Sukey's Favorite

Cosmopolis
By Don DeLillo
Simon & Schuster Audio, $26
5.5 hours, unabridged cassette, ISBN 0743528484

Buy or borrow this book!

Support your local independent bookseller

Find it in a WorldCat library

Compare prices at major online bookstores

Eric Packer lives in world where "all wealth has become wealth for its own sake." Descending from his $104-million, forty-eight-room triplex, heading for his white stretch limo that glows of "cyber-capital," Eric knows two things: he's betting his megafortune against a falling yen and he wants a haircut. So starts Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo's brilliant, wildly satirical odyssey through the streets of New York on a day in April 2000. This is no ordinary trip across town, but nothing—or everything—is ordinary for this terminally egomaniacal young billionaire. Traffic is snarled by the president's motorcade (which president? Eric asks his ubiquitous security expert), then by rioting political activists, then by the funeral procession of his favorite Sufi rap artist. But that doesn't stop Eric's people—his many experts, his doctor, his wife of 21 days whom he barely knows—from getting in and out of the car and his "fluid reality." It's a wild ride that only DeLillo could deliver, turned into a mesmerizing audio that only Will Patton's enthralling delivery could bring off.

Mistakes were made

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

Doctors, nurses and hospitals have become the stuff of TV shows with hair-raising, life-and-death scenarios that capture large, dedicated audiences. The real thing can be even more fascinating, especially when it's seen through the eyes of a trained medical professional who is also a gifted writer. Atul Gawande is both of those things. He was in his last year as a surgical resident and working as a staff writer on medicine and science for The New Yorker when he wrote Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, read here by William David Griffith. The frontline stories he relates focus on the uncertainties, dilemmas and unknowns of practical medicine, on "what happens when the simplicities of science come up against the complexities of individual lives." Informative and intriguing from beginning to end.


The private side of a private eye

Elvis Cole, star of Robert Crais' super-successful detective novels, usually has fun. Even when the sleuthing gets rough, he