Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon

Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon (Find this book in our catalog)
If you like adventure stories, with a quest or a road trip, you will love this, especially if you have fond memories of reading classic boys adventures like The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle. This book reads like a pastiche of those old stories, using some of their merry and hearty language, and yet this book is way more!

Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay came from a passion for classic comic books. This time the breathless action, the raucus humor, the cliff-hanging suspense, and the colorful characters are said by the publisher to owe their inspiration to sources such as The Arabian Nights and the works of Alexandre Dumas. I was also reminded of the movie "The Princess Bride."

Pale, black-clad Zelikman ben Solomon of Regensburg is a moody, itinerant physician who has paired up with Amram, a huge, grey-haired, black-skinned ex-soldier with a battle axe. Rootless, with interesting and unspoken pasts, they make their way through the Caucasus Mountains in 950 A. D., living from hand-to-mouth as blades for hire or as con artists. They are forced by circumstances into becoming escorts and bodyguards to a young prince of the Khazar Empire whose entire family was murdered and who is traveling home to recover his rightful throne. On the way they encounter many dangers from robbers, mercenary armies, and evil emperors. There is much spitting on swords and beheading, of good guys and bad. As well as, writes Michael Chabon, "Jews with swords," there are intrigues, secrets, plots and betrayals. There are even elephants!

Yiddish Policeman's Union to become a movie

United Press International reports Hollywood filmmaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen have signed on to adapt Michael Chabon's novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union for the big screen. I look forward to it very much since the Coen brothers also made the recent release, No Country for Old Men, which was a hugely successful adaptation of the novel by Cormac McCarthy.

The Yiddish Policeman's Union is recommended in countless reading guides as a terrific book group title. Why not read it before the film comes out so that you or your group are ready to compare the book and the film?

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A murder mystery set in the imaginary Jewish homeland that is Alaska.

Jacket Notes:
"The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" pens an homage to the stylish menace of 1940s noir, in a novel that imagines if Alaska, not Israel, had become the homeland for the Jews after World War II."

REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 03/05/2007:
Reviewed by Jess Walter: "They are the "frozen Chosen," two million people living, dying and kvetching in Sitka, Alaska, the temporary homeland established for displaced World War II Jews in Chabon's ambitious and entertaining new novel. It is-deep breath now-a murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller, so perhaps it's no surprise that, in the back half of the book, the moving parts become unwieldy; Chabon is juggling narrative chainsaws here.The novel begins-the same way that Philip Roth launchedThe Plot Against America -with a fascinating historical footnote: what if, as Franklin Roosevelt proposed on the eve of World War II, a temporary Jewish settlement had been established on the Alaska panhandle? Roosevelt's plan went nowhere, but Chabon runs the idea into the present, back-loading his tale with a haunting history. Israel failed to get a foothold in the Middle East, and since the Sitka solution was only temporary, Alaskan Jews are about to lose their cold homeland. The book's timeless refrain: "It's a strange time to be a Jew."Into this world arrives Chabon's Chandler-ready hero, Meyer Landsman, a drunken rogue cop who wakes in a flophouse to find that one of his neighbors has been murdered. With his half-Tlingit, half-Jewish partner and his sexy-tough boss, who happens also to be his ex-wife, Landsman investigates a fascinating underworld of Orthodox black-hat gangs and crime-lord rabbis. Chabon's "Alyeska" is an act of fearless imagination, more evidence of the soaring talent of his previous genre-blender, the Pulitzer Prize-winningThe Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay .Eventually, however, Chabon's homage to noir feels heavy-handed, with too many scenes of snappy tough-guy banter and too much of the kind of elaborate thriller plotting that requires long explanations and offscreen conspiracies.Chabon can certainly write noir-or whatever else he wants; his recent Sherlock Holmes novel,The Final Solution , was lovely, even if theNew York Times Book Review sniffed its surprise that the mystery novel would "appeal to the real writer." Should any other snobs mistake Chabon for anything less than a real writer, this book offers new evidence of his peerless storytelling and style. Characters have skin "as pale as a page of commentary" and rough voices "like an onion rolling in a bucket." It's a solid performance that would have been even better with a little more Yiddish and a little less police."

About Michael Chabon: Photo; Wikipedia bio

Conversation starters:

Chabon's work is characterized by "complex language, frequent use of metaphor, and an extensive vocabulary."

Recurring themes in his work include "nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and issues of Jewish identity."

HarperCollins reading group guide for Yiddish Policeman's Union