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How to Be Alone: Essays - Jonathan Franzen (CD)
Title: Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror Title: How to Be Alone: Essays Author: Jonathan Franzen Genre: Literature And Fiction, Short Stories And Essays Format: 8 CDs (Unabridged) Synopsis: Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Now in How to be Alone, discover the personal narratives and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections. The audiobook How to be Alone features Franzen's reading of a moving narrative of his father's struggle with Alzheimer's disease (which won a National Magazine Award and has been reprinted around the world). Although his essays range from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each essay wrestles with essential themes of Franzen's writing: the erosion of civic life and private dignity, and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America. Here, in 14 essays, are 14 fresh answers to the question of how to be alone in a noisy and distracting mass culture. These essays show the wry distrust of the claims of technology and psychology, the love-hate relationship with consumerism, and the subversive belief in the tragic shape of the individual life that help make Franzen one of our sharpest, toughest, and most entertaining social critics. Review: Library Journal (January 15, 2003) In these essays, Franzen, winner of the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction, demonstrates how our materialistic culture has brought about the homogenization of society. He notes that although one might assume a black lesbian New Yorker and a Southern Baptist Georgian are very different people, in reality, owing to the influence of the mass media and powerful corporations, "both watch David Letterman every night, both are struggling to find health insurance, both play Lotto, and both have a guilty crush on Uma Thurman." From a personal and scholarly point of view, Franzen discusses such topics as our obsession with technology, the state of the novel, modern prisons, the proliferation of sex-advice books, and a scandal in the Chicago postal system. Also included is a very moving account of his father's battle with Alzheimer's disease. Although many of the works are scholarly in tone, Brian d'Arcy James's lucid, well-paced narration makes this collection accessible and interesting. Very highly recommended to all libraries.-Beth Farrell, Portage Cty. Dist. Lib., OH Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.