By: William Goldman

Rating: 4/5

Three Word Summary: Dentists are Nazis

William Goldman is talented. He wrote screenplays for classic films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men. He wrote both the book and the adapted screenplay for the beloved Princess Bride. And he did the same for Marathon Man.

That each of these works is remarkably different only serves to demonstrate Goldman’s versatility as a writer and a storyteller. Butch Cassidy is a western about the likeable outlaws. The Princess Bride is a fantasy story with humor and heart.

Marathon Man is a thriller, full of spies and lies and a Nazi and diamonds and running. Oh, and that famous torture scene featuring teeth and a sadistic dentist and unspeakable pain. Marathon Man would eventually become an equally well-known film featuring Dustin Hoffman, but first it was a great book.

Tom ‘Babe’ Levy is a brilliant history grad student at Columbia in New York during the 1970s. He imagines himself as a marathon man and fantasizes about racing against legendary long-distance runner Paavo Nurmi. He is content to live his life running and studying when he meets a pretty co-ed and is suddenly sucked into a game of international espionage that he didn’t realize awaited him.

Because Dr. Christian Szell, the infamous ‘White Angel’ and former dentist at Auschwitz has come to New York to do business. Babe and Szell are set on a collision course as Nazi dentist meets a determined marathon man. But this is far from the typical page-turning thriller — it’s smart and unpredictable.

Babe is forced to face facts about his beloved big brother, his brilliant but shamed father and even himself if he means to defeat the evil German dentist and his kind. He is forced to dig deep into his hard fought endurance and embrace what it means to be a true marathon man.

That dental torture scene in both the novel and film have become a well-known piece of American pop culture and, according to the book’s introduction, made Goldman the scurge of the dental world. Szell is a diabolical protagonist who brings a whole new meaning to the Tooth Fairy.