Book, 2000 by Philip RothIt is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.
Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled.
This book is one of the Zuckerman novels as it includes Roth's best known character, Nathan Zuckerman. Eight other novels feature this character.
He won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year for The Human Stain.
Movie, 2003 directed by Robert BentonFeatures: Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris, Gary Sinise
Tagline: How far would you go to escape the past?
Awards: American Film Institute Award for (one of ten) Best Movies of 2003; it got mixed reviews from critics, many saying that Kidman and Hopkins were wrong for their roles.
Have you read (or seen) The Human Stain or any of Roth's other numerous books?
I saw the movie but honestly don't really remember it that well. The book is on my 100 books list of Prize Winners. Everyman (PEN/Faulkner Award 2007) was the 1st book I read for the 100 books challenge (3 hearts). American Pastoral (Pulitzer Prize 1998) and Sabbath's Theater (National Book Award for fiction 1995) are also on my list but I haven't gotten to them yet. Four books by Philip Roth on my list--he has won a lot of prizes!
