Herman Wouk - The Lawgiver

96 kbps, Read by Peter Riegert, Zosia Mamet, Unabridged
 
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-lawgiver-herman-wouk/1110199547?ean=9781451699388

Overview
For more than fifty years, legendary author Herman Wouk has dreamed of writing a novel about the life of Moses. Finally, at age ninety-seven, he has found an ingeniously witty way to tell the tale in The Lawgiver, a romantic and suspenseful epistolary novel about a group of people trying to make a movie about Moses in the present day. The story emerges from letters, memos, e-mails, journals, news articles, recorded talk, Skype transcripts, and text messages.

At the center of The Lawgiver is Margo Solovei, a brilliant young writer-director who has rejected her rabbinical father’s strict Jewish upbringing to pursue a career in the arts. When an Australian multibillionaire promises to finance a movie about Moses if the script meets certain standards, Margo does everything she can to land the job, including a reunion with her estranged first love, an influential lawyer with whom she still has unfinished business.

Two other key characters in the novel are Herman Wouk himself and his wife of more than sixty years, Betty Sarah, who, almost against their will, find themselves entangled in the Moses movie when the Australian billionaire insists on Wouk’s stamp of approval.

As Wouk and his characters contend with Moses and marriage, and the force of tradition, rebellion, and reunion, The Lawgiver reflects the wisdom of a lifetime. Inspired by the great nineteenth-century novelists, one of America’s most beloved twentieth-century authors has now written a remarkable twenty-first-century work of fiction.

From Barnes & Noble
Herman Wouk's longevity still surprises people. In fact, just last year, Stephen King honored the now 97-year-old novelist with an award-winning short story entitled "Herman Wouk Is Alive." The wonder, however, does not stop with his age: The man who began his career as an author in 1941 is still writing. For more than fifty of those years, he has been contemplating writing a novel about the life of Moses. The Lawgiver is that novel, but Wouk approaches it in a winningly circuitous. Instead of a Ten Commandments Moses, we have a female writer/director who is hell-bent on advancing her career by making a film about the Old Testament patriarch. (P.S. Among the people making cameo appearances in this fiction are Wouk and his wife of more than sixty years.)

The Washington Post
…Wouk fulfills the dream of a novel he conceived ages ago, and in doing so reveals himself to be as serious as anyone in his choice of both subject (the Bible) and style (postmodern collage). Fortunately for his readers, he wields a computer with a touch as light as a quill pen…Clearly, The Lawgiver has unleashed Wouk's inner metafictionalist as well as a parodist of considerable virtue, which is to say viciousness…this book about a movie about a book is also about the very act of writing books. Wouk reminds us of the eternal value of storytelling while he shows 30- and 50- and 80-year-old whippersnappers how it's done.
—Melvin Jules Bukiet

Publishers Weekly
Moses, star of the Hebrew Bible; major figure in the New Testament and the Qur’an; played on screen by Charlton Heston, Burt Lancaster, and Val Kilmer; now the inspiration for both Wouk’s novel and the big-budget movie production it chronicles. At 97, Wouk (Marjorie Morningstar; The Winds of War) has created a tale that, for all its modern trappings (it’s told in e-mails, faxes, and transcripts, and relies on the movements of the very rich and the very Hollywood), is essentially old-fashioned. This is not a bad thing: after an exposition-heavy start that sets up an Australian billionaire intent on financing a film about the Lawgiver, various screenwriters, producers, actors, lawyers, and even scientists with various agendas; Hollywood wunderkind and lapsed Jew Margo Solovei, who learned Moses’s story from her rabbi father; and Wouk playing himself, the novel comes into its own as a suspenseful narrative that asks fundamental questions: is Moses still relevant? Can this movie get made? Will true love prevail? The answers will not necessarily surprise, but getting to them is a fun ride, and though the epilogue, an address from Wouk, has the feel of a vanity project, in creating a contemporary version of Marjorie Morningstar, Wouk the author has made something old, and something very old, new again.