Category Archives: Audiobook

****All The Light We Cannot See

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Anthony DoerrBy Anthony Doerr. (Read by Zach Appelman.) A sweet and satisfying story of Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a French girl blind from childhood, and an orphaned German boy, Werner Pfennig, who is a genius with radios, and how their paths intersect in the desperate, waning days of World War II. Marie-Laure’s father—keeper of the keys at Paris’s Museum of Natural History—builds her a perfect model of their neighborhood, first in Paris, then in the walled city of Saint-Malo, where they flee to live with his uncle when the Nazis invade. By studying these replicas, she learns how to navigate her world.

The Saint-Malo model hides a secret, an invaluable diamond, a diamond with a peculiar light in its center, entrusted to her father for safekeeping, but a Nazi loot-hunter is on the trail. The difficulty of surviving for these two extremely perceptive prodigies, is tensely portrayed, and the light and lack of it in their worlds takes different forms, both literal and symbolic. While the circumstances of war are familiar—especially World War II in Europe—the particular reactions of these main characters are “surprisingly fresh and enveloping,” says Janet Maslin in the New York Times.

I’m not a fan of final chapter postscripts that let you know what happened to characters and their families in later years, feeling that better left to the reader’s devising, based on a book’s-worth of clues and insights. And, while I usually bow down in praise of the skills of audiobook narrators, this one was oddly off-hand, floaty and lacking in necessary heft.

*** The Director

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Robin Hood

“Robin Hood’s Band Made Merry by Killing the King’s Deer” (photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

By David Ignatius (narrated by George Guidall). This thriller is set in the bowels of the nation’s national security apparatus, at the time a new CIA director is appointed who is not a Beltway insider, but plucked from the corporate world. The new director, Graham Weber, is pitted against the puppeteers of competing security agencies and (this is not a spoiler) a computer wizard inside the Agency who has gone rogue, James Morris.

How much readers like the book seems to depend on how excited they were by the electronic shenanigans of Morris, though there didn’t seem to be a lot new there—not for readers of Wired, anyway. Still, while Morris and his network were entertaining, the old-school-tie boys on Weber’s other flank were palpably less convincing. The women in the story fell into their respective stereotypes. A flimsy seduction scene is best ignored.

But the bigger problem—and where this book diverges from the best writing of, say, Neal Stephenson—is that, while it has the geeky stuff down, it has no social science sense. “Rob from the banks of the rich countries and give to the poor ones?” Really? Which poor countries would that be? Zimbabwe? North Korea? Myanmar? Uganda? Many of the world’s poorest countries stay that way because the leadership class steals everything they can get their hands on. Sending them “free” cash makes no sense. I didn’t want to read a lecture on political science and economics, but needed some acknowledgement that such sophisticated technologists thought deeper than a Robin Hood fantasy. Unfortunately, this gap undercuts their whole motivation for the crime.

If you can ignore that problem, and if you, like me, worry about our growing electronic vulnerabilities, you may like this book! And, you’ll notice the similarities in supposed high-mindedness between Morris and real-life cyber-spy Ed Snowden.

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***The Cobweb

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spider, cobweb

(photo: pixabay.com)

By Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George (narrated by Marc Vietor)–As a huge Neal Stephenson fan, I was delighted to see this political thriller—co-written with J. Frederick George—in a special Audible 2-for-1 sale. Unfortunately, it lacked the very aspects of Stephenson’s other works that I enjoy most—complexity, humor (ok, there was a bit), challenging ideas, although there was some effective skewering of government bureaucracy.

J. Frederick George is the pen name of historian George Jewsbury, a Russia specialist—whose special expertise is little-used in this tale about the first Gulf War—who is also Stephenson’s uncle. This book was originally published under another pen name for the two of them, Stephen Bury. That’s not quite the most complicated aspect of the plot.

The story takes place in Iowa and Washington, D.C., and the title refers to how people in the nation’s intelligence agencies can protect themselves by keeping anyone who might disturb their world so smothered in procedure and paperwork and investigative committees that they lose their ability to actually accomplish anything. Ample evidence since the book’s publication (1996, reissued in 2005) demonstrates how the different pieces of the nation’s security apparatus have worked at cross-purposes and always to their own presumed advantage and protection. Amazon reviewers familiar with Stephenson’s other work gave it lower ratings (“Neal Stephenson lite,” one said), but overall, four stars.

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***The Killing Floor

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Greyhound bus, Cleveland

(photo: wikimedia.org)

By Lee Child (narrated by Dick Hill) – This is the first Jack Reacher novel (1997), and the first I’ve read. They’re so popular, fans must either get past the flimsy logic behind Reacher’s choice to become a Greyhound-riding drifter or Child at some point strengthens that case. Like Jo Nesbo’s first Harry Hole novel (reviewed here), you know from the get-go that Reacher’s woman will be an endangered species before the plot runs out.

