The Book of Daniel

Name: The Book of Daniel
Rating: 4 (520 reviews)

by E. L. Doctorow

First published 1971

Amazon

4.0(520)

In the late 1960s, graduate student Daniel Isaacson begins writing about the parents who were executed for conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Moving between Daniel’s present, his sister Susan’s political despair and memories of childhood, the novel reconstructs the arrest, trial and death of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, fictional counterparts of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Daniel interviews former allies, informers and officials while confronting the damage left by public campaigns that turned the children into symbols. His investigation connects the anti-Communist politics of the early Cold War with the radical movements and anti-Vietnam demonstrations of the 1960s. The novel examines guilt, state power, family memory and the difficulty of separating historical truth from political inheritance.