The Human Stain Part 1

By: Philip Roth

Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris

Length: 5 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.

Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for 50 years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."

As an added bonus, when you purchase any of our Audible Modern Vanguard productions of Phillip Roth's books, you'll also get the exclusive Jim Atlas interview below added to your library.

This production is part of our Audible Modern Vanguard line, a collection of important works from groundbreaking authors.

This production is part of our Audible Modern Vanguard line, a collection of important works from groundbreaking authors.

©2001 Philip Roth (P)2009 Audible, Inc.

Spectaular!

Phillip Roth is such a great writer that after reading his books its hard to read light weight stuff like detective novels which I love. But after reading a book like The Human Stain, how can Harry Bosch's tiny problems compare with the serious issues the The Human Stain deals with: What is the price we pay for personal freedom? What price would we pay to be completely free of the bigotry of society? What is it like living with a lie for your entire life? I mean, come on, these are legitimate problems to explore and when written about in a beautiful language is enriching. It's like the difference between eating MacDonalds and a great French or Italian feast. Roth has the ability to so intimately paint pictures of his characters that we know them as friends or foes in real life. This book should be mandatory reading for every school kid in the United States.

A very American tale

The Human Stain is perhaps Philip Roth's best novel. Roth has a skill for taking a snapshot of life and investigating it thoroughly without wasting words or boring the reader. The decisions people make in their lives, the outcome of the those decisions, and how the decisions impact the people around them: that is the essence of The Human Stain.

What a headache

I have never read a novel by Philip Roth before, and I must says I found it to be a rambling, wild, incoherent, meandering, long, somewhat confusing read. That said, the narrator was a perfect fit for this style of writing, and I did listen til the end to find out how it would wrap up. I'll never read another one of his novels, though.

Absolutely terrible

Long, drawn out and terribly boring story about terribly shallow people. Couldn't finish it. Even Dennis Boutsikaris couldn't save this one.