Details:
Man to Mann
Neville Conway
A novel about racial disharmony met with tolerance and forgiveness. It involves one man's search for his true identity. It is 1989. Michael Mann is a well-known but financially struggling freelance journalist and broadcaster nearing fifty, whose Jewish background he has suppressed as an irrelevance. He is currently nearing the end of a trial series of late night flagship programmes with the BBC which are his brainchild. They are one-to-one conversations with distinguished or famous guests, which centre on issues of principle. These programmes are live, for Mann is an unyielding opponent of recorded, edited, and therefore manipulated argument. He is also trying to establish a more civilised and spontaneous kind of television discussion. The programmes have been a success...
But into this artificial construct the real world intrudes – a bullied boy and his tormented mother, anti- and pro-Semitism amongst his colleagues, a rebellious resentful son. And he is obliged by his intended last guest's illness to interview instead a man he has every reason to hate and fear, a former Nazi turned polemicist on racial disharmony. His past, his family relationships, and his carefully guarded persona are thrown into a maelstrom. But the clash of minds, watched by millions of viewers, proves momentous and unpredictable for both men, and leads Mann to new truths about himself and his origins, to a deeper understanding of his failings, and ultimately, both for him and his beloved partner, to the confrontation of the flaw they have sought to ignore in their relationship. It is a rebirth.
The Author:
Neville Conway was formerly consultant cardiologist at the Wessex Regional Cardiac Centre, Southampton.
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