Rating: 
Summary: White Noise
Review: The book White Noise was an interesting book. It was a book about a family and their problems. This family goes through a lot in the book. The father wants to be like Hitler and is learning all about him and learning how to speak German. The wife has to deal with this obession of her husband. The whole book has to deal with death. This is all the husband talks about and thinks about is dying. The couple is afraid of who will die first, either the husband or the wife. It's strange to think that is would be something a person would constantly think about and base their life around the subject. There is a big issue in the book about a drug called Dylar that the wife takes so the idea of death will fade away from her. One of the daughters finds out about the drug and tells her father. Towards the end the father wants to take the drug. This is a weird situation. In today's society people would not be taking a drug to stop thinking about death and who is going to dye first. We all know that we will eventually die, it is a part of life and living. Everyone goes through it. This is what made the book interesting. Who would have thought that their are people in this world who would base their life areound the idea of death.
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Summary: What's the fuss about?
Review: Maybe if I'd read White Noise back when it was first published I'd have been more impressed. It's hard to remember to give credit to DeLillo in regard to his 'visionary' treatment of environmental issues when so many more horrible things have occurred since. Same thing goes for his exposee of fractured families, rampant commercialism, etc. I guess I'm saying that a great deal of White Noise's worth depended upon topicality and it's showing every one of it's seventeen years. 'Course, in another seventeen years we'll be reading White Noise for a pleasant trip to simpler times.
In the end, it's a smart book with a few good passages but I didn't like it.
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Summary: The natural language of the species
Review: White Noise is a truly brilliant take on American culture and its frenzied consumerism. DeLillo's work exposes the primitivism that still remains in (and is sometimes the result of) post-modern culture. Media and consumerism saturate the book and consume the characters (almost literally). Yet, even as American culture it is satirized, the sheer spectacle of it is celebrated; consumerism eventually reaches religious proportions (a theology that ultimately offers no salvation). I don't think DeLillo's taking any moralist stance here. He's merely creating on the page what the white noise of media creates in our living room -- a bath of language that is narcotic in every sense of the word. What I find interesting, too, is the way that it mirrors the marginalizations that hyper-capitalism (especially that of 1985 and Reagonomics) creates, its most insidious aspect. Those that can't fully participate in the American spectacle are devoured by the wash of white noise even quicker. Women are turned into prostitutes (even, in essence, the narrator's wife, Babette), the elderly are forgotten and confused (lost in the mall, scrounging for food), and minorities are rendered invisible (for a book saturated with American iconology and pop culture, race is conspicuous in its absence -- very telling about these characters). American culture at its most relentless and horrifying. The cult of the famous and the dead, indeed.
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Summary: White Noise~what a book!
Review: White Noise is a book about an American family who has problems just like every other American family. It is about a family who has many children and each parent has been married before. I enjoyed this book a lot but I was a little disappointed with the ending. That is why I gave the book a 4 and not a five. This book kept its readers wanting more even after the story was over. It is a story about consumerism; it questions how materialistic objects can affect one's life and dealt with fears caused by the feel death caused. It talks about love affairs, fears that rule one's life and dangerous deadly events. White Noise allows you as the reader to get into the family's feelings and learn all about their attitudes their fears and their likes. Everyone has an answer or a question to answer a question in this book. There is always debate and events going on with in the family to keep the readers attention. The book could be showing how Don DeLillo looks at life. He senses emptiness and sees a lot of consumerism taking place that helps deal with the emptiness. Such as the incidents that take place in this story in the supermarket. I enjoyed how the author told the story and the events he used. Overall this book kept my interest very well and the only thing I would have changed was the ending.
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Summary: Interesting thoughts....
Review: White noise is a story that pinpoints the strangeness of life, as is depicted through the lines of an American family. While this book is very funny capturing the simple silliness of life it is also that very humor that undermines the seriousness of what I think DeLillo attempts to outline. Narrator, and chairman of the department of Hitler studies at a small college, is Jack Gladney. His wife, Babette, is taking unknown drugs to alleviate her fear of death, and their children are acting different every day. Two main themes that come out of White Noise are the ideas of consumerism and also the fear of death. DeLillo includes a toxic emission incident, in which poisonous side products threaten the lives of Jack and his family, thus augmenting their fear of death. While these elements seem entirely appropriate to make this story work, DeLillo puts in a couple of extra themes as well that really prove detrimental to the story. One of these extras is the overlying fact of fascism, which resides within Gladney's fascination with his studies. Overall this book is well worth the effort to read. It is both funny, and "real." It is something that makes you reassess your outtake on life, and make decisions about your future.
