Preview
  • The Deadline

  • Essays
  • By: Jill Lepore
  • Narrated by: Jill Lepore
  • Length: 22 hrs and 30 mins
  • 4.3 out of 5 stars (23 ratings)

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The Deadline

By: Jill Lepore
Narrated by: Jill Lepore
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Publisher's summary

A book to be enjoyed and kept for posterity, The Deadline is the art of the essay at its best.

Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. The astonishing essays collected in The Deadline offer a prismatic portrait of Americans’ techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented—but armed—aimlessness. From lockdowns and race commissions to Bratz dolls and bicycles, to the losses that haunt Lepore’s life, these essays again and again cross what she calls the deadline, the “river of time that divides the quick from the dead.” Echoing Gore Vidal’s United States in its massive intellectual erudition, The Deadline, with its remarkable juxtaposition of the political and the personal, challenges the very nature of the essay—and of history—itself.

©2023 Jill Lepore (P)2023 Pushkin Industries
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Critic reviews

“Lepore brings her vibrant curiosity and wide-ranging erudition to a host of topics...‘All historians are coroners,’ she remarks, explaining her deft dissection of past lives, but not all bring to their writing Lepore’s grace, precision, and deep humanity. A noteworthy collection from an indispensable writer and thinker."―Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Jill Lepore is America's greatest living essayist. No one else can sway so gracefully between the personal and the political, the micro and the macro, while remaining so firmly grounded in common human experience... These wonderful essays form a stunning mosaic of contemporary America and an alternative annal of our times." ―Fintan O’Toole, author of We Don’t Know Ourselves

What listeners say about The Deadline

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Best author narration!!

Excellent essays. Lepore’s exuberant narration is heartfelt and humorous. Not finished yet but Continue to enjoy

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1 person found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Wonderful material, annoying performance

These essays are important in capturing the history and sweep of historical political themes. The frustrations and bewilderments that we see in political behavior today are by no means new. The essays increase in general interest as the book goes on.
The impact of the book would be greatly helped by a professional voice actor as reader.

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compelling commentaries and narration

the only negative: it should have been two books! after 10 hrs of listening to anything I'm ready to move on.

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Setting current problems on a historical and human context

This book provides the historical context for rationalizations and emotional politics that is often missing from what is becoming just ideological manifestos from all sides. With her knowledge of law and the investigative methods of a history professor as well as a journalist, Jill Lepore continuously asks the question, “Where did this come from and why do people use it and believe it?” She doesn’t hide her emotional response to events and statements, which I think makes her more believable. The groupings of essays into topical themes across time reinforces the conclusion she seems to make frequently that all of this has happened before and no one learned from it—being doomed to repeat history because you don’t stuffy it. But the book doesn’t leave me hopeless for the future.

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Excellent

I bought both the audio and a hard copy, will read over an over again

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    3 out of 5 stars
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Narrator voice both easy to listen to and understand

Narrators voice was a problem for me. Try to adjust tones here and there, but it just wasn’t working for me.

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