Review for My Latest Title by Alice Munro

DEAR LIFE: Stories

Alice Munro
Read by Kimberly Farr, Arthur Morey

"Alice Munro has written another extraordinary collection of short stories. Both Kimberly Farr and Arthur Morey lend intuitive pacing to their nuanced performances of these works. The listener becomes steeped in the meaning and beauty of Munro's stories by virtue of the performers' deliberate pacing. They give each one the focus that is essential for the concentrated prose of the short story genre. Further, they convey the sense of profundity that these stories evoke with eloquent and clear deliveries. Some of the stories take place in the author’s home territory of Canada during the period of her childhood. However, the collection's timeless and intimate subjects will resonate with anyone listening to these perilous journeys of life. A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine [Published: NOVEMBER 2012]"

Pakistan

Last Sunday's NYT says the president figured out some months ago that we had to cut losses in Afghanistan; the real problem is Pakistan. Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist--a brilliant man and writer who  knows the major players--has been writing for years about the corruption, the multiform politicking--  fights between special interests (army, political leaders), between religious factions, moneyed interests and personal. Pakistan on the Brink and Descent into Chaos make things seem as unhappy as they must be. I can't keep it in my head, who can? Nor can I even imagine where the fix is. The only comfort is that somebody like Rashid does know what's happening. The prospect of intelligence is comforting. I hope the president's people are reading / listening to him. 

Life Imitates Sci-Fi

Peter Diamandis was getting great reviews for  Abundance and then Space X, which he'd been working on, successfully launched the first private rocket for space exploration this week. This author believes that THINGS might get better. In the meantime, who argues with people who  get their private rocket ship off the ground? Another proof about imitation:One aim of private launches is to collect minerals from asteroids. That's what's happening in Earth Unaware, the novelization of Orson Scott Card's graphic novel, a prequil to the Ender series. A final example is Gregory Benford's Great Sky River and Tides of Light, (Gabrielle DeCuir and Stefan Rudnicki produced Benford and Card, they're wonderful.) In Benford's future world there are usb ports down our spines to hold the personalities of dearly beloved. He also has a way of transporting images from retina to retina. A video on Google goggles came out a month ago. It's all Benford.

Big Picture

Season of the Witch  & To End all Wars 

The more specific the story, the more the reader/listener can expand on it bringing his or her own wisdom and grief. Last year’s To End All Wars, (Adam Hochschield, Tantor) seemed narrowly focused on the English in WWI, but developed into an essay on the dreadful persistence of war, against all reason. David Talbot's, The Season of the Witch…, (Brilliance) on San Francisco from the late sixties to the middle eighties. An awful and wonderful epoch in one of the world’s truly beautiful cities. Beyond that, Talbot reminds us of the fragility of the American spirit, its many near-death experiences, its resuscitations, the questionable future. The words are about San Francisco but the music could be heard everywhere in America. Talbot understands that the 60s was not a fashion statement, but an attempt to revive patriotism in a country that had lost its memory. Both authors are serious historian/journalists, Hochschild was a founder of Mother Jones, Talbot founded and is editor-in-chief of Salon. 

Leaks

No news. John Kiriakou, author of The Reluctant Spy (Tantor) was charged with disclosing classified information to journalists two months ago. There's a good review of the audio on audible.com, and the PW description on amazon is accurate. More detailed piece in Mother Jones, Jan. 23. Kiriakou comes across in his book as the best kind of straight shooter, a true patriot who was upset by what he saw happening in the CIA. I'll try to post information on the linked Facebook page. 

Michelangelo

The Agony and the Ecstasy (Random H.) Is Irving Stone's satisfying novel,  full of Italian high-renaissance material—people, places, manners. It’s sanitized: Stone's problem was how to deal with Michelangelo's presumed homosexuality in mid 20thC. homophobic culture. The movie strays even further towards the silly. But it has virtues. The sets are beautiful—the designer John DeCuir recreated the Sistine Chapel as it really was—in bright colors. Charleton Heston’s performance is moving. Really. In the movie, the book, the real life, what comes through is the restless, unexamined energy of a great artist who can’t stop working, whether he’s handsome or homely, paid or not paid, gay or straight. 

