From Library Journal
Phil Benson might have become a brilliant concert pianist had he not been so in love with his childhood sweetheart Katie, who had her own obsession--fear of nuclear holocaust. We follow them from the 1950s to the 1980s--from Katie's break off, so as not to hold Phil back from a music scholarship, to Chernobyl. Though Katie marries someone else (he has a bomb shelter), she is so terrified at the time of the Cuban missile crisis that she calls Phil back, and through a devious trick of her jealous husband, spends the next two weeks imprisoned with Phil in the dark, dreary shelter. So much fear and togetherness have a profound effect on both their lives, somehow freeing Katie to become a normal, healthy woman, but turning Phil into a loser, drifting from one job to another. Unfortunately, the situation and characters in this novel just don't seem believable. Kennedy is the author of Faces (LJ 8/87), a collection of short stories. St . Hiroshima was first published in England in 1987.
- Marion Hanscom, SUNY at Binghamton Lib.Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
This story traces the lives of Phil Benson and Katie Doheney. As a boy, Phil tried to summon up an enthusiasm for baseball but his real passion lay in classical music which was considered somehow subversive - not really American, so he used his piano teacher's home as a sanctuary where his musical conspiracy with the universe could flourish. Katie is seen as a victim of another sort of conspiracy - convinced from the first brush of her childhood logic with the real life spectacle of death in a road accident and the image of the Hiroshima mushroom on television. The threat of nuclear holocaust stalked Katie's every moment. Meanwhile Katie stalked Phil Benson and they grew to understand each other's obsessions - Phil's keyboard was Katie's bomb shelter. The novel follows Katie into unlikely matrimony and Phil into the arms of a gun-toting St Louis actress. By the same author: "Faces" and "The Journal of Nicholas the American".
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
