The Prisoner of Guantanamo by Dan Fesperman::David Colacci

According to Cheney and the gang, some torturers are more equal than others.

This is the story of how one American becomes unequal. How an average guy, born of poor fishing folks of poor Maine stock, becomes a torturer. How a guy who knew boats, and joined the Marines, and learned Arabic, and went to Washington ended up scraping the truth from the bodies of men, like clams.

The guy lives a simple life. He dresses, he goes to work, he has lunch, he goes back to work. Sometimes, he dates. Indeed, there is nothing remarkable about this guy. Except that his job is to interrogate prisoners, and the prisoners are on a little island, outside humanity. Continue reading “The Prisoner of Guantanamo by Dan Fesperman::David Colacci”

Eye of Revengeby Jonathon King

Nick, Miami news reporter, is a decent, semi-sad, semi-serious, guy. One day he is sent out to cover a typical Miami highway accident. Dead on the scene are his wife and one of his twin daughters.

One year later Nick is a decent semi sad semi serious guy with one daughter and an editor who doesn’t send him out to accident scenes.

The reporter should not be part of the story. Sometimes he is. Here’s how.

John Lee reads Ruth Rendell:End in Tears.

There are inside words and outside words. Sometimes outside words – like Inspector Wexford’s “They don’t have handbags anymore,” – sound like inside words because they form a running commentary on something like the world. Sometimes, like Hannah Goldsmith’s, they escape, aciduously, censoriously.

Throughout the course of this investigation into the death of an unlovely and overloved teenage girl, there is an exchange of words, between and across sides. Consider Mike and Wexford:

They got on, Wexford and Mike. “If they couldn’t quite say everything that came into their heads to each other… they got as near to doing this as two people ever can.”

Turn internal words into external words, that is.

For example, one of the things that came into the Detective Inspector’s head which he couldn’t say aloud was that his friend was just a fraction too old for Jeans.

And so a thousand inside words run across the bottom of the scene like a ticker tape across the real.

The real — well, let’s not exaggerate. Mike Burden is convinced that the girl was moving drugs. Selling drugs. Buying drugs.

“You remind me of that guy at the Roman senate who used to rise to his feet every day and say : ‘Carthage must be destroyed.’ Delende est Cartago. Well, it was destroyed. Finally.”

“There you are then. It proves my point. It’s drugs.”

India Knight’s My Life on a Plate read by Jill Tanner

More than a little over the top, Clara Hutt is dropping her 2 boys off this morning wearing her pajama bottoms (again) and wondering (again) why all the other mothers can arrive at school with perfectly starched blouses and expertly applied makiage. Not now, Darling, I’m Paaaarking,” and again, “I AM PAAARKING,” and again “Stop it, Charlie, don’t make me want to break your legs.”

There are so many things wrong with this picture that the fact that Clara doesn’t speak to her children like the mummies in books is, well, funny. Indeed, Charlie is six and already has a “vast panoply of hideous, faintly disturbing, terms of abuse.” “You tiresome retard” he says to his brother. Or to some hapless toddler on a play date: “God! You exasperating creature! What is it? Talk for God’s sake!! God. God. Bloody God!” She is, of course, to blame she thinks, while she watches Naomi The Perfect Mother and Crossing Guard doing her pelvic floor exercises. Hup two three four and hoooooolddd.

I think Clara is darling. In perfectly bad faith for the nought generation, Clara has all the elements of a mad Greek family member. But she is English, and thanks to Jill Tanner’s drawn out vowels and enthusiastic syntax, we are happy to relocate our tragic flaws.

Clara’s mother is, on the other hand, global.

Kellerman’s Gone

Couples. Kellerman’s shrink narrator is full of meticulous, obsessive, data-driven characterizations of L.A. couples and couplings. Milos and Rick, for instance.

Rick gets his hair trimmed every two weeks at a high priced West Hollywood salon. Milos drives every two months to La Brea and Washington where he hands his 7 bucks + tip to an 89 year old barber who claims to have cut Eisenhower’s hair during World War II.

What makes a couple couple in L.A? What makes couples live and die in L.A. — as couples? Consider Alex Delaware and his exes. They come, they go, they come back, they go….

L.A. kills couples, sometimes permanently.

Long Time No See:: Re-hearing Susan Isaacs read by Cristine Mcmurdo-Wallis

Who in God’s name could murder a woman who puts doilies on the bottom of guest-room wastepaper baskets? In this decade of the Mother, of Mommihood, of stretchy, skin tight maternity dresses, of preternaturally calm Nannies, Long Time No See is perhaps the precursor of a series of mysteries dedicated to killable mothers.

