Word: booths
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...ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT is all but finished, and Ken Booth knows it. Vietnam, the draft, the '60s--they seem to have been forgotten. When Booth, the central figure in John Godey's novel The Talisman, and a few others who have stayed with the movement demonstrate at the White House, not even the FBI shows up to take their photographs. So Booth searches for another way to reach the public, another way for the movement to get the attention it needs. He decides they will steal the remains of the Unknown Soldier of World War II, as ransom...
...call Godey's latest book simply a work of fiction would be misleading. Although none of the major characters really exists, there are striking similarities between most of them and actual political figures. For example, Francis Rowan, the priest whose freedom Ken Booth seeks by stealing the Unknown Soldier, seems clearly patterned after religious activists of the '60s such as Daniel Berrigan and James Groppi--and in fact, Berrigan is compared to Rowan by name...
Godey seems to be trying to make both his characters and their vague movement realistic. He almost succeeds, and despite the novel's wild premise the reader begins to take Booth and his compatriots seriously. One member of the group, Bruce Parmentier, joined the movement after several years as a lawyer. He began his career as a public prosecutor in a small New Jersey town, but quit the job when he found that he no longer wanted to jail the people he was prosecuting...
...Booth, the leader of the group, had been an associate professor of economics before he became involved with the fight against the war. He served in World War II, and even after devoting himself to the movement, he retained a deep feeling that somehow his war had been "good," and Vietnam was "bad." Booth believed in the rationale for the Second World War, but not for Vietnam--that, he thought even before the movement began, was an "abomination...
...NOVEL ABOUT CHARACTERS like Parmentier and Booth could examine just what it was that made some people leave society for "the movement," or for any movement, in the '60s. But The Talisman is not that novel, and most of the other people in the book are merely caricatures of stock political figures. The President seems to be mostly concerned with his makeup looking right on television, when, after the Unknown Soldier is taken from Arlington Cemetery, he will announce whether Francis Rowan will be freed or not. His news secretary is a nearly imcompetent former newspaperman who once worked...