the repulsion to really enjoy this work of fiction.


No "The Naked and the Dead", 26 Mar 2008
A strange book about the Hitler/Heidler/Schicklgruber family and an imagined supernatural guidance on the early development of AH. Not so much an examination of the nature of evil as an entirely fanciful imagining of what evil might be. I found this book unsatifying and, for me, it seemed to stop in mid air - think I must have missed something.


Just Could Not Put It Down, 14 Dec 2007

Norman Mailer was born in 1923 and published his first book, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948. The Armies of the Night won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1969; Mailer received another Pulitzer in 1980 for The Executioner's Song. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, New York.

Perhaps only someone of Norman Mailer's stature in the literary world could take on the task of writing such a book, even though it is a work of fiction. Initially I had to steel myself to read it. Hannibal, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, I can read avidly about them all, as they are from the dim and distant past. But to read about Adolf Hitler a man who was still alive in my early childhood, the man who killed my father-in-law and many other brave men and women like him, as surely as if he had pulled the trigger himself, seemed almost sacrilegious. Why would I want to read about the man, who above all others in world history, both ancient and modern caused the deaths of countless thousands of people for no other reason than is own psychotic delusions of greatness as the leader of what he hoped would be a master race.

As I started the book I still had my doubts about whether I really wanted to read it. I was worried that the book would tend to glorify the man, simply by its existence, but by the time I had read forty or fifty pages I was hooked and it had become a must read, a book I could not put down. The book sets out to explore the evil of the most cruel man the world has ever known. Narrated by a mysterious SS man the story gives us young Adolf, from birth. Also the lives of his father and mother and his sisters and brothers. It also gives the intimate details of his childhood and adolescence. The book gives an insight into the struggle of good and evil that exists in all of us.

Fiction of an oblivion, 23 May 2007
Concise and giving in his narrative, Norman Mailer has touched upon the period of Hitler's life least spoken of in a sea of biographies and academic works written. The childhood of a would-be Monster or an already-was Monster? Perhaps he's trying to answer to the forever remaining question one is left after learning about Hitler: How could God put such a Despot amongst humanity? Or was it Him? Or the Satan?

While Mailer's novel is rich in details of Hitler's childhood and the miserbale conditions people used to live in at the end of the 19th century and how the evil and noble spirit/messenger/angels were brooding around for souls to save and/or destroy, the one question that remained intact althroughout was weather Mr Mailer was blaming it all on the Devil, e.g. the Maestro for having inspired evil into baby Adolf through his dreams... A human tragedy of such a scale, with consequences yet being repelled, Hitler's actions were not because of religious upbringing or the lack of it. Call me a feminist, but all the male writers and eventually the reviewers below fail to notice that it's the miserable circumstances of social upbringing that consume the human spirit and sometimes make of them monsters or marvellous leaders. To raise Hitler to a level of pedestal where the evil and good were fighting for his soul, is too much of a tribute to an otherwise ordinary criminal whose mind coupled with psychosomatic underdevelopment did not contain space for anything spiritual. He was a being in great disharmony that neither God nor his opponent were urged to save. His actions were so horrendous that at the time it seems the extraterrestial Good and Evil joined in forces to mainatain damage control...

As a fiction, it's a swift read, so, yes, buy it and read it, but don't blame yourselves when feeling you missed the point. Maybe that's the essence of Mailer's much praised (and deservedly so) writing.

A collision of egos inside and outside the ring, 12 Nov 2007
The Fight is a vivid account of the 1974 world heavyweight boxing match in Zaire, billed as The Rumble in the Jungle, between George Foreman and Mohammad Ali. Mailer writes about Africa with more than a nod to Joseph Conrad, and writes about boxing with all the sweep and authority that Hemingway showed on bullfighting, but this book is about more than boxing. Mailer, a white Jew from New York, confronts his prejudices about blacks and about Africa, and while this seems less than remarkable now, it is easy to forget that mild racism was not only normal then among English-speaking whites, but was in fact the received wisdom of the time. This book was therefore a work of some courage and risk for a writer of Norman Mailer's stature.

The use of the third person to describe the author is strange at first, and it seems possible that Mailer's ego might overshadow even the monstrous ego of Ali. But what emerges is more sensitive than that. Ali is portrayed as an aging prodigy tortured by doubt and surrounded by a retinue of oddballs, and Mailer succeeds in first isolating and then overcoming his buried prejudice and superstition.

This is a powerful and at times moving book, and I would recommend it to all, including those who are uninterested or even repelled by the sport of boxing.


