Making History: A Novel
- Book Review,
by Stephen Fry
From School Library Journal
YA-A time-travel tale, of sorts, this novel by a British comedian is alternately funny and thought-provoking. The protagonist, Michael Young, is a trendy, somewhat vapid graduate student at Cambridge who is just finishing his dissertation on the early years of Hitler. Fry alternates chapters describing Michael's actions with sections of his dissertation, allowing a glimpse into the environment that spawned the rise of the Fuhrer. Upon Michael's meeting with physics professor Leo Zuckermann, the nefarious plot thickens. What if Hitler had never been born? What would a world without the Holocaust be like? The two men send male-sterility pills back in time to the water supply used by Hitler's parents. Instantly, Michael finds himself, British accent and all, as an American student at Princeton in an entirely different world. Is it a better world? The novel is full of surprises, with the outcome not even remotely as pristine as Michael had hoped. This is a strange book, full of dry British humor and quips. It also deals with the Nazi "final solution," a topic at the far extreme from laughable. It takes readers into a world of ironic possibilities fraught with disaster, resulting from the best of intentions. YAs will find this an easy read that will stretch their imaginations, entertain them, and leave them thinking about the possible outcomes of the "road not taken."-Carol DeAngelo, Garcia Consulting Inc., EPA Headquarters, Washington, DCCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Michael Young, a Cambridge graduate student who has just completed his dissertation on Adolf Hitler's childhood, and German physicist Leo Zuckermann, inventor of a machine that can look into the past, come up with a way to prevent Hitler from ever having been born. Apparently unfamiliar with the Awful Warnings of the time travel genre, Michael and Leo don't hesitate to change history, and the results of their successful experience certainly make a difference. In this clever, thought-provoking, and very funny novel, Fry ably and convincingly imagines a world that never knew Hitler. This intelligent and gripping tale is even better than Fry's witty The Liar (LJ 4/15/93) and should appeal to a wider audience. Highly recommended.-?Elizabeth Mellett, Brookline P.L., Mass.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, Allen Lincoln
...reads like a Twilight Zone episode infused with BBC humor.... Normally too clever by three-quarters, Fry here is only too clever by half.
The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani
...shockingly tasteless and deeply offensive.
The Washington Post
"Terrific . . . A bright, engaging and learned novel."
From Booklist
Availing himself of that durable literary device, time travel, Fry entangles Michael Young, history student at Cambridge University, in a scheme to prevent the birth of Adolf Hitler. An unwitting prey to dozens of the author's entertaining traps--yes, this is a funny novel, albeit an uneasily amusing one--the first trap being his desire to publish his thesis, sort of a "Hitler: The Early Years" written up as a novel. For help he turns to Professor Leo Zuckermann, physicist and son of an SS doctor. The professor burns to purge himself of this parentage, and happens to have invented a time machine; Young happens to have some male sterilization pills he stole from his ex-girlfriend, a geneticist. So they time-transport the pills to poison the wellwater of Adolf's would-be father. That works, but--shazaam!--both Young and Zuckermann inadvertently fall into the time machine. They separately reappear at Princeton University, circa 1996, where the world appears not to have heard of Adolf Hitler. History has, however, produced a Rudolf Glober, under whose aegis Zuckermann's father led a more "successful" career than under Hitler, so Young and Zuckermann must, once they reunite, reenter the time machine and restore history as it was. A simultaneously zany and serious yarn spinner, Fry creates here a bizarre but skillfully controlled alternative world, with the virtuoso pacing and tension that attract readers. Gilbert Taylor
From Kirkus Reviews
Would the world be better off if Hitler had never lived? British TV personality and novelist Fry (The Hippopotamus, 1995, etc.) inflates a speculative idyll into an overlong, glibly caustic--and often hilarious--social satire. Interfering with history is a shopworn science fiction conceit that, as everyone from H.G. Wells's Time Traveller to Captain Kirk of Star Trek has discovered, is not time well spent: The most absurd paradoxes (murdering your grandfather, etc.) must be resolved to leave everything more or less as it was before the story began. In his third novel, Fry fashions an elaborately contrived plot so that the nebbishy Michael Young, a snide, pop-culturequoting Cambridge University doctoral student in German history, will meet the guilt-ridden German physicist Leo Zuckermann (whose father was an Auschwitz physician) and use Zuckerman's fancy laptop time machine to drop infertility pills into Hitler's father's morning beer. Then, after some Spielbergian special effects, Young wakes up across the Atlantic to find that he's been circumcised and is now majoring in philosophy at a brutishly conservative Princeton. America is in a Cold War conflict with a German hegemony that spans most of Europe and Asia. In place of Hitler is Rudolf Gloder, a far more intelligent Nazi who encouraged his nation to develop atomic weapons in advance of the US, smashed Russia's Communist revolution, and found a way to make Jews persecute themselves. Young, determined to return the past to its untampered state, learns what history always teaches: Even in a world without Hitler, things can always be worse. An amusing, sophomoric, hyperbolic, academic send-up, timed to coincide with Fry's upcoming role in a film about Oscar Wilde. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Bookpage
"Part academic send-up, part zany screenplay, and part intriguing invented history . . . a novel that makes you think while laughing and laugh while thinking."
Book Description
What if hitler had never been born? In Stephen Fry's most seriously ambitious novel to date, he creates a futuristic fantasy that becomes a thriller with a funny streak. Tackling one of history's darkest episodes, he poses the question: What if Hitler had never been born? An unquestionable improvement, no doubt. Michael Young, an earnest young history graduate student, has just finished his dissertation, an exploration into the roots of evil and the early life of Adolf Hitler. When he meets up with an aging German physicist, they concoct an idealistic experiment that involves time travel to prevent the conception of the Fhrer. It will change the course of history, but will it create a better world? With characteristic brilliance and wit, Fry presents a thought-provoking alternate history that is both trenchant and deeply affecting.
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