Books - Inside, Outside

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	Books - Inside, Outside

Inside, Outside is a 1985 Herman Wouk novel telling the story of four generations of a Russian Jewish family and its travails in Russia and America. The book is a first person narrative told from the viewpoint of Israel David Goodkind, the third of the four generations in the book. The story unfolds as Goodkind works in a minor bureaucratic post in the White House between March and October 1973; his insignificance gives him time to work on his memoirs (the book itself, which is told as though Goodkind wrote it) while his position gives him opportunities to come face to face with the harried President Richard Nixon.

The story alternates between Goodkind's story of his family history and early years (specifically, his first 26 years (1915-1941)) and his account of current events in 1973, leading up to the moment of the Yom Kippur War. The tales of Goodkind's early years center, naturally, around his family - his mother and father, his sister, his mother's father and father's mother, his mother's half sister, and a tribe of more distant uncles, aunts and cousins (the Mishpocha) - while the tales of his present day in 1973 are centered on his wife, his daughter, their friends, two of his old college friends from Columbia, and Nixon, and the tales of his twenties are centered on his first major flame Bobby Webb, his co-worker and roommate Peter Quat, and his boss Harry Goldhandler, a gagwriter for Broadway shows and radio comedy programs.

Among the famous people Goodkind comes face to face with in the course of the book besides Nixon are Golda Meir, Zero Mostel, Marlene Dietrich, and the Gershwin brothers.

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