Unabridged | recordedbookreview.com

The Wildwater Walking Club by Claire Cook read by Kimberly Dakin

July 11th, 2010

Fiction that doubles as a helpful manual for out of work women, full of unemployment management tips and personality re-development exercises. Noreen, for example, is asked to say something about herself without reference to her job. She cannot. She can, however, use the fancy sneakers which she purchased at an ex-employee discount to find herself. Noreen is a very sensible girl, so it is not surprising that she spends the next month walking.

First she walks by herself. Then she meets up with a neighbor, and then with another neighbor. Each day, they walk and talk and learn about and from each other. Each day they count their steps.

The Wildwater Walking Club thus embarks upon a curious sort of benchmarking, with the footstep of an 8 1/2 inch sneaker as the only unit of measure. At the end of the month, they add up their miles and ‘trade them in’ for a trip to the Lavender Festival.

Tagged: lavender, sneaker, unemployment, walking club

Categories: Unabridged

Crash Proof 2.0 by Peter Schiff read by Sean Pratt

April 24th, 2010

Don’t buy anything. Don’t borrow anything. Don’t open any kind of e-trade account, or invest in any kinds of funds, or buy any kinds of currencies, or pay any kind of broker. Read this book, cover to cover. Then write a letter of praise to Peter Schiff for his clarity of thought, his easy to understand explanations of economic realities, and his ability to map out alternatives for Americans with a little bit of good sense.

Tagged: crash, economic collapse, Euro-Pacific, foreign currency, foreign investment, free market, gold, mortgage, Peter Schiff, saving, spending, underconsumption, wall street

Categories: Audible,Brilliant,Editor's pick,Listen up,Original narration,Unabridged

ORIGIN & CAUSE by Shelly Reuben

February 6th, 2010

Let’s just say that murders happened in the middle of other things: a cop, a lawyer, a fire investigator get up, they fight with their wives, they eat. Sometimes they think. The law is something they think about. How it came to be what it is, where it came from, when it changed. If you have a father who reads, who respects the history of things, who loves the Law, you think about what a lawyer should be, what the law should be, what an institution like the law allows human beings to be.

In Europe, rich people sometimes keep a modest apartment in a poor or marginal area of their city. They call it their “pied a terre”. Translated, this means “foot on the ground”. It is said that their purpose in maintaining these small apartments is to remind them of their roots and to keep them in touch with reality. And that’s exactly why I always keep my copy of Letters To A Young Lawyer in my briefcase. The words within, the philosophy, Harris’ love of simplicity and reverence for the law, this is my psychological pied a terre.

Tagged: arson, csi, English law, ethics, fire investigator, jury trial, pied a terre, tort law, tort reform

Categories: Audible,Brilliant,Editor's pick,Listen up,Unabridged

The Chameleon’s Shadow by Minette Walters read by Simon Vance

May 20th, 2008

Forget Harley Street. The latest design in shrinks is a six foot 250 pound lesbian weight lifter who runs a pub with her bosomy girlfriend, and offers bed, morning after breakfast, and laundry service. This is what the 21st century male patient wants: a powerful, intuitive M.D. who can hoist him effortlessly over her shoulder, tuck him into bed without sexual threat or expectation, wash the blood off his shirt and serve up bacon and egg for breakfast.

Such a shrink, and only such a shrink can handle what the Iraq, the national health service and the Metropolitan police have brewed in ex-Lieutenant Charles Acland, now of London, hateful and harijan: untouchable.

Tagged: doctor, homeless, Iraq, London, psychiatrist, psychiatry, veteran, war, wounded

Categories: Brilliant,Editor's pick,Original narration,Tantor Media,Unabridged

The Ritual Bath by Faye Kellerman performed by Mitchell Greenberg

March 14th, 2008

Rina Lazarus is a religious woman who cleans the ritual bath, cooks huge Sabbath meals, and teaches Math at a Yeshiva for boys in “Jewtown”, near L.A. She dresses modestly, covers her hair with a kerchief or a wig, and celebrates the Sabbath by hosting huge home cooked meals for the rabbis of the Ohavei Torah community. After a woman is raped while walking home from the bathhouse, Rina finds herself in the middle of a rape investigation, helping the red-haired goy-detective in charge. Peter Decker is enchanted by Rina, who reveals herself to him as a lover of the Book—which is what “Ohavei Torah” means.

Categories: Editor's pick,Enchanting,Listen up,Original narration,Unabridged

Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter by Blaize Clement, performed by Julia Gibson

December 5th, 2007

Another silly and lovable murder mystery written by an out of work real estate agent? Well, let’s see: Dixie Hemingway is a 32 year old ex-deputy living Sarasota, Florida, with her brother, the fireman, and his lover, Pablo, an undercover cop. She is a certified and insured and licensed Cat sitter. She is paid $20 to feed a cat and change the litter once a day; $60 for an over night visit. She also walks dogs and hugs them goodbye. She takes pets seriously and avoids humans. She is, like most Floridians, recovering from humans. Like fat, mad mothers of suicidal children, or overpampered party girls who have aged into overpampered divorcees. Dixie is different. More cat than human; both more curious and curiouser.

