The Dean's December

Albert Corde, dean of a Chicago college, is unprepared for the violent response to his scathing articles on city corruption or to his involvement in the trial of two blacks charged with the killing of a white student. Corde finds himself accused of betraying his city, of being a civic-minded fool and a racist. Journeying to Bucharest, where his mother-in-law lies dying, Corde is forced to make the harsh comparisons between the corruption and inhumanity of Communist tyranny and the rotting, abandoned cityscapes of Chicago. Juxtaposing the month's impinging events in Chicago and Bucharest--events both intimate and public--Bellow deftly illustrates how the whirling forces of this century may gather to conspire our doom.