Beet (P.S. Series)

Beet College is doomed...and nobody really cares. The Board of Trustees, led by developer Joel Bollovate, has squandered the endowment. Debutante-cum-self-styled-poet Matha Polite, an indiscriminate radical with a four-student following, wants to bring the institution down. Sweet-tempered terrorist hopeful Akim Ben Ladin (né Arthur Horowitz) sits in his off-campus cave and dreams about blowing Beet up. Faculty members are too busy concocting useless, trendy courses to do anything about it. Not to mention that American higher education is going down the tubes, one less lesser school isn't going to matter. So why is Professor Peace Porterfield trying to save Beet? Beats us.

The Washington Post - Ron Charles

…an academic satire greased by the kind of insight and rage that could come only from enduring a thousand stultifying faculty meetings…Of course, the litter of academic satires is already very large. After classics from Kingsley Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, Malcolm Bradbury, Mary McCarthy, Richard Russo, Jane Smiley, Tom Wolfe and others, Beet doesn't break any new ground, but it certainly holds its own in this well-furrowed field. Again and again, I wanted to call up old colleagues still toiling away in the groves of academe and tell them about hysterical moments in this book.

Roger Rosenblatt's essays for Time magazine and PBS have won two George Polk Awards, the Peabody, and the Emmy. He is the author of six Off-Broadway plays and thirteen books, including the national bestseller Rules for Aging and Children of War, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has written two satirical novels, Beet and Lapham Rising, also a national bestseller. In 2008 he was appointed Distinguished Professor of English and Writing at Stony Brook University.