The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History » (Bargain)

Best known for his National Book Award-winning novel The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen is equally adept at turning out elegant essays, social commentary, and cultural criticism.

The Discomfort Zone is Franzen's memoir of growth from his boyhood as a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person," through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions. It's also a portrait of a Midwestern middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s and a vivid personal history of an America turning its back on a certain idealism.

Daring, honest, and written with the comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that marks Franzen's fiction, The Discomfort Zone tells of the formation of one young mind in the crucible of an everyday American family.

The Washington Post - Bob Irvy

A common thread running through the essays is the peeling away of childish illusion to reveal a second reality -- the very definition of growing up, and a discomfort zone if there ever was one. Discovering the beauty and ubiquity of birds, for instance, after a lifetime of looking at them but not seeing them, made Franzen feel as if he'd always "been mistaken about something important." Franzen may be known as The Man Who Said No To Oprah; he's written about that pop-culture melodrama elsewhere, thankfully. Here, we get the small, unexpectedly fraught moments that accumulate into a life. They're interesting merely because they happened to Franzen, who has the enviable ability to make them so.