Tobias Wolff. (2010). This Boy's Life. Unabridged HighBridge.

Tobias Wolff. 2010. This Boy's Life. HighBridge.

Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life. HighBridge, 2010.

Tobias Wolff. This Boy's Life. Unabridged HighBridge, 2010.

OverDrive Product Record

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/1294-1/{552EFDAB-366E-4FBB-AD11-FA5CEBBF624A}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/1294-1/{552EFDAB-366E-4FBB-AD11-FA5CEBBF624A}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/1294-1/552/EFD/AB/{552EFDAB-366E-4FBB-AD11-FA5CEBBF624A}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/1294-1/552/EFD/AB/{552EFDAB-366E-4FBB-AD11-FA5CEBBF624A}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

formats

1. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781615730896
     2. • type: 8
        • value: highbridge_audio#9781615730896
   • name: OverDrive MP3 Audiobook
   • id: audiobook-mp3
2. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781615730896
     2. • type: 8
        • value: highbridge_audio#9781615730896
   • name: OverDrive Listen
   • id: audiobook-overdrive

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9781615730889

mediaType

Audiobook

primaryCreator

• role: Author
• name: Tobias Wolff

title

This Boy's Life

dateAdded

2015-09-04T11:43:00-04:00

contentDetails

1. • href: https://link.overdrive.com/?websiteID=141&titleID=316549
   • type: text/html
   • account:
     • name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
     • id: 1151

sortTitle

This Boys Life

crossRefId

316549

id

552efdab-366e-4fbb-ad11-fa5cebbf624a

starRating

3.9

OverDrive MetaData

isPublicDomain

False

formats

1. • duration: 10:01:58
   • fileName: ThisBoysLife_9781615730896_316549
   • partCount: 10
   • fileSize: 289535866
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781615730896
     2. • type: 8
        • value: highbridge_audio#9781615730896
   • rights:
     1. • type: PlayOnPC
        • value: 1
     2. • type: PlayOnPCCount
        • value: -1
     3. • type: BurnToCD
        • value: 1
     4. • type: BurnToCDCount
        • value: -1
     5. • type: PlayOnPM
        • value: 1
     6. • type: TransferToSDMI
        • value: 1
     7. • type: TransferToNonSDMI
        • value: 1
     8. • type: TransferCount
        • value: -1
     9. • type: CollaborativePlay
        • value: 0
     10. • type: PublicPerformance
         • value: 0
     11. • type: TranscodeToAAC
         • value: 1
   • name: OverDrive MP3 Audiobook
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: audiobook-mp3
   • onSaleDate: 7/27/2010
   • samples:
     1. • source: Part 1
        • formatType: audiobook-mp3
        • url: https://excerpts.cdn.overdrive.com/FormatType-425/1294-1/316549-ThisBoysLife.mp3
     2. • source: Part 1
        • formatType: audiobook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=552EFDAB-366E-4FBB-AD11-FA5CEBBF624A&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
2. • duration: 10:01:58
   • fileName: ThisBoysLife
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 288948344
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781615730896
     2. • type: 8
        • value: highbridge_audio#9781615730896
   • name: OverDrive Listen
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: audiobook-overdrive
   • onSaleDate: 7/27/2010
   • samples:
     1. • source: Part 1
        • formatType: audiobook-mp3
        • url: https://excerpts.cdn.overdrive.com/FormatType-425/1294-1/316549-ThisBoysLife.mp3
     2. • source: Part 1
        • formatType: audiobook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=552EFDAB-366E-4FBB-AD11-FA5CEBBF624A&.epub-sample.overdrive.com

keywords

1. • value: Personal Memoirs
2. • value: Literary

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Wolff, Tobias
   • name: Tobias Wolff
2. • role: Narrator
   • fileAs: Wyman, Oliver
   • name: Oliver Wyman

