Home > Fiction & Literature > Action & Adventure > Ordinary Heroes

Ordinary Heroes

List Price: $15.00

Save 30.0%

You Pay: $10.50

Want this eBook?Our eBook Library Software is required to purchase and download eBooks. Download it here.

Tell a Friend

Overview

Whilst mourning the death of his father, Stewart Dubin, a journalist covering the courtroom beat, decides to research the life of a man he had always respected, always admired, but possible never quite loved.

Editorial Reviews

When retired newspaperman Stewart Dubinsky (last seen in 1987's Presumed Innocent ) discovers letters his deceased father wrote during his tour of duty in WWII, a host of family secrets come to light. In Turow's ambitious, fascinating page-turner, a "ferocious curiosity" compels the divorced Dubinsky to study his "remote, circumspect" father's papers, which include love letters written to a fiance the family had never heard of, and a lengthy manuscript, which his father wrote in prison and which includes the shocking disclosure of his father's court-martial for assisting in the escape of OSS officer Robert Martin, a suspected spy. The manuscript, hidden from everyone but the attorney defending him, tells of Capt. David Dubin's investigation into Martin's activities and of both men's entanglements with fierce, secretive comrade Gita Lodz. From optimistic soldier to disenchanted veteran, Dubin - who, via the manuscript, becomes the book's de facto narrator - describes the years of violence he endured and of a love triangle that exacted a heavy emotional toll. Dubinsky's investigations prove revelatory at first, and life-altering at last. Turow makes the leap from courtroom to battlefield effortlessly. (Nov. 1) Copyright 1997-2005 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
-- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Scott Turow

Scott Turow is a writer and lawyer. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 12, 1949. Turow earned a B.A. from Amherst College in 1970 and an M.A. from Stanford University in 1974. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1978. Turow used his experiences in law school to write One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School. He was an Assistant United States Attorney in Chicago and served as a prosecutor in several corruption cases. Turow is a partner in an international law firm and specializes in white-collar crime. Turow has written a series of legal thrillers that include Presumed Innocent, The Laws of Our Fathers, and Pleading Guilty.

Customer Reviews

There are no customer reviews available at this time. To add your review, Register or Sign In to your account using our free eBook Library Software.

Additional Info

Imprint

Macmillan

Filesize

855.42 KB

Number of Pages

512

eBook ISBN

9780374706173

Awards

  • Great Lakes Book Awards

Excerpt from: Ordinary Heroes by Scott Turow

1. Stewart: All Parents Keep Secrets

All parents keep secrets from their children. My father, it seemed, kept more than most.

The first clue came when Dad passed away in February 2003 at the age of eighty-eight, after sailing into a Bermuda Triangle of illness heart disease, lung cancer, and emphysema all more or less attributable to sixty years of cigarettes. Characteristically, my mother refused to leave the burial details to my sister and me and met the funeral director with us. She chose a casket big enough to require a hood ornament, then pondered each word as the mortician read out the proposed death announcement.

"Was David a veteran " he asked. The undertaker was the cleanest-looking man I'd ever seen, with lacquered nails, shaped eyebrows, and a face so smooth I suspected electrolysis.

"World War II," barked Sarah, who at the age of fifty-two still raced to answer before me.

The funeral director showed us the tiny black rendering of the Stars and Stripes that would appear in the paper beside Dad's name, but my mother was already agitating her thinning gray curls.

"No," she said. "No war. Not for this David Dubin." When she was upset, Mom's English tended to fail her. And my sister and I both knew enough to keep quiet when she was in those moods. The war, except for the bare details of how my father, an American officer, and my mother, an inmate in a German concentration camp, had fallen in love, virtually at first sight, had been an unpleasantness too great for discussion throughout our lives. But I had always assumed the silence was for her sake, not his.

By the end of the mourning visitation, Mom was ready to face sorting through Dad's belongings. Sarah announced she was too pressed to lend a hand and headed back to her accounting practice in Oakland, no doubt relishing the contrast with my unemployment. Mom assigned me to my father's closet on Monday morning, insisting that I consider taking much of his clothing. It was nearly all disastrously out of fashion, and only my mother could envision me, a longtime fatso, ever shrinking enough to squeeze into any of it. I selected a few ties to make her happy and began boxing the rest of his old shirts and suits for donation to the Haven, the Jewish relief agency my mother had helped found decades ago and which she almost single-handedly propelled for nearly twenty years as its Executive Director.