Jesper Olsen suffers brain haemorrhage

From BBC Sports

My first childhood football hero suffered a brain haemorrhage I read yesterday.

Nearly four years ago I started a serie about my Football Heroes. Obviously Olsen was one of them. This is what I wrote back then.

Take care Jesper!

Philip Roth – The plot against America (06-020)

This was one book that caught my eye, when I saw it on the bestsellers list. I have to admit to being snobbish I guess, but the Steeles, Grishams and Kings of this world have ruined the bestseller list so much, I don’t trust books on that list. But then I read a review. I read about what the book was about and wanted to read it. Badly.

I wasn’t disappointed. The idea for this novel is great. A ‘what if’ novel. In this case, what if Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator had become president of the United States of America. Lindbergh was known to be an anti-Semite. How would America have reacted had he won the 1940 election and not Franklin Roosevelt. For the Jews in the States, things would have gone completely different.

Roth managed to describe the situation very well, this really could have happened, when you read the book. The war in Europe with the USA under Lindbergh, history is certainly different from how we remember it really went.

Roth tells about the lives of a fictional family Roth in Newark, where a lot of Jewish families live together and the kids do not know many outsiders. Little Philip is seven. His brother Sandy a few years his senior, his father selling insurance, his mother full time mother. They cannot imagine that Lindbergh could possibly win the elections against their popular president Roosevelt, but they see it happen anyway. And their lives change a lot. It gets worse when aunt Evelyn marries a rabbi who had become one of the advisors of Lindbergh. Sandy spends a summer in Kansas and comes back as an American boy. Not a Jewish boy in the US as it had been until then. Cousin Alvin already lost a leg in the war in Europe fighting fascism by then. But it does get much worse, not just for them, but for all Jews in the US.

The book draws you in and does not let you go anymore. Roth almost makes you glad that WW2 went as it did, which is an achievement, as we all know that it was not a period in history that mankind can be proud of. Roth is therefore a great author who has written a truly classic novel. My compliments!

Number: 06-020
Title: The plot against America
Author: Philip Roth
Language: English (USA)
Year: 2004
# Pages: 391 (3454)
Category: Fiction/Literature
ISBN: 0-224-07453-9