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Adams worked as an insider at the highest levels of academic administration for much longer than anyone should ever have to. This book clearly takes up much of the hatred of the culture wars. You can see this topic played out in The Education of Max Bickford, or in novels like Straight Man, but the topic is so much more painfully dissected in this novel, as the people involved in the internecine war are much more human than they are ideological machines, and it's the humanity that suffers in the present conversation between traditional academic scholars and cultural studies mavens.It's hard to put your finger on why this book is great. I've always been interested in anarchist communes of the Pacific Northwest. There's research and a resurrection of one of these. Another strong interest is how sexual harassment is being used as a weapon to gain academic power by a very small minority, and how this weapon is destroying any sense of collegiality in humanities departments. what Adams reaches for is the humanity behind people in those humanities departments. It is this that nobody really dares to show, but which is nevertheless always there. This novel won't be for everyone. Anyone, however, who has suffered through the culture wars while attending graduate school in English at the University of Washington, however, will find this book right on the money. I'm not sure if other graduate programs are as terribly afflicted as that one, but that school was a disaster in which all sense of conversation had broken down, and only single-issue name-calling, and lies, and the bearing of false witness remained, except for a few small circles when they were in very protected environments. This novel astutely and rather wisely recounts that one battleground in the cultural wars. I feel almost grateful to have gone through that war just in order to have this book's psychogeography down pat. Novels like this take something horrible and make it comprehensible, and manage to create a sense of community out of the incommunicable.I'm grateful. I suspect that those who aren't very in on the lingo and debates of the last few years in literary studies will have a tough go with this one and be unable to quite get their bearings. For me, I couldn't put it down. It was a powerful and tremendous book that moved me as deeply as literature ever has, and is likely to remain one of my favorite books. there were some characters I couldn't get a feel for, and some of the plot concerning the fin de siecle anarchists seemed slow, as I couldn't wait to get back to the sexual harassment case in present time, but finally the author managed to pull it all together into a very impressive ending. This book is a song of experience: a lifetime spent in academia distilled, and one feels the author's simultaneous gratitude, amusement, and sorrow all mixed together and in no particular order.