A Classic - although Penquin got the year wrong '74, not '75, 04 Nov 2004
This is a classic piece of sports writing and goes way beyond 'the fight' and into the atmosphere of all the pre hype. It covers one of the most important sporting (shock) events ever to have taken place..."The Rumble in the Jungle" and you get a real sense of this in Mailer's enthusiam. If you're an Ali fan, you should've read it by now....if you're not a fan, you'll still love the detail described in this book. It's one of those books that people remember reading years later. It's a shame that Penquin got the year of the fight wrong in their synopsis...and I've told them!. Rumble in the Jungle was October 1974, not 1975....(which was the "Trilla in Manila", now there's another story!)

Great non-fiction, 14 Mar 2002
One of the greatest sportsmen of our world, and this was possibly one of the greatest moments of his sporting career. This book is not just about a fight but about Africa, the nature of men, race and racism and superhuman achievement.

Mailer is completely honest throughout the book, and sometimes what he says, particularly about race, can be a little shocking. But the author is being honest with us about what he thinks, and his thoughts are interesting and thought-provoking.

The image of Ali, bouncing off the ropes for the first 6 rounds despite promising the world he was going to dance is vividly painted. The description of Foreman's training on the heavy bag, which he hit so hard he left dent in it, is close to mind when in the later chapters ali is absorbing those same punches.

The book also deals with the author's own celebrity, and makes this a very personal account of a great moment.

I left this book with one overpowering feeling - i wish i had been there.

Essential reading, 18 Jun 2001
A superb snapshot of a particular time and place; this is written in typical Norman Mailer style -allowing the reader amazing insight at times and a very personal, distanced view at others. Ali comes across as the great figure his reputation implies -even Mailer is humbly respectful in his presence. I would suggest reading David Remnick's equally impressive 'King of the world' first, as Remnick's book charts the 'back story' of how the heavyweight belt passed from Floyd Patterson to Sonny Liston and finally Ali. Then finish by watching the Oscar-winning documentary 'When we were Kings' -which of course, features Norman Mailer himself (Ideally, get the DVD, which features the entire Rumble In The Jungle fight as a bonus).

A Great follow up to "when we were kings", 17 Sep 2000
If you have seen the oscar winning documentary "When we were kings" and wished for "more" , this is a good book to read. A word of warning though, it is a classic "Mailer", at once written in prosaic, almost sureal style and simultaneously dripping with the man's ego (fans of his other work, especially "Harlot's ghost", will know what I mean).

But why not? the film documented the clash of two titanic egos, Ali & Frasier, so the style of writing mirrors the event anyway.

However, for those of you who are going onto their next Mailer book, I would start with "When we were kings first". Note , its not about the boxing REALLY, as I have never seen any other boxing video or read any such book, but both capture the mood, the zaniness and the spectacle of a great sporting event in the midst of a brutal dictatorship that existed in Zaire at that time. In that sense, the two compliment each other wonderfully, like reading/viewing "The English Patient", or "I Claudius" or "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"

Earth moving.., 01 Oct 2008
This could have gone on for another 700 pages and i would've been fine.
A great book by a great writer.
Brutal, realistic story-telling.

War for real, 16 Jul 2008
The Naked and the Dead remains the most realistic war novel I have read. It is neither a romance of heroic deeds nor the grinding, dehumanised tragedy that WWI novels tend to be. Showing war as a contrasted field of acts of courage, calculation, treachery and occasionally weakness and cowardice, but mostly as drudgery and sheer blind chance, it feels honest and true to experience.

Norman Mailer, indeed, wrote his account of WWII in the Pacific fresh from returning from the front. His book focuses on one island and tracks the destiny of a platoon, whose 15 or so members, each with their own private life back home, their fears and ambitions, become intimate acquaintances of the reader. The Naked and the Dead encompasses a complete campaign, beginning with the sea landing, building up to a major battle, and including the fighting itself. It then swerves into a wildcat mission to circumvent the Japanese line, turning into a classic nail-biting tale of jungle guerrilla, of ambushes and night-fights and forced marches, where the differences between GIs and NCOs erupt to create as much havoc as the fight with the Japanese. In parallel, the novel follows the general's intrigues among the officer corps, providing a bird's eye view of the campaign, its strategy, and its tactics, as well as their impact on the foot-soldiers.

Mailer's tome combines psychology and character analysis with the excitement of action and the realistic depiction of everyday scenes (the construction of the camp, the long struggle to move an anti-aircraft gun by foot, the night watches). It makes the reader feel present, as close as can be to standing on the actual scene. Of course, this was WWII, and every war is probably unique. Still, this is the closest thing, and it is for sure better than having to fight in one.

