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11/22/63
Author:
King, Stephen
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Class:
Fiction
Age: Adult
Language: English
Demand: Average
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LC: PS3561
Print Run: 2000000
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ISBN-13: 9781451627282
LCCN: 2011025874
Imprint: Scribner
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Pub Date: 11/08/2011
Availability: Available
List: $35.00
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Hardcover
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Physical Description:
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ix, 849 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.
H 9.25",
W 6.12",
D 2.3",
2.72 lbs.
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LC Series:
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Brodart Sources:
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Brodart's Blockbuster List
Brodart's Insight Catalog: Adult
Brodart's TOP Adult Titles
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Bibliographies:
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Booklist High-Demand Hot List
Fiction Core Collection, 17th ed.
Fiction Core Collection, 18th ed.
Fiction Core Collection, 19th ed.
Fiction Core Collection, 20th ed.
Library Journal Bestsellers
Los Angeles Times Bestsellers List
New York Times Bestsellers List
New York Times Bestsellers: Adult Fiction
Publishers Weekly Bestsellers
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Awards:
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Kirkus Best Books
Kirkus Starred Reviews
New York Times Notable Books
Thriller Award Winners
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Starred Reviews:
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Kirkus Reviews
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TIPS Subjects:
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Alternative Histories
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BISAC Subjects: |
FICTION / General
FICTION / Horror
FICTION / Thrillers / Suspense
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LC Subjects:
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Alternative histories (Fiction)
Kennedy, John F., (John Fitzgerald),, 1917-1963, Assassination, Fiction
Time travel, Fiction
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SEARS Subjects: |
Alternative histories
Kennedy, John F., (John Fitzgerald),, 1917-1963, Assassination, Fiction
Time travel, Fiction
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Reading Programs: |
Accelerated Reader Level:
5.4
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Points: 42.0
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| Annotations |
| Brodart's TOP Adult Titles | 07/01/2011 |
| Jake Epping, 35, a high school English teacher, is shocked when he receives a personal essay from a student about a horrific event in his life. Then Jake's friend, Al, tells Jake about a secret portal in his diner that would take time travelers back to 1958. Epping, still reeling from the assassination of President Kennedy, decides to give it a try and change history. LP 5/23/2011 960pp Author res: ME. Large first printing (A) 10-Digit ISBN: 1451627289; 13-Digit ISBN: 9781451627282 Previous: Full Dark, No Stars; Under the Dome, et al. BRODART CO., c2011. |
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| Starred Reviews: |
| Kirkus Reviews | 10/15/2011 |
| King (Under the Dome, 2009, etc.) adds counterfactual historian to his list of occupations. Well, not exactly: The author is really turning in a sturdy, customarily massive exercise in time travel that just happens to involve the possibility of altering history. Didn't Star Trek tell us not to do that? Yes, but no matter: Up in his beloved Maine, which he celebrates eloquently here ('For the first time since I'd topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Dery hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy'), King follows his own rules. In this romp, Jake Epping, a high-school English teacher (vintage King, that detail), slowly comes to see the opportunity to alter the fate of a friend who, in one reality, is hale and hearty but in another dying of cancer, no thanks to a lifetime of puffing unfiltered cigarettes. Epping discovers a time portal tucked away in a storeroom--don't ask why there--and zips back to 1958, where not just his friend but practically everyone including the family pets smokes: 'I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by.' A different world indeed: In this one, Jake, a sort of sad sack back in Reality 1, finds love and a new identity in Reality 2. Not just that, but he now sees an opportunity to unmake the past by inserting himself into some ugly business involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, various representatives of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and JFK in Dallas in the fall of 1963. It would be spoiling things to reveal how things turn out; suffice it to say that any change in Reality 2 will produce a change in Reality 1, not to mention that Oswald may have been a patsy, just as he claimed--or maybe not. King's vision of one outcome of the Kennedy assassination plot reminds us of what might have been--that is, almost certainly a better present than the one in which we're all actually living. 'If you want to know what political extremism can lead to,' warns King in an afterword, 'look at the Zapruder film.' Though his scenarios aren't always plausible in strictest terms, King's imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn. 864pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2011. |
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| Journal Reviews |
| BookPage | 11/01/2011 |