Machines

Just before Christmas finished George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral, The Origins of the Digital Universe, Random House. About the creation of binary language—the origins of the computer and binary code. Interesting story lines—the influence of Hungarian theoretical mathematicians, fleeing Nazi Germany (several from Budapest Jewish upper-class families). The story of Alan Turing, a brilliant who helped break the code of the Nazi enigma machine. (After the war Turing was prosecuted for his homosexuality and committed suicide.) The Turing machine is a theoretical machine based on concepts (and mechanical plans) by the eighteenth-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibnitz But a description of what such a machine might look like (wheels and pinballs etc. etc.—in a story set in the Roman empire) turns up in the great story “The Oracle Engine” by M.T. Anderson, in Steampunk, an Anthology…. Brilliance.

Pinker

Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature, Brilliance (Check his website, stevenpinker.com. Or http://proxypantheon.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/interview-with-audiobook-reader-arthur-morey/).

Better Angels enthusiastically reviewed everywhere. Pinker’s message: humankind is less violent than ever. This is not conventional wisdom; it’s a hard sell. Pinker writes huge, overwhelming books. He works across disciplines—history, evolutionary biology, philosophy, sociology—so he persuades partly by weight of evidence. If you disagreed, where would you start?  

More Brains

Also recorded anniversary edition of Stephen J. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, Tantor. Pinker and Gould crossed paths and swords. Gould, who died too soon, was also a major public scientist. Gould goes after racial stereotyping here by looking at argument that people of color lack brainpower. He tells great stories. (Imagine using buckshot to fill up the skulls of artists and intellectuals to find out who had biggest brain. (Tipoff: Turgenev wins, Walt Whitman loses.) Gould shows the persistence of idiocy and thuggery. 

Collaboration

“Neuroplasticity” is discussed in two recent books, Jeffrey Schwartz’s The Mind and the Brain, Tantor and Richard J. Davidson’s The Emotional Life of your Brain. Brilliance. The two books come from different directions helping define the nature of thought, the ways of the brain. Both have Buddhist edge. Davidson's research is really impressive. Both had the same collaborator, Sharon Begley, a science writer/editor for the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek with a book of her own on neuroplasticity. Paul Zak's The Moral Molecule (Brilliance) is also connecting biochemistry with behavior.

Monster Novel

Parallel Stores, by Hungarian novelist Péter Nádas, Sixty hours, Brilliance (their longest ever; mine too). 

Nádas is highly respected in Europe. Nádas writes  scenes and characters in no discoverable order. They cross paths or maybe not, recur? Usually not. Docial and political history, violence, madness, extremely explicit sex—these categories overlap. The style is as difficult as subject: Who’s speaking or thinking or being reported? Should we make the audiobook clearer than the novel on the page? 

Gossip

Gossip, the Untrivial Pursuit, Joseph Epstein, Tantor. 

Joe Epstein and I both taught writing at Northwestern. A dapper man. He knows cool people and baseball and basketball, Aristotle, 18C English essayists, French poetry. Epstein talks about the social utility of gossip, its value as a weapon, its sheer funniness. You can’t enhance Joe Epstein. His sentences are beautiful. He’s extremely efficient; in a very short book (less than 8 hours) he makes you think you have a feel for the subject. Gossip is a lecture-demonstration. Epstein gossips about gossip. 

Tragedy for Laughs

Ed King, David Guterson, Random House. 

This is not Snow Falling on Cedars. It is funny though, and also about the impossibility of escaping destiny. Ed (as in Oedipus) is a star-crossed computer mogul who can’t escape chaos. Marx says all great world-historic facts and personages appear twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Guterson pulls the rug out from Tragedy, sits Freudian Psychiatry on a whoopee cushion.You’ll laugh, but maybe in desperation? Taking the lid off of passion and destiny without putting it back in place is a terrorist act.