-
The Ghost Writer
- The Nathan Zuckerman Series, Book 1
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
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Publisher's summary
The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the great books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff.
At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution. If she were, it might change his life.
The first volume in the Zuckerman Bound trilogy and epilogue, The Ghost Writer is about the tensions between literature and life, artistic truthfulness and conventional decency - and about those implacable practitioners who live with the consequences of sacrificing one for the other.
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For years, they were the best of friends: the grand, erratic Humboldt and the ambitious young Charlie. But now Humboldt has died a failure, and Charlie's success-ridden life has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life: he has left Charlie something in his will.
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Great Book, Great Reader
- By Scott on 05-10-08
By: Saul Bellow
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Where the Past Begins
- A Writer's Memoir
- By: Amy Tan
- Narrated by: Amy Tan
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Moving from her childhood in Oakland and growing up with her Chinese parents through her success as a novelist, Amy Tan delves into her creative interests in music, the paralysis of beginning a new project, journal writing, and travelling. Where the Past Begins chronicles the making of a writer. With characteristic humor and poignant observation, Tan weaves a nontraditional introspective narrative that is as complex and vibrant as this beloved American novelist's fiction.
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Narration Issues
- By Sara on 12-14-17
By: Amy Tan
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My Life with Bob
- Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
- By: Pamela Paul
- Narrated by: Eileen Stevens, Pamela Paul
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Pamela Paul has kept a single book by her side for 28 years - carried throughout high school and college, hauled from Paris to London to Thailand, from job to job, safely packed away and then carefully removed from apartment to house to its current perch on a shelf over her desk - reliable if frayed, anonymous-looking yet deeply personal. This book has a name: Bob. Bob is Paul's Book of Books, a journal that records every book she's ever read.
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An uncanny mirror and a celebration of book love
- By Cherilyn Parsons on 07-28-19
By: Pamela Paul
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The Patriots
- A Novel
- By: Sana Krasikov
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
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Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
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The Bad Seed
- By: William March
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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There's something special about eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark. With her carefully plaited hair and her sweet cotton dresses, she's the very picture of old-fashioned innocence. But when their neighborhood suffers a series of terrible accidents, her mother begins to wonder: Why do bad things seem to happen when little Rhoda is around?
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loved it
- By CoCo B.M.J on 07-23-19
By: William March
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Daring
- My Passages - A Memoir
- By: Gail Sheehy
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 14 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Candid, insightful, and powerful, Daring: My Passages is the story of the unconventional life of a writer who dared - to walk New York City streets with hookers and pimps to expose violent prostitution; to march with civil rights protesters in Northern Ireland as British paratroopers opened fire; to seek out Egypt's president Anwar Sadat when he was targeted for death after making peace with Israel.
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Enjoyed unexpectedly
- By Corinne O'Rourke on 09-06-23
By: Gail Sheehy
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More Die of Heartbreak
- By: Saul Bellow
- Narrated by: Ramiz Monsef
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Kenneth Trachtenberg, an eccentric and witty native of Paris, travels to the Midwest to spend time with his famous American uncle, a world-renowned botanist and self-described "plant visionary". After numerous affairs and failed relationships, the restless Uncle Benn seeks a settled existence in the form of marriage - but tying the knot again opens the door to a host of new torments.
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A great book
- By John A. on 03-16-22
By: Saul Bellow
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A Tale of Love and Darkness
- By: Amos Oz
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 23 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the 40s and 50s in a small apartment crowded with books in 12 languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was 12 and a half years old, his mother committed suicide - a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz.
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His life was interesting, but not his memoir
- By DR Harle on 01-27-19
By: Amos Oz
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Distant Star
- By: Roberto Bolano
- Narrated by: Walter Krochmal
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime.
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Omg
- By Sierra on 08-03-16
By: Roberto Bolano
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The hero of Everyman is obsessed with mortality. As he reminds himself at one point, "I'm 34! Worry about oblivion when you're 75." But he cannot help himself. He is the ex-husband in three marriages gone wrong. He is the father of two sons who detest him, despite a daughter who adores him. A masterful portrait of one man's inner struggles, Everyman is a brilliant showcase for one of the world's most distinguished novelists.
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Goodbye, Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin. Neil comes from poor Newark, while Brenda is of suburban Short Hills. On one summer break, they meet and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender.
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A masterpiece
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The Counterlife
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The Counterlife is about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Wherever they may find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate. Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through the book's evocative landscapes, familiar and foreign, is the mind of the novelist Nathan Zuckerman.
