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Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel (Paperback)

by Gordon Burn (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 214 pages
  • Publisher: Faber and Faber (3 April 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0571240267
  • ISBN-13: 978-0571240265
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.6 x 1.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 36,997 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Product Description

Summer 2007 was an extraordinarily rich time for news. Floods. Foot and mouth. The disappearances of Tony Blair and Madeleine MacCann. The arrival of Gordon Brown. Terror attacks in Glasgow. And Gordon Burn, artist, journalist and true-crime author, has taken the events from this bleak summer and turned them into a novel about the way news is made, and the way the media creates and manipulates the stories we see before us. This is a daring and thrilling novel from one of the most astute observers of celebrity and tragedy. It is sure to make the headlines itself for the way it is written and for the controversial subjects he tackles. In "Born Yesterday" Gordon Burn creates a whole new way of writing a novel, and makes us think again about the stories we are fed by the media around us.


About the Author

Gordon Burn was born in Newcastle in 1948 and now lives in London. He is the author of three novels, Alma Cogan (winner of the Whitbread First Novel Prize), Fullalove and The North of England Home Service, and non-fiction titles including Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, Happy Like Murderers and Best and Edwards.
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Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The news as a novel, 11 April 2008
By Christopher Ross (The North, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
I feel compelled to tell everyone about this book. Gordon Burn has taken the top news stories of 2007 and turned them into a novel. It sounds simple enough but the author has used these stories to tell a tale of the modern age.
A single sentence in this novel is a hundred times more thought-provoking and insightful than all the column inches given in the press. He is able to point out coincidences without offering opinion. Part journalism, part novel this is one of the most exciting pieces of literature to be published in years. If you have any interest in the written word then I urge you to read this.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars 2007 Through A Lens Darkly, 11 Jan 2009
By A. Clancy "T.Clancy" (UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel (Hardcover)
Completed in February 2008, the book is a collage of events and coincidences culled from the UK news pages of summer 2007, in particular the abduction of Madeleine McCann and the transfer of power from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown. Gordon Burn's previous novels spun a web of detail about the British landscape and its fallen celebrities (from showbiz and crime) that weaved a rich portrait of Britain in the present and recent past. He takes this approach a stage further here, looking at the near present tense of the writing. He crams in detail from media reported news from 2007; there is a richness of detail but the casualty is the crafted complex prose that painted tangible characters and was so central to his previous fictional works. The writing here has none of the depth of his earlier novels (probably due to the speed with which he completed the book). There is really no character painting here (no fictional characters as such) and this is the book's loss. To compensate Burn brings together some powerful ideas around celebrity, glamour, death, and life as a media icon, harking back to 'Alma Cogan'. 'Born Yesterday' is more a cultural critique than a novel, but an engaging read anyway. I personally hope to see Gordon Burn return to his more fictionalised take on the shifting social landscape of Britain that serves as such good starting point for his observational writing.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE, 27 April 2008
By Peter Hurst "peter hurst" (wigan, england) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
In 'Born Yesterday: The News As A Novel' Gordon Burn guides us through the big British news events of 2007, focusing particularly on the handover of power from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown and on the dissapearance of Madeleine McCann - as seen through the prism of the modern, 24/7 mass media - with literary skill and journalistic exactitude.

Burn clearly has some important things to say about the way the modern mass media effects our lives. The use of Marketing techniques to try to 'sell' an image to the public of Gordon Brown in order to win public approval and the attempt to 'sell' Madeleine McCann's image as a means of keeping her memory alive are both particularly salient in the book. The gap/discrepancy between media image and everyday reality, or in the words of Burn, between 'What is organic and what is artificially simulated' forms the heart the book.

'A narrative. A story. It is this...more than anything, a government must have if it is going to succeed. A story. A narrative to inspire supporters and enthuse the electorate.'

'Madeleine's eyes that had been styilised into media emblems...It had been a controversial decision to go big on the defect in Madeleine's eye and make this her distinguishing mark, the one certain way of identifying her. Because what follows from that, if the kidnapper wants to disguise the fact that the girl with him is the girl in question? Answer: damage the eye in some way...'Certainly we thought it was possible...But in terms of marketing it was a good ploy.''

Burn is a very good writer and one that makes you think about the society in which you live. The themes explored in the book are themes Burn has explored before but here they are brought to their obvious conclusion. Themes of obsession with fame and celebrity allied to a modern mass media feeding the frenzy predominate.

The line between the 'fake' world of what we used to refer to as showbusiness, and it's glorification of celeb culture on the one hand, and the 'real' world as represented by salient figures in the news in 2007 (like Gordon Brown and the McCanns) on the other hand are seen here to be blurrred by the refracted light of a modern mass media seemingly intent upon blurring that boundary ever further.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Answering the age-old question, What is truth?
Gordon Burn's final book Born Yesterday (he died in July 2009), is about as good a tribute to its author as you could get. Read more
Published 3 months ago by A Common Reader

3.0 out of 5 stars BRILLIANTLY IMPORTANT OR JUST A CHEAP SHOT?
I gave this book 3 stars because I am basically undecided. The concept behind the book is certainly thought-provoking i.e. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Eric Wilton

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