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Outstanding
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Los Angeles Times James Marcus
Consistently fascinating.
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
Quirky, funny, poignant, self-deprecating and ultimately wise. [15 June 2006, p.614]
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
While Franzen's family was unmarked by significant tragedy, the common yet painful contradictions of growing up are at the heart of this wonderful book. [29 May 2006, p.44]
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Outstanding
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New York Observer Adam Begley
So expertly shaped and composed, so genuinely, organically thought-provoking. [11 Sept 2006, p.21]
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Outstanding
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LA Weekly Nathan Ihara
Few writers can align intellect and sentiment with such elegance. In Franzen’s world, the cerebral and the emotional are part of the same beast, both feeding furiously on life. Discomforting, yes, but also beautiful.
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Outstanding
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The Independent Christina Patterson
A rich and rewarding mélange of social and family history, and of personal and political reflection, this is, most of all, a moving tale of a boy who learnt to wear a mask, a boy so alarmed by the "ever-invading sea" of his mother that he cut himself off from all emotion - a boy who never quite shook off his inner nerd.
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Outstanding
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The Observer Tim Adams
In our age of harsher polarities and extremes, his knowing elegies for that median time and place make luminous, essential reading.
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Favorable
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The Guardian Edmund White
This memoir has a lot of hilarious passages, especially about the author's first 15 years (which occupy more than half the book).
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Favorable
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The Onion A.V. Club Noel Murray
The Discomfort Zone will likely resonate strongest with people who had childhoods similar to Franzen's, right down to the oppressively pleasant Midwestern suburban home, the conservative worrywart parents, and the wannabe-hip church and school authority figures.
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Favorable
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Sydney Morning Herald Malcolm Knox
The process of transforming experience into fiction - "I will be written," he quotes Rilke - begins consanguineously with experience itself. That's what the writer does when he's living an ordinary life, when his amazing true stories must be the ones that he makes up.
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Favorable
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Washington Post Bob Ivry
He takes experiences from his life that, to be frank, aren't all that exciting, feeds them through the mixing board of his prodigious insight, and produces some beautiful music.
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Favorable
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Houston Chronicle Eric Miles Williamson
To be sure, Oprah, who adores sincerity, would admire Franzen's The Discomfort Zone. In choosing Franzen to be an Oprah novelist, it would seem Winfrey made the right choice after all.
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Favorable
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San Francisco Chronicle Heller McAlpin
The book is essentially a memoir -- an uncommonly percipient, well-written one -- of growing up as the adored baby of a middle-class family in the middle of the country in the middle of the past century.
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Favorable
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USA Today Bob Minzesheimer
As an essayist, Franzen has a talent for seamless transitions and for weaving together multiple lines of thought, which is harder than it looks.
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Favorable
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Village Voice Theo Schell-Lambert
The third-person outsourcing—"Even after cigarettes, the boy could taste the magic in his mouth"(157)—proposes common ground, fends off loneliness by making the story typical.
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Favorable
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Boston Globe Dan Cryer
I admire the way Franzen refrains from making melodrama out of his adolescence, or of rendering the suburbs as stereotypically stultifying.
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Favorable
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Library Journal Terren Ilana Wein
As in his previous work, the style here is energetic and engaged; many ideas are woven together, not often quickly or easily; this is not for lazy readers. [1 July 2006, p.78]
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Favorable
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Entertainment Weekly Gregory Kirschling
Funny, masterfully composed, self-deprecating — if sometimes too foppish — ruminations on his life.
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Favorable
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Booklist Donna Seaman
This gratifyingly unpredictable and finely crafted collection ends with a tour de force, "My Bird Problem," a thoughtful, wry, and edgy musing on marital bliss and misery, global warming, the wonder of birds, and our halfhearted effort to protect the environment. [1 Aug 2006, p.27]
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Mixed
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Randy Boyagoda
Franzen is courageous in attempting to make compelling extended explorations of collegiate German grammar and high-end bird-watching accessories, but even when arranged alongside revealing personal stories, clever cultural pronouncements and biting political observations, the primary stuff seems so idiosyncratically and self-consciously important to Franzen that it overwhelms the other material. [9 Sept 2006, p.D30]
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Mixed
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Christian Science Monitor Marjorie Kehe
It's hilarious and it's painful. It's sharply insightful and it's also frustratingly obtuse.
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Mixed
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Daily Telegraph Christopher Tayler
His habit of connecting the personal and the political becomes less effective when he's the ostensible subject of the book, however ironically handled.
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Unfavorable
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Daily Telegraph Lionel Shriver
Its upshot is that Franzen had a boring childhood, a tritely pretentious adolescence, an unhappy marriage about which we are never provided enough detail to distinguish it from a multitude of unhappy marriages, and a professional life that he coyly elides.
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Unfavorable
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Wall Street Journal Russ Smith
It's the odd memoir that leaves a reader with a feeling of mild revulsion and yet also a twinge of regret that the book isn't longer -- that is, in a kind of discomfort zone.
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Unfavorable
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The New York Times Book Review Daniel Mendelsohn
An unappetizing new essay collection that makes it only too clear that the weird poles between which the author seemed to oscillate during l’affaire Oprah — a kind of smug cleverness, on the one hand, and a disarming, sometimes misguided candor, on the other; a self-involved and self-regarding precocity and an adolescent failure to grasp the effect of his grandiosity on others — frame not only the career, but the man himself.
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Unfavorable
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Chicago Sun-Times Cheryl L. Reed
After a while, I began to tire of Franzen's unchecked superiority and his Freudian absence of female names -- even his former wife is nameless. Meanwhile, his male friends and brothers are all portrayed in full humanity, with first and/or last names.
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Terrible
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The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
Mr. Franzen turns his unforgiving eye on himself and succeeds in giving us an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass: petulant, pompous, obsessive, selfish and overwhelmingly self-absorbed.
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