imprint

HighBridge Audio

publishDate

2010-07-27T00:00:00-04:00

edition

Unabridged

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

This Boy's Life

fullDescription

First published in 1989, this memoir has become a classic in the genre. With this book, Wolff essentially launched the memoir craze that has been going strong ever since. It was made into a movie in 1993.Fiction writer Tobias Wolff electrified critics with his scarifying 1989 memoir, which many deemed as notable for its artful structure and finely wrought prose as for the events it describes. The story is pretty grim: Teenaged Wolff moves with his divorced mother from Florida to Utah to Washington State to escape her violent boyfriend. When she remarries, Wolff finds himself in a bitter battle of wills with his abusive stepfather, a contest in which the two prove to be more evenly matched than might have been supposed. Deception, disguise, and illusion are the weapons the young man learns to employ as he grows up-not bad training for a writer-to-be. Somber though this tale of family strife is, it is also darkly funny and so artistically satisfying that listeners come away exhilarated.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
   • content: "This Boy's Life is as fine as any of Wolff's novels. It is honest and pure, without a trace of self-pity."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer
   • content: "A coming-of-age-with-pluck remembrance that is heartwarming and heartbreaking, deadly funny, deeply serious, achingly real."
3. • premium: False
   • source: The Philadelphia Inquirer
   • content: "A work of genuine literary art . . . as grim and eerie as Great Expectations, as surreal and cruel as The Painted Bird, as comic and transcendent as Huckleberry Finn."
4. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times
   • content: "So absolutely clear and hypnotic . . . that a reader wants to take it apart and find some simple way to describe why it works so beautifully."
5. • premium: False
   • source: San Francisco Chronicle
   • content: "[This] extraordinary new memoir is so beautifully written that we not only root for the kid Wolff remembers, but we also are moved by the universality of his experience."
6. • premium: False
   • source: The Oregonian
   • content: "Wolff's genius is in his fine storytelling. This Boy's Life reads and entertains as easily as a novel. Wolff's writing and timing are superb, as are his depictions of those of us who endured the '50s."
7. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "Consistently entertaining—richer, darker, and funnier than anything else Tobias Wolff has written."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Los Angeles Times Book Review
   • content: "Wolf writes in language that is lyrical without embellishment, defines his characters with exact strokes and perfectly pitched voices, creates suspense around ordinary events, locating deep mystery within them. . . . To the rich fiction of childhood that ranges from Huckleberry Finn to Catcher in the Rye, Wolff has contributed his superb memoir."
9. • premium: False
   • source: The New Yorker
   • content: "A finely composed and fastidiously voiced recollection of a troubled adolescence."
10. • premium: False
    • source: The Cleveland Plain Dealer
    • content: "What emerges from this memoir is an absorbing story of a boy we are glad to have met, and a man whose next book we eagerly await."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Richard Russo, The Chicago Tribune
    • content: "Wonderfully funny ...What a fine story."
12. • premium: False
    • source: Time magazine
    • content: "Unforgettable."
13. • premium: False
    • source: The New York Times Magazine
    • content: "At once compassionate and deeply disturbing . . . "
14. • premium: False
    • source: The Atlantic Monthly
    • content: "Some of [Wolff's] brattish misdeeds are funny, some are pathetic, and all are amazing, because it seems so unlikely that the bewildered juvenile nuisance was to become the excellent writer he is."
15. • premium: False
    • source: Kirkus'
    • content: "A jewel-like memoir of childhood in the 1950s . . . Lucid, bitter, precise, terribly sad: the real-life equivalent of Wolff's acclaimed fiction."
16. • premium: False
    • source: Publishers Weekly
    • content: "Authentic and endearing."
17. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content: A young artist finds his voice in THIS BOY'S LIFE, and narrator Oliver Wyman reproduces his adolescent tone with remarkable verve and clarity. Tobias Wolff's 1989 memoir of his early life with his submissive mother and the violent men who either stalk her or marry her is strangely humorous and extraordinarily brave in its naked portrayal of abuse and conflict. Wyman captures the Wolff character's longing for normalcy in a universe that is topsy-turvy from what most young men experience growing up in America. Wolff the writer views Wolff the teenager with a distance that Wyman could have played for pity. Instead Wyman follows the author's lead and makes this story both moving and inspiring without being depressing. R.O. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
18. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      December 1, 1988
      In PEN/Faulkner Award-winner Wolff's fourth book, he recounts his coming-of-age with customary skill and self-assurance. Seeking a better life in the Northwestern U.S. with his divorced mother, whose ``strange docility, almost paralysis, with men of the tyrant breed'' taught Wolff the virtue of rebellion, he considered himself ``in hiding,'' moved to invent a private, ``better'' version of himself in order to rise above his troubles. Primary among these were the adultsdrolly eccentric, sometimes dementedwho were bent on humiliating him. Since Wolff the writer never pities Wolff the boy, the author characterizes the crew of grown-up losers with damning objectivity, from the neurotic stepfather who painted his entire house (piano and Christmas tree included) white, to the Native American football star whose ultimate failure was as inexplicable as his athletic brilliance. Briskly and candidly reportedWolff's boyhood best friend ``bathed twice a day but always gave off an ammoniac hormonal smell, the smell of growth and anxiety''his youth yields a self-made man whose struggle to fit the pieces together is authentic and endearing. Literary Guild alternate.

19. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      November 29, 2010
      Wolff’s well-regarded 1989 chronicle of his difficult childhood and adolescence is already considered a contemporary classic, and an avatar—for better and for worse—of the current memoir frenzy. Wyman reads with a certain downturned tone, where each sentence drifts into a melancholy fog. Try as he might, Wyman cannot lift the funk that hangs over Wolff’s tale of youthful desperation and ambition, and ultimately adopts the book’s bittersweet, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone. Wyman collapses the distance between himself and the book’s narrator, so that we eventually come to mistake him for Wolff’s Toby. A Grove paperback.

popularity

300

links

• self:
  • href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/552efdab-366e-4fbb-ad11-fa5cebbf624a/metadata
  • type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json

id

552efdab-366e-4fbb-ad11-fa5cebbf624a

starRating

3.9

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/1294-1/{552EFDAB-366E-4FBB-AD11-FA5CEBBF624A}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/1294-1/{552EFDAB-366E-4FBB-AD11-FA5CEBBF624A}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/1294-1/552/EFD/AB/{552EFDAB-366E-4FBB-AD11-FA5CEBBF624A}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/1294-1/552/EFD/AB/{552EFDAB-366E-4FBB-AD11-FA5CEBBF624A}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

isPublicPerformanceAllowed

False

languages

1. • code: en
   • name: English

subjects

1. • value: Biography & Autobiography
2. • value: Nonfiction

publishDateText

07/27/2010

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9781615730889

mediaType

Audiobook

shortDescription

First published in 1989, this memoir has become a classic in the genre. With this book, Wolff essentially launched the memoir craze that has been going strong ever since. It was made into a movie in 1993.Fiction writer Tobias Wolff electrified critics with his scarifying 1989 memoir, which many deemed as notable for its artful structure and finely wrought prose as for the events it describes. The story is pretty grim: Teenaged Wolff moves with his divorced mother from Florida to Utah to Washington State to escape her violent boyfriend. When she remarries, Wolff finds himself in a bitter battle of wills with his abusive stepfather, a contest in which the two prove to be more evenly matched than might have been supposed. Deception, disguise, and illusion are the weapons the young man learns to employ as he grows up-not bad training for a writer-to-be. Somber though this tale of family strife is, it is also darkly funny and so artistically satisfying that listeners come away exhilarated.

sortTitle

This Boys Life

crossRefId

316549

publisher

HighBridge

bisacCodes

1. • code: BIO007000
   • description: Biography & Autobiography / Literary
2. • code: BIO026000
   • description: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs