IT'S FICTION. Book Review No. 10 is Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (details or compare prices), a counter-fictional that starts with Charles Lindbergh defeating Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 Presidential election on a peace platform. President Lindbergh works with Christian nativists and some secret help from the Germans to encourage businesses to engage in Jim Crow practices against Jewish customers, as well as to create an Office of American Absorption to answer the "Jewish question" in the U.S. (Canada along with the rest of the Commonwealth is assisting England and the Soviet Union against Germany) by breaking up Jewish communities, encouraging Jewish families to live amongst Gentiles, and otherwise forcing assimilation. (Mr Roth does not serve up his usual gratuitous sex references.)

Walter Winchell becomes a presidential aspirant in part to reverse the policies of the Lindbergh administration. I do not want to give away too many of the plot details as the resolution is a bit contrived, but the United States does end up in the war on the British and Soviet side, and the postwar world is pretty much the world we know.

People who would like to foster greater understanding among people by compelling association might do well to read those parts of the book, to understand the dynamics that compelled association sets up, some positive, many not. Roth's Office of American Absorption comes off as the oppressive scheme it really is. Will the forced association being contemplated in some Nebraska school districts one day be seen in the same light?