Very impressive, 25 Oct 2007
There's nothing much to say really: together with James Jones' "The thin red line" this is the best account of WW II combat that I know of. An extremely powerful, shocking & violent book, I had to read this as a university assignment years ago and (exceptionally so) I am still grateful to that particular teacher. The battle scenes are impressive, but the power of the book derives at least as much from the moving descriptions of the pre-war lives of the soldiers involved: all of them ordinary men, suddenly finding themselves caught up in a nightmare.

Much more than just a War Novel, 24 Jan 2006
The mental tussle between Hearn and Cummings provided some great moments of tension, you are never sure how the General will react to Hearns challenges.

Mailer does a great job of impressing upon the reader the extent of physical toil and pain the men are put through, the 'litter detail' in particular. I could literally feel my arms and legs ache as I read it.

He also was not afraid to confront a wide spread resentment of the Jews amongst the men, at a time when, post Holocaust, many would have liked to conviniently forget their previous prejudices.

The Naked and the Dead, 23 Jun 2005
I picked up this book at random and have been hooked on Mailer ever since.

Quite simply the best WWII book I have ever read.

By getting into the minds of his characters and switching between them, Mailer creates a tension and unease that is sustained from cover to cover. With this comes a real insight into war being about individuals rather than a homogenous group with a common cause or aim.

Typical mailer, 05 Oct 2008
If one chooses to strangle one's wife in her New York apartment, what is the best way to make the murder look like a suicide?

Throw the bitch out the window and claim she jumped!

Mailer out-does himself with this one. This is violent - both physically and sexualy - drunken, drugged up, immoral and dirty. Fantastic.

A narrow canvas; only a few days pass by during the novel, but the lead manages to screw and drink his way around the city after killing the whore, and has some worthy adventures.

Provocative stuff. Not for Feminists, thank god.

Mailer is dead: Long live Norman mailer!

Incredible., 01 Oct 2008
Man, this shook my world, and loosened some anchors. Brutal, brutal writing, shocking and nerve-wracking. Well written and more than a book.
had to take a break after reading 4 of his books in a row - this being the last - to recover from the beating.
What a talent.

In response to the previous review, 21 Apr 2008
Just quickly responding to the previous review (entitled If you read one book by Mailer...make it this one), which I enjoyed and mostly agree with. In it, the reviewer described the ending as perhaps "a final loss of courage" on the part of Mailer. [Possible spoilers ahead for those who haven't read the book]. It would occur to me that this term (final loss of courage) is actually quite apt for the character of Rojak and for the themes of the book, and is in fact a fitting characterisation for the final chapters.

In the first chapter, Rojak describes his 'heroic' killing of a company of German soldiers during the war, and his bottling it before finishing off the last wounded man, thus empting the victory of any glory for him. The one night described in the rest of the book shares a similar trajectory of relentlessness, but in the final chapters Rojak again bottles it and bargains with the moon, choosing personal safety over the yin and yang of the monumental forces guiding him. In the end he is outside the moon's pull, in the limbo of that metaphysical space.


Challenging and rewarding., 08 Nov 2001
Bought on a whim and the only Norman Mailer book I have read, An American Dream is a very very good book indeed. Mailer's prose is as sharp (jagged in places) as I have ever read - if you thought Bret Easton Ellis could be unforgiving, then the first chapter of this will give you something to consider! This is not to say that this book is to be thought of along the same lines as say 'American Psycho' (although there are similarities). The plot itself is rich, with many threads interweaving elegantly around eachother, a fantastic ending. Truly excellent if you are willing to put the effort in.

If you read one book by Mailer...make it this one, 06 Nov 1999
Despite the outwardly satirical connotations behind the title of An American Dream, this novel is far less a political or intellectual attack on his homeland as it is a foray into the existential limits of Mailer's own mind.

The core of the book is a simple tale of the battle between the good and bad forces within a man's soul. The lead character and narrator of the story, Stephen Rojack, is not for the most part a bad person, and yet his actions are occasionally very bad indeed. By the end of the very first chapter, Rojack has already committed a single brutal act which will propel him forward into a life of deceit and fear and eventual tragedy.

From that moment onwards he becomes a victim of his own defiant temerity before his nation's laws and the morality of a culture he does not particularly value. His lack of conformity and his intelligence combine to destroy him, and at the end of the book it his only his primitive courage, the quintessence of his being as a man, that he is expected to rely on. The fates, angered by his gall, are left to exact their revenge via another to whom he has grown close during the whole ordeal. Thus eventually he receives his comeuppance, albeit indirectly.

