BOBBY IN NAZILAND is the new book from the author of the bestselling John Lennon bio Nowhere Man.From the final days of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the mid-1950s to the arrival of the Beatles in 1964, Bobby in Naziland is an unsentimental journey through
one Brooklyn neighborhood. Though only a 20-minute and 15-cent subway ride from the skyscrapers of Manhattan, Flatbush remained provincial and working-class―a place where Auschwitz survivors and W.W. II vets lived side by side and the war lingered like a mass hallucination.Meet Bobby, a local kid who shares a shabby apartment with his status-conscious mother and bigoted father, a soda jerk haunted by memories of the
Nazi death camp he helped liberate. Flatbush, to Bobby, is a world of brawls with neighborhood “punks,” Hebrew-school tales of Adolf Eichmann’s daring capture, and grade-school duck-and-cover drills. Drawn to images of mushroom clouds and books about executions, Bobby ultimately turns the seething hatred he senses everywhere against himself.From a perch in his father’s candy store, Bobby provides a child’s-eye view of the mid-20th-century American experience―a poignant intertwining of the
personal and historical.Filled with echoes of the current moment, Bobby in Naziland also vividly depicts the racism that Donald Trump—who grew up just a few miles from
Flatbush, in Queens—knew intimately and exploited to win the presidency.TARGET AUDIENCE
Baby boomers, Brooklyn aficionados, history buffs, Beatles and baseball fans, and anyone who’s come of age in a confusing world.ADVANCE PRAISE
“Sexy, funny, heartbreaking, terrifying…. I hear Robert Rosen singing a universal song, and I love it!” —Thomas E. Kennedy, author of In the Company of Angels“A compelling portrait of a time and a place that no longer exists…. Rosen’s book is speaking for a generation.” —The Huffington Post“A poignant sketch of Flatbush during a time when the borough lost the Dodgers and the nation lost its innocence. Compulsively readable, especially for Boomers.” —Doug Garr, former speechwriter for New York governor Mario Cuomo; author of Between Heaven and Earth: An Adventure in Free Fall