When young Alex's Greek American family leaves the United States so his father can pursue a political career in Greece, he grows up amid revolution, military dictatorship, and the beauty of his father's homeland Composed of a series of childhood recollections, fictional only in the change of names, this first novel by the California-born son of former Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou tells the story of a young man from California whose family returns to Greece, where his father pursues a career in politics. The real subject here is the love-hate relationship of the little American boy transplanted to a culture he doesn't know and is unwilling to accept. The Greeks, as he learns, can be primitive and cruel. He is offended when his young playmates kill birds with their slingshots. In the concluding chapter, ``My Father Dancing,'' the 15-year-old comes downstairs to turn off the Greek phonograph music to which his father is dancing among a gathering of guests. This is, as he knows, no ordinary gesture of rebelliousness but an act of disloyalty and unthinkable rudeness: and, unable to dare a complete break with his father, he turns the phonograph on again. The narrator admits that he was a confused and angry young man in large part because ``the world of my childhood was a world of crowds, of speeches and cavalcades, of applause and adulation. This childhood creates a dramatically conflicted and deep-rooted syndrome of feelings in the older person: I grew up inside these crowds. Sometimes I think they are my real parents. I love them. I want them to shrivel up and die. I want them to leave me alone. I want them to forgive me and praise me, make me great and make me humble.'' Writing this book may well have been an act of contrition for a young man's resentment of his father, and for a mean-spiritedness toward a parent who now, in adulthood, creates a greater complexity of feeling. Writing from a motive such as this can often be salutary for the composer, but only rarely does it make for great art. Unfortunately, Papandreous case proves no exception. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. First things first. Is this book worth reading? Definitely. Is it well written? Yes, beautifully. Does it hold one's interest? Indeed, to the very last page. -- Selwa Roosevelt, Washington Post Book World, January 7, 1997 Nick deserves poetic license. He writes like a poet, able to define patriotic and filial (and grand-filial) love in down-to-earth terms of sensuous specifics. -- Patrick Skene Catling, Irish Times, September 28, 1996 Papandreou's serenely short novel is voiced in a simple register, rich in visual felicities, touching epiphanies and unassuming wit. -- Trevor Lewis, Sunday Times, November 10, 1996 The son holds his own against that father, which actually makes the book hold its own under the weight of history and the fickleness of memory. -- The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Susan Salter Reynolds The author grew up in Greece and King City, Canada. He has a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University and a B.A. from Yale, and went to high school in King City, Ontario where he lived with his family during the Greek dictatorship. After completing his doctorate, he served two years in the Greek military and then worked as an economist at the World Bank in Washington D.C.. His short stories have been published in Threepenny Review, AGNI, Harvard Review, Quarterly West, Indiana Review, Antietam Review and elsewhere. He lives in Greece. From the first chapter. To know my Greece I would share with you a tomato on the sandy beaches of Skopellos, open a sea urchin with my penknife and serve you the scarlet eggs inside while the salt stretches the skin on our backs. We would bodysurf on white waves in the day and soak up the moonlight at night. I would dry you a starfish and hang it on your wall so you could smell the salty Aegean in your room, and ask you to breathe in the aroma of osier, broom and ginger root.