Book Review : The Plot against America by Philip Roth (Rating ****)
When the hubristic, newly elected US president boasts of America's invulnerability to foreign attack, the sense of imminent calamity is overwhelming. The title invokes 9/11, but the novel is set 60 years ago. The plot against America isn't Islamic but homegrown (with a little assistance from Germany). And instead of reconstructing real historical events, as David Hare does in Stuff Happens, Philip Roth offers something bolder: a reconstruction of imagined events, a "what if...?" that reads like a "what really happened". Just suppose...that the air hero Charles Lindbergh, the man who made the first solo transatlantic flight in 1927, who earned huge sympathy when his baby son was kidnapped and murdered five years later, who called Hitler "a great man" and was decorated by order of the Führer for his services to the Reich, just suppose that he'd taken up Republican invitations to run for president in November 1940, and milked the