Underworld: A Novel by Don DeLillo
	List Price:   $17.95 Unit Price:   $14.36 You Save:   $3.59 (20%) ISBN-10:   0684848155 ISBN-13:   9780684848150 Publisher:   Simon & Schuster; Scribner Category:   Young Adults Pub. Date:   July 1998 Pages:   832 Format:   Trade Paper
Subjects
NEW YORK (N.Y.)_FICTION AMERICAN FICTION (FICTIONAL WORKS BY ONE AUTHOR)
Description/Notes
Malcolm JonesNewsweekThere's pleasure on evey page of this pitch-perfect evocation of a half-century. Michael OndaatjeThe book is an aria and a wolf-whistle of our half century. It contains multitudes. A gloriously fused history of the past 50 years that offers a key to understanding American culture, 'Underworld' moves through the nation's diverse landscapes, analyzing the mesmerizing interplay between two central characters, and '(offering) us another history of ourselves, the unofficial underground moments' (Michael Ondaatje). A National Book Award Finalist. Joan MellenThe Baltimore SunUnderworldis a page-turner and a masterwork, a sublime novel and a delight to read. Greg BurkmanThe Seattle TimesMasterpieces teach you how to read them, andUnderworldis no exception....Anastonishing piece of prose and a benchmark of twentieth-century fiction,Underworldis stunnigly beautiful in its generous humanity, locating the true power of history not in tyranny, collective political movements of history books, but inside each of us. Salman RushdieUnderworldis magnificent book by an American master. Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life; she is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.Underworldis a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep, clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times -- Don DeLillo's greatest and most powerful work of fiction. From Part 5, Better Things For Better Living Through Chemistry: Selected Fragments Public and Private in the 1950s and 1960s, Chapter 3, January 11, 1955 We were about thirty miles below the Canadian border in a rambling encampment that was mostly barracks and other frame structures, a harking back, maybe, to the missionary roots of the order -- except the natives, in this case, were us. Poor city kids who showed promise; some frail-bodied types with photographic memories and a certain uncleanness about them; those who were bright but unstable; those who could not adjust; the ones whose adjustment was ordained by the state; a cluster of Latins from some Jesuit center in Venezuela, smart young men with a cosmopolitan style, freezing their weenies off; and a few farmboys from not so far away, shyer than borrowed suits.'Sometimes I think the education we dispense is better suited to a fifty-year-old who feels he missed the point the first time around. Too many abstract ideas. Eternal verities left and right. You'd be better served looking at your shoe and naming the parts. You in particular, Shay, coming from the place you come from.'This seemed to animate him. He leaned across the desk and gazed, is the word, at my wet boots.'Those are ugly things, aren't they?''Yes they are.''Name the parts. Go ahead. We're not so chi chi here, we're not so intellectually chic that we can't test a student face-to-face.''Name the parts,' I said. 'All right. Laces.''Laces. One to each shoe. Proceed.'I lifted one foot and turned it awkwardly.'Sole and heel.''Yes, go on.'I set my foot back down and stared at the boot, which seemed about as blank as a closed brown box.'Proceed, boy.''There's not much to name, is there? A front and a top.''A front and a top. You make me want to weep.''The rounded part at the front.''You're so eloquent I may have to pause to regain my composure. You've named the lace. What's the flap under the lace?''The tongue.''Well?''I knew the name. I just didn't see the thing.'He made a show of draping himself across the desk, writhing slightly as if in the midst of some dire distress.'You didn't see the thing because you don't know how to look. And you don't know how to look because you don't know the names.'He tilted his chin in high rebuke, mostly theatrical, and withdrew his body from the surface of the desk, dropping his bottom into the swivel chair and looking at me again and then doing a decisive quarter turn and raising his right leg sufficiently so that the foot, the shoe, was posted upright at the edge of the desk.A plain black everyday clerical shoe.'Okay,' he said. 'We know about the sole and heel.''Yes.''And we've identified the tongue and lace.''Yes,' I said.With his finger he traced a strip of leather that went across the top edge of the shoe and dipped down under the lace.'What is it?' I said.'You tell me. What is it?''I don't know.''It's the cuff.''The cuff.''The cuff. And this stiff section over the heel. That's the counter.''That's the counter.''And this piece amidships between the cuff and the strip above the sole. That's the quarter.''The quarter,' I said.'And the strip above the sole. That's the welt. Say it, boy.''The welt.''How everyday things lie hidden. Because we don't know what they're called. What's the frontal area that covers the instep?''I don't know.''You don't know. It's called the vamp.''The vamp.''Say it.''The vamp. The frontal area that covers the instep. I thought I wasn't supposed to memorize.''Don't memorize ideas. And don't take us too seriously when we turn up our noses at rote learning. Rote helps build the man. You stick the lace through the what?''This I should know.''Of course you know. The perforations at either side of, and above, the tongue.''I can't think of the word. Eyelet.''Maybe I'll let you liv