The Husband

Sol Stein

srpen 2013 · Untreed Reads

Podrobnosti o e‑knize

Peter Carmody is a man most people would envy. He has a successful career, an attractive wife, two children he loves and who love him. Yet Peter Carmody has been playing at a marriage that has run down over the years through emotional attrition and boredom. Sometimes, when the martinis come fast enough and the determined, frenetic gaiety of friends momentarily fills up the emptiness, the charade is almost convincing. But in the small, honest hours of the night, Peter recognizes his arrangement for what it is--the very opposite of living. In an explosive self confrontation, Peter gambles all he has against what he hopes to have in a life with Elizabeth, the woman he loves. Resented by his friends who lack the courage--perhaps the desperation--to break out of their own loveless arrangements, and humiliated by the American way of divorce that strips him of his children, property, and self respect, Peter touches despair before realizing that making an honest, joyful connection with Elizabeth is an affirmation of life worth any cost. The Husband is a very real and dramatic story of a man struggling to find the truth of his life. The Husband is someone you know.

O autorovi

Sol Stein is a Chicago-born transplant to the Bronx. In the 1950's he was an anti-Communist scriptwriter for the Voice of America, Washington¿s Cold War propaganda radio network, and a leading defender of civil liberties. But he made his lasting mark in publishing. In 1962 he and his wife at the time, Patricia Day, founded the publishing house Stein and Day, which had immediate success that year with the director Elia Kazan¿s debut book, America, America. The story of a Greek youth who comes to the United States, the book sold three million copies, and Mr. Kazan turned it into a movie, released the next year. Mr. Stein was Stein and Day¿s editor in chief. In one of the many books Mr. Stein himself wrote, Bankruptcy: A Feast for Lawyers (1989), he exposed the bureaucratic nightmare that had accompanied the financial implosion of Stein and Day after 27 years in business. Solomon Stein was born in Chicago on Oct. 13, 1926, to Louis and Zelda (Zam) Stein, Jewish immigrants who fled Russia. His mother became a translator for the United Nations. His father was a jewelry designer. The family moved to the North Bronx in 1930. Mr. Stein went on to enroll at City College, but his studies there were interrupted when he enlisted in the Army Air Forces in 1944. He voluntarily transferred to the infantry and served in Germany during the post-World War II occupation. After returning from military service, he completed his bachelor of social science degree and earned a master¿s in English and comparative literature at Columbia. Besides working as an anti-Communist scriptwriter for the Voice of America, Mr. Stein was a member of its ideological advisory staff starting in the early 1950s. The journalist Robert Scheer, who was editor of the left-leaning Ramparts magazine in the late 1960s, branded him The Archdeacon of the Cold War. Sol Sttein passed away on September 26, 2019 at the age of 92.