Bibliographical Description
88.09.W055: Hoover – Saigon, Illinois
PAUL | HOOVER | SAIGON | [dotted rule 75 mm] | ILLINOIS | VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES | VINTAGE BOOKS | A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE | NEW YORK
120 leaves, pp. [8] 1 2-5, 6 7-21 22 23-31 32 33-38 39 40-55 56 57-69 70 71-80 81 82-87 88 89-96 97 98-108 109 110-119 120 121-139 140 141-153 154 155-167 168 169-182 183 184-198 199 200-211 212 213-229 [3]
A Vintage Original, September 1988
Contents: π1a blurbs, π1b blank, π2a title, π2b imprint, π3a dedication ‘IN MEMORY OF OPAL CATHERINE HOOVER | AND FOR | MAXINE, KOREN, JULIAN, AND PHILIP’, π3b blank, π4a acknowledgments ‘ACKNOWLEDGMENTS | I AM INDEBTED TO | PAT MULCAHY FOR HER ENCOURAGEMENT | AND ASTUTE EDITING; LIKEWISE TO | VERONICA GENG OF THE NEW YORKER. | I WOULD ALSO LIKE TO THANK | MAXINE CHERNOFF FOR | HER EARLY READINGS OF THE NOVEL.’, π4b blank, 1-229 Saigon, Illinois, χ1b about the author, χ2a Vintage Contemporaries list and order form, χ2b Vintage Contemporaries list, continued, with order form.
Cover design by Lorraine Louie; cover illustration by Rick Lovell; designed by Barbara M. Bachman.
Copyright: © 1988. ISBN: 0-394-75849-8 / 9780394758498. Price: $6.95. Saigon, Illinois was first published by Vintage Contemporaries 1988.
Copies: JDP 1.1
Blurbs
- (front cover) A superb premier novel, a story brimming with life’s wonder and chance. Filled with sharp and canny, kindly wit. – Larry Heinemann, author of Paco’s Story
- Classified as a conscientious objector by his draft board in Malta, Indiana, Jim Holder sets out for Chicago to perform alternative service to his country at a large municipal hospital. The time: 1969. The backdrop: a city where daily life swerves wildly back and forth between lazy days and baseball games to violent demonstrations in the streets. The cast of characters: Holder’s roommates, and their pals (poets manqué, revolutionary hustlers, rich boys turned Trotskyite), and his motley crew of co-workers at the hospital. How many lives can holder touch and still keep his pacifist center in its place? How many bodies can he count—on TV, in the morgue, in the cemeteries of the small towns that surround his own—and still stay clean? In this funny, moving, richly populated novel, Paul Hoover recaptures an era and raises issues still unanswered in our national awareness.
- You can call me Holder. It’s one of your basic names like Gold, Paper, and Anxious. Most of us belong to the Church of Peace, which is German Protestant—Midwestern and rural. We refuse to kill anyone with a gun, or with anything else except good intentions [excerpt].