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Book Summary and Reviews of Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson

Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson

Lost at Sea

The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Published:
  • Oct 2012, 416 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Ronson investigates the strange things we're willing to believe in, from lifelike robots programmed with our loved ones' personalities to indigo children to hypersuccessful spiritual healers to the Insane Clown Posse's juggalo fans. He looks at ordinary lives that take on extraordinary perspectives, for instance a pop singer whose life's greatest passion is the coming alien invasion, and the scientist designated to greet those aliens when they arrive. Ronson throws himself into the stories - in a tour de force piece, he splits himself into multiple Ronsons (Happy, Paul, and Titch, among others) to get to the bottom of credit card companies' predatory tactics and the murky, fabulously wealthy companies behind those tactics. Amateur nuclear physicists, assisted-suicide practitioners, the town of North Pole, Alaska's Christmas-induced high school mass-murder plot: Ronson explores all these tales with a sense of higher purpose and universality, and suddenly, mid-read, they are stories not about the fringe of society or about people far removed from our own experience, but about all of us.

Incisive and hilarious, poignant and maddening, revealing and disturbing - Ronson writes about our modern world, the foibles of contemporary culture, and the chaos that lies at the edge of our daily lives.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. A sterling collection of amazing stories from an offbeat journalist at the top of his game." - Kirkus Reviews

"An unputtable, full immersion into the world's strangest species." - Barnes and Noble

"Frequently hilarious, sometimes disturbing, always entertaining, these compelling stories of the chaos that lies on the fringe of our daily lives will have you wondering just what we're capable of." - Picador.com

This information about Lost at Sea was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Jon Ronson

Jon Ronson's books include the New York Times bestseller The Psychopath Test, and Them: Adventures with Extremists and The Men Who Stare at Goats—both international bestsellers. The Men Who Stare at Goats was adapted as a major motion picture, released in 2009 and starring George Clooney. Ronson lives in London and New York City.

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