Fiction

Man of the Hour

Name: Man of the Hour
Author: Peter Blauner
ISBN: 9781453215227

by Peter Blauner

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Overview

After a teacher saves his students from a terrorist attack, he finds himself at the center of the investigation
Coney Island is a weird place, packed with people from every walk of life, and David Fitzgerald fits in well. An English professor at a tough public school, he works hard to connect with students with whom he has little in common. Sometimes he succeeds; sometimes he fails. But one of his failures is about to become a catastrophe. A former student of David’s, Nasser Hamdy, has fallen in with a group of Islamic extremists who practice a cheap kind of jihad, mugging and robbing in the name of their holy war. But when they graduate to bomb-making, David finds himself wrapped up in their scheme—first as a target, and then as a suspect. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Peter Blauner including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

Synopsis

A terrorist attack casts one man as a hero—and suspect—in this "remarkable" thriller from the New York Times–bestselling author (Stephen King). Coney Island is a weird place, packed with people from every walk of life, and David Fitzgerald fits in well. An English professor at a tough public school, he works hard to connect with students with whom he has little in common. Sometimes he succeeds; sometimes he fails. But one of his failures is about to become a catastrophe. A former student of David's, Nasser Hamdy, has fallen in with a group of Islamic extremists who practice a cheap kind of jihad, mugging and robbing in the name of their holy war. But when they graduate to bomb-making, David finds himself wrapped up in their scheme—first as a target, and then as a suspect. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Peter Blauner including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author's personal collection.

About the Author, Peter Blauner

Peter Blauner (b. 1959) has spent nearly his entire life in New York City. After graduating from Wesleyan University he took a staff job at New York Magazine, where he found the inspiration for his first book, the Edgar Award–winning Slow Motion Riot, in the men and women who work in the city’s probation department. Since then, he has written five more novels: Casino Moon, the New York Times bestseller The Intruder, Man of the Hour, The Last Good Day, and 2006’s Slipping Into Darkness.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

Peter Blauner's pressure cooker, Man of the Hour, is an explosive and telling time bomb about a radical anti-American terrorist faction, an outraged nation, and the unfortunate man who's caught in the middle. After David Fitzgerald, a high school English teacher, heroically risks his life to save a student from a bomb-gutted school bus, Americans everywhere herald his name. But when suspicions rise that Fitzgerald may be the one to blame, his 15 minutes of fame turn into a potential lifetime of hell. What's worse? Now the truly guilty are set to strike again.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Thorough reportage and dead-on description make Blauner's latest city-streets novel (after 1997's paperback bestseller The Intruder) as impressive for its realism as for its suspense. David Fitzgerald is a slang-talking, highly literate 40-year-old English teacher who tolerates the frustrations of working at dilapidated Coney Island High School for the sake of students like bright, conflicted Palestinian Elizabeth Hamdy. Elizabeth's older brother, Nasser, was also once in Fitzgerald's class. Unreachable and full of hatred for America and Israel, he has joined a terrorist group that practices jihad, believing that even robbing a convenience store or killing a child is sanctioned by God's will. When Nasser and his fellow terrorists plant a bomb in a school bus, Fitzgerald becomes an accidental hero by preventing most of his class from entering the vehicle and then risking his life to rescue a pregnant teenager who is already on board. Circumstantial factors, however, soon reverse Fitzgerald's image and he becomes a prime suspect in the bombing, savaged by the system but never officially accused. Dysfunctional urban settings inhabited by uneasy, suspicious immigrants create a backdrop to Fitzgerald's personal drama: a marriage to a mentally unstable actress, and a deep fear that his contact with his son will be terminated. Blauner, a former journalist, writes about the media with the jaded authority of an insider. His novel looks unflinchingly at the aspects of contemporary American life that make morality a transient, relative principle.

Library Journal

The "man of the hour," David Fitzgerald, is a teacher at Coney Island High School who faces his responsibilities with all the right stuff: enthusiasm for learning, an empathic understanding of his students, and intellectual discipline. But when he becomes the lead suspect in the bombing of a school bus that results in the death of the driver, he soon learns that some things in life are beyond human control. In no time, he is chin-deep in trouble: suspended, ostracized, hounded by a rapacious press, and grilled by the police. Two other characters also take up the story: the real culprit, Nasser, a former student of Palestinian descent who is a member of a group waging a holy war against the United States, and his sister, Elizabeth, who still attends Coney Island High. Blauner's (The Intruder, LJ 4/15/96) gifts as a storyteller come through in mettlesome form, and the skill of the narrative is only surpassed by the subtle and thorough interpretation of human motives. Put this one on your list. -- A.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston

Scott Sutherland

Nasser's awkward, jittery presence gives the story its edge as well as its narrative spark...
— The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

Taking a page from the Atlanta Olympics, Blauner turns a Coney Island high school teacher into a reluctant hero, and then a mercilessly persecuted suspect, in a terrorist bombing. Each day, David Fitzgerald teaches a course on the literature of heroism; each night, pondering the breakup of his marriage and his struggle to stay ahead of bills for his lawyers and for his son Arthur's expenses, he wonders whether he could ever be a hero himself. But David finds out more than he ever wanted to know about heroism when Nasser Hamdy, an unsuccessful Jordanian alumnus whose younger sister Elizabeth is David's star pupil, plants a bomb under the bus about to take David's students on a field trip. Though the bus driver is killed, David's delay in boarding his charges saves all but Seniqua Rollins, whom he pulls from the flames in a rescue that puts him on every front page in America. Blauner is particularly good on the ways David's original qualms about his packaging as a ubiquitous modern hero give way to a half-eager acceptance of his own unsought fame. But ambitious reporter Judy Mandel, as much out of her depth as David is out of his, finds that she can stay on top of the breaking story only by casting him as a potential suspect-a crucifixion Blauner also evokes with cunning power. (His slyest touch: David is never indicted or even arrested, tried entirely in the unforgiving court of public opinion.) The trouble with this arresting premise, torn from yesterday's headlines, about the ironic interlocking of the roles of hero and traitor, is that it's got nowhere to go; even readers gulping down the tale at one sitting will easily see how it'll turn out. Despite the big push from thepublisher, then, this smoothly predictable suspenser isn't the big success that The Intruder (1997) was. But Blauner's last thriller should be out in paperback just in time to read instead.