I Am Charlotte Simmons

De: Tom Wolfe

Narrado por: Dylan Baker

Dupont University: the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition....Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina, who has come here on full scholarship. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the upper-crust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.

As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite, her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's god-like basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turn of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus, she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.

With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the '00s. I Am Charlotte Simmons is the much-anticipated triumph of America's master chronicler.

©2004 Tom Wolfe (P)2004 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers LLC

Reseñas de la Crítica

• Audie Award Finalist, Fiction (unabridged), 2005

"Like everything Wolfe writes, I Am Charlotte Simmons grabs your interest at the outset and saps the desire to do anything else until you finish." (The New York Times Book Review)
"The book is brilliant, wicked, true, and, like everything Wolfe writes, thematically coherent, cunningly well plotted, and delightfully told." (Atlantic Monthly)

Unfortunately Accurate

As usual, Tom Wolfe has created a sadly accurate portait of a slice of American culture that is succumbing to the relentless vulgarization of popular culture. The vulgarity and explicitness of the language of the book is not a thumbed-nosed reaction to a stuck up society, but a type of resignation to the zeitgeist of the lowest common denominator. The book is brilliant, sad and frustrating. For those who have experienced college life in the past 20 years will either wince or revel at the accuracy of the depiction of the debasement of the values depicted. Well-read and nicely paced, the unabridged audio book doesn't seem nearly as long as it is.

A True Tour de Force Satire of Higher Education

Wolfe is in total control of his craft in "I Am Charlotte Simmons," in which he skewers the hot air of much of 21st century university life. Few aspects of today's American undergraduate education experience escape Wolfe's penetrating analysis and lively prose. The fraternities, awash in beer and testosterone, the big business of college athletics, with its fat-cat enablers and overpaid head coaches, the high-minded but mostly ignored faculty, the truth-seeking, though also fame-seeking student journalists, the spoiled sorority girls in their tight designer jeans, and the hypocritical president, who long ago cut his deal in choosing a cozy and comfortable lifestyle over the life the mind, all are held accountable for spending so much money, effort, and time on so much of little importance.

Dylan Baker's inspired performance of more than a dozen unique major and minor characters, along with numerous bit players, is perhaps the best I've ever heard among the some 100 or more audio books I've listen to during the past 20 years. How he managed to keep all the male and female characters of various ages, races, education levels, socio-economic levels, and regions of origin, straight over the course of 31 hours of reading is mind boggling.

This book is a wild, funny, insightful, and often uncomfortable ride through a broken institution that follows the search for money, entertainment, and sex a lot more than it follows the search for anything related to truth. There's a lot of drinking, swearing, hooking up, and looking the other way as the nation's finest young adults, along with their wiser though thoroughly compromised elders, navigate their way through two semesters at one of the nation's finest institutions of higher learning. It's "Animal House" on steroids.

I can't imagine another living American writer who could render this sad tale more thoroughly and enjoyably than Tom Wolfe, Ph.D.

Tom Wolfe Unleashed (& Unedited)

I'm a big fan of Tom Wolfe, loved "Bonfire of the Vanities," and adored "A Man in Full." Both books I thought ended too soon, and wished he had written multi-volume sequels, à la George R.R. Martin's Song of Fire & Ice, or Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series.

"I am Charlotte Simmons," however -- although full of insightful cultural observations of university students and college life, and featuring interesting characters -- tested my patience. The problem is that many of the scenes are described in such minute detail, with every flickering thought and feeling explained, that they seem to go on forever. This is a book in need of an editor.

I slogged through it, though, and found it, overall, a pleasant experience. I would not, however, read a sequel to this book.

(The narration was excellent.)

True to life

I can tell you from personal experience that this novel reflects real life. Although I was in school in the seventies, you can bet things are even wilder today. This is a troubling novel and should give those of us brought up on sex and drugs and rock and roll some pause to consider where all this is eventually going to lead. Like Wolfe's other work, this is well crafted. Too bad they couldn't get a better narrator.

Fast start-Slow finish

The book built a number of interesting story lines with lots of suspence, then fizzled at the end. I found the characters from Charlott's home town of Sparta, NC to be less than realistic, and I suspect a lot of good Spartians have been offended by the way they were potrayed. I live 30 miles from Sparta and find the discriptions of the people and the area to be faulty. I also wonder how the author could believe any young lady who earns a perfect score on the SAT could be so stupid.