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Eros, Thanatos, and the Male Yenta
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The worst audiobook I’ve ever listened to
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Operation Shylock
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The hero of Everyman is obsessed with mortality. As he reminds himself at one point, "I'm 34! Worry about oblivion when you're 75." But he cannot help himself. He is the ex-husband in three marriages gone wrong. He is the father of two sons who detest him, despite a daughter who adores him. A masterful portrait of one man's inner struggles, Everyman is a brilliant showcase for one of the world's most distinguished novelists.
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Full Frontal Roth
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A masterpiece
- By marjorie on 10-12-24
By: Philip Roth
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- By G. Benett on 10-03-19
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Patrimony
- A True Story
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Patrimony, a true story, touches the emotions as strongly as anything Philip Roth has ever written. Roth watches as his 86-year-old father - famous for his vigor, his charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollections - battles with the brain tumor that will kill him. The son, full of love, anxiety, and dread, accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, and, as he does so, discloses the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished his father's long, stubborn engagement with life.
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You must not forget anything
- By Darwin8u on 06-19-18
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The Professor of Desire
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As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself “a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes.” Little does he realize how prophetic this motto will be—or how damning. For as Philip Roth follows Kepesh from the domesticity of childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a ménage à trois in London to the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates a novel that “ranks among the major achievements in the literature of our time”—Village Voice.
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The Breast
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From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral: Like a latter-day Gregor Samsa, Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed—into a 155-pound breast. What follows is “terrific…inventive and sane and very funny (The New York Times Book Review).
By: Philip Roth
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The Great American Novel
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Gil Gamesh, the only pitcher who ever literally tried to kill the umpire. The ex-con first baseman, John Baal, “The Babe Ruth of the Big House,” who never hit a home run sober. If you’ve never heard of them—or of the homeless baseball team the Ruppert Mundys—it’s because of the Communist plot, and the capitalist scandal, that expunged the entire Patriot League from baseball memory.
By: Philip Roth
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Nemesis
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- Unabridged
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Bucky Cantor is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director during the summer of 1944. A javelin thrower and weightlifter, he is disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As the devastating disease begins to ravage Bucky’s playground, Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain.
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Something to think about
- By Michael Beilenson on 08-01-24
By: Philip Roth
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When She Was Good
- By: Philip Roth
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- Unabridged
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When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process. With his unerring portraits of Lucy and her hapless, childlike husband, Roy, Roth has created an uncompromising work of fictional realism, a vision of provincial American piety, yearning, and discontent that is at once pitiless and compassionate.
By: Philip Roth
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The Ghostwriter
- By: Alessandra Torre
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- Unabridged
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I have three months to write the last book of my life. Three months to confess the details of that day, and how it changed everything for me. My name is Helena Ross. I've written 15 romance novels, 10 of which have become international best sellers. But this one isn't a romance, no happily ever after in place. This novel holds only the truth, which I have run away from for four years. The truth, which I have hidden from the police, from my loved ones, from the world.
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Ugly cry good
- By Nicole B. on 12-13-17
By: Alessandra Torre
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Indignation
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- Unabridged
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In 1951, the second year of the Korean War, a studious, law-abiding, and intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, begins his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at a local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hardworking neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad - mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees on every corner for his beloved boy.
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Tight, beautiful and also strange and sad.
- By Darwin8u on 08-22-16
By: Philip Roth
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My Life as a Man
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- Unabridged
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A fiction-within-a-fiction, a labyrinthine edifice of funny, mournful, and harrowing meditations on the fatal impasse between a man and a woman, My Life as a Man is Philip Roth’s most blistering novel. At its heart lies the marriage of Peter and Maureen Tarnopol, a gifted young writer and the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead is his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and shored up by moral blackmail, but it is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen’s death, Peter is still trying—and failing—to write his way free of it.
By: Philip Roth
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Libra
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In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.
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Narrator's Monotonous Tone Ruined Book
- By Dan in DC on 12-03-16
By: Don DeLillo
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Underworld
- By: Don DeLillo
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- Unabridged
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Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.
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CYBEX burned into my eyes
- By Ruth Ann Orlansky on 07-01-12
By: Don DeLillo
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Everyman
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The fate of Roth’s everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes. A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a daughter from a second marriage who adores him.
By: Philip Roth
What listeners say about The Ghost Writer
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- Barbara or Jerold Gendler
- 02-04-22
Revelation
Believe it or not it’s thought provoking . Reminded me of the movie Anastasia . U’ll have to listen to under stand . About to embark on the whole Zuckerman series . Can’t wait !