Here we see Mailer depicting with great enthusiasm and earnestness the criminal elements of New York, and combining this grim setting with the inner thoughts and meditations of a man open to new interpretations of the world. The influence of writers such as Burroughs and Henry Miller are clearly visible in the incredible wealth of metaphors and the very obliqueness of the perspective which he takes on so many subjects.

It is here that the author excels, producing an extraordinarily rich prose, absolutely overflowing with ideas and confirming Mailer as one of the most resourceful and perspicacious voices in literature. But, unlike many of the novel's most patently obvious influences, An American Dream is written with such skill as to enable the philosophical, moral, and spiritual dimensions to run quite seamlessly alongside a thriller; a story with strong, believable characters.

An American Dream is not perfect. Against it can be levelled accusations of misogyny (two major female characters are murdered), dadaism (particularly in one rather dated and ill-conceived section involving anal intercourse) and, most significantly, it can be argued that the ending is perhaps a little too contrived, a little too symmetrical in relation to the novel's start.

One can imagine the author, after 200 pages of genius - after writing chapters which he might not have believed himself capable of writing - alone before his unfinished manuscript and utterly at a loss as to how to complete the work. I cannot say with conviction if there is any truth to this, but the book certainly reads like a final loss of courage. To be made to find an ending for a book like An American Dream is an unenviable task. It is so strong, it is so unmanageable in its scope.... Perhaps it should have been a longer novel. Perhaps if any of Mailer's novels needed to be 500 words-plus to be entirely complete, this was the one. But then it might have lost much of its immediacy and precision.

However, do not allow the nit-pickings of this humble reader put you off. Mailer himself once wrote it was his opinion that An American Dream was, sentence-for-sentence, one of the best books of the century. He wrote that some years ago and he may well have changed his mind since then, although I sincerely hope that he hasn't for he was right first time. As a demonstration of literary prowess - or in more Mailer-like terms, as a flexing of the author's intellectual muscles - the novel has few peers.

And if that's not sufficient to convince you to take a look, it's also a cracking good read!

Fascinating but lacking a clear rationale, 11 Oct 2008
I regard Norman Mailer very highly. His prose style is authorative and carefully chosen for affect. One feels the craft of countless hours of reflection and experience as descriptions and human enigmas are etched. However, I often feel at the end of his novels that something is missing or that I have missed the esential ingredient. It is frustrating.

This novel is ambitious in its approach to the near mythical origins of Hitler. Mailer successfully portrays the family as full of the normal frailities that may well have been prevalent in this part of Austria at this time - incest, violence, small ambitions, the heartbreak of infant mortality. Throughout, Alois Hitler, Adolf's father, is uppermost. Through his exploits and musings, we gain more of an insight into the times than we do a putative rationale for the adult Hitler.

The choice of narrator is also fascinating, providing an interesting aside on the battle between good and evil. I recommend this book as long as the reader is not expecting existential truths about Hitler. It is thought provoking and a fitting finale for Mailer's talents.

The Castle in the Forest, 17 Aug 2008
The Castle in the Forest is a book about Adolf Hitler's family. It starts out almost as a documentary, when the narrator, who at first tells us he is an SS-officer, is sent to Spital in Austria in the 1930's to investigate Adolf Hitler's ancestry. Once the story of the family starts, the style shifts to that of a very readable novel, though the first chapters are so full of incest, that it is a bit disgusting.

Even though I enjoyed the book most of the time, I came out feeling a bit disappointed. I picked up this book because I was very curious what Norman Mailer would write about Adolf Hitler and the person he became. It promised to be a revealing novel, but it was only an account of one of the theories about Hitler's ancestry in which the protagonist was Hitler's father Alois.
Also, the hand of the supernatural was ever present in the lives of the Hitlers and it can hardly be plausible to conclude that the interference of the devil was the possible cause for Hitler's hatred and the atrocities he came to commit when he was in power. Perhaps the book has not been correctly presented as the synopsis promises that the author would `respond to these and other crucial aspects of Hitler's personality'. I don't know what Mailer's intention with this book was, but it couldn't possibly be an explanation of Hitler's personality. So what was the point Mailer was trying to make? Whatever that was, I didn't get it.

I also regret that despite the outstanding writing skills of the author, and the fact that I found the novel intriguing, sometimes I found it hard to enjoy it because no matter what I read about the family, I could not set aside my feelings about Hitler and the monstrosities he committed. I could not seem to overcome the repulsion to really enjoy this work of fiction.


No "The Naked and the Dead", 26 Mar 2008
A strange book about the Hitler/Heidler/Schicklgruber family and an imagined supernatural guidance on the early development of AH. Not so much an examination of the nature of evil as an entirely fanciful imagining of what evil might be. I found this book unsatifying and, for me, it seemed to stop in mid air - think I must have missed something.


