"A remarkable achievement, a vividly detailed and deeply textured mural of a century of American life....StartFragmentThroughoutthe novel, Dew renders the political personal and the personal incandescent....She StartFragmentzoomsinto the hearts and minds of her characters with the kind of acuity thatreminds us why we read."EndFragmentEndFragment - Rachel Basch - Washington PostRobb Forman Dew is a master at delineating the way the mundane and profound are joined at the hip, and Being Polite to Hitler in its portrait of midcentury America shuttles us smoothly from the most intimate heartbreak to events of interest worldwide, reminding us of the nearly infinite variations of grief, and solace, and how even the most conscientious and compassionate can leave emotional havoc in their wake. - Jim Shepard, author of Like You'd Understand, AnywayRobb Forman Dew is one of our great national treasures: a novelist whose keen and sympathetic understanding of human nature is matched by her elegant, beautiful prose. Being Polite to Hitler is an absorbing story in which many readers will find their own families, and their own selves. - Dani Shapiro, author of Family History and Devotion: A MemoirNational Book Award winner Dew (for Dale Loves Sophie to Death) uses her signature elegant and often delightfully funny style to move seamlessly back and forth between the macro- and microcosm of the new America. Her latest should generate demand for the first two series titles as well. - Beth E. Andersen - Library JournalNational Book Award-winner Dew wraps up the trilogy she began with The Evidence Against Her by considering, in ways both joyful and elegiac, the juxtaposition of the profound and the mundane through the years 1953 to 1973 in smalltown Washburn, Ohio.... Agnes is clearly a literary heir of Mrs. Ramsay, and the narrative, ranging freely not only among Agnes's sprawling family but also throughout her political and cultural milieu, owes a debt to Woolf. Particularly when read in conjunction with her other novels about Washburn, Dew's latest is an impressionistic portrait of a family and an age striving for clarity and understanding. - Publishers WeeklyA winning, quietly lyrical account of a simpler time. - Lisa Kay Greissinger - People