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- Rodrigo
- 03-08-17
Difficult book
No problem with the narrator, but it is just a difficult book to understand. Philip roth was a fabulous author but not for the easily distracted
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1 person found this helpful
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- Darwin8u
- 01-28-17
Turning Sentences Around
“I know the kind of man I am and the kind of writer. I have my own kind of bravery, and please, let’s leave it at that.”
― Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer
I've read a ton of Roth, but have yet to really engage the Zuckerman series. The Ghost Writer is book one in the four book cycle Zuckerman Bound:
1. The Ghost Writer (1979)
2. Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
3. The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
4. The Prague Orgy (1985)
It is hard to engage some of the more specific reasons WHY I loved this book -- without giving away some of the more the dramatic elements. However, within that constraint I CAN say I loved how Roth explores both what it means to be a Jewish writer (with all the expectations that come with that occupation in a post-holocaust world) and what it means to be a fiction writer period. How art reflects life and life is impacted by the work and the flow of art. There are few living writers whose output I respect more than Philip Roth, and while I don't think his 80s novels stand up entirely to later novels, he is still stretching the limits of prose and dangling ideas and situations that are both entertaining and almost absurd.
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21 people found this helpful
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- SandyK
- 04-17-23
Sorry, I Can’t Go with the Conventional Thinking
I know the book has been seen to be a significant one and received generally critical acclaim back in the day.
I’ve listened to it carefully and read some of the favorable reviews and criticism. For the most part, I just don’t get it.
First, I don’t believe it makes it as either a solid short story or a novel. The characters generally aren’t developed enough to be understood with any particular depth. I’d like that as to either form, but it’s especially sorry, if this is supposed to be a novel.
I see some texture in Nathan, but then out of the blue crops up the whole Anne Frank deal. I won’t be a spoiler for any of you, but it’s crucial. And I think it’s cooked up, out of nowhere, and it doesn’t take the story in any clear direction. In my view. I see Roth’s scheme. Interesting. But, in my view, contrived.
As to Roth’s use of some of these characters to show something about major Jewish literary figures of the 60s, etc., that might have interested readers then. And it interests me for a variety of reasons. But I don’t see anything lasting in it, or meaning and value in the novel per se.
I’ll listen to the remaining books in the trilogy. And if I change my mind, I’ll be more generous in a later review.
But, as for me, no great shakes here.
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1 person found this helpful
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- JazzMusicFan
- 09-13-18
The beginning of Nathan Zuckerman
Wonderful story. Read it years ago. I have read everything by Roth, decided to listen to them a second time around. Fun to see where Nathan began, and then to watch him develop as well Roth through all these novels! Philip and Nathan will be missed, luckily we can turn on an audible when we need a fix! Enjoyed the narrator.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Linda Ridge Johnson
- 05-28-18
Better Than Reading It Myself!
I usually have not enjoyed audible books; however, this narrator made me stay in the moment and made most-likely-tedious portions rather not so much. This narration was movie-like, what with the insertion of the Zuckerman family history as well as the 'Amy' back-story. I enjoyed the voice characterizations by which each person was portrayed . I must say, I was sad for the story to end and surprised by the book's intrigue and suspenseful plot twists. It's probably because I'm not a writer that I didn't understand the title choice. This experience makes me want to download the Zuckerman trilogy from Audible!
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2 people found this helpful
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- CKLazzell
- 05-06-22
Intro to Roth
This was my first taste of Roth, and it DEFINITELY won't be my last. I started out by really liking the book - the general, honest depictions of being a human in the U.S.A. after WWII, and more specifically, a Jew in that time and place that did not personally go through the persecution in Germany. What it means to take liberties in being yourself as well as artistically and how that can affect your family and community. Very funny in an everyday sort of way, imaginative and unpredictable. By the end I loved it rather than liked, and will 100% be reading more Roth.
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- John Ash
- 08-13-18
Writers must listen
At some point in your development as a writer you worshiped an author and not only thought if I could just use words the way they did, or create stories with their passion, or develop characters that acted the way theirs did, or ...This is the story to put yourself in. Just become Nate and let your own hero worship begin.
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- Tim Bishop
- 01-03-24
Not the best story
I kept waiting for a decent plot to develop but it was more of a hash of repetitive themes. Characters never really developed beyond how they were introduced. I would pass on this one.
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Story
- Dr A
- 03-16-19
Disappointed
Very thin content, restating the obvious, enough material for an article, s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d into a book. No subtlety. I lasted for about a quarter of the book before deleting it.
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