Just Could Not Put It Down, 14 Dec 2007

Norman Mailer was born in 1923 and published his first book, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948. The Armies of the Night won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1969; Mailer received another Pulitzer in 1980 for The Executioner's Song. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, New York.

Perhaps only someone of Norman Mailer's stature in the literary world could take on the task of writing such a book, even though it is a work of fiction. Initially I had to steel myself to read it. Hannibal, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, I can read avidly about them all, as they are from the dim and distant past. But to read about Adolf Hitler a man who was still alive in my early childhood, the man who killed my father-in-law and many other brave men and women like him, as surely as if he had pulled the trigger himself, seemed almost sacrilegious. Why would I want to read about the man, who above all others in world history, both ancient and modern caused the deaths of countless thousands of people for no other reason than is own psychotic delusions of greatness as the leader of what he hoped would be a master race.

As I started the book I still had my doubts about whether I really wanted to read it. I was worried that the book would tend to glorify the man, simply by its existence, but by the time I had read forty or fifty pages I was hooked and it had become a must read, a book I could not put down. The book sets out to explore the evil of the most cruel man the world has ever known. Narrated by a mysterious SS man the story gives us young Adolf, from birth. Also the lives of his father and mother and his sisters and brothers. It also gives the intimate details of his childhood and adolescence. The book gives an insight into the struggle of good and evil that exists in all of us.

Fiction of an oblivion, 23 May 2007
Concise and giving in his narrative, Norman Mailer has touched upon the period of Hitler's life least spoken of in a sea of biographies and academic works written. The childhood of a would-be Monster or an already-was Monster? Perhaps he's trying to answer to the forever remaining question one is left after learning about Hitler: How could God put such a Despot amongst humanity? Or was it Him? Or the Satan?

While Mailer's novel is rich in details of Hitler's childhood and the miserbale conditions people used to live in at the end of the 19th century and how the evil and noble spirit/messenger/angels were brooding around for souls to save and/or destroy, the one question that remained intact althroughout was weather Mr Mailer was blaming it all on the Devil, e.g. the Maestro for having inspired evil into baby Adolf through his dreams... A human tragedy of such a scale, with consequences yet being repelled, Hitler's actions were not because of religious upbringing or the lack of it. Call me a feminist, but all the male writers and eventually the reviewers below fail to notice that it's the miserable circumstances of social upbringing that consume the human spirit and sometimes make of them monsters or marvellous leaders. To raise Hitler to a level of pedestal where the evil and good were fighting for his soul, is too much of a tribute to an otherwise ordinary criminal whose mind coupled with psychosomatic underdevelopment did not contain space for anything spiritual. He was a being in great disharmony that neither God nor his opponent were urged to save. His actions were so horrendous that at the time it seems the extraterrestial Good and Evil joined in forces to mainatain damage control...

As a fiction, it's a swift read, so, yes, buy it and read it, but don't blame yourselves when feeling you missed the point. Maybe that's the essence of Mailer's much praised (and deservedly so) writing.

Another stunning novel by Norman.., 01 Oct 2008
More brutality and vicious writing from Norman. His obsession with the "metaphysical" gets more of a free-reign on this one but it still hits hard, hard.
Some chapters knocked me flat. The man must have lived some life to get words like this in his head.

Outstanding., 04 Sep 2008
So, you wake up with a bitch of a hangover, but realise your arm throbs worse than your head. You take a look and see a new tattoo - bearing the name of a female you don't know - still weeping blood. Your jalopy - a Porche, bought by your rich, but estranged, wife - is covered in blood also. Blood that aint yours.

What's your first move on such a morning?

All the good stuff is in here: murder, broads, drugs, violence, sex, booze, more sex (including talk of an inter-racial bi-sexual threesome), financial double-dealing, cheating, doping, tripping and more sex and violence.

It's a shame the damn book isn't twice the size!

Fantastic. Buy it now.

Tough, hard-boiled, brilliance, 22 Mar 2007
Norman Mailer is a bit of an enigma; I have read several of his books, "the Fight", "Naked and the Dead", "Harlot's Ghost" and he cannot be said to have ever written consistently in an particular genre. In this he tries his hand at the hard-boiled, no-detail-missing, James Ellroy style thriller. This is good stuff by any standard. There is an overwhelming seediness throughout the whole book; no character has any qualms about philandering , murdering, drug-taking or disposing of the bodies. As a one-time visitor to Provincetown I never would have guessed that, beneath the surface, the place was such a Soddom and Gommorah style cesspit! The characterisation and exageration work, however; the dialogue is gritty and very rarely feels forced even though the wisecracks are up there with David Mamet's best. This is definitely a success and even though, as far as I am aware this is Mailer's only thriller it doesn't feel like he is indulging himself with a vanity project (such as Martin Amis's attempted police thriller "Night Train").
Great book and although written in a very elaborate style for the genre, a compulsive read.

