Word: soldier
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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 for the freedom of an activist priest convicted in the murder of an FBI agent...
...Talisman is a suspense novel that tries to be political, but ends up being unbelievable. The story itself is plausible, if only barely; the right combination of pumps and levers probably could raise the Unknown Soldier's coffin, and in any case, part of the fun with the book is in finding out how it is done. That was the case with Godey's earlier The Taking of Pelham One Two Three--how in the world, the reader wants to know, could a group of men kidnap a subway car in New York...
...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...
...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 for an advertising agency. The Secretary of the Treasury wears glasses with rims that are "square to match his economic theories...
...invented in response to white officialdom, the characters, who are all black, spend their lives reacting in one way or another to persistent discrimination. Macon Dead, a successful black slumlord, will always be warped, both because he must live with a name given his father by a drunken Union soldier who filled out the form wrong, and because he will not be any more accepted by the white banks than he will be by his black tenants. His wife, the doctor's daughter, will never be part of the city's black community because she alone is from the middle...