| The buzz on Stephen King's latest novel, 11/22/63, is that it's about a man who goes back in time to save JFK. It's true; that is the mission undertaken by King's hero, 35-year-old high school teacher Jake Epping. But to a careful reader, it quickly becomes clear that this is actually a novel about falling in love: first with a time period, and then with an awkward, tall librarian named Sadie. Jake learns about this portal to the past from his friend Al, the owner of the local diner-slash-time- machine. Al had hoped to thwart Lee Harvey Oswald on his own, but had to return to the present when he became ill with lung cancer. (One of the quirks of King's time-travel is that no matter how long you stay, you only lose two minutes in the present.) So Al boots an unbelieving Jake out through the back door of the diner's storeroom, into a warm September day in 1958. From the moment Jake steps up to a soda counter and orders a root beer, he is hooked on the past. 'It was . . . full. Tasty all the way through,' Jake thinks. Like the apple in the Garden of Eden, the drink has revealed new possibilities. With his 21st-century life off the rails, Jake decides he has nothing to lose by taking up Al's quest. Since Jake arrives in the past in 1958, there's a lot of ground laid before the novel arrives at the titular date of the JFK assassination. Despite the somewhat leisurely pace, the reader is entertained by creepy details about the Oswald family and interludes with 1960s-era spying equipment, which run alongside Jake's gradual embrace of the small Texas town where he takes a job at the high school. He meets Sadie; he is mothered by the school's stern-but-soft principal; he directs the school play. As time passes, his 1960s life becomes more real to Jake than his life in the 21st century. Still, as 1963 approaches, he is unable to forget his mission. Through his depictions of 1950s and '60s life, it's clear that King has a deep affection for the time period in which he grew up. Even so, he's not blind to its problems, portraying the bad smells in the air near factories with no EPA regulations, the racial strife and the poverty. His vision of Dallas is particularly sinister; King compares it to Derry, Maine, his iconic fictional city that just isn't right--one of several nods to his 1986 novel, It. This new novel stands out from King's oeuvre because a villain is not immediately apparent. There's no Plymouth with a mind of its own (Christine), no killer virus (The Stand)--there's not even an unbalanced parent (The Shining, Carrie) or crazed fan (Misery). But the adversary in 11/22/63 is perhaps King's most implacable force yet: history itself. Oswald, who is a lackluster bad guy to say the least, is merely its tool, one of many. History, as Al explains to Jake early on, does not want to be changed--'I felt like a man trying to fight his way out of a nylon stocking. It would give a little, then snap back just as tight as before.'--and the past throws up terrifying obstacles to those who would try. This eerie quality further complicates the typical questions about fate vs. self-determination that time-travel stories raise. Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme has already optioned 11/22/63 for film. Though perhaps less cinematic than some of King's other works, this quietly moving and thought-provoking book, with its unexpectedly poignant ending, is a compelling tale. 960pg. BOOKPAGE, c2011. |
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| Booklist | 09/15/2011 |
| Like the similarly sprawling Under the Dome (2009), this novel was abandoned by King decades ago before he took another shot, and perhaps that accounts for both novels' intoxicating, early-King bouquet of ambition and swagger. In this distant cousin to The Dead Zone (1979), Jake Epping is living a normal schoolteacher's life when a short-order cook named Al introduces him to a time warp hidden in a diner pantry-- leading directly to 11:58 a.m., September 9, 1958. Al's dying of cancer, which means he needs a successor to carry out his grand mission: kill Lee Harvey Oswald so that the 1963 JFK assassination never happens. Jake takes the plunge and finds two things he never expected: true love and the fact that 'the obdurate past' doesn't want to change. The roadblocks King throws into Jake's path are fairly ingenious--some of them are outright gut-punches--while history buffs will dig the upside-down travelogue of Oswald's life. This doesn't loom as large as some King epics; on the other hand, did we appreciate It in 1986 as much as we do now? Leave it at this: fans will love it. High-Demand Backstory: King is his own backstory: demand for anything new will be loud. Daniel Kraus. 864pg. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2011. |
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| Library Journal | 09/15/2011 |
| In King's latest, his first full-length novel since 2009's Under the Dome, the horror master ventures into sf. Maine restaurant owner Al tells high school English teacher Jake Epping that there's a time portal to the year 1958 in his diner. Al has terminal cancer and asks Jake to grant his dying wish: go back in time and prevent the 1963 assassination of JFK. Jake's travels take him first to Derry, ME--the fictional (and creepy) setting of King's 1986 blockbuster It--to try to stop the horrific 1958 murder of a family. Later, he heads to Texas, where he bides his time--teaching in a small town, where he falls for school librarian Sadie Dunhill--and keeps tabs on the thuggish Lee Harvey Oswald. It all leads to an inevitable climax at the Book Depository and an outcome that changes American history. VERDICT Though this hefty novel starts strong, diving energetically into the story and savoring the possibilities of time travel, the middle drags a bit--particularly during Jake's small-town life in Texas. Still, King remains an excellent storyteller, and his evocation of mid-20th-century America is deft. Alternate-history buffs will especially enjoy the twist ending. Film rights have been optioned by Jonathan Demme (of Silence of the Lambs fame). (See Prepub Alert, 5/23/11.)--David Rapp, Library Journal. 864pg. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2011. |
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| Library Journal Prepub Alert | 05/23/2011 |