Sex and severed heads at the seaside, 03 Dec 1998
This is the first Norman Mailer I've read, and I am impressed. You can almost smell the sea of Mailer's ghostly, winter Provincetown. I became caught up in the protagonist's horrible situation, so that when I occasionally had to put the book down, I was that man. This might well not be one of Mailer's best reads, but if you like a scary, dirty, human read, then this is it.

A collision of egos inside and outside the ring, 12 Nov 2007
The Fight is a vivid account of the 1974 world heavyweight boxing match in Zaire, billed as The Rumble in the Jungle, between George Foreman and Mohammad Ali. Mailer writes about Africa with more than a nod to Joseph Conrad, and writes about boxing with all the sweep and authority that Hemingway showed on bullfighting, but this book is about more than boxing. Mailer, a white Jew from New York, confronts his prejudices about blacks and about Africa, and while this seems less than remarkable now, it is easy to forget that mild racism was not only normal then among English-speaking whites, but was in fact the received wisdom of the time. This book was therefore a work of some courage and risk for a writer of Norman Mailer's stature.

The use of the third person to describe the author is strange at first, and it seems possible that Mailer's ego might overshadow even the monstrous ego of Ali. But what emerges is more sensitive than that. Ali is portrayed as an aging prodigy tortured by doubt and surrounded by a retinue of oddballs, and Mailer succeeds in first isolating and then overcoming his buried prejudice and superstition.

This is a powerful and at times moving book, and I would recommend it to all, including those who are uninterested or even repelled by the sport of boxing.


A Classic - although Penquin got the year wrong '74, not '75, 04 Nov 2004
This is a classic piece of sports writing and goes way beyond 'the fight' and into the atmosphere of all the pre hype. It covers one of the most important sporting (shock) events ever to have taken place..."The Rumble in the Jungle" and you get a real sense of this in Mailer's enthusiam. If you're an Ali fan, you should've read it by now....if you're not a fan, you'll still love the detail described in this book. It's one of those books that people remember reading years later. It's a shame that Penquin got the year of the fight wrong in their synopsis...and I've told them!. Rumble in the Jungle was October 1974, not 1975....(which was the "Trilla in Manila", now there's another story!)

Great non-fiction, 14 Mar 2002
One of the greatest sportsmen of our world, and this was possibly one of the greatest moments of his sporting career. This book is not just about a fight but about Africa, the nature of men, race and racism and superhuman achievement.

Mailer is completely honest throughout the book, and sometimes what he says, particularly about race, can be a little shocking. But the author is being honest with us about what he thinks, and his thoughts are interesting and thought-provoking.

The image of Ali, bouncing off the ropes for the first 6 rounds despite promising the world he was going to dance is vividly painted. The description of Foreman's training on the heavy bag, which he hit so hard he left dent in it, is close to mind when in the later chapters ali is absorbing those same punches.

The book also deals with the author's own celebrity, and makes this a very personal account of a great moment.

I left this book with one overpowering feeling - i wish i had been there.

Essential reading, 18 Jun 2001
A superb snapshot of a particular time and place; this is written in typical Norman Mailer style -allowing the reader amazing insight at times and a very personal, distanced view at others. Ali comes across as the great figure his reputation implies -even Mailer is humbly respectful in his presence. I would suggest reading David Remnick's equally impressive 'King of the world' first, as Remnick's book charts the 'back story' of how the heavyweight belt passed from Floyd Patterson to Sonny Liston and finally Ali. Then finish by watching the Oscar-winning documentary 'When we were Kings' -which of course, features Norman Mailer himself (Ideally, get the DVD, which features the entire Rumble In The Jungle fight as a bonus).

A Great follow up to "when we were kings", 17 Sep 2000
If you have seen the oscar winning documentary "When we were kings" and wished for "more" , this is a good book to read. A word of warning though, it is a classic "Mailer", at once written in prosaic, almost sureal style and simultaneously dripping with the man's ego (fans of his other work, especially "Harlot's ghost", will know what I mean).

But why not? the film documented the clash of two titanic egos, Ali & Frasier, so the style of writing mirrors the event anyway.

