
Freedom
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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David LeDoux
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By:
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Jonathan Franzen
From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections, a darkly comedic novel about family.
Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul - the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter - environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man - she was doing her small part to build a better world. But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz - outré rocker and Walter's college best friend and rival - still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become “a very different kind of neighbor,” an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes?
In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's intensely realized characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.
©2010 Jonathan Franzen (P)2010 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...




















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Perfection
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The characters in this book are very believable and we all know and/or are related to them. We just prefer not to know them too well. Still, I enjoyed this book a lot and would recommend it, but not quite at highly as Franzen's previous and best book.
Not as good as The Corrections
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However... there is no one to "root for" ultimately or rather there is and then everyone is shot down by their obsession with their their own values. (It didn't have to be this way... I didn't hate Holden Caufield for his feelings.)
Intelligent people already "get" that too many people are obsessed with their personal "freedoms" allowing us to wreck each others relationships and/or our environment in the name of our "freedom". Oh well. I suppose it *needed* to be written. Trust me... now you know it's"out there" you don't NEED to trudge through the mire of characters and story that make up this ostensibly "significant" book. I pity the poor student who gets this book stuck on their reading list for an American Literature class. Perhaps it will lead to lively class discussions about what makes a person turn into a jerk.
A Muddled Story about Jerks
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It strikes me how many other reviewers are negative by reason of "not liking" many of the characters. This seems to completely irrelevant to the enjoyment of this narrative for me. The book, and in particular the reading, are not without serious flaws but neither are we as a species or the time we live in.
Get past the first chapter - and the reader
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a bit much
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great listening!!
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The voice performance, and it is a performance, is excellent.
Freedom to find fault in everything
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Excellent!
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Missed the point
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Freedom, a truly American concept
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