Maybe male writers just have to get that damsel-in-distress-rescue-fantasy-thing out of their system, but I wish they would. It’s too transparent an attempt to give their protagonists some depth via a meaningful, but brief relationship with really good sex. These relationships have to be short, though, so they don’t spill over into sequels and doing the laundry, picking up the kids, and the other minutia that would inevitably follow if the relationship continued.

The plot had a pretty big “huh?” in it, too, though I quite liked the image of homeless Jack Reacher tooling around the Georgia countryside in the borrowed Bentleys. (Spoiler alert: The “huh” was, if the Margrave powers-that-be hired detective Finlay because they mistakenly thought he was slow-witted—because of what Finlay says was the worst job interview in history—wouldn’t their FBI agent confederate, who knows Finlay, have set them straight?) Superb narration by Dick Hill!

****Ordinary Grace

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William Kent Krueger, Ordinary Grace, Edgar Award

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By William Kent Krueger (narrated by Rich Orlow) – Ordinary Grace: A Novel
(2013) was on many prize-giving organizations’ 2013 “best of” lists and won the 2014 Edgar Award for Best Novel from Mystery Writers of America. Krueger, known for his Cork O’Connor series, wrote this stand-alone, because he wanted to explore Aeschylus’s seemingly paradoxical notion of God’s “awful grace”—awful in the overworked sense of “awesome,” and started thinking about the characters that would let him do that and the situations they would be in that required the wisdom from that awful grace. The ordinary grace of the title also figures in the story at a key moment.

Because this is not in the tradition of his crime novels and is a coming-of-age story with a crime in it, the novel focuses on a thirteen-year-old boy and his stuttering kid brother. The interactions with the townspeople all seem true, and they are vivid, rounded characters, not necessarily fully admirable. But it’s small-town Minnesota (lots of literary crime in that state in recent years), and nothing about life seems dark or dangerous to these two preacher’s boys until the bodies start showing up, down by the railroad trestle. I felt the rumble of that plot coming a long way down the track, but if the book didn’t offer big surprises, it had a few smaller ones, and was delivered with evident heart. It was refreshing to see boys the reader knows will grow into good men, not deranged serial killers. Narration excellent, especially the characters of Gus and the Sioux, Warren Redstone.

Krueger says he’s a writer “in part because of the scary stories I used to hear around campfires when I was a boy scout.” Readers can thank those dancing flames.

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****Spycraft

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Desmond Llewelyn, Q, James Bond, Spycraft

Desmond Llewelyn as “Q” (photo: wikimedia.org)

By Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton, and Henry Robert Schlesinger. Foreword by George Tenet, narration by David Drummond. The digitization and miniaturization everywhere in our daily lives has affected tradecraft in the espionage world, too—and sometimes began there before entering the consumer market. Initially, the CIA tried to heavily censor Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA’s Spytechs, from Communism to Al-Qaeda, but eventually ended up making almost no changes. The book details the history of the Agency’s Office of Technical Services—the department that, since World War II, has come up with all the dead drops, audio surveillance techniques, secret inks, espionage gear, and so on needed by field agents. Q, in other words.

Co-authored by a former OTS director, Spycraft begins with a review of cases involving some of the most notorious and significant, mostly Soviet, spies run by the CIA, then turns to a detailed review of various spycraft essentials and what makes them work—or not—in the field. The history of the Soviet spies, most of whom were discovered and executed, provides an appreciation for the steady improvements in technology, though it’s pretty much a mug’s game, because improvements in detection soon follow. The challenge is to remain one step ahead. I didn’t come away with a satisfactory answer to the key question: with all this amazing technology, how come the CIA has missed the big plays? 9/11, Iraq’s true WMD situation, the Arab Spring?

For anyone writing spy and espionage fiction, Spycraft summarizes innumerable backstory issues and technical details that must be right! But beyond these specifics, the choice of what OTS worked on and how the technical officers solved problems reveals the dilemmas faced by field agents. Other readers may simply be amazed at the scope and persistence of this clandestine effort. (Amazon reader rating: 4.5 stars.)

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***** An Officer and a Spy

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Emile Zola, DreyfusBy Robert Harris (read by David Rintoul) –This novelization of the infamous Dreyfus affair in turn-of-the-20th Century Paris starts slowly, then builds powerfully. French Army Officer Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was sentenced to life imprisonment on aptly named Devil’s Island on flimsy and trumped-up evidence that he was a spy. As the book’s narrator, Lt. Col. Georges Picquart, gradually discovers, a spy remains in the French military command and, if so, he begins to suspect and then believe that Dreyfus is innocent.

