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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

For sixty years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a temporary safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.

Homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. And in the cheap hotel where Landsman has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under his nose. When he begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy, word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, and Landsman finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, evil and salvation that are his heritage.

At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.

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