A Shade of Difference

Advise and Consent #2

by Allen Drury

Racial tensions threaten to sink the US in this sequel to the Pulitzer Prize–winning Advise and Consent from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author.
 
From Allen Drury, the twentieth-century grand master of political fiction, comes a novel of the United Nations and the racial friction that could spark a worldwide powder keg.
 
International tensions rise as ambassadors and politicians scheme, using the independence of a small African nation as the focal point for hidden agendas. A cascade of events begun in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations could lead to the weakening of the United States, the loss of the Panama Canal, and a possible civil war. Allen Drury paints a vivid and laser-accurate portrait of Washington and international politics, from top secret conferences, to elite cocktail parties, club luncheon rooms, and the private offices of the key players in government.
 
Praise for Allen Drury and A Shade of Difference
 
“On every page you hear the drums of jeopardy. This is a measure of Mr. Drury’s mastery. He has a remarkable skill for keeping not only his characters but also his readers in dramatic turmoil. There are hardly any bystanders in his dramatis personae.” —The New York Times
 
“The market that found Advise and Consent enormously readable will take this in stride. Here is another contemporary-and beyond-novel dealing with the chitchat as well as the more profound thoughts on issues that are with us—yesterday, today, tomorrow.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
“Drury’s stories are detailed and compelling portraits of the machinery of government as relevant today as when they were first published.” —HuffPost

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Political Thriller, Politics, Thriller, Literature

689 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

In late 1943, Allen Stuart Drury, a 25-year old Army veteran, sought work. A position as the Senate correspondent for United Press International provided him with employment and insider knowledge of the Senate. In addition to fulfilling his duties as a reporter, he kept a journal of his views of the Senate and individual senators. In addition to the Senate personalities, his journal captured the events of the 78th & 79th Congresses.
Although written in the mid-1940s, his diary was not published until 1963. "A Senate Journal" found an audience in part because of the great success of "Advise and Consent," his novel in 1959 about the consideration in the Senate of a controversial nominee for secretary of state. His greatest success was "Advise and Consent," was made into a film in 1962. The book was partly inspired by the suicide of Lester C. Hunt, senator from Wyoming. It spent 102 weeks on the New York Times' best-seller list. 'Advise & Consent' led to several sequels. 'A Shade of Difference' is set a year later. Drury then turned his attention to the next presidential election after those events with 'Capable of Honor' & 'Preserve & Protect'. He then wrote two alternative sequels based on a different outcome of an assassination attack in an earlier work: 'Come Nineveh, Come Tyre' & 'The Promise of Joy'. In 1971, he published 'The Throne of Saturn', a sf novel about the 1st attempt at sending a manned mission to Mars. He dedicated the work "To the US Astronauts & those who help them fly." Political characters in the book are archetypal rather than comfortably human. The book carries a strong anti-communist flavor. The book has a lot to say about interference in the space program by leftist Americans. Having wrapped up his political series by '75, Drury began a new one with the '77 novel 'Anna Hastings', more about journalism than politics. He returned to the timeline in '79, with the political novel 'Mark Coffin USS' (tho the main relationship between the two books was that Hastings was a minor character in 'Mark Coffin USS's sequels). It was succeeded, by the two-part 'The Hill of Summer' & 'The Roads of Earth', which are true sequels to 'Mark Coffin USS' He also wrote stand-alone novels, 'Decision' & 'Pentagon', as well as several other fiction & non-fiction works. His political novels have been described as page-turners, set against the Cold War, with an aggressive USSR seeking to undermine the USA. Drury lived in Tiburon, CA from '64 until his '98 cardiac arrest. He'd completed his 20th novel, 'Public Men' set at Stanford, just two weeks before his death. He died on 9/2/98 at St Mary's Medical Center in San Francisco, on his 80th birthday. He never married.--Wikipedia (edited)

Reviews

[Ron Wroblewski · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the 2nd in the 6 book series by Drury on Politics in the US in the 1950-1960s. I read them all in the 1960s and am re-reading them now. This book could have been published now. It deals with racial problems in the US and how a UN resolution wanted to condemn the US and interview in the US internal situation.
I want to quote from the final speech given by Senator Fry to the UN assembly. Senator Fly was dying from Leukemia and only had a few days to live.

