Lend us your ears -- it's audiobook month

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

Louise Erdrich's lyrical prose is always wonderful when read aloud. And her new book, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, with a perfectly pitched performance by Anna Fields, including smooth segues into the Ojibwa language, is a wonderful audio presentation of an extraordinary novel. Set on the remote Ojibwa reservation of her three previous Dakota novels, Erdrich focuses on beloved Father Damien, a Catholic priest who has spent more than 80 years among the clashing clans and remarkable characters of Little No Horse. Early on, the good Father discloses to readers that he is really a she -- Agnes DeWitt, a former nun and farm woman. Damien has guarded her odd, secret duality, but used her singular sensibility to absorb Ojibwa spirituality and to forgive and redeem in a unique way. Now at the end of her life, faced with the possible canonization of a long-time nemesis, the bitter Sister Leopolda, Father Damien/ Agnes is forced to wrestle with her demons and with the true nature of lies, fact and fiction.


A wealth of words

Ten children, an alcoholic husband who spends most of his meager salary on booze, the wolf constantly at the door . . . what's Evelyn Ryan, a deeply dedicated mother, to do? Well, in the 1950s, a truly talented woman who wouldn't and couldn't consider a career might turn to entering contests -- writing jingles, slogans and rhymes that might win the prize to keep that wolf at bay. In The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, Terry Ryan, one of Evelyn's 10 children, takes us back to that time of tail fins and black and white TVs and into her childhood home. Her mother won every major appliance, the pots, pans, food and most of their Christmas presents in contests, not to mention the prize money that made up the down payment and later stopped foreclosure on that home. Warm and witty, Evelyn Ryan was unusual not just for her cleverness, but for her inextinguishable love of life and the pleasure she found in writing the words that saved her family. It's our pleasure to meet her.


Ordinary heroes

Tom Brokaw, who grew up in the 1940s and '50s, found a renewed appreciation for his parents' generation when he covered the 40th and then the 50th anniversary of D-Day. That appreciation took form in two best-selling books and audios celebrating The Greatest Generation. Now, he treats us to a third, An Album of Memories made possible by the outpouring of personal responses he received after his first books were published. These are the stories of history as it was lived by ordinary people during the Great Depression and World War II, stories that need to be heard, with lessons that need to be learned. Brokaw sets each scene in historical perspective, from those dismaying Depression days, through the war in Europe and the Pacific, to the heady years that followed. The men and women who lived through them recount the memories of glory and grief, of harrowing times and of hard-won triumphs. Read by a full cast of performers, these reflections broaden Brokaw's fine portrait of that Greatest Generation.


Dreams

Jim Morris didn't walk on to a big league ball field until he was 35. How he made it, and why he even considered trying out at that advanced sports-age, makes up the turbulent, triumphant finale of The Oldest Rookie: Big-League Dreams From a Small-Town Guy. His story will probably be labeled "a sports memoir," but there's a lot more here than baseball.

Morris was a Navy brat, dragged from town to town, rootless and often friendless. A natural ballplayer, he had loved it from the time he was a tot and found sports to be his entree into the world. He wasn't that surprised when the Milwaukee Brewers signed him, but he was at a loss when three arm surgeries ended his brief minor league career. Though he met and married a wonderful woman, became a science teacher and baseball coach, life seemed to have too many black holes and dreams left drifting. But in 1999, Jim Morris pitched his first major league game and, more importantly, he showed himself, and a lot of others, that dreams that looked lost forever can still come true.


Spenser rides again

Though always true to his beautiful Susan, Spenser appreciates a pretty face and a well-turned ankle. So, when Mary Lou, a blond with bombshell attributes, asks him to find her husband's murderer, Spenser packs his bag and his piece and heads West. And that's where Robert B. Parker's latest Spenser saga, Potshot, with Joe Mantegna as our moral-minded, tough-as-nails Boston P.I., starts. Nonplused by what he's finding -- rather, not finding -- Spenser senses that there's another story being told, one he can't quite hear. Then, there's the possibility that Mary Lou may be more a distressing damsel than a damsel in distress. To boost his hearing and balance the odds against a band of thugs harassing the town of Potshot, Spenser gathers a gang of his own, including his super-cool cohort, Hawk. Together, wry banter spraying faster than the bullets from an AK-47, they face down the bad guys and root out the truth. Peak-power Parker pizzazz all the way.


The corpse was a dead woman

Another blond with bombshell attributes turns up in You Only Die Twice, Edna Buchanan's most recent Miami-set, Britt Montero mystery. But this blonde, who has washed up on the beach, is very dead. Britt, one of my favorite crime fiction characters, who covers the police beat for Miami's major newspaper, gets the story early and tries to help the police identify the beautiful blonde. When the cop in charge tells her that the corpse is a dead woman, she thinks, "yeah, what else is new?" Then, it sinks in -- the beach blonde is Kaithlin Jordan, supposedly murdered by her wealthy husband 10 years ago. Now, she's dead again and her death-row hubby will walk out of jail, just weeks before his execution. Surrounded by so many questions, Britt is in her element and we're in for a well-crafted caper, consummately read by Sandra Burr.


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