| You've surely read all about King's latest--you've even read about it here--but the plot bears repeating. Middle-aged high school teacher Jake Epping is told by friend Al that the storeroom of the dinner he runs is a portal to 1958. So Jake slips back to the time of Elvis and cars with fins, falls for the beautiful school librarian, and moves toward those devastating shots on 11/22/63 that ended Kennedy's life and a lot of dreams forever. Can Jake change history? And what does this all have to do with a GED student back in contemporary times whose essay about his father's murder of his mother and siblings has so shaken Jake? Buy multiples, of course. 864pg., CD. LJ Prepub Alert Online Review. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2011. |
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| Publishers Weekly | 09/19/2011 |
| High school English teacher Jake Epping has his work cut out for him in King's entertaining SF romantic thriller. Al Templeton, the proprietor of Al's Diner in Lisbon Falls, Maine, has discovered a temporal 'rabbit hole' in the diner's storage room that leads to a point in the past-- 11:58 a.m. September 9, 1958, to be precise. Each time you go through the rabbit hole, according to Al, only two minutes have elapsed when you return to 2011, no matter how long your stay; furthermore, history resets itself each time you return to that morning 53 years ago. Al persuades Jake to take a brief, exploratory trip through the rabbit hole into 1958 Lisbon Falls. After Jake's return, a suddenly older and sick- looking Al confesses that he spent several years in this bygone world, in an effort to prevent President Kennedy's assassination, but because he contracted lung cancer, he was unable to fulfill his history-changing mission. 'You can go back, and you can stop' the assassination, he tells Jake. Jake, with only an alcoholic ex-wife by way of family, is inclined to honor his dying friend's request to save JFK, but he also has a personal reason to venture into the past. A night school student of his, school janitor Harry Dunning, recently turned in an autobiographical essay describing how on Halloween night 1958 Dunning's father took a hammer to Dunning's mother and other family members with, in some cases, fatal results. An attempt to head off this smaller tragedy provides a test case for Jake, to see if he can alter the past for the better. Hundreds of pages later, once over the initial hurdles, Jake is working under a pseudonym as a high school teacher in Jodie, Tex., an idyllic community north of Dallas. Knowing who's going to win sporting events like the World Series comes in handy when he's short of funds, though this ability to foretell the future turns out to have a downside. Indeed, the past, as Jake discovers to his peril, has an uncanny, sometimes violent way of resisting change, of putting obstacles in the way of anyone who dares fiddle with it. The author of Carrie knows well how to spice the action with horrific shivers. In Jodie, Jake meets a fellow teacher, Sadie Dunhill, who's estranged from her husband, a religious fanatic with serious sexual hangups. Jake and Sadie fall in love, but their relationship has its difficulties, not least because Jake is reluctant to tell Sadie his real identity or reason for being in Texas. Clearly inspired by Jack Finney's classic Time and Again, King smoothly blends their romance into the main story line, setting up the bittersweet ending that's as apt as it is surprising. He also does a fine job evoking the sights, sounds, and smells of the late '50s and early '60s. The root beer even tastes better back then. By early 1963, Jake is zeroing in on a certain former U.S. Marine who defected to the Soviet Union and has recently returned to the U.S. with his Russian wife. Relying on Al's judgment, Jake is only about 75% sure that Lee Harvey Oswald alone shot JFK, so he spends much time trying to ascertain whether Oswald is part of a conspiracy. Jake admits to not having researched the Kennedy assassination while still in 2011 Maine. If he had, he might've given up after concluding that it would be hopeless to try to stop, say, the Mafia, or the CIA, or Vice President Johnson from killing Kennedy. On the other hand, the plot would've been a lot less interesting if Jake, convinced on entering the past that Oswald was the sole gunman, felt compelled to eliminate Oswald long before that pathetic loser settled into his sniper's nest in the Texas School Book Depository, toward which Jake winds up racing on the morning of November 22, 1963.In an afterword, King puts the probability that Oswald acted alone at 'ninety-eight percent, maybe even ninety-nine.' 'It is very, very difficult for a reasonable person to believe otherwise,' he adds. King cites several major books he consulted, but omits what I consider the definitive tome on the subject, Vincent Bugliosi's Edgar-winning Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (Norton, 2007). Bugliosi, who makes an overwhelming case in my view that the Warren Commission essentially got it right, covers the same ground as a book King does mention, Gerald Posner's Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (Random, 2003), then goes on to destroy the arguments of the conspiracy theorists, with wit and ridicule as weapons. Of course, there will always be intelligent and otherwise reasonable people, like PW's anonymous reviewer of Reclaiming History and King's wife, novelist Tabitha King (a life-long 'contrarian,' King tells us), who side with the host of cranks emotionally invested in believing Oswald was the patsy he claimed. Those folks may have a problem with this suspenseful time-travel epic, but the rest of us will happily follow well-meaning, good-hearted Jake Epping, the anti-Oswald if you will, on his quixotic quest. Peter Cannon is PW's Mystery/Thriller reviews editor. 864pg. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2011. |
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9781451627282,dl.it[0].title
| Review Citations |
| New York Times Book Review | 11/13/2011 |
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