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Summary
Summary
"Oates' American saga captivates because it exists within an actual drama playing out across the country...Martyrs is a graceful and excruciating story of two families who do not live very far apart, but exist in different realities. " --USA Today, 4-star review
"Successful because [Oates] refuses to satirize or dehumanize anyone, even murderous foes of abortion...With its wrath and violence, A Book of American Martyrs offers this teaspoon of warmth in these troubled times: that it is possible to be wrong without surrendering your humanity." --Los Angeles Times
"The most relevant book of Oates's half-century-long career, a powerful reminder that fiction can be as timely as this morning's tweets but infinitely more illuminating." --Washington Post
A powerfully resonant and provocative novel from American master and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates
In this striking, enormously affecting novel, Joyce Carol Oates tells the story of two very different and yet intimately linked American families. Luther Dunphy is an ardent Evangelical who envisions himself as acting out God's will when he assassinates an abortion provider in his small Ohio town while Augustus Voorhees, the idealistic but self-regarding doctor who is killed, leaves behind a wife and children scarred and embittered by grief.
In her moving, insightful portrait, Joyce Carol Oates fully inhabits the perspectives of two interwoven families whose destinies are defined by their warring convictions and squarely-but with great empathy-confronts an intractable, abiding rift in American society.
A Book of American Martyrs is a stunning, timely depiction of an issue hotly debated on a national stage but which makes itself felt most lastingly in communities torn apart by violence and hatred.
Author Notes
Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Syracuse University and a master's degree in English from the University of Wisconsin.
She is the author of numerous novels and collections of short stories. Her works include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Bellefleur, You Must Remember This, Because It Is Bitter, Because It Is My Heart, Solstice, Marya : A Life, and Give Me Your Heart. She has received numerous awards including the National Book Award for Them, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature. She was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her title Lovely, Dark, Deep. She also wrote a series of suspense novels under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith. In 2015, her novel The Accursed became listed as a bestseller on the iBooks chart.
She worked as a professor of English at the University of Windsor, before becoming the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She and her late husband Raymond J. Smith operated a small press and published a literary magazine, The Ontario Review.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
On Nov. 2, 1999 in Muskegee Falls, Ohio, a self-described "soldier of God" named Luther Dunphy loads a shotgun, drives to an abortion clinic near his home, and guns down Dr. Augustus Voorhees as he arrives at work. In this chilling novel, bestselling author Oates (Carthage) approaches one of America's enduringly divisive topics through the lens of a sprawling family epic. The bulk of the novel deals with the shooting's aftermath and its impact on the daughters of Dunphy and Voorhees-two women whose lives are permanently shifted by their fathers' legacy for opposite sides of the contentious abortion-rights debate. Divided into five sections, the book begins by delving into the lives of Dunphy (now on death row) and Voorhees before the narrative finally coalesces around Naomi Voorhees's floundering attempts to understand her family, leading her to a career in documentary filmmaking and a surprising connection with Dawn "The Hammer of Jesus" Dunphy, whose anger and aggression propel her into a championship-level boxing career. Unfortunately, some of the emotional nuance is thinly developed, with the majority of the characters standing as archetypes of opposing worldviews. Nevertheless, Oates's sprawling tale presents a sensitively painted portrait of the inextricable quality of grief and the weight of family legacy, showing how unexpected connections can bind people together in counterintuitive ways. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
A BOOK OF AMERICAN MARTYRS, by Joyce Carol Oates. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $19.99.) Early in Oates's novel, Luther Dunphy, an evangelical, invokes the Lord just before shooting dead an abortion provider, Augustus Voorhees. The story chronicles the fallout of the killing for the Dunphy and Voorhees families, and even if it's soon clear whom Oates considers the martyrs to be, she examines the moral complexities of abortion from several sides. HIS FINAL BATTLE: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt, by Joseph Lelyveld. (Vintage, $18.) Seeking an unprecedented fourth term as president, Roosevelt was far sicker than he let on, and perhaps knew he would not live long. Lelyveld, the former executive editor of The New York Times, reviews Roosevelt's last 16 months in office, including the Manhattan Project and the culmination of World War II. DIFFICULT WOMEN, by Roxane Gay. (Grove, $16.) For many of the characters across this collection, Gay's first book of short stories, love, sex, intimacy and violence are intertwined; in the opening tale, two sisters have forged an unbreakable bond in the hands of a predator. Our reviewer, Gemma Sieff, praised "the cryptic, claustrophobic relationships described in these pages and the strange detours that riddle Gay's imaginary landscapes." LOVE FOR SALE: Pop Music in America, by David Hajdú. (Picador, $17.) From vaudeville singers and the jazz clubs of 1920s Harlem to present-day streaming services, Hajdú, a music critic for The Nation, traces the evolution of popular music over roughly the past hundred years. Weaving together his personal and critical reflections, Hajdú tries to answer a vexing set of questions: When we talk about pop music, what precisely do we mean? And does it still matter to American culture? VICTORIA, by Daisy Goodwin. (St. Martin's Griffin, $16.99) Soon after her 18th birthday, Victoria ascended to the throne. Goodwin, who adapted Victoria's biography for a PBS Masterpiece drama, focuses on the young queen's life before her marriage to Albert, as she reckons with her independence and power. As our reviewer, Priya Parmar, said, this depiction of Victoria sought out "the woman she actually was." THE BRIDGE TO BRILLIANCE: How One Woman and One Community Are Inspiring the World, by Nadia Lopez with Rebecca Paley. (Penguin, $17.) Lopez runs the Mott Hall Bridges Academy in Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood, and rose to prominence when the Humans of New York photographer Brandon Stanton visited her. She looks at the challenges educators face in reaching the nation's poorest children.
Library Journal Review
In 1999 in rural Ohio, "Army of God" antiabortionist Luther Dunphy assassinates OB/GYN Gus Voorhees and his volunteer driver outside of the clinic where Dr. -Voorhees provides abortions. The families of the two men are torn apart as wives and children are left to deal with the aftermath, with Oates's narrative moving among -Luther's account of his life before and after the killing and the lives of his daughter, Dawn, and Gus's daughter, Naomi. Naomi's and Dawn's converging paths as aspiring documentary filmmaker and promising boxer are particularly compelling as each young woman battles her demons and holds the hope for some future reconciliation. The result is a timely tale of two divided American families and their respective journeys through the grief of losing fathers, sons, and husbands. -VERDICT Best-selling, award-winning author Oates (We Were the Mulvaneys) hardly needs introduction, and her satisfying, multilayered offering will surely be in demand. Book groups would do well to add this to their springtime fare for lively discussion material. In the light of recent American political events, questions put forward by Oates's latest should be addressed, even if clear answers may be hard to find. [See Prepub Alert, 8/15/16.]--Jennifer B. -Stidham, Houston Community Coll. Northeast © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
