This is a love story of great beauty and great tenderness, the kind of love story that entangles the listener in the lives of the characters, so that after the story is over, one continues to live with those characters. And fortunately, the listener will not have to say farewell to these characters. The Immigrants is complete in itself, an absorbing novel of high adventure, romance, joy and tragedy. But it is also the first in a series that will tell the story of three Californian families over the course of the twentieth century.
Howard Fast has placed the entire action of this highly charged novel in the space of one day at the substantial home of a prominent United States senator. This dinner party sounds like a well-ordered and gracious affair, but as events unfold, there are things to be settled - some are political and ethical, some are emotional, and some are questions of life and death. This is a profound and important novel with the dramatic intensity of first class theater.
In The Establishment, Howard Fast pulls the listener into the turbulent and passionate lives of the Dan Lavette family story begun in The Immigrants and continued in Second Generation. Howard Fast again brings to life a cast of characters whose lives become a portrait of their time.
Listeners will witness the events in the lives of the children of Dan Lavette: Follow daughter Barbara Lavette, a strong and magnetic personality, from tragedy to final fulfillment; observe the elder son, Tom, as he quests for and finally succumbs to his own unscrupulous drive for power; and feel the conflict as the younger son, Joe, struggles between dedication to his medical work to the poor and having no emotional strength left for his beautiful wife left alone.
In this triumphant conclusion to the Lavette saga, Howard Fast brings the story up to the present, to the fourth generation. As Dan Lavette dominated The Immigrants, so his eldest child, Barbara, is the focus of this wide-ranging and passionate novel. After a life filled with danger, love and death, Barbara, now in her sixties, is living a simple life in San Francisco. And then, almost on a whim, she runs for Congress and sets in motion a series of adventures that brings her back to the excitement of the times, to a renewal of romantic love, to mortal danger as a reporter in Central America, to loss and tragedy, and in the end, to an exultant embracing of life.
The Legacy continues the saga of the Lavette family begun in these bestsellers: The Immigrants, Second Generation, and The Establishment. This fourth-in-series story takes place during the turbulent 1960s as Barbara Lavette and her family are embroiled in the issues of that decade: Civil Rights, Israel's Six-Day War, the Nixon years, Vietnam and riots in the street. Barbara Lavette develops into a powerful, strong willed, capable person while the children of the third generation of Lavettes take their place in society and stand by their own ideals and values. The Legacy will capture listeners with its involving story and leave them wanting more!
Howard Fast, author of The Immigrants, has proven himself to be one of this country's most popular authors. This second volume about the fortunes of Dan Lavette, the young Italian who lost his parents but launched a stormy and brilliant career as a result of the great San Francisco earthquake, encompasses an even more dramatic sweep of history from the depression years to the close of World War II. It is the rare novelist who can create a world with such empathy and passion that the listener actually comes to share the loves and emotions of its characters.
The unforgettable novelistic recreation of the night before Christmas when General Washington and a rag-tag army slipped across the Delaware to surprise the Hessians and forge a nation.
Historical novelist Howard Fast brings the past colorfully to life with his powerful stories. In his best-selling April Morning, he portrays a young man's introduction to the harsh realities of war during our nation's fight for independence. Fifteen-year-old Adam Cooper is anxcious to join the excitement and action of the Revolutionary War. On the morning of April 19, 1775, he stands beside his Massachusetts farmer father to face the redcoats marching out of Boston. But suddenly, his father falls on the village green, and Adam's hands are shaking as he shoots at columns of marching men. With realistic drama and riveting suspense, Howard Fast brings the glory and the agony of the colonial battlefield vividly to life.
"There is no human being on the face of this earth exempt from the Jewish influence. For as long as there has been history, the Jew has wandered through it, shaping it at times, riding the current silently at other times, but always leaving his mark. History without the Jew? It is inconceivable."-Howard Fast. This popular history brings the history of the Jewish people into focus, from Genesis to contemporary times.
It was everywhere. You couldn't talk about the revolution without using the word freedom in the same breath. But Gideon Jackson knew that freedom meant something different if your skin was black. Fast's fictional account of the post Civil War era takes us into the life of Gideon Jackson, a black man, newly freed, and determined to make a difference.
