The Learners, Chip Kidd
The Learners, Chip Kidd
1 Rating(s)
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The Learners

Author: Chip Kidd

Narrator: Bronson Pinchot

Unabridged: 6 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/19/2008

Synopsis

A young graphic designer fresh out of college in the summer of 1961, Happy has just landed his first job at a wacky advertising firm filled with eccentric creative artists. Everything is going great until Happy is 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, this stand-alone sequel to Chip Kidd’s previous novel, The Cheese Monkeys, again shows that Kidd’s writing is every bit as original, stunning, and memorable as his celebrated book jackets.

About Chip Kidd

Chip Kidd is a writer and graphic designer in New York City whose book-jacket designs have helped spawn a revolution in the art of American book packaging. He has written about popular culture for McSweeney’s, Vogue, New York Times, New York Observer, Entertainment Weekly, Details, 2WICE, and others.

About Bronson Pinchot

Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Oriana on March 17, 2008

Sigh. I've been thinking for the last few days about what I should say in this review. I love Chip Kidd's voice, you see, his snappy dialogue and his witty little characters and his charming descriptions. There's a lot of clever stuff in this book, too, including smart digressions on form vs. conten......more

Goodreads review by Jason on September 02, 2008

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.) Any graphic designer worth their salt will already know who Chip Kidd is; he's the one who single-han......more

Goodreads review by Paul on September 07, 2010

Chip Kidd is not a bad writer. The Learners is not a bad story. But somehow, neither Kidd nor his novel The Learners never really come full circle. I never read The Cheese Monkeys, of which The Learners is supposed to be a stand-alone sequel. And it’s true, I didn’t feel like I was left out from not......more

Goodreads review by Susan on March 01, 2008

The first half of the book is somewhat slow at times (though the typography digressions are awesome!), but it really starts to pick up the pace right before the Milgram experiment. The last third that follows is so brilliant I completely forgot any problems I had with the beginning. It reminded me a......more

Goodreads review by D.M. on January 08, 2014

I've been in Chip Kidd's sway for something like 20 years now, so when his first authored book, The Cheese Monkeys, came out I was all over it. It took me a bit longer to get to The Learners, but not for avoiding it. I finally got around to buying it only this month, and read it in an eager rush, th......more

Quotes

“The Learners is witty and well observed as an office comedy, as a meditation on art, and as a story of self-discovery…the book is packed with sharp insights…Kidd ultimately is a brilliant, self-aware designer and a clever writer.” New York Times Book Review 

“Required reading.” New York Post

“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

“Snappy…Kidd invents a banter-filled workplace worthy of Howard Hawks, gleefully tweaks the old-guard panic of the Mad Men-era ad world, and even throws in a few typographic bells and whistles. A-.” Entertainment Weekly 

“[A] major writing talent…[Chip Kidd is] an author to watch.” USA Today 

“Ingenious…The Learners seduces the reader through a deceptive manipulation of form and content: It’s a matryoshka, or stacking doll, that hides a startling, dark content. By the time we get to the end of the first of its three parts, we are dropped into a creepy, disturbing, sociopolitical satire.” Philadelphia Inquirer

“Wild and winning, funny and moving.” San Francisco Chronicle

“Arresting and hip…captivating.” Christian Science Monitor 

“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) 

“Narrator Bronson Pinchot…offers a fresh perspective and a perfectly played performance that captures the essence of Kidd’s work. Pinchot assumes the personality of Happy with such vigor that he seems the only possible choice to narrate the novel…A witty story told by an even wittier narrator is a perfect combination.” AudioFile

Awards

  • Audie Award
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