Beet - by Roger Rosenblatt (Paperback)

From the Back Cover

Roger Rosenblatt's dazzling comic gifts are on enviable display....Beet will settle the issue: is Roger Rosenblatt our most audacious comic visionary, or our most audacious visionary comic?"--Joyce Carol Oates

Beet College is doomed...and nobody really cares. The Board of Trustees, led by developer Joel Bollovate, has squandered the endowment. Debutante-cum-self-styled-poet Matha Polite, an indiscriminate radical with a four-student following, wants to bring the institution down. Sweet-tempered terrorist hopeful Akim Ben Ladin (né Arthur Horowitz) sits in his off-campus cave and dreams about blowing Beet up. Faculty members are too busy concocting useless, trendy courses to do anything about it. Not to mention that American higher education is going down the tubes, one less lesser school isn't going to matter. So why is Professor Peace Porterfield trying to save Beet? Beats us.

"Rosenblatt [applies] his sharp wit to elite education."--Wall Street Journal

Review Quotes

"This is Mr. Rosenblatt's first novel. I hope it's not his last." - New York Sun

"[An] uproarious debut.... Rosenblatt wields his satiric saber with skill and compassion. A-." - Entertainment Weekly

"Great stuff." - Kirkus Reviews

"Roger Rosenblatt's dazzling comic gifts are on enviable display in this virtuoso comedy of American manners set on a revered old New England college campus in a time, very like our own, of financial, moral, and interpersonal crisis. Beet will settle the issue: is Roger Rosenblatt our most audacious comic visionary, or our most audacious visionary comic?" - Joyce Carol Oates

"Roger Rosenblatt, a journalist, essayist and playwright, added novelist to his résumé a couple of years ago when he published "Lapham Rising," the story of old money versus new in the Hamptons. In that work he showed a talent for satirizing elite society, and now he's back with another novel, "Beet," applying his sharp wit to elite education and in the process skewering all the usual suspects found in academic satires of recent years.... he has fashioned an amusing tale about the serious matter of what happens to prestigious institutions when they are held in thrall to the bottom line and a postmodern curriculum." - Wall Street Journal