Books: Betrayals a Family Madness by Thomas Keneally

by Thomas Keneally Simon & Schuster; 336 pages; $17.95

Thomas Keneally, 50, is an Australian novelist (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith), playwright (Bullie's House), screenwriter (Silver City) and movie actor (The Devil's Playground). The subjects of his nearly 20 books are equally protean: Joan of Arc, the U.S. Civil War battle at Antietam, World War I armistice negotiations, exploration in Antarctica. His 1982 volume, Schindler's List, set off a literary tempest: although it told of an actual German businessman who saved some 1,300 Jews from the Nazis, the book was awarded Britain's prestigious Booker McConnell prize for fiction, eligible apparently because Keneally used novelistic techniques of narrative and reconstruction in...

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