![]() ![]() In 1989, tongue loosened by powerful painkillers and memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon’s own grandfather told him stories he had never heard before, revealing pieces of a history long buried and forgotten.Ĭhabon has transformed the experience he had listening to his own grandfather into a speculative history that attempts to reconstruct the mysterious origins and fate of Chabon Scientific, Co., an authentic mail-order novelty company whose ads for scale models of human skeletons, combustion engines and space rockets were once a fixture in the back pages of Esquire and Popular Mechanics. Moving from the Jewish slums of pre-war South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to New York’s Wallkill Prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of “the American Century,” Moonglow collapses an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week. Unfolding as a deathbed confession from grandfather to grandson, it is a tale of madness and model rocketry, of war and adventure, of love and desire, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at mid-century and, above all, of the destructive impact-and the creative power-of the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies. ![]() In his new novel, Moonglow, Chabon explores truth and lies, family legends, and existential adventure. ![]()
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