However, for those of you who are going onto their next Mailer book, I would start with "When we were kings first". Note , its not about the boxing REALLY, as I have never seen any other boxing video or read any such book, but both capture the mood, the zaniness and the spectacle of a great sporting event in the midst of a brutal dictatorship that existed in Zaire at that time. In that sense, the two compliment each other wonderfully, like reading/viewing "The English Patient", or "I Claudius" or "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"

Earth moving.., 01 Oct 2008
This could have gone on for another 700 pages and i would've been fine.
A great book by a great writer.
Brutal, realistic story-telling.

War for real, 16 Jul 2008
The Naked and the Dead remains the most realistic war novel I have read. It is neither a romance of heroic deeds nor the grinding, dehumanised tragedy that WWI novels tend to be. Showing war as a contrasted field of acts of courage, calculation, treachery and occasionally weakness and cowardice, but mostly as drudgery and sheer blind chance, it feels honest and true to experience.

Norman Mailer, indeed, wrote his account of WWII in the Pacific fresh from returning from the front. His book focuses on one island and tracks the destiny of a platoon, whose 15 or so members, each with their own private life back home, their fears and ambitions, become intimate acquaintances of the reader. The Naked and the Dead encompasses a complete campaign, beginning with the sea landing, building up to a major battle, and including the fighting itself. It then swerves into a wildcat mission to circumvent the Japanese line, turning into a classic nail-biting tale of jungle guerrilla, of ambushes and night-fights and forced marches, where the differences between GIs and NCOs erupt to create as much havoc as the fight with the Japanese. In parallel, the novel follows the general's intrigues among the officer corps, providing a bird's eye view of the campaign, its strategy, and its tactics, as well as their impact on the foot-soldiers.

Mailer's tome combines psychology and character analysis with the excitement of action and the realistic depiction of everyday scenes (the construction of the camp, the long struggle to move an anti-aircraft gun by foot, the night watches). It makes the reader feel present, as close as can be to standing on the actual scene. Of course, this was WWII, and every war is probably unique. Still, this is the closest thing, and it is for sure better than having to fight in one.

Very impressive, 25 Oct 2007
There's nothing much to say really: together with James Jones' "The thin red line" this is the best account of WW II combat that I know of. An extremely powerful, shocking & violent book, I had to read this as a university assignment years ago and (exceptionally so) I am still grateful to that particular teacher. The battle scenes are impressive, but the power of the book derives at least as much from the moving descriptions of the pre-war lives of the soldiers involved: all of them ordinary men, suddenly finding themselves caught up in a nightmare.

Much more than just a War Novel, 24 Jan 2006
The mental tussle between Hearn and Cummings provided some great moments of tension, you are never sure how the General will react to Hearns challenges.

Mailer does a great job of impressing upon the reader the extent of physical toil and pain the men are put through, the 'litter detail' in particular. I could literally feel my arms and legs ache as I read it.

He also was not afraid to confront a wide spread resentment of the Jews amongst the men, at a time when, post Holocaust, many would have liked to conviniently forget their previous prejudices.

The Naked and the Dead, 23 Jun 2005
I picked up this book at random and have been hooked on Mailer ever since.

Quite simply the best WWII book I have ever read.

By getting into the minds of his characters and switching between them, Mailer creates a tension and unease that is sustained from cover to cover. With this comes a real insight into war being about individuals rather than a homogenous group with a common cause or aim.

Typical mailer, 05 Oct 2008
If one chooses to strangle one's wife in her New York apartment, what is the best way to make the murder look like a suicide?

Throw the bitch out the window and claim she jumped!

Mailer out-does himself with this one. This is violent - both physically and sexualy - drunken, drugged up, immoral and dirty. Fantastic.

A narrow canvas; only a few days pass by during the novel, but the lead manages to screw and drink his way around the city after killing the whore, and has some worthy adventures.

Provocative stuff. Not for Feminists, thank god.

Mailer is dead: Long live Norman mailer!

Incredible., 01 Oct 2008
Man, this shook my world, and loosened some anchors. Brutal, brutal writing, shocking and nerve-wracking. Well written and more than a book.
had to take a break after reading 4 of his books in a row - this being the last - to recover from the beating.
What a talent.

In response to the previous review, 21 Apr 2008
Just quickly responding to the previous review (entitled If you read one book by Mailer...make it this one), which I enjoyed and mostly agree with. In it, the reviewer described the ending as perhaps "a final loss of courage" on the part of Mailer. [Possible spoilers ahead for those who haven't read the book]. It would occur to me that this term (final loss of courage) is actually quite apt for the character of Rojak and for the themes of the book, and is in fact a fitting characterisation for the final chapters.

In the first chapter, Rojak describes his 'heroic' killing of a company of German soldiers during the war, and his bottling it before finishing off the last wounded man, thus empting the victory of any glory for him. The one night described in the rest of the book shares a similar trajectory of relentlessness, but in the final chapters Rojak again bottles it and bargains with the moon, choosing personal safety over the yin and yang of the monumental forces guiding him. In the end he is outside the moon's pull, in the limbo of that metaphysical space.


