Category: Listen up

Sister Mine by Tawni O’Dell read by Renee Raudman

Hitachi’s beautifully directed High Definition video series called True Stories features a segment on “Coal’s Comeback”. A bunch of old em·phy·se·mic grandpas are fishing, muttering into the wind, when the voice of Bruce No of Hitachi America announces that Supercritical Technology is the new generation of Coal, the clean generation of Coal.

Then back to the toothless grandpas, “I want to make sure that when my grandkids go fishing … that they’ve got something to fish for”.

The whole thing, with the baseball caps and the feckless red neck river kid talking about his favorite fish and the plain unchanging faces of Cowdunk, America, is so heartfelt and hokey that it could be the opening show at the Democratic primary.

But instead it is the green, whitewashed version of an industry which corrupts every aspect of life in small Pennsylvania coal mining towns, where abused daughters grow up and sisters disappear and little girls dress like porn stars and don’t know why its wrong to try to sell their brothers in exchange for rides to the Mall.

Man in the Middle by Brian Haig read by L.J. Ganser

An insider’s view of the pentagon:

Three of the four military services have their headquarters within these walls… The underlying idea is that proximity will force the services to work together in neighborly harmony. And it would seem to make sense because after all the four military services perform the same basic mission, the same rudimentary purpose… And why it makes sense is precisely why it doesn’t work, we’re all vying for the same taxpayer bucks, pool of human talent, and opportunities to strut our stuff.

The Army is the oldest, the largest, the smartest, with obviously the most primo jag corps. The Marines are also fairly good guys. Primarily because they think like the army, except they’re a lot more hormonal… The Air Force, newest of the services, is like an orphan teen-ager with a fat trust fund. Prematurely arrogant and totally obsessed with all the cool shit they can buy. Nobody likes them but we all envy them. Last, our seafaring comrades, an overdressed yachting club whose main contributions to national security seems to be propping up bars and bordellos in strange and exotic ports.

Each service sees the world according to its strategic perspective… The Navy sees the globe as three-quarters water, with several largely irrelevant land masses called continents populated by quarrelsome people who somehow become scared shitless the minute an aircraft carrier rolls up off their shore.

For the airforce, the world is a really neat target range, conveniently dotted with cities and towns to stop stuff on, so long as it doesn’t interfere with happy hour…

And so the cynical, sharp, acerbic, acidic wit of the Jag officer investigating the suicide/murder of an officer….

A joint staff manned by officers drawn from the four services, are supposed to shelve their loyalties and their career aspirations, to direct the services to work together cooperatively, rationally and efficiently. This is like hiring the marriage counselor who’s fucking your wife to fix your marriage.

Butchers Hill by Laura Lippman ready by Deborah Hazlett

The skinny long legged girl with patch pockets shimmies down the fire escape to meet him, and hovers just a little bit above the ground, hanging, swinging above Castle street, in his dream, and forty years ago. After the dream, the old man wakes up, and hears the neighborhood kids destroying the neighborhood. He jumps down to the sidewalk, and shoots up and into the night at them. One of the kids dies. He sweeps up the broken glass in front of his house before he man goes to prison.

He is Tess Monaghan’s first client. She needs the business. Her second client is a sassy business woman and a liar. But Tess takes her case too.

The past comes back like a prisoner or a dream. There is no place for it, no place to put it.

Critical by Robin Cook read by George Guidall

For years the facile, monarch-note like introductory blurbs of audiobooks have been aimed at delayed airline passengers looking forward to a two or three hour seat in a jet on hot tarmac. As nonlocalizably uninformative as the pilot, but more or less referential.

The introduction to Robin Cook’s Critical marks a new slovenly low for the Recorded Books label, with its mistaken reference to “Jack’s heart operation”. (Dear editors: There is nothing wrong with Jack’s heart. Not in this book. It’s a different body part being operated on. Really. )

One sure sign that a publisher, or a civilization, is going down the drain is when it’s references are wrong. Another is when medics start talking about an innate sense of ethics. Ethics is a form of action, a set of practices and reflections based on habit and training. Ethics is not a sense. Nor is it innate — in the newborn –or in the coat closet. It is not inside anything because it is not a body, not a thing that occupies space.

But if it did occupy space, it would not be space in New Jersey, where Robin Cook has been spending too much time and where Critical gets its goombahs, its bad guys, its evil. The good guys are of course in New York, doing autopsies, solving crimes and playing Dick and Jane, medical examiners….

Somewhere in between are the doctors. And the entourage of bureaucrats who settle into their attached positions like feudal serfs, and the moneylenders, insurers and staph infections which prop up and support the institution of medicine in a big city.

Bad Luck and Trouble by Lee Child read by Dick Hill

Reacher heard the rack of the slide twenty feet behind him. He heard it very clearly. It was exactly the kind of sound he had trained himself never to miss. To his ears, it was a complete, complex split second symphony and every component registered precisely. The scrape of alloy on alloy, its metallic resonance partially damped by a flesh palm and the ball of a thumb and the side of an index finger. .. The grateful expansion of a magazine spring, the smack of a brass cased shell socketing home the return of the slide. Those sounds took about a thirtieth of a second to reach his ears, and he spent maybe another thirtieth of a second processing them. His life and his history lacked many things: he had never known stability or normality or comfort or convention. He had never counted on anything except surprise and unpredictability and danger. He took things exactly as they came for exactly what they were….

