The Half Opened Door

Originally published: Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979.

By the turn of the twentieth century, academic nativism had taken root in elite American colleges—specifically, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant hegemony was endangered by new kinds of student, many of them Catholic and Jewish immigrants. The newcomers threatened to displace native-born Americans by raising academic standards and winning a disproportionate share of the scholarships. The Half-Opened Door analyzes the role of these institutions, casting light on their place in class structure and values in the United States. It details the origins, history, and demise of discriminatory admissions processes and depicts how the entrenched position of the upper class was successfully challenged. The educational, and hence economic, mobility of Catholics and Jews has shown other groups—for example, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Spanish-speaking Americans—not only the difficulties that these earlier aspirants had in overcoming class and ethnic barriers, but the fact that it can be done. One of the ironies of the history of higher education in the United States is the use of quotas by admissions committees. Restrictive measures were imposed on Jews because they were so successful, whereas benign quotas are currently used to encourage underrepresented minorities to enter colleges and professional schools. The competing claims of both the older and the newer minorities continue to be the subject of controversy, editorial comments, and court cases—and will be for years to come.

The Drums of Winter is a sweeping epic, a family saga, a novel of history. Set in the time of the American Revolution, it details the decline and fall of a great family, the proud love of a noble woman, a young man’s search for his true father, and a conflict between brothers which moves from Europe to American and climaxes in one of the decisive battles of the Revolutionary War. The Haynows are the most powerful family in Hessia. Baron Haynow is a strong, self-made man, deeply in love with his wife, Anna, whom he rescued from poverty twenty years before. When the American colonists rebel against the British, it seems at first a chance to increase the Haynow family power by monopolizing the American tobacco trade. Then an intrusive figure from the past appears, resurrecting old loves, old jealousies. Anna learns that her first husband , long believed dead, is still alive in America—and that Haynow has withheld his letters from her. The revelation sets in motion a chain of conflicts that shatter the Haynow family. How these conflicts are resolved on the battlefields of the American Revolution—with Robert a mercenary under the command of his hated brother, Claus; and Anna risking death in search of her first love—provides the unexpected climax to this rich and compelling novel.

In the Los Angeles ghetto of Necroville, the yearly celebration of the Night of the Dead - where the dead are resurrected through the miracle of nanotechnology and live their second lives as non-citizens - becomes a journey of discovery and revelation for five individuals on the run from their pasts. With his customary flair for making the bizarre both credible and fascinating, McDonald tosses aside the line of demarcation between living and dead in a story that confronts the central quandary of human existence: the essence of non-being.