Rating: 
Summary: Great Book
Review: Read all the bad reviews of this book. Each is from a person who wants a straightforward A-Team type plot. If you want that, go read Tom Clancy. If you want a powerful, brilliant, funny book read this.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant but flawed
Review: I'd give 3 1/2 stars but will charitably round up. This was my first exposure to DeLillo, and I'll read him again. He's a virtuoso writer, with a gift for dead-on descriptions of everyday experience, as well as offbeat, slightly dadaist comic dialogue. In these ways, he often reminded me of John Updike and Donald Barthelme, respectively. In general, I agree with many of the recent reviews - this is a work of brilliant and hilarious post-modern observation. Nonetheless, it took me over 2 months to read, in which time it was put aside several times in favor of other books. After a wonderful start, it definitely seemed to drag. I never really bought into the concept of the paralyzing fear of death, and thought that that whole theme became very redundant and overworked by story's end. In truth, I feel there was enough material here for a great 150 page novella. So while I can't rave about White Noise in its totality, there were so many moments of compact perfection that I'll probably be enjoying it in bits and pieces for years to come.
Rating:
Summary: A Post Modern Look at Family, Death and America
Review: White Noise is arguably one of the finest books of its time. White Noise is centered around Jack Gladney and his pieced together family. Jack immerses himself in his study of Hitler in order to stave off the inveitable fact that death is looming around the corner. DeLillo creates a picture of America surrounded by television, pollution, and paranoia. If you enjoy this book I suggest End Zone and Moa II.
Rating:
Summary: The best american novel of the Eighties.
Review: Divorce, pollution, television, computers, spies, firearms, drugs, science, supermarkets, pornography, tourists and Hitler Studies. All this and more is combined in a dryly (and - darkly) funny tale of middle class dread. Jack Gladney, professor of the only Hitler Studies degree program in the world, lives with his blended family in a New England College town. The Gladney's embrace all that SHOULD be comforting about middle class life, but nothing erases their fear of death. Things get complicated after a bit of infidelity and the appearance of an experimental drug (it takes away the fear of death). Those who either love or despise Pynchon should appreciate this startling picture of Middle American life wrapped into a tightly plotted suspense story.
Rating:
Summary: A Postmodern Masterpiece
Review: In what is arguably his best book, DeLillo pulls apart Jack Gladney's suburban and academic idyll in order to reveal new pleasures from familiar images. After reading the book, who could go into a supermarket and view it in the same light again? And how much do we now trust high academia? These are but some of the delicious questions DeLillo leaves us with, allowing us to answer them for ourselves with reference to our own lives. People seeking conventional families and conventional storylines will not find them in this book: DeLillo offers a far more interesting take on life than that. His subversion of the formulaism of consumer life, and the posturing hollowness of academia are all on-ramps to his broader canvas; the fear of death, and our techonoligical and philosophical attempts to cheat it. But for a novel about the fear of dying, toxic events and dangerously experimental pharmaceuticals, White Noise is immensely funny, in DeLillo's unique off-beat way.
Rating: 
Summary: thoughtful & quirky dialogue, but characters are homogeneous
Review: The story flowed right along, but I was slightly annoyed by the fact that all the characters, from Gladney's 14 yr son to the aging father-in-law to the wierd nun at the end, all speak with the same cynical and stylized voice.
Rating:
Summary: painful hysteria
Review: As Flannery O'Connor said, all humorous books are about life and death. Delillo understands and brilliantly portrays the intersection of humor, pain and the necessity of life. He focuses his seemingly unlimited genuis on the essential problems humanity has always faced and is perhaps the only living writer to do so with as much courage and skill. This is perhaps the best book since Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" and the bravest book I've read in years. A fantastic introduction for any new reader to Delillo's linguistic grace. His sentences prick like razors through the idoitic cloud of contemporary existence.
Rating:
Summary: great beginning and dull end
Review: After reading the first two thirds of the book, I thought, "what a great book!", then it goes on forever and ever. A depressing book.
Rating: 
Summary: I was dying to read this book and ended up wondering why
Review: Although somewhat engaging for the first 100 pages, the book moved from interesting to banal. I had to force myself to finish it. I was especially disappointed since I had heard that it was extremely funny.
Rating:
Summary: Further Reading for fans
Review: I adored this book. If anyone out there feels the same, I would like to recommend another book that is similar but deliciously different: "A Wild Sheep Chase" by Haruki Murakami. It's the Eastern version of the postmodern crisis undergone by Jack and his family in White Noise.
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