Salinger

By: David Shields, Shane Salerno

Narrated by: Peter Friedman, January LaVoy, Robert Petkoff, Campbell Scott

Length: 19 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher's summary

Based on eight years of exhaustive research and exclusive interviews with more than 200 people - and published in coordination with the international theatrical release of a major documentary film from the Weinstein Company - Salinger is a global cultural event: the definitive biography of one of the most beloved and mysterious figures of the 20th century.

For more than 50 years, the ever elusive author of The Catcher in the Rye has been the subject of a relentless stream of newspaper and magazine articles as well as several biographies. Yet all of these attempts have been hampered by a fundamental lack of access and by the persistent recycling of inaccurate information. Salinger remains, astonishingly, an enigma. The complex and contradictory human being behind the myth has never been revealed.

No longer.

In the eight years since Salinger was begun, and especially in the three years since Salinger’s death, the authors interviewed on five continents more than 200 people, many of whom had previously refused to go on the record about their relationship with Salinger. This oral biography offers direct eyewitness accounts from Salinger’s World War II brothers-in-arms, his family members, his close friends, his lovers, his classmates, his neighbors, his editors, his publishers, his New Yorker colleagues, and people with whom he had relationships that were secret even to his own family. Shields and Salerno illuminate most brightly the last 56 years of Salinger’s life: a period that, until now, had remained completely dark to biographers.

Provided unprecedented access to diaries, letters, legal records, and secret documents, listeners will feel they have, for the first time, gotten beyond Salinger’s meticulously built-up wall. The result is the definitive portrait of one of the most fascinating figures of the 20th century.

©2013 David Shields and Shane Salerno (P)2013 Simon & Schuster

One of the best biographies ever

This is an absolutely amazing biography, created with a new method of extensive use of Salinger's own writings and letters. I rate this one of the best biographies I have ever read. And I have read quite a few.

Fascinating story about recluse man

Salinger is a fascinating story about a famously recluse man. The story dives into Salingers life and attempts to connect his life’s events to the motives of his desperate need for privacy.
The story is built up by recounts from eye-witnesses and his own words through is literature and correspondence.

The only feeling that remains is; what would Salinger have thought about the book himself?
Salinger was very clear about demanding his privacy, so is this book a breach of that privacy? Or is this just part of the mystical creature Salinger has created of himself?

Very boring

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

The book relied on letters, notes and comments from people who knew Salinger and simply read or quoted them. The same theme used to depict the complex character of the author is used over and over. After the first part, I could not go on.

Has Salinger turned you off from other books in this genre?

No

What didn’t you like about the narrators’s performance?

It was fair, but he had difficult material.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

Not really

Not suited for listening

I'm pretty sure I would find this book irritating even if I were reading it - more later on that - but this is wholly annoying to listen to. It's mostly epistolary, and that means an endless succession of this pattern: "Letter write/Quote quote quote. New letter writer/Quote quote quote. Author identifies his own voice/Words words words."

Just aggravating.

So, will I go off and buy the book instead? No, I won't, mostly because the authors are so enormously impressed with their own research that they feel compelled to give us ... ALL of it. So we get letters revealing the most boring, inconsequential details ... constantly.

Two stars is probably generous.

Obviously I Do Not Get It!

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

Only if it had been a different experience all together. This book was like diving into a fishbowl of snippets and reading them one by one. Am I the only one who found this audiobook disconcerting? A collage, yes, certainly. Difficult to hear and really difficult to try and put the pieces together, you bet. I thought I wanted to know more about JDS, but not like this. All over the map, it's 1948, then 1953, then 1972, then 1948. Very, very disappointed. The collage was too much for me.

Would you ever listen to anything by David Shields and Shane Salerno again?

I don't know, probably not.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

No

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Disappointment. My granddaughter was named Esme after the character in "To Esme with Love and Squalor." Her dad was in Afghanistan when she was born. Therefore I am very interested in the life and times of JDS. Too difficult to try and decipher.

This book is horrible

Would you try another book from David Shields and Shane Salerno and/or the narrators?

The writing is strange, it wanders and Salinger's story is told from many other person's who knew him points of view. It is terribly written and my wife and I turned it off in the car after only 1 hour of listening. I just want a credit back on this one.

Don't bother

This was just bad. The entire book is in diary entry format from several perspectives, all over the place with regard to timeline, and just a bore. I love biographies and would have, perhaps, had a better experience with a hard copy but in audio I struggled to finish it. Save your credit.