THE LOTUS EATERS
Gerald Green
(Longmans, London, 1959)
Condition: Fair to good. Hardcover with dust jacket showing wear at edges and spine; some foxing and small tears along jacket folds. Pages clean, light toning and binding firm.
About the Book:
Following his success with The Last Angry Man, Gerald Green turns his sharp social eye to the excesses and contradictions of postwar America. The Lotus Eaters contrasts the hedonistic glitter of a Florida pleasure resortits hotels, bars, beaches, and moral sinkholeswith an archaeological dig nearby, where scientists are unearthing the remains of a primitive civilization.
At the heart of the novel stand two men:
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Tom Sorrento, a disillusioned ex-football hero turned anthropologist, searching for meaning in the ruins of the past.
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Ira deKay, a slick PR man and pleasure merchant, driven by greed, charm, and cynicism.
Their rivalryprofessional, moral, and romanticplays out amid a world intoxicated by leisure, lust, and self-indulgence. As both men fall for the same woman, Green orchestrates a tense, ironic drama in which the search for pleasure collides with the hunger for truth.
Laced with satire and psychological insight, The Lotus Eaters is a sprawling, cinematic portrayal of the moral disintegration beneath Americas golden façadea contemporary Babylon where the soul risks being drowned in its own comfort.
About the Author:
Gerald Green (19222006) was an American novelist, journalist, and television writer best known for The Last Angry Man (1956), a bestseller adapted into an Academy Awardnominated film. A graduate of Columbia University and a veteran of the U.S. Army, Green worked for NBC and later wrote the screenplay for Holocaust (1978), the groundbreaking television miniseries. His fiction blends journalistic realism with social criticism, exploring themes of moral decay, conscience, and the search for integrity in modern life.
Edition Details:
Publisher: Longmans, Green & Co.
Publication date: 1959
Format: Hardcover with illustrated dust jacket
Category: Fiction / Social Commentary / Psychological Novel