My Cold War - Softcover

This novel is like a treasure hunt, which is to say it is very well-observed. ----Norman Mailer"

A sharp, searching novel of an American son and the family he left behind å ¦rom a writer of rare breadth and human insight. My Cold War is a critically acclaimed debut novel of extraordinary depth and range: the story of a man's alienation and attempts at reconnection with his family, and a rich exploration of the thorny implications of American popular culture. At its center is John Delano, a professor of Cold War Studies and successful mass-market historian a la Stephen Ambrose or Ken Burns. Raised by an awkward, embittered father and a frustrated mother in a Levittown-style suburb on Long Island, Delano has made a name for himself as a gimmicky interpreter of Cold War America, a controversial but popular repackager of events like the JFK assassination for those who lived through them without noticing. And yet, as the novel opens, Delano has reached an impasse: during a crisis of confidence, he shelves a major new book project in favor of a quest to drive to the Midwest and seek out his estranged younger brother. But when the trip ends in a sobering discovery that his brother has led a life of desperate transience, grasping at straws and scapegoats å ¨e undergoes an epiphany that propels him back to the newly sacred ground where he and his brother were raised. Long recognized as a writer of exceptional vision and unflinching candor, Tom Piazza has crafted a novel full of incident and argument, a book that speaks with depth and range about what it has meant to be American in our time.