The Learners: The Book After the Cheese Monkeys - Softcover

Kidd, Chip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061673242 ISBN 13: 9780061673245

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2009

Synopsis

Fresh out of college in the summer of 1961, Happy lands his first job as a graphic designer (okay, art assistant) at a small Connecticut advertising agency populated by a cast of endearing eccentrics. Life for Happy seems to be -- well, happy. But when he's assigned to design a newspaper ad recruiting participants for an experiment in the Yale Psychology Department, Happy can't resist responding to the ad himself. Little does he know that the experience will devastate him, forcing a reexamination of his past, his soul, and the nature of human cruelty -- chiefly, his own. Written in sharp, witty prose and peppered with absorbing ruminations on graphic design, The Learners again shows that Chip Kidd's writing is every bit as original, stunning, and memorable as his celebrated book jackets.

About this title

Review:

"Like "The Cheese Monkeys," "The Learners" is about learning--again under duress--to see everything, including oneself, differently....[In] Kidd's attempt to blend the satirical and serious...he modulates the mix just right in the novel's redemptive climax, which is both wild and winning, funny and moving."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Kidd smoothly mixes the reality of Milgram's rather sinister work with the fiction of Happy's new life in advertising....Even more impressive than the blend of fiction and fact is the way that "The Learners" shifts from raucous ad office comedy to the tragic repercussions of the Yale experiments."--Connecticut Post Online

"The advertising business and the [Milgram psychology] experiment are linked in this swift, often funny and always intelligent book."--Hartford Courant

"Kidd uses his fiction to explore the roots and broader implications of his work in the modern industry of persuasion....Kidd has held up an engrossing, distorting mirror to a time when marketplace language we all now speak was only just being coined."--Calgary Herald (Alberta)

"Kidd uses his narrative to investigate the relationships between form and content, authority and advertising....pointed observations on design and mass culture make this short novel a compelling read."--Chicago Reader

"Required reading."--New York Post

"Amusing and thought-provoking."--New York Newsday

"Arresting and hip....captivating."--Christian Science Monitor

"Kidd shares his deep knowledge of graphic design with his readers in inventive and generally delightful ways....His wit, astute observation, and compassion make The Learners that rarest of offerings--[an] immensely enjoyable novel."--Boston Globe

"Kidd's novel is slyly funny as well as starkly emotional, and never overwritten or melodramatic. He has a Dickensian flair for giving his characters names that somehow suit them, and yet gives them a depth and poignancy that resonates long after the last page."--Wichita Eagle

About the Author:

Chip Kidd was born in Reading, PA in 1964. He lives in New York City and Stonington, CT.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0061673242
• ISBN 13: 9780061673245
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288