The Learners: The Book After "the Cheese Monkeys" - Softcover

"Like "The Cheese Monkeys," "The Learners" is about learning--again under duress--to see everything, including oneself, differently....[In] Kidd's attempt to blend the satirical and serious...he modulates the mix just right in the novel's redemptive climax, which is both wild and winning, funny and moving."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Kidd smoothly mixes the reality of Milgram's rather sinister work with the fiction of Happy's new life in advertising....Even more impressive than the blend of fiction and fact is the way that "The Learners" shifts from raucous ad office comedy to the tragic repercussions of the Yale experiments."--Connecticut Post Online

"Kidd uses his narrative to investigate the relationships between form and content, authority and advertising....pointed observations on design and mass culture make this short novel a compelling read."--Chicago Reader

"Required reading."--New York Post

"Arresting and hip....captivating."--Christian Science Monitor

"A fascinating study of the shape and texture of words....Kidd's transition from artist to author is natural and seamless....[The Learners is] humorous and insightful and full of amusingly accurate scenes from the early 1960s--right down to the three-martini lunches and pillbox hats."--The Sunday Oregonian

"The advertising business and the [Milgram psychology] experiment are linked in this swift, often funny and always intelligent book."--Hartford Courant

"Kidd uses his fiction to explore the roots and broader implications of his work in the modern industry of persuasion....Kidd has held up an engrossing, distorting mirror to a time when marketplace language we all now speak was only just being coined."--Calgary Herald (Alberta)

"Amusing and thought-provoking."--New York Newsday

"Kidd shares his deep knowledge of graphic design with his readers in inventive and generally delightful ways....His wit, astute observation, and compassion make The Learners that rarest of offerings--[an] immensely enjoyable novel."--Boston Globe

A follow up to The Cheese Monkeys finds 1961 college graduate Happy embarking on his new advertising job in the middle of an eccentric team of co-workers, an effort that is marked by their struggles to land and keep promising clients and Happy's participation in a devastating Yale psychology experiment. Reprint. 40,000 first printing.