Cheap In the Presence of Mine Enemies (Book) (Harry Turtledove) Price

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Customer Reviews of In the Presence of Mine Enemies

Good Ideas, not a great novel
I've read the majority of Harry Turtledove's novels, and I've noticed on his more recent efforts that he is either getting worse as a writer or my tastes are becoming more refined. Turtledove has good ideas in all of his books, and this is no exception. He just isn't a very good writer. For some reason, he feels like he has to beat everything to death. About once every three pages he reminds the reader that these people are Jews and if they get caught, they're done for. He repeats things like this ad nauseum. I wish he would try to be a little more subtle and let the reader read between the lines. He has the same problem in his American Empire series.

Also, as someone else said, there really isn't a lot that happens in this book. I was hoping for some more action. There are way too many bridge scenes, and if you don't know how to play bridge, you won't understand these.

I always find myself buying Turtledove's books even though I can't stand his style because his ideas are interesting. So this book has some things going for it, but be prepared to sift through a lot of filler.

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Great book
This is a great book about a future that fortunately did not happen. It is also, in many ways about pasts that did happen in several places and throughout history. I know the "if the Nazis had won the second world war" theme has been beaten to death. I would however like to point out that this is NOT the theme of this book -- the theme of this book is hidden identity, public identity and the scary point at which the two merge. (It is also an interesting study in how dictatorships exploit what ANYONE has to hide. Any careful reader will notice that even the non-Jewish characters are afraid and have things they would like to hide.) As such, the fact that the fall of the Reich is much like the fall of the USSR (and really, we don't have any other models for the fall of a dictatorship in the modern age) didn't disturb me. The second half of the book is a tale of how the characters bring both their public and their secret identities into actualization and achieve some sort of coherent whole. It is a story of the characters -- Jewish and not -- finding their humanity with their freedom.

As such, I don't know a more relevant story for our time. A book worth buying, reading, re-reading and reading to your children.

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Fall of the USSR as the Greater German Reich
Turtledove likes to follow real history in his books, with an added twist. Here, he expands on one of his short stories of Germans winning both World War 2 and 3. Following a family of hidden Jews at the heart of an eighty year Reich, Turtledove uses the real history of the fall of the USSR to map out the transformation of the Reich into a more modern liberal state. It was an interesting read, took me about a day. Turtledove does go into a bit too much detail with the card games and I thought the school system mentioned throughout was a little more old German-American and a lot less of the actual German system. I am not certain if that was to make the schools more understandable to Americans or what. Interesting and made me think.