As in the present day, it isn’t so much the original crime—in this case, convicting an innocent man—that creates all the problems, it’s the cover-up. The book is full of real-life characters of the time with whom I was passingly familiar—Georges Clemenceau, Émile Zola (J’Accuse!), Picquart, who rose to be Minister of War after Dreyfus’s release, and of course, Dreyfus. Learning how they out-maneuvered the army’s top generals is riveting, even though you know they ultimately succeed. Alphonse Bertillon, the originator of concepts of scientific policing reappears, with some dubious handwriting analyses; his contributions were explored more fully in The Crimes of Paris, which I read last year.

Louis Begley’s New York Times review would have had the book provide more context about French society at the time, though some of his examples are to me pretty clear: the high position of the army in society and “the extraordinary wave of virulent anti-Semitism that had washed over France since the 1880s.”

The Dreyfus case still resonates today, not least because of the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe from both the left and right wings and the growing Muslim communities. Coincidentally last weekend, I attended a reading and discussion of a new play by McCarter Theatre’s Emily Mann, Hoodwinked, about the shootings at Ft. Hood and the friction between tolerance and intolerance within radical Islam and outside it. Looking back on Dreyfus, it’s easy to see where the players went wrong out of prejudice, self-interest, and absolutism. We see events in our own time through these same distorting lenses and, therefore, unclearly.

***** The Civil War of 1812

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War of 1812

Naval Engagement off Kingston: H.M.S. “Royal George” pursued by Commodore Chauncey in U.S.S. “Oneida,” November 9, 1812.

It’s probably hard for any reasonably well-informed American to know less about the War of 1812 than I did when starting an audio-read of Alan Taylor’s 2010 The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies.(Taylor just won his second Pulitzer Prize for history for a new book.) The extent of my knowledge was irritation that the British burned the National Archives, making my genealogical researches more speculative and numerous trips to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, where I’d visited Fort George (British) and Fort Niagara (American), on the shore of Lake Ontario, and barely separated by the Niagara River. There, I’d heard a bit about Canadian heroes Sir Isaac Brock and Laura Secord. Despite growing up near Detroit, I escaped unscathed by information about the role of that city and the Michigan territory in the war or the legendary naval battles on the Great Lakes.

This book was remarkable in making this conflict so interesting and relevant. Taylor describes it as a “civil war” for several reasons. For one, Irish immigrants fought on both sides and the British claimed these former nationals as their own; for another, the uncertain allegiances of the northern New Englanders and Canadians alike, with allegiances to the new nation not as firmly fixed as we might think and much trade and movement across the weak border. Within the United States, Federalists (leaning toward Britain) and Republicans (anti-British) were at odds throughout, maneuvering against each other, thwarting efforts to recruit and equip an adequate army. Militarily, both sides made disastrous tactical mistakes and miscalculations. For example, the Americans thought the Canadians would welcome being “freed” from the oppressor Britain, but for the ordinary citizen of Upper Canada, the side to choose was the one most likely to end the war soonest.

Especially intriguing was Britain’s calculated use of Indians to terrify ill-trained American soldiers, who had such fear of the natives they would flee an impending battle rather than engage. And, while the conflict is often described as “a draw,” in Taylor’s analysis, the losers were the Indians, because the peace did not secure their lands, and the British no longer supported them against American expansion and territorial expropriation. A fascinating read.

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**** The Cold, Cold Ground

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By Adrian McKinty (narrated by Gerard Doyle) – In the bleak Belfast spring of 1981, hunger strikers in HM Prison Maze are starting to die. Paramilitaries are setting off bombs and gunfire rakes the streets at night. Police detective Sean Duffy–a rare Catholic in the Royal Ulster Constabulary–is presented with what looks like a “normal” murder case that soon blossoms into the possibility of a serial killer at work, targeting homosexuals. At that time, homosexuality was still illegal in Northern Ireland and not tolerated. In the mix is the apparent suicide of the beautiful ex-wife of one of the hunger strikers. Mysterious mail begins to arrive. The backdrop of violence is persuasively portrayed and hearkens back to real events and people. First of a trilogy (actually, now probably a quartet).

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**** Fighter Pilot: The Memoir of Legendary Ace Robin Olds

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By Christina Olds, Ed Rasimus and Robin Olds. Narrated by Robertson Dean. A tale of modern derring-do, with Olds–a flying ace in both World War II and Vietnam, who led that war’s most renowned air battle–fighting both the enemy and the Pentagon. The authors credit him with impeccable judgment about strategy and tactics in both the immediate flying situation and long-term for the U.S. military. His heavy drinking, failed marriages, and lack of diplomacy are glossed over as “I am who I am.” He was a larger-than-life personality, and it’s a great story. His views about Vietnam don’t square with contemporary assessments, but reflect the frustrations of military men at the time that, if the country was going to commit young lives to the effort, they should plan to win, not pull their punches.

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