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  • It took me awhile to come around to this offering from Michael Chabon. I think part of the problem for me was its position as a Hugo and Nebula award winner. I was expecting something with a slightly more science fiction bent to it. Instead I got a very well realized alternate history and pulp de ... Continue

    It took me awhile to come around to this offering from Michael Chabon. I think part of the problem for me was its position as a Hugo and Nebula award winner. I was expecting something with a slightly more science fiction bent to it. Instead I got a very well realized alternate history and pulp detective story.

    While the story starts right in with the primary murder case, it took me awhile to get hooked in to the story. There are places where the narrator tends to ramble a bit in a stream of consciousness sort of way, which had a tendency to bog the story down in spots.

    The building of the alternate history and the Jewish settlement in Alaska is superb. The imagery and feel for the Sitka setting were extremely well done and in the end is what kept me reading, even when things slowed down developmentally.

    

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• ― Braydin said on Mar 18, 2009 about the Hardcover edition| Add your feedback

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  • This is Chabon's best and most entertaining book since Kavalier and Clay. The sarcasm and snark cuts through the bleak Alaskan setting to craft a ripping detective tale.

    

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• ― TFox said on Aug 4, 2007 about the Hardcover edition| Add your feedback

The brilliantly original new novel from Michael Chabon, author of 'The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay' and 'The Final Solution'. What if, as Franklin Roosevelt once proposed, Alaska -- and not Israel -- had become the homeland for the Jews after World War II? In Michael Chabon's Yiddish-speaking 'Alyeska', Orthodox gangs in side-curls and knee breeches roam the streets of Sitka, where Detective Meyer Landsman discovers the corpse of a heroin-addled chess prodigy in the flophouse Meyer calls home. Marionette strings stretch back to the hands of charismatic Rebbe Gold, leader of a sect that seems to have drawn its mission statement from the Cosa Nostra -- but behind Rebbe looms an even larger shadow. Despite sensible protests from Berko, his half-Tlingit, half-Jewish partner, Meyer is determined to unsnarl the meaning behind the murder. Even if that means surrendering his badge and his dignity to the chief of Sitka's homicide unit -- also known as his fearsome ex-wife, Bina. 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union' interweaves a homage to the stylish menace of 1940s film noir with a bittersweet fable of identity, home and faith.It is a novel of colossal ambition and heart from one of the most important and beloved writers working today.

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