Challenging and rewarding., 08 Nov 2001
Bought on a whim and the only Norman Mailer book I have read, An American Dream is a very very good book indeed. Mailer's prose is as sharp (jagged in places) as I have ever read - if you thought Bret Easton Ellis could be unforgiving, then the first chapter of this will give you something to consider! This is not to say that this book is to be thought of along the same lines as say 'American Psycho' (although there are similarities). The plot itself is rich, with many threads interweaving elegantly around eachother, a fantastic ending. Truly excellent if you are willing to put the effort in.

If you read one book by Mailer...make it this one, 06 Nov 1999
Despite the outwardly satirical connotations behind the title of An American Dream, this novel is far less a political or intellectual attack on his homeland as it is a foray into the existential limits of Mailer's own mind.

The core of the book is a simple tale of the battle between the good and bad forces within a man's soul. The lead character and narrator of the story, Stephen Rojack, is not for the most part a bad person, and yet his actions are occasionally very bad indeed. By the end of the very first chapter, Rojack has already committed a single brutal act which will propel him forward into a life of deceit and fear and eventual tragedy.

From that moment onwards he becomes a victim of his own defiant temerity before his nation's laws and the morality of a culture he does not particularly value. His lack of conformity and his intelligence combine to destroy him, and at the end of the book it his only his primitive courage, the quintessence of his being as a man, that he is expected to rely on. The fates, angered by his gall, are left to exact their revenge via another to whom he has grown close during the whole ordeal. Thus eventually he receives his comeuppance, albeit indirectly.

Here we see Mailer depicting with great enthusiasm and earnestness the criminal elements of New York, and combining this grim setting with the inner thoughts and meditations of a man open to new interpretations of the world. The influence of writers such as Burroughs and Henry Miller are clearly visible in the incredible wealth of metaphors and the very obliqueness of the perspective which he takes on so many subjects.

It is here that the author excels, producing an extraordinarily rich prose, absolutely overflowing with ideas and confirming Mailer as one of the most resourceful and perspicacious voices in literature. But, unlike many of the novel's most patently obvious influences, An American Dream is written with such skill as to enable the philosophical, moral, and spiritual dimensions to run quite seamlessly alongside a thriller; a story with strong, believable characters.

An American Dream is not perfect. Against it can be levelled accusations of misogyny (two major female characters are murdered), dadaism (particularly in one rather dated and ill-conceived section involving anal intercourse) and, most significantly, it can be argued that the ending is perhaps a little too contrived, a little too symmetrical in relation to the novel's start.

One can imagine the author, after 200 pages of genius - after writing chapters which he might not have believed himself capable of writing - alone before his unfinished manuscript and utterly at a loss as to how to complete the work. I cannot say with conviction if there is any truth to this, but the book certainly reads like a final loss of courage. To be made to find an ending for a book like An American Dream is an unenviable task. It is so strong, it is so unmanageable in its scope.... Perhaps it should have been a longer novel. Perhaps if any of Mailer's novels needed to be 500 words-plus to be entirely complete, this was the one. But then it might have lost much of its immediacy and precision.

However, do not allow the nit-pickings of this humble reader put you off. Mailer himself once wrote it was his opinion that An American Dream was, sentence-for-sentence, one of the best books of the century. He wrote that some years ago and he may well have changed his mind since then, although I sincerely hope that he hasn't for he was right first time. As a demonstration of literary prowess - or in more Mailer-like terms, as a flexing of the author's intellectual muscles - the novel has few peers.

And if that's not sufficient to convince you to take a look, it's also a cracking good read!

Fascinating but lacking a clear rationale, 11 Oct 2008
I regard Norman Mailer very highly. His prose style is authorative and carefully chosen for affect. One feels the craft of countless hours of reflection and experience as descriptions and human enigmas are etched. However, I often feel at the end of his novels that something is missing or that I have missed the esential ingredient. It is frustrating.

This novel is ambitious in its approach to the near mythical origins of Hitler. Mailer successfully portrays the family as full of the normal frailities that may well have been prevalent in this part of Austria at this time - incest, violence, small ambitions, the heartbreak of infant mortality. Throughout, Alois Hitler, Adolf's father, is uppermost. Through his exploits and musings, we gain more of an insight into the times than we do a putative rationale for the adult Hitler.

The choice of narrator is also fascinating, providing an interesting aside on the battle between good and evil. I recommend this book as long as the reader is not expecting existential truths about