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The Learners: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Chip Kidd
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $8.00
You Save: $18.00 (69%)
New (42) Collectible (2) from $8.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 69751
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st Scribner Hardcover Ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.2 x 1
ISBN: 0743255240
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780743255240
ASIN: 0743255240
Publication Date: February 19, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Fresh out of college in the summer of 1961, Happy lands his first job as a graphic designer (okay, art assistant) at a small Connecticut advertising agency populated by a cast of endearing eccentrics. Life for Happy seems to be -- well, happy. But when he's assigned to design a newspaper ad recruiting participants for an experiment in the Yale Psychology Department, Happy can't resist responding to the ad himself. Little does he know that the experience will devastate him, forcing a reexamination of his past, his soul, and the nature of human cruelty -- chiefly, his own. Written in sharp, witty prose and peppered with absorbing ruminations on graphic design, The Learners again shows that Chip Kidd's writing is every bit as original, stunning, and memorable as his celebrated book jackets.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 excellent sequel September 9, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I agree with the other reviewers... if I hadn't loved "The Cheese Monkeys," I never would have read this book, but I'm glad I did, because it was excellent. For those who don't like Kidd's writing style, it could get annoying, but for those who do, it's another gem. Overall a great novel, very fast read, makes you think about psychology a little bit too.
Funny and clever July 8, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you've read The Cheese Monkeys and you liked it, you'll definitely like this, because it just follows on from where that novel left off. Which is, on the whole, a good thing.
It means that for those of us who are graphic designers, we get to read the second novel (okay maybe there are more but I don't know about them) about a graphic designer. That's pretty cool for designers. If you're not a designer then I don't think it matters since designers probably read novels about policemen quite happily.
Having said that, The Learners doesn't just happen to be about a graphic designer. Since it's also written (and designed) by a graphic designer, there's quite a lot of stuff in it about graphic design that borders on the educational. You may learn something about typefaces.
Back to the story: it's about a guy called Happy, who appears to have no romantic or sexual interest in any of the other characters, which is a bit odd. In fact, this book doesn't deal with sex at all except for about three pages when it still doesn't, not really.
It's actually mostly about the main character's reaction to an experiment he takes part in to test how much one human will hurt another if told to by somebody they trust. It's based on an experiment that really did take place in the 1950s.
The setting is the best part of the book though: a small designer's office in New Haven, the sort of place that doesn't exist in today's world of identikit offices. Instead of Project desk systems, there are poky offices with glass doors and polished wood, rolls of paper, the smell of ink, eccentric people and general cosy confusion. That's very well portrayed.
But the story seems a bit thin and kind of there just to hang all the graphic designer stuff on, all the clever stuff the (very clever) author wants to tell us in a that slightly cutesy post Salinger style he adopts that could get annoying but which I happen to like.
I don't know whether everyone would like it, but I loved it.
And the cover artwork is, as you'd expect, superb.
Don't read this book... July 8, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
...unless you read The Cheese Monkeys first. I was familiar with Mr. Kidd's graphic design for some time, and saw him speak at the Gravity Free Conference. It was such an enjoyable talk I ordered The Cheese Monkeys online, and it was waiting for me on my arrival home. I was out of town all week and thought I would just read a few chapters before bed. The way I figure it Kidd owes me a good nights sleep. When I finished the book I waited a few hours and went out and bought The Learners, devouring it as well. I'm not sure what makes a book great, but for me, both of these are in that category. The Cheese Monkeys is such a nice nostalgic look back at college and the experiences that make that time so amazing, as well as the time travel back to a time when creating art didn't involve a mouse and a delete key. It also has a girl, the type that I would have either married or taken out a restraining order against, I'm not sure in what order.
And The Learners picks up where The Cheese Monkeys left off, with the college student getting his first job, part of his quest born of his college experience, that once again pays homage to the day when things were thought out before they were created, because creating took cumulative effort.
I'll say no more, to avoid spoiling the story. But I think these books need to both be read, in the proper order. They paint the same kind of historic picture in my head that Mad Men does, where you can smell the stale cigarette smoke and picture the Boomerang Formica. Enjoy. I certainly did.
 Too Gimmiky June 8, 2008
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
I had high hopes for this book after reading a review in Newsweek. Unfortunately it did not live up to my expectations. The author uses so many adjectives to describe everything that I felt like I was reading a high school English student's composition.
Gimmicks abound from little asides like what metaphor, and content are, to the names of the characters, like "Sketch", and "Tip"!
Speaking of characters beyond the descriptive adjectives, they are undeveloped, and as a reader, I could care less what happened to any of them.
I trudged through and finished the book, hoping it would make sense in the end, but alas.....
Save your money.
A worthy sequel May 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"The Learners," a sequel to Kidd's "The Cheese Monkeys," is a fascinating read, multilayered and extraordinarily original in its execution.
Our hero, Happy, has graduated from university and has head to New Haven, not for graduate studies at Yale, but to seek a job with the advertising firm that gave his favorite professor his start. Once ensconced at the agency the author introduces a motley assortment of characters and types he draws with lacerating wit and skill. Presented in sections labeled "Before," "During" and "After," the story takes Happy to the Yale lab of real-life Professor Stanley Milgram, and follows him as he participates in the famous "Obedience to Authority" experiments.
For a lesser talent this premise would provide the requisite amount of material for a standard situation comedy. Kidd is NOT a lesser talent. he is an original thinker and extravegantly gifted writer. One doesn't guess where this story is going with any degree of accuracy; indeed the end "The Learners" is quite unexpected and shocking, and yet appropriate and genuine.
With "The Cheese Monkeys," and now "The Learners," Chip Kidd is a writer I've placed on my "must read" list.
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