Witty, aphoristic, and never at a loss for a trenchant comment, NPR's much-loved commentator, Andrei Codrescu, has been keeping his American audience abreast of the absurdities of American culture for over ten years. He is known nationally for his regular appearances on "All Things Considered," and now for his recent debut as a film star in the movie version of his own book, Road Scholar. The Romanian-born Codrescu is fast on his way to becoming an American pop icon. In Zombification, Codrescu's NPR essays from 1989 to 1993 have been gathered together here in one volume, where they appear in print for the first time ever.
Born in Transylvania, Romania, in 1946, Codrescu emigrated to the United States in 1966. He began then to cast a keen and watchful eye upon his adopted homeland. The essays collected here come directly off the NPR airwaves, and were broadcast during a period in our nation's history that witnessed the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the radical change in American foreign and domestic policy. All of these momentous consciousness shifts have been chronicled through the eyes of Codrescu, an incisive commentator who seems to miss nothing. Ranging from indignation at world indifference toward the new nations of Europe to compassion for the underprivileged of the United States, Codrescu takes the pulse of our time with the exasperated affection and barbed irony for which he is known.
The area of Codrescu's concerns is wide, extending beyond world politics to include, for example, whales, dreams, Gypsies, and yes, that weathered institution, Congress. However, the unique voice who transmits these startling words could only be that of the Transylvanian-American who has given NPR listeners a sense of 1990s wonder.
Zombification is a powerful book by one of America's finest writers.
The clerk at my neighborhood store thinks I'm eccentric because I'd rather read yesterday's
New York Times than today's
Seattle Post Intelligencer. He'll say, "Today's
Times hasn't come in yet; that's yesterday's." I tell him, "I prefer the writing in the
Times." To which he replies, "But that's
yesterday's news!"
Similarly, this collection of Codrescu's essays on NPR's All Things Considered between 1989 and 1993 may strike you at first as cute but now irrelevant two-page vignettes about current events no longer current. But Codrescu grew up in totalitarian Communist Bloc Romania, and his antennae are continually honing in on the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which events are defined, filtered, massaged, and reported by the media -- and how in turn the media define, filter, and massage us into numbness: zombification. These are timeless essays about the eternal dysfunctional codependency of power and belief. Highly Recommended.
