Turn of the Century, Kurt Andersen
Turn of the Century, Kurt Andersen
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Turn of the Century

Author: Kurt Andersen

Narrator: John Rubinstein

Abridged: 5 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/11/1999


Synopsis

As big and exciting as the next century, this is a novel of real life at our giddy, feverish, topsy-turvy edge of the millennium. Turn of the Century is a good old-fashioned novel about the day after tomorrow--an uproarious, exquisitely observed panorama of our world as the twentieth century morphs into the twenty-first, transforming family, marriage, and friendship and propelled by the supercharged global businesses and new technologies that make everyone's lives shake and spin a little faster.
        
As the year 2000 progresses, George Mactier and Lizzie Zimbalist, ten years married, are caught up in the whirl of their centrifugally accelerating lives. George is a TV producer for the upstart network MBC, launching a truly and weirdly groundbreaking new show that blurs the line between fact and fiction. Lizzie is a software entrepreneur dealing with the breakneck pleasures and pains of running her own company in an industry where the rules are rewritten daily. Rocketing between Los An-geles and Seattle, with occasional stopovers at home in Manhattan for tag-team parenting of their three children, George and Lizzie are the kind of businesspeople who, growing up in the sixties and seventies, never dreamed they would end up in business. They're too busy to spend the money that's rolling in, and too smart not to feel ambivalent about their crazed, high-gloss existences, but nothing seems to slow the roller-coaster momentum of their inter-secting lives and careers.
        
However, after Lizzie, recovering from a Microsoft deal gone awry, becomes a confidante and adviser to George's boss, billionaire media mogul Harold Mose, the couple discovers that no amount of sophisticated spin can obscure basic instincts: envy, greed, suspicion, sexual temptation--and, maybe, love. When they and their children are finally drawn into a thrilling, high-tech corporate hoax that sends Wall Street reeling (and makes one person very, very rich), George and Lizzie can only marvel at life's oversized surprises and hold on for dear life.
        
Like Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, Kurt Andersen's Turn of the Century lays bare the follies of our age with laser-beam precision, creating memorable characters and dissecting the ways we think, speak, and navigate this new era of extreme capitalism and mind-boggling technology. Entertaining, imaginative, knowing, and wise, Turn of the Century is a richly plotted comedy of manners about the way we live now.

About The Author

Kurt Andersen is author of Heyday and Turn of the Century and frequently writes for New York and Vanity Fair. He is host and cocreator of the Peabody Award–winning public radio program Studio 360. In 2006, he founded Very Short List, an email service for connoisseurs of culture who would never call themselves “connoisseurs.” He was cofounder of Spy magazine, and has been a columnist and critic for the New Yorker and Time. Andersen lives with his wife and daughters in Brooklyn.John Rubinstein appeared on Broadway in Pippin, Children of a Lesser God (Tony Award), M. Butterfly, and Ragtime, and starred in the television series Family and Crazy Like a Fox. His films include 21 Grams and Red Dragon. He is also a composer of film music and a director.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Julie

Could not put it down - brought me back to the Y2k hysteria, the up and down of the .com and the excitement of a new millennium - loved the characters. Warning - its really long!......more

Personally, I enjoyed this one a good bit, but I'm only giving it three stars. That's because I can't see it being particularly accessible to anyone who has never lived in New York and worked in either media, technology, or possibly finance. The software-company boardroom scenes, and the depictions......more

Goodreads review by Kelly

This book is amazing on two levels. Not only does it weave a dense but masterful story juggling scores of characters and subplots and an arsenal of Chekov's guns; it also features some shockingly accurate predictions for the way we live twenty years after the book was published, not in a gee-whiz-fl......more


Quotes

“Outrageously funny . . . wickedly satirical . . . the most unclichéd novel imaginable.”—The New York Times 
 
“Astonishing . . . Andersen [is] the first most promising novelist of the Third Millennium.”—Entertainment Weekly
 
“Extraordinary . . . exceptional.”—The Independent on Sunday
 
“Wonderful writing [that] sparkles with original observations.”—USA Today