"White Noise"

A great book I read recently is "White Noise" by Don DeLillo. It won the National Book Award in 1985 and was in TIME magazine's list of 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. It was mainly about the contemporary, plugged in milieu that we live in, and humans' fear of death. The protagonist in the story is Jack Gladney, a professor who teaches Hitler Studies. The book has numerous vignettes to portray the society we live in. One is about a chemical plant near Gladney's home accidentally releasing a cloud of gas that may be poisonous. Another is about Gladney's wife, who takes drugs to remove her fear of death. DeLillo's saturnine view of technology for the most part predicted the future. "White Noise" was written before the explosion of the internet, and before Prozac existed, both of which DeLillo alluded to in the book. All in all, White noise was enlightening, and it belongs on the "To-read" list of anyone intrested in modern society.