Rating:
Summary: White Noise
Review: I really enjoyed reading the novel. I thought it gave a good look into the American obsession with consumerism and death. Even though some of Delillo's ideas seemed a little far fetched it was easy to find some truth in them. Gladney's obsession with death is something that every American worries about. Maybe not to the extent that Gladney and his wife worry about it, however, still today we find ourselves trying to find ways to live a longer and healthier life. The novel gives a good look into the lives of what, on the outside, seems to be a typical American family. Bust jut like families today things aren't always as good as they seem. Overall, I thought it was a good book and would definitely reccommend it to college readers.
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Summary: Pure Amusement!
Review: In DeLillo's book White Noise, the ideas of death, media, society and the family are all confronted in a way I have never seen before. The author does an amazing job of showing how people react to everyday life, in a humorous and amusing way. DeLillo takes an ordinary man and knit-picks his world apart, piece by piece, in the end, creating a tale of secret, subliminalization, and astonishment. This book opened my eyes to the world around me and in effect, made me realize things about others and myself that I may have looked over in the past. The title alone makes one realize there are things happening everyday that you may not necessarily see or realize, but they are there. This book is funny and entertaining, and I would recommend it to anyone in the mood for a good laugh and an insight on life never seen before.
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Summary: Alas...
Review: this is not as good as one would have hoped. DeLillo is but a weaker version of William Gaddis. For the real thing, and more demanding by far, read Gaddis. The difference between just being good, and a genius. Start with Gaddis's "A Carpenter's Gothic". For a more devastating take on Hitler and the German mentality that made him possible, read Gunter Grass (start with "The Tin Drum"), especially his "Dog Years".
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Summary: Levity's Rainbow?
Review: After reading Underworld shortly after its appearance, this is the second work I read by DeLillo. I thought that Underworld was a book that contained a number of strong scenes/vignettes, but ultimately failed to show a level of coherence that it's length required. While I appreciated White Noise's satire, brevity and improved focus better, I still feel a lack of coherence between the various themes of the novel. The two main themes of White Noise are consumerism and fear of death. At the interface between both subjects DeLillo has inserted a prophetic toxic emission incident, in which poisonous side products threaten the lives of the main character and his family, thus augmenting their fear of death. While these three elements seem entirely appropriate to make this story work, the author inserts a couple of extra themes that really prove detrimental to the story. Jack's chair in Hitler studies and the discussion of other fields of study at his faculty provide material for highly amusing satirical puns. Yet, in the end attempts to imply and provide a link between Jack's academic interests and his fear of death are shallow. Babette's Dylar episode resulting in Jack's assault on Mink, again starts out great but makes you shrug at the end. The quality of the prose is as high as it is in Underworld. Again some of the scenes deserve a "classic status". The satire often approaches the Swiftian level. Yet again, in my personal opinion, DeLillo leaves the full potential of the individual ingredients of the novel unmet. Powerful observations on many aspects of modern life, yet maybe a little too smart for it's own good.
Rating: 
Summary: The scintillating grace of a wet firecracker
Review: Written in 1984, DeLillo's delightfully obscure novel plows through a slice of prescient postmodern America at a time when America was stubbornly modern. However, anyone born since 1970 is environmentally sophisticated enough to breeze across this tattered landscape of a book with merely a nod. One might even wonder if perhaps the book was the result of a prolonged sleep deprivation jag as nothing seems to hang together in any but the most tangential, immaterial sort of way. There are assaults on meaning and symbol, but none calculated to break through into the realm of shared consciousness or gravity. A puzzling book, either a mild success or a grand failure, but not much else to be appreciated. Save your money for some meaningful white noise of your own and check this out from the local library, instead.
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