Robb Forman Dew. (2011). Being Polite to Hitler: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company.

Robb Forman Dew. 2011. Being Polite to Hitler: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company.

Robb Forman Dew, Being Polite to Hitler: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company, 2011.

Robb Forman Dew. Being Polite to Hitler: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company, 2011.

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

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After teaching and raising her family for most of her life, Agnes Scofield realizes that she is truly weary of the routine her life has become. But how, at 51, can she establish an identity apart from what has so long defined her?
Often eloquent, sometimes blunt, and always full of fire, The Scofield clan is not a family that keeps its opinions to itself. As much as she'd like to, Agnes can no more deflect their adamant advice than she can step down as their matriarch. And despite her newfound freedom, Agnes finds herself becoming even more entangled in the family web. She shepherds her daughter-in-law, Lavinia, who moves in with her own two daughters to escape her husband's drinking. She puts out fires, smoothes fraying nerves, and, stunned as anyone, receives a marriage proposal. Having expected her life to become smaller, Agnes is amazed to see it grow instead.
Robb Forman Dew intricately weaves together personal and family life into a richly wrought tapestry of the country in the 1950s and beyond. Being Polite to Hitler is a moving, frank, and surprising portrait of post-World War II America.

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     October 18, 2010
     National Book Award–winner Dew wraps up the trilogy she began with The Evidence Against Her by considering, in ways both joyful and elegiac, the juxtaposition of the profound and the mundane through the years 1953 to 1973 in smalltown Washburn, Ohio. Long-widowed schoolteacher Agnes Scofield, 54, reflects on her identity against the distant backdrop of polio scares, epic baseball games, nuclear threats, the space race, and civil rights strife, as everyday life in Washburn continues unabated. Prompted by a health scare and by passions and desires in her own and her children's lives, Agnes must decide whether to perpetuate convention or to choose the change swirling all around her, to embrace a "season of carelessness": what about that much younger suitor? Agnes is clearly a literary heir of Mrs. Ramsay, and the narrative, ranging freely not only among Agnes's sprawling family but also throughout her political and cultural milieu, owes a debt to Woolf. Particularly when read in conjunction with her other novels about Washburn, Dew's latest is an impressionistic portrait of a family and an age striving for clarity and understanding.

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     November 1, 2010
     

     The third installment of Dew's portrait of the Scofield clan of Washburn, Ohio (The Truth of the Matter, 2005, etc.), focuses on the aging of matriarch Agnes.

     When the novel opens in 1953, Agnes is in her early 50s, long widowed and living alone in the big old Scofield manse, which she can barely maintain on her teacher's salary. Now that her three older children, Claytor, Betts and Dwight (actually her much younger brother but raised as a son), are married and raising their own families with varying success, while the youngest, Howard, is about to marry, Agnes's maternal interest does not stretch much beyond dutiful. She receives comically awkward overtures of affection from a clueless filmmaker intent on documenting daily life in Washburn. The fact that the filmmaker is tone-deaf to the nuances of the lives he follows is the novel's best, slightly mean joke. Agnes's real suitor is Sam Holloway. Her son-in-law Will's business partner, Sam is considerably younger than Agnes but proves a perfectly companionable and practical mate. More passionate, though not by much, is alcoholic Claytor's relationship with his Southern wife Lavinia, who eschews the prevalent Midwestern decorum, a combination of restraint and etiquette that she derides in a speech that gives the novel its title. Lavinia is the only source of energy among carefully self-controlled characters in a formal narrative that mirrors too closely the very midcentury, Middle American reserve being recorded. The second half of the novel passes in quick succession through the later '50s and '60s and into the early '70s, recording births, illnesses, family gatherings and small crises but no serious drama. Most interesting are historical tidbits Dew drops in, from the polio epidemic of the '50s to Wernher von Braun's reaction to JFK's death to the desegregation of Little Rock's high school.

     The fictional characters, so vivid in The Evidence Against Her (2001), have paled as they have aged, and even the passions of the younger generation are too muted to engage the reader.

     (COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

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     October 15, 2010
     

     In her third book centered on Agnes Scofield of Washburn, OH, following 2001's The Evidence Against Her and 2005's The Truth of the Matter, Dew brings her readers into post-World War II small-town America via the lives of Agnes and the friends and family who look to her to anchor their own unsettled lives. It is now 1953, and Agnes, widowed and in her early fifties, has had it with teaching third graders. Her offspring (including a much younger brother raised as her son) and their children are trying to find their way in a country on the verge of unprecedented change. The need to hide their troubled marriages, alcoholism, and plain old crankiness under a veneer of civilized behavior is at odds with the nation's increasing political upheaval. As the Fifties turn into the Sixties and push through to the Seventies, Agnes and Sam, her much younger, lovely second husband, scout the way forward. VERDICT National Book Award winner Dew (for Dale Loves Sophie to Death) uses her signature elegant and often delightfully funny style to move seamlessly back and forth between the macro- and microcosm of the new America. Her latest should generate demand for the first two series titles as well. [See "Prepub Exploded," BookSmack!, 7/10.]--Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

     Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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     December 1, 2010
     In the third book of her trilogy (after The Evidence against Her, 2001, and The Truth of the Matter, 2005), Dew again visits the Scofield clan of Washburn, Ohio. As in the previous novels, the comings and goings of the extended family have a somewhat muted, anticlimactic feel to them. Couples fight but dont break up; people fall deathly ill, then survive. The most startling part of the novel is a late-in-the-book chapter that attempts to consolidate the 1950s Asian flu outbreak, scientist Werner von Braun, and the popularity of a new china pattern. The chapter winds up with a self-referential breaking of the fourth wall so bizarre that one wonders if Dew threw it in just to make sure her readers were paying attention. This is a calm, gentle read for those who already know and care about the Scofield clan and a detail-rich slice of life for those interested in midcentury Americana. Perhaps like her characters, Dew also longs to burst forth into something new and will do so in her next novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)

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After teaching and raising her family for most of her life, Agnes Scofield realizes that she is truly weary of the routine her life has become. But how, at 51, can she establish an identity apart from what has so long defined her?
Often eloquent, sometimes blunt, and always full of fire, The Scofield clan is not a family that keeps its opinions to itself. As much as she'd like to, Agnes can no more deflect their adamant advice than she can step down as their matriarch. And despite her newfound freedom, Agnes finds herself becoming even more entangled in the family web. She shepherds her daughter-in-law, Lavinia, who moves in with her own two daughters to escape her husband's drinking. She puts out fires, smoothes fraying nerves, and, stunned as anyone, receives a marriage proposal. Having expected her life to become smaller, Agnes is amazed to see it grow instead.
Robb Forman Dew intricately weaves together personal and family life into a richly wrought tapestry of the...

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