Synopses & Reviews
Jack Gladney teachers Hitler studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America where his colleagues include New York expatriates who want to immerse themselves in "American magic and dread." Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the usual rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism.
Then a lethal black chemical cloud floats over theif lives, an "airborne toxic event" unleashed by an industrail accident. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladney family radio transmisisons, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings pulsing with life, yet heralding the danger of death.
Review
"A writer of stupendous talents...His cool but evocative prose is witty, biting, surprising, precise....Splendid stuff: not merely are its wit and glitter distinctive, but it's true it describes, with sympathetic but devastating finality, an academic subspecies that any habitue of the campuses will immediately recognize." Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
About the Author
Don DeLillo published his first short story when he was twenty-three years old. He has since written twelve novels, including
White Noise (1985) which won the National Book Award. It was followed by
Libra (1988), his novel about the assassination of President Kennedy, and by
Mao II, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
In 1997, he published the bestselling Underworld, and in 1999 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, given to a writer whose work expresses the theme of the freedom of the individual in society; he was the first American author to receive it. His latest novel, The Body Artist, was published in January 2001. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.