This perfectly tuned register and processor of mechanical sounds is Jack Reacher, calculator and decipherer of numerical messages, auditor and predictor of probable forces of character, probable explosions of personality, probable damage to friends and country. Reacher is a ‘restless’ ex MP who left his happy gang of Special Investigators ten years ago, and has an unsettled and unsettling personality. He does not believe in carrying a spare shirt:

The Suspect by John Lescroart read by David Collacci

Good defense attorneys are familiar with the figures of vulnerability: the good father of a mad, ungrateful daughter, the young grieving widow, the secretary who knows too much. And they are familiar with the figures of corruption: the oversexed politician, the narrow-minded small town sheriff, the power hungry prosecutor, the greedy pharmaceutical executive. Vulnerability and corruption, however, are not enough. There must also be a reason, a lesson, a moral, and a story something a first year law student can outline and articulate and reference. Not too bloody, not too sexy, not too sad. Just long enough to make us want a fair and happy ending. Which we get.

The Sleeping Doll by Jeffery Deaver performed by Anne Twomey

A story of an FBI Special Agent, California mother and widow tracking a cultish killer. In between the pages of the story is a manual on how to read lies on faces, on bodies, on lips, in friends, suspects and children. The Agent specializes in kinesics: a science of lies…

There are 2 routes from Monterey to San Jose.

You can take Highway 1 which winds along the coast to Santa Cruz then cut over vertigo-inducting Highway 17 through artsy Los Gatos where you can buy crafts and crystals and incense and tie-dyed Janis Joplin dresses and, O.K., Robert Cavalli and Dolce and Gabbana….

Some authors are best at giving directions – in writing captions to mapquest. Even if one doesn’t really care about the female Agent or the Charles Manson wannabe, one is enchanted by the idea of driving down Pacific Highway to buy shoes.

No! I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club by Virginia Ironside Read by Sian Phillips

It is so civilized to recognize that one is old, so English. Mary Sharp is a spritely, frank, practical English lady, retired, and almost 60. She has lively, vivid opinions and wobbly upper arms and lives in a not very nice part of West London with a sweet young lodger. Five of her friends have died this year. The rest are about to die, one way or another. But dying is not the point: being old is the point. As she announces at a ghastly dinner part after asking the hostess to move the penis shaped flowers (“But I can’t see you, darling!”):

If you’re sixty, you’re sixty. Sixty is old. I’m just longing to be old and I don’t want to be told I’m young when I’m not. I’m fed up with being young. Boring. I was young in the sixties. … When I was 20, 60 was old. When I was 30, 40 and 50, 60 was still old and I’m not going to change the goalposts now….

And when her hostess says: “But I don’t feel a day over 30,” Mary responds:

But Marian, don’t you realize that that’s tragic? To continue feeling 30 for the whole of your life? So boring! A nightmare! I’m longing to feel sixty! What’s wrong with that?

And so Mary is happy to turn 60, to join the 7 million grannies in England involved in child care, to master the technology necessary to babysit an infant:

I tried everything…. I picked him up and sang to him… I offered him more milk… The only way I could calm him down was to walk him round the flat talking nonstop and pointing things out to him… Let’s look at these nice bannisters…. OOh! Here’s a mirror . I an see Gene in there, and granny’s looking a bit distraught and knackered, isn’t she? And now …. We looked out the window and watched all the cars…. occasionally people would pass by. Look, Gene, I would say in my gentle voice: there’s a man in a hood. He’s probably a mugger. He’s a naughty man, isn’t he? And look! There’s a nice drug dealer the other side of the road. He’s making lots and lots of money selling people heroin…..”

The Sleeping Doll by Jeffrey Deaver read by Anne Twomey

Do you believe the people who write the back page summaries of bestselling audio CDs actually listen to the CDs? I don’t. The girl left alive after the cult murder of her family has very little to do with this Deaver novel, which is about a female FBI special agent trained in the science of kinesics (sic?) Special Agent Kathryn Dance can tell whether her suspects are telling the truth by reading their bodies. Her children, too. But that doesn’t count. What counts is finding Daniel Pell, a magnetic, persuasive, good looking murderer who gathered around himself a group of depleted submissive females and included them in the scenes of his sex and his crimes.

Nerve Damage by Peter Abrahams read by Alan Nebelthau

In the yard a piece of shiny scrap metal from a nuclear power plant is waiting for Roy to see it. But Roy is reading a not yet published New York Times obituary:

Roy Valois a sculptor whose large works are displayed in many public spaces around the United States and in several prominent museums, died today at INSERT. He was INSERT. The cause was INSERT according to INSERT. The self taught Mr. Valois worked almost exclusively with recovered materials, usually scrap metal but he was “no primitive” according to Kurt Palmeteer …. Roy Valois was born in the western Maine town of N. Grafton on TO COME. He went to local schools where he excelled at sports, eventually entering the University of Maine on a hockey scholarship. But it was while working at a summer job that involved welding and other metalwork that Mr. Valois found his true calling…. It was also at Georgetown that he met his wife Delia Stern, an economist later employed by the United Nations. She died in an airplane crash off Venezuela in TO COME…

Delia is also the name of the sculpture that occupies the center of his house, and reminds his next ex-girlfriend that he is still, in some sense, married. The obituary is wrong about his wife, he tells the journalist at the NY Times. Delia worked for the Hobbes Institute, not the U.N. The journalist is killed the next day.

And Roy himself is not well. He has a cough. His nose bleeds. His arm breaks. A doctor tells him that he has asbestos-caused cancer: . After his treatment in a Fung-Shui designed office, a man in a wheelchair, his age, but skeletal, is wheeled out or wheeled in by a nurse. Roy doesn’t want to be anywhere near the man in the wheelchair, because from the point of view of the unconscious anywhere near = anywhere like. And Roy scales his way through the world more or less unconscious, feeling his way around like a hockey player or a hydraulic excavator.

Roy has shovel fulls of partial information. From Dr. Choo. From his now dead wife. From the past. And we imagine that Roy will piece together something like the truth out of what remains. Scrap metal, memory, curiosity.