Bernadette Dunne reads Work Less Make More by Jennifer White

This is so well read, so well thought out, so well organized that it stands out as a motherlode of precious advise for anybody who wants to work better, be better, CHANGE.

Remember your fifth grade teacher? The one that was a little pretty, a little strict, a little scary? The one that somehow taught you short division? Well, here she is. Standing over you while you pull out your journal, and think carefully before you answer.

Structured like a 5th grade workbook divided into modules, with fact sets, homework questions, thinking assignments, and morals (i.e. the moral of this story is ______), it turns you, inevitably, into a fifth grader: in other words, a student.

Buy a composition book, two #2 pencils, and a big eraser.

New! Dating is a search problem. Solve it with Google Romance.

Death Match is the Beta version of Google Dating Search. Consider it:a small exclusive matchmaking service run by a brilliant lonely Geek charges 25,000 dollars per search. It mixes men, women and algorithms. It finds: perfect couples.

The metallic, mechanical voice of Barrett Whitener engineers the sounds of Miss Google. She’s the demented computer in the kitchen, the thing that produces the results. Eliza. And yes, like all things female, one day Miss Google goes nuts.

That’s when Southern, fay, tangy, overintelligent ex-FBI forensic psychologist Christopher Lasch is hired. To investigate the suicides. Of the men, the women, the perfect matches.

And shows us that jealousy is present in all human products, even search engines.

Charlie Wilson’s War by George Crile read by Christopher Lane

Imagine overhearing the comments of secretaries, girlfriends, GS-11s, GS-18s, CIA heads of station, assistants to CIA heads of station, busty, born-again Texan society matrons, outrageously charming right-wing politicians with more friends than God, superstitious immigrants and sons of immigrants, Muj(ahadeen) terrorists, Afghani torturers, Pakistani tyrants, Egyptian defense ministers turned mule and donkey merchants, so that you can actually see the pieces of history being pushed into place, so that a cult of personalities and a war become cause and effect. Almost. Because things are not so simple….

It is the genius of Crile, ace reporter, that manages these unmanageable personalities and tracks one mad Texan after another, one fanatic after another across the Washington political stage, quoting all the way.

“Now [Avracatos] was forced to recognize that without Charlie he would still be roaming the halls of the CIA without purpose….The man who tried to pretend nothing could hurt him discovered he actually loved Charlie Wilson.”

He risked an awful lot for us. He was unique. He ran with the CIA instead of hitting us from the outside. How many fucking Congressman in the last 40 years have gone to bat publically to get the CIA more money? …Even in the heyday of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles when the cold war was one big fucking goat fuck, noone was publically calling for more money for the CIA to use in Guatamela or Cuba or anywhere.

This is not just a text read out loud. This is not a written momento of what was written about guns, mules, Afghanis. It is a tale of what was said, who said it to whom and how, with what kind of accent, and what they were wearing when they said it and who was looking at them when they said it and who wanted to fuck them because they said it …. and how they were fucked. Short, hard, telegrammic statements that moved men and things and boundaries. What Sartre would have called: the gossip, the rumours, the news. Told, and told again because it was originally told, this story which when read is re-heard, again. But differently.

Linda Fairstein Death Dance read by Barbara Rosenblat

Ghoul: An evil spirit or demon in Muslim folklore believed to plunder graves and feed on corpses.

There is a ghoulish, golemic, East European element that surfaces in the life of every dishy Jewish blonde A.D.A. in NYC. A specific perversion, a senselessness knocks at her door just before it becomes evil, or criminal, or comic.

She is buried alive in the Botanical Gardens by a paraphiliac with a love of Poe. She is held captive in the Metropolitan Opera while a stage hand fingers her inner thigh. She opens a letter which bursts into flames and spoils her hairdo.

Indeed, one of the most lovable qualities of Alex(andra) Cooper, daughter and heir of a man who invented a widget, is the way the forces of weirdness tag at her heels.

For example. She talks to a Turkish intern who likes to rape unconscious women while Mike and Mercer try to trace his number. They can’t. Alex groans: “How come this works on T.V. and in the movies but when I need it the system fails?”
Well, blondie, because the 212 area code is not from the Upper West Side but from Ankara, Turkey … It’s not incompetence. It’s not idiocy. It’s something else.