Tagged: Blaize Clement, Julia Gibson, small town

Categories: Enchanting,Good Mystery,Original narration,Recorded Books,Unabridged

Still Life by Louise Penny read by Ralph Cosham

November 12th, 2007

Even little old Canadian villages have murders, and artists. Jane Neal lived and painted in a big house and kept both her canvases and her home private. Except for the kitchen. To it she invited her circle of friends and fellow-artists, poor and English speaking. They and their language migrate to Three Pines to continue the war between French and English sensibilities.

The death of Jane Neal re-invokes these French and English factions, in a series of tense encounters between Police Inspector Gamache and the local folks: the usual suspects.

The plot is crisp and economical, but the descriptions are sweet, pastoral, even poignant. We want to know who murdered Jane because we like her more and more as we reconnoitre her life.

Every day for Lucy’s entire dog life Jane had sliced a banana for breakfast and had miraculously dropped one of the perfect disks to the floor where it sat for an instant before being gobbled up….Every morning Lucy’s prayers were answered, confirming her belief that God was old and clumsy and smelled like roses… and lived in the kitchen.

Categories: Blackstone Audio,Interesting,Unabridged

Next by Michael Crichton read by Dylan Baker

October 3rd, 2007

Increasingly, the essay, the critique, the report and the annunciation are being reconfigured in the form of fiction.

Michael Crichton has mastered this form. His Next is more than a story about the re-distribution of genomes; it is Critique, Satire, Farce and Science Report, with:

just the right amount of irony in representing jerks, like Brad the idiot nephew who attaches to underage teens, and relies on his rich uncle for jobs, cars, and bail;
just the right amount of irony in depicting the social-emotional infantilism of scientists who can’t navigate their way out of their self-made moral sinkholes;
just the right amount of Hollywoodability in scenes with children, animals and cars;
just the right amount of Doris Day type silliness in domestic showdowns between a sorry husband and his forgiving but disciplinary wife: here Blondie accepts the half-son, half chimpanzee Henry has brought home from the Lab, welcomes her role as Mommy, and scolds Henry for not thinking ahead.
just the right amount of mad British eco-alienated humour to work its way into the next Cadbury or British Air commercial…

(more…)

Categories: Clever,Editor's pick,Interesting,Unabridged

The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins read by Bernadette Dunne (!)

September 16th, 2007

I am reading, no hearing, a beautiful book where a photograph is described:

This is us when we are happy is not the message that Alice Roosevelt’s wedding delivers…and unlike Alice Roosevelt who continued to be an unrepentant thorn in her father’s side even after Teddy’s death, all the Curtis children never stopped believing “Chief” could do no wrong, never stopped believing Chief was the perfect father, even after absences of many years, never stopped seeking Chief’s approval.

The woman who gives this sharp, tenderized commentary on Edward Curtis, father, renegade husband and shadow-catcher is at the wheel of a car in L.A., stuck in traffic. She tells us about Edward with the same familiarity that she tells us about the shortcut (Fountain Avenue) she will take, the shortcut everyone takes, the shortcut each of the 30 million drivers currently sharing the road believes that they alone discovered.

He became, she tells us,

by disappearing from their daily lives, not a father but the myth of one, a myth they needed to believe in to survive. And despite his actions, despite all contrary evidence, they needed to sustain that system of belief even if it meant altering their memory, creating a false memory, a false identity of who their father really was. If Edward, the disappearing father was to play the good guy in their system of belief, then someone anyone had to play the villain because surely there was real unhappiness in their home in everything around them… and someone , never dad, no never him, someone else had to take the blame… the person who was too tired to cook dinner after working all day long, that other unromantic parent asleep at the stove in her flannel slippers, stressed out and exhausted: mom….”

And as she drives and thinks and turns her thoughts over, and over, she assembles the person of Edward Curtis, and how this photographer intersects with the structure of the family, how he poses and positions himself within the family so as to appear a certain way, to seem a certain way. This seeming was in fact his art.

It is no wonder that there is an aura of indeterminacy surrounding this shadow-catcher, an uncertainty arising from the distance he put between himself and his world, himself and his own century.

And with this distance comes a mystery, a puzzle which is reconnoitred but not entirely solved by the story we are told about a man who sets up a photography studio in Seattle just after the fire…

Categories: Bernadette Dunne,Brilliant,Editor's pick,Original narration,Unabridged

Critical by Robin Cook read by George Guidall

August 24th, 2007

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.

Categories: Recorded Books,Unabridged

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