"Francine Prose has a knack for getting to the heart of human nature. . . . We are allowed to enter the moral dilemmas of fascinating characters whose emotional lives are strung out by the same human frailties, secrets and insecurities we all share." --USA Today
One spring afternoon, Vincent Nolan, a young neo-Nazi walks into the office of a human rights foundation headed by Meyer Maslow, a charismatic Holocaust survivor. Vincent announces that he wants to make a radical change. But what is Maslow to make of this rough-looking stranger with Waffen SS tattoos who says that his mission is to save guys like him from becoming guys like him?
As Vincent gradually turns into the sort of person who might actually be able to do that, he also begins to transform everyone around him, including Maslow himself. Masterfully plotted, darkly comic, A Changed Man poses essential questions about human nature, morality, and the capacity for change, illuminating the everyday transactions, both political and personal, in our lives.
So much said already - but in the end: It's a great book (at least in the audio-edition), one that continues to resonate after it's finished (snippets of dialogue or inner monologue coming back to mind, the perspective that's sharp but compassionate at the same time, hope for and questions about the characters - and can a man truly change?). Sure, there may be minor 'weaknesses' (is the end too cheesy? the Nazi too harmless?...
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Kudos to Francine Prose for being able to climb inside the minds of a racist skin-head and a Holocaust survivor and produce an entertaining read. Vincent Nolan, a neo-Nazi skinhead, shows up at the World Brotherhood Watch, and offers to work for Meyer Maslow, a Holocaust survivor and director of the foundation. Brotherhood Watch will attract wealthy donors only as long as it is newsworthy. Vincent has shown up at just the...
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Eric Conger reads this story of improbables with both coolness and verve. The coolness is found in his reserved, compelling tone His verve is most obvious in the darkly comic, which abounds in "A Changed Man." A repellant skinhead, so steeped in his hateful prejudices as to almost embody them, enters the office of a human rights foundation, World Brotherhood Watch. Vincent Nolan is his name and he claims that he...
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Ms. Prose (what a name) wrote one of the best and funniest modern satires--"Blue Angle"--so I was eager to see what she would come up with next. "A Changed Man" is similarly insightful, and she controls the characters so deftly--and understands them so well--that even the most unlikely romance (it would seem laughable if I described the novel's plot) becomes not only plausible but quite compelling.
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A novelist is a person who can live in other people's skins, said E.L. Doctorow. I know of no other writer (other than Francine Prose) who can imagine so fully what a great variety of people, clearly very different from her, think and feel. In this brilliantly keen novel, she displays her nearly clairvoyant talents in a Tolstoyan fashion, but in addition to the profound psychological insights, she displays something else that...
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