The
Spoken Word

Listen to love with audiobooks

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

Art Buchwald, Pulitzer Prize winner, renowned syndicated columnist and wryly funny commentator on the contemporary scene, seems to knows a lot about married love. Stella in Heaven, which he refers to as "Almost a Novel," is -- no surprise -- wryly funny, but it's also a touching, sweet story of love that lingers after death has done its part to part Stella and Roger from their long life together. Stella now has a nice room at what might be called the Ritz Carlton Hereafter, where Moses, St. Peter and Mary Magdalene are also in residence, and she's arranged to talk to Roger by celestial cell phone almost daily. Concerned that Roger is lonely and has no one to tell him what to do (a necessity for most married men), Stella and her pals in Paradise decide to find him a new wife. That gets Roger into some situations he'd rather not be in and calls into question how long love lasts and when the past is past. Elliott Gould does a super job with the alternating voices and characters of both Roger and Stella.


A mother's love, a daughter's love
The Red Tent, Anita Diamant's vivid evocation of Biblical womanhood, has gained the kind of popularity that authors (and publishers) dream of. The book, narrated in the first person by Dinah, daughter of Jacob and Leah, gives voice and intensely intimate image to women's lives in that ancient time that shaped our enduring values. Now, this powerful tale of love, motherhood, sadness, happiness, honor and honesty is on audio, read in an unabridged presentation by Carol Bilger. Dinah, only a fleeting face in the book of Exodus, tells the stories that mothers pass to daughters, not only of the woman who gave birth to her, but of Jacob's three other wives and then of her own fortune, good and bad, in a new land. Remarkably researched, this is historical fiction that reveals the inner reaches of a woman's life, a woman's heart and a woman's love.


Love and adulation
Jack Kennedy, once the king of Camelot, has lost some of his luster. But Jackie, his chic, couture-clad, culture-conscious consort, has retained her ineffable allure for over half a century and remains an icon of elegance and quiet courage. She was and is loved as royalty -- as close as we Americans come to having royalty. Endless books have been written about her, endless photos published, so I was surprised and delighted at how informative, how compelling, how intriguing Sally Bradford's new biography, America's Queen: A Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, read here by Sandra Burr, turns out to be. Using new sources and lengthy interviews with Lee Radziwell, Bradford paints a detailed, amazingly fresh picture of the triumphs and tragedies of Jackie's very public life and lets us see into her very private persona.


Love of truth?
"Information is not knowledge," and if you don't believe that before you listen to Killing Time, Caleb Carr's newest novel set in the not-too-distant future, you will by the time the last cassette rolls to a stop. The year is 2023, the world is thriving on info-tech wealth, but it's also awash in the ever-increasing information -- or misinformation -- that can be manipulated by governments and the insidious men and women who manipulate governments. Into this messy world come an extraordinarily brilliant sister and brother who want to put things right by, you guessed it, manufacturing and manipulating misinformation themselves. And into their world comes Dr. Gideon Wolfe, the psychiatrist and criminal profiler who chronicles these events, at first mesmerized by their zeal and mission, but then slowly disillusioned. Carr makes a top-notch narrator for his exciting cautionary tale that may leave you with the distinct feeling that the future is now.


Love of "The Life"
Angelo Vestieri is a gangster's gangster, wealthy, powerful, an enemy to be feared, a true friend to true friends, an astute businessman, a stone-cold killer who lived "the life" through and through, a solitary man who rarely loved but, when he did, loved forever. As Vestieri, now an old man and survivor of bullets, betrayal and brutal gangland wars, lies dying in a New York hospital, the only two remaining people who loved him meet at his bedside and share his story and then their own. Gangster is that story, crafted with his best-selling knack for character and gritty authenticity by Lorenzo Carcaterra and read with his star-quality knack for characterization and narrative timing by Joe Mantegna. Vestieri and his cohorts have the same strange romantic appeal of many of Mario Puzo's memorable Mafiosi -- tough guys with a tough sense of loyalty and a ferocity that fascinates.


Politics that obscures love
President Kilcannon, young and liberal, has just been elected by a narrow margin. As he takes the oath of office, the chief justice, old and conservative, dies of a stroke, leaving the deeply divided Supreme Court evenly split. Kilcannon's first job is to select a new chief justice, not an easy task for a Democrat dealing with a Republican Senate and one that could easily become an inside-the-Beltway bombshell. That's just for starters in Richard North Patterson's Protect and Defend, ably read in its 21-hour entirety by Patricia Kalember. In California, a 15-year-old, pregnant with a hydrocephalic child, wants to sue for permission to have a late-term abortion over her parent's objections. You'll soon see that as her case moves toward the high court, a cataclysmic clash -- with many ramifications and many sub-plots -- is in the offing, as is another great listen. (Please note that the president's would-be-future opponent is named Chad Palmer!!)


Sukey Howard reports on spoken word audio each month.

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