Death of the Great Man, Peter D. Kramer
Death of the Great Man, Peter D. Kramer
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Death of the Great Man

Author: Peter D. Kramer

Narrator: Richard Poe, Alyssa Bresnahan

Unabridged: 14 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 04/25/2023


Synopsis

In a novel that’s part comic mystery, part political satire, and part case vignette, a psychiatrist reviews his involvement with a narcissistic national leader who has turned up dead on the consulting room couch.

When Peter D. Kramer wrote about his work with psychiatric patients in books like Listening to Prozac and Should You Leave?, Joyce Carol Oates said, “To read his prose on virtually any subject is to be provoked, enthralled, illuminated.”

When Kramer switched to fiction, Publishers Weekly wrote, “The depth, quality, and ambition of Kramer’s prose will surprise those expecting a superficial crossover effort.”

In his new novel, Death of the Great Man, Kramer uses those literary skills to introduce readers to an unforgettable character, Henry Farber, a well-meaning psychiatrist forced into hiding when the nation’s chief executive—a narcissistic autocrat in his disastrous second term—is found dead on the consulting room couch.
From an isolated bungalow, Farber sets out to clear his name while offering an intimate view of a flawed populist leader. What begins as comic mystery and political satire matures into a moving journey of self-exploration and a commentary on the fate of truth-telling in an era when lying has become a norm in public life.

About Peter D. Kramer

Peter D. Kramer is a psychiatrist and faculty member of Brown Medical School specializing in the area of clinical depression


Reviews

Goodreads review by dee on December 29, 2022

Rarely do I comment on writing styles of authors; who am I to condemn their use of adverbs or to criticise the lack of commas, yet Kramer’s style of writing in The Great Man almost immediately put me off. I am a grammarian at heart and have been since my grandmother began instilling the ideology of......more

Goodreads review by Annarella on March 08, 2023

I laughed and appreciated the political satire, it's a book that I found hard to review as I loved some parts and was bored by other. The humour and the satire works and I liked them. Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine......more

Goodreads review by Joshua on May 29, 2023

[URL not allowed] Dr Peter Kramer is a Jewish psychiatrist from Rhode Island who writes engagingly for the public. When he writes about encounters in the therapy room, he is not content to change names, but changes details and circumstances to be sure that his patients cannot b......more

Goodreads review by Mary on October 22, 2023

I can't remember the last time I was so ambivalent about a novel. In what may be an end run around the Goldwater Rule, Kramer (a highly regarded psychiatrist and NF author) tells a compelling story. His semi-autobiographical main character gets dragged into becoming a "consultant" (don't call him a......more

Goodreads review by Rick on December 02, 2024

Hopefully not as prescient as it seems I read Dr Kramer’s work with interest as a fellow writer and psychiatrist, contemporary in age and trained in a similar analytic tradition. The protagonist’s therapeutic methods and thought processes were therefore as engaging for me as the underlying story, whi......more