Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm only partway through this, but can tell you as a child of a Cornell professor in the years depicted, the author (born 1980) has no idea about the time and place he's writing about, except maybe in the Blum/Netanyahu/Cohen heads who think they know what other people are thinking. More a novel about current Israeli (Ashkenazi vs Sephardim) and campus politics, projected onto the past, than about Cornell and Ithaca at that time. A lot of Monsey, Borough Park and Prospect Heights yeshiva-think. If you're Jewish, you may find it funny; if you're a 'goy' you probably won't. My advice: take a pass on any book or author blurbed by James Wood or Harold Bloom. Much better books about Cornell and Ithaca are Nabokov's 'Pnin' and 'Pale Fire', Richard Farina's 'Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me' and Alison Lurie's 'The War Between the Tates'. Among the many anachronisms: Cool Whip in a can and Pampers didn't exist in 1958, nor did Route 81, and no parent read or edited their kid's college essays or obsessed over where they'd get in. No one served wine and cheese at a faculty get-together. Cornell has never had a theological seminary, and no student or professor has ever had to attend chapel there. Women were admitted since the day of the university's founding. Many of the most distinguished faculty (Hans Bethe, David Brion Davis, Urie Bronfenbrenner, Alfred Kahn, Alison Lurie, Felix Reichman) were Jewish. If Jews were as boorish as Cohen makes them sound, they would not have found a warm welcome at the Ithaca Yacht Club, but my father's Jewish colleagues were not, and the only person I know who was blackballed was a neighbor my father put up for membership, who was turned down because he had been a pacifist and conscientious objector during the war. As the title page says, this is a book of fiction, as indeed it is. I doubt there was any university in the northeast at the time that resembles this fabulation, except in Cohen's head.