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Title details for Sunnyside by Glen David Gold - Available

Sunnyside

by Glen David Gold
Robertson Dean
Audiobook
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Glen David Gold, author of the best seller Carter Beats the Devil, now gives us a grand entertainment with the brilliantly realized figure of Charlie Chaplin at its center: a novel at once cinematic and intimate, heartrending and darkly comic, that captures the moment when American capitalism, a world at war, and the emerging mecca of Hollywood intersect to spawn an enduring culture of celebrity.
Sunnyside opens on a winter day in 1916 during which Charlie Chaplin is spotted in more than eight hundred places simultaneously, an extraordinary delusion that forever binds the overlapping fortunes of three men: Leland Wheeler, son of the world’s last (and worst) Wild West star, as he finds unexpected love on the battlefields of France; Hugo Black, drafted to fight under the towering General Edmund Ironside in America’s doomed expedition against the Bolsheviks; and Chaplin himself, as he faces a tightening vise of complications—studio moguls, questions about his patriotism, his unchecked heart, and, most menacing of all, his mother.
The narrative is as rich and expansive as the ground it covers, and it is cast with a dazzling roster of both real and fictional characters: Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Adolph Zukor, Chaplin’s (first) child bride, a thieving Girl Scout, the secretary of the treasury, a lovesick film theorist, three Russian princesses (gracious, nervous, and nihilist), a crew of fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants moviemakers, legions of starstruck fans, and Rin Tin Tin.
By turns lighthearted and profound, Sunnyside is an altogether spellbinding novel about dreams, ambition, and the dawn of the modern age.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 5, 2009

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781415959237
      • File size: 674241 KB
      • Duration: 23:24:40

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      A novel of the early twentieth century combines historical characters, anchored by Charlie Chaplin, with a raft of whacky fictional ones. Robertson Dean is an excellent narrator with a range of vocal tools and capabilities. However, his sporadic attempts at voicing do little to serve this story. For example, when Charlie Chaplin does an impromptu monologue as Comrade Leon Trotsky, much of the poignancy of the piece is lost due to the vague blend of accents employed. This kind of voicing is especially difficult when a character as well known as Chaplin is involved and the author has chosen to use his "voice" to create yet another great historical character. M.C. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from March 30, 2009
      From the bestselling author of Carter Beats the Devil
      comes an elegant blend of reality and fiction, war drama and Hollywood glamour. Gold sets into motion his cameo-heavy, multipronged plot with a bizarre incident in winter 1916, when Charlie Chaplin is spotted simultaneously in 800 places across the country, causing mass hysteria and panic. The primary story line follows Chaplin's struggles with women, creativity, film budgets and his opposition to the war. In a second, intersecting world, Leland Wheeler moves from the hinterlands to San Francisco with dreams of being a film star. He rechristens himself Leland Duncan, and though he gets shipped to the battlefields of France, the two ailing puppies he finds over there later provide his entrée to the movie biz. Finally, Hugo Black is a Detroit gentleman who volunteers for the infantry in an uncharacteristic whim and finds himself fighting in America's secret invasion of Russia. The result is a dramatic narrative of chance and coincidence, and also a serious reconstruction of an evolving social landscape. It is wholly exhausting and entirely satisfying: to borrow an idea from Chaplin's great personal-artistic quest in the book, it's a work as good as Gold.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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