pg 751 - 'i would like to think that the time has come for an end to hate in the world. I would like to think that we have reached a point in human history when we might all realize that hate is no longer effective, that hate, indeed is fatal.
It is time to appeal to all of us, without regard to nationhood or political policy, but simply as human beings to deal with one another kindly and charitably in all things.
Armies stand poised, nuclear arsenals are full to overflowing, rockets rest at the ready on launching pads around the earth. The arms race mounts and mounts and no one yet has managed to cancel out the logic of history which has always said before that arms races have but one ending.
Hand in hand with all this go suspicion and mistrust and jealousy, bad faith and bitterness, envy and hate. The peoples of the earth huddle in terror before the weight of disaster they have mustered to their command. Nothing but awful destruction seems to be ahead for humanity, and no fine words and no brave slogans seems any more able to prevent the blowing out of the tiny flame of hope.
How does mankind stand in this awful hour. Where does it find in all its pomp and pride and power the answer to its own fateful divisions? Where in this globe, where in this universe is there any help for us? Who will come to our aid, who have failed so badly in our trusteeship of the bounteous and lovely earth? Who will save us, if we do not save ourselves?
We are wedded to one another, it may be to our death, it may be to our living. We cannot escape one another, however hard we try. Though we fly to the moon and far beyond, we shall take with us what is in our hearts, and if it be not pure, we shall slaughter one another wherever we meet, as surely on some outward star ss there on earth.
This is the human condition - that we cannot flee from one another. For good, for ill, we await ourselves behind every door, down every street, at the end of every passageway. We try to remain apart, we fail. We try to hide, we are exposed. Nothing makes us better than we are.
I beg of you, here in this body of which men have hoped so much and for which they have already done so much, let us love one another. Let us love one another. It is all we have left"

Doesn't that sound like today? What do we have left, but to learn to love one another and help one another. Allen Drury speaks to all generations. He speaks to us today. Let us learn to love one another.

One to book 3.

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This endless tome was the #3 bestseller in 1962. This review is the second installment of the 1962 reading challenge I set for myself in August. (For background on why 1962, see My Big Fat Reading Project: http://keepthewisdom.blogspot.com/200...) Finishing the novel also marked the completion of my list of Top Ten Bestsellers for that year.

I read Drury's first novel, Advise and Consent, a couple years ago. That one was the #1 bestseller of 1960 and also won the Pulitzer Prize. In any case, I knew what I was getting into this time.

Drury practically invented the Washington, DC, political novel genre, though thankfully his successors have not written in such wordy and dense prose. A Shade of Difference adds the United Nations to the mix and, as foreshadowed by the title, has racism as the underlying theme, making it a timely read. It is set during a year when Civil Rights was a contentious issue in America and when many African nations were seeking independence from colonial masters.

Since you might decide to read the book, I don't want to waste your time with a wordy and dense review. Believe me, you will need that time.

Of note to me was the tension Drury built between individuals who believed that change takes time and is best done within the systems of government as opposed to those who advocated force and violence to either achieve change or prevent it. One of the moderate characters is a Black member of the House of Representatives.

I was also interested in the author's portrayal of the United Nations. That made me want to learn more about both its history and current state. Any suggestions for good books, non-fiction or novels, about the UN would be welcome.

One other thing: both of Drury's novels were written a few years before their timescapes, so all the characters are fictional, including the POTUS. I find that somewhat disorienting and have to make myself stop trying to relate the novels to actual historical events. It is eerie though how prescient he was.

In 1962 I was beginning my sophomore year in high school. Though I was mostly interested in boys, it was a time when I began to be aware of political issues, especially Civil Rights. Reading books from the 1960s that deal with what was going on, particularly behind the scenes in government, is compelling and is also filling in gaps for me, showing me the issues that have loomed so large in my adult life.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not quite as good as book one, but still an excellent read. It's interesting to read these books that were written in the 50's and 60's, during the cold war, desegregation, assassination, etc. They're written with kind of a "what if" viewpoint, but I'm reading them a good 50 years later, knowing full well what that "what if" turned into. Fascinating!

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this whole series back in the 60's. Loved them then. Drury is the writer who got me started on political thrillers!

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

So this is definitely not one for the faint of heart as it's a book about geopolitics and race relations set in the late '60's and written in 1962, and it only follows about 2-3 weeks of time over it's dense 800 pages. I picked it up out of an inherited bunch of paperbacks and didn't realize the commitment I had made till was into it a bit, but I'm glad I did so. The multiple overlapping stories about school desegregation, colonialism in Africa, numerous politicians destinies and hopes are all fictional but Drury was building off where we were in 1962 in terms of our race with the Soviets, our fractioning on civil rights, and the beginning of true world governance as the UN is the prime focal point here. The reader definitely has to have some interest in pages and pages of thoughts and dialogue about how countries feel toward each other and how politicians are always trying to balance things, but for the political history buff, it's a good fictional read.

[Mark Phillips · Rating 2 out of 5]

Continuing where Advise and Consent left off, this novel deals with racial conflict. An African ruler seeks to win freedom from British colonial rule, and humiliate the U.S. A Panamanian who wants control of the Canal champions both goals in the United Nations.

For a modern reader, this is pretty tough going. Drury is preachy, and what he's preaching is pretty cringe-worthy: that orderly transition to freedom, both foreign and domestic, is far more important than freedom, and civilized white men of integrity and conscience will be the shepherds of that gradual transition, even if it takes generations. For Drury, the uppity Blacks who want accelerated progress are portrayed as savage, coarse, cruel, violent, and pawns of the communists. He even goes so far as to refer (clearly, though not by name) to Harry Belafonte and Billie Holiday as trash for protesting for civil rights.

As an exposition of how a whole generation of reactionaries thought, the novel is historically educational. As literature that transcends its time, it disappoints. At its core, this novel is 100 pages of soap opera surrounded by 700 pages of gradualist, patronizing propaganda. Now I've got to decide whether to continue the series. As I understand it, Drury falls further and further behind the moral arc of the times as he goes on to trash all my heroes of the Sixties. I guess it says something interesting about how quickly and profoundly American values were changing that the author who sounded so wise, perspicacious, and fair-minded in Advise and Consent can seem so out of touch and insensitive just a few years later in its sequel.

[Steven Hill · Rating 4 out of 5]

8 out of 10

[Nancy McPherson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A little easier to get into than Advise and Consent. If read first, a lot of the Advise and Consent characters are already familiar, but it doesn't really spoil the first book.

[Andrew Roy · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's okay

[Hayden Hayes · Rating 4 out of 5]

almost as good as advise and consent. Didn't hit my emotions quite as hard, but still couldn't stop reading

[slauderdale]

This book is not so much reviewed as it is discussed in my blog post "Too much Allen Drury": https://librarianslauderdale.wordpres...

21st century readers who have heard of "Advise and Consent" the book or "Advise & Consent" the movie may not also know that "Advise and Consent" is the first in a series of six books that Drury wrote over a span of sixteen years. I really wasn’t planning on reading more than that first book until I read about the premise of 1962’s "A Shade of Difference" on Wikipedia ...

[Jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Allen Drury takes his unique style from the Senate to another flawed but necessary institution, the United Nations General Assembly. Orrin Knox, a featured Senator from Advise and Consent has been promoted by the new President to Secretary of State. Many of the other players from Advise and Consent are also here in featured and side roles.

This is a big book, but it’s also a big topic: race relations in the United States, in the world, and the growth of freedom in both spheres. Drury doesn’t pull any punches, and characters who were on the right side in the previous book end up on the wrong side here, because that’s the way things were. But as in the previous book, Drury goes out of his way to provide his characters with motivations that make sense and that keep all sides human.

More amazingly, as in his previous book this one seems to be set a few years in the future. He wrote it in 1960 to 1962, but in the book, I think, we have just landed people on the moon (the book isn’t explicit about this, but does say we have a successful “expedition”). And he describes activists in the United States more as they appeared in the late sixties than the late fifties, even predicting the intimidation of traitors to causes.

He also plays with stereotypes in a stereotypically Drurian way. For example, among all the nations of the UN he describes Britain as other writers would describe the then-Orient, as enigmatic mysteries never fully revealing themselves.

One of the better characterization’s is Orrin Knox’s transition from senator to administration official, and how it changes him.

It starts with some members of the United Nations trying to intimidate the United States for segregation—a noble action for, unfortunately, ignoble motives. Throughout the book, the United States delegation has to grapple with the fact that the motion they’re trying to defeat addresses a real and horrendous problem within the United States. But addressing it in this way may well mean the end of the United Nations.

[Arlene Starr · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's quite a book! This book is a political fiction novel based on actual historical events. It takes place in the 1960's when segregation was just being implemented in the schools. A good deal of the story takes place in the assembly of the United Nations in New York and in the senate in Washington DC. You feel like you are there in an assembly of the United Nations with U.S. senators, congressmen, majority leaders, newspaper men, and representatives and ambassadors of other countries. You hear verbal debates, threats, bluffs, and eventually a resolution for adoption put forth by the His Royal Highness the M'Bulu of Mbuele of Gorotoland, and later an amendment by the Ambassador of Panama. From here the book moves forward depicting the struggle of how the United States defends itself while many of the other countries are in favor of the amendment.
It is a book full of passion and compassion, the characterization is excellent, and the author is
brilliant in the way he handles this story. The book is written in present tense, first person, and is divided into five segments, the first four are by four of the main characters of the story. However there are many others who are actively involved throughout. To me it starts out slowly but stick with it and you will be glad you did. The author makes the characters live in the eye of the reader and even though it may be over six hundred pages, for me it was sad when I reached the end.

[Byron]

This is the second novel in a four novel series written by political reporter Allen Drury. I've read the opening act ("Terrible Terry's book") and it seems quite similar in style to Drury's earlier work, "Advise and Consent."

The critique of Drury's writing is that he is slow and methodical in his approach to the plot, leading to a slow and methodical approach by this reader.

Each plot point is met not by the subsequent action, but by paragraphs and pages of response from each of his main characters. The narrator is an omniscient being who chooses to focus on one character for a few paragraphs before switching to another. The writing is clear, so there's never confusion, but the plot slows down immensely.

Having covered the fact that Drury is not a cheap thrills paperback novelist, we move on to his redeeming qualities. Drury weaves a fantastically complex web of characters, motives, and actions. He is skilled at creating memorable characters whose actions are clear results of their motives, and so his books are a true delight for a reader willing to sift through enough prose to enjoy it.

[Nikki]

I remember reading both these books not long after they were published (I was a 9th-grader in '62) but I'm not certain that at least one was in a Reader's Digest Condensed version; in any case I had a lot more patience for long, long books back then. It's fun revisiting some of the books you have in your project although I probably won't reread -- my reading time is growing short (although I keep believing I have 20 years left!) Of course, I also enjoy reading about the books you read that I haven't read.

[Jeff Mayo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually read this first, not realizing it was a sequel to "Advise and Consent." I circled around to reread it after reading the first book, which I then considered a prequel. This one focuses on the United Nations. A small African nation wants independence. The United States and Russia use it as a pawn to try to gain international advantage on one another during the Cold War. As things escalate, integration of public schools in the southern states, the possibility of losing the Panama Canal, and a Civil War are all negotiated in private offices, at elite cocktail parties, and somewhat openly in public places. It is an interesting read, and some parts of the fictional novel came to pass over the years, which makes you wonder when the rest will actually happen. Not as good as the first book in the series, but it doesn't miss by much. The characters here aren't as interesting, but the story holds up well.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's been more than 25 years since I read this book, but I've been wanting to re-read it and now I shall. It was the sequel to Advise and Consent, Drury's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

[Margareth8537 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting to read and very detailed

[Jane Carpenter · Rating 3 out of 5]

couldn't find the books

[Jeff Crosby · Rating 1 out of 5]

It just didn’t hold my interest. I grew tired of Terrible Terry. I also found the prose overloaded. It was not worth finishing.

[Bob Kuster · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really Good read and a worthy follow up to Advise and Consent. Hal Fry tells us love is the answer. Hal is so right.

[Cws]

F Dru

[Bob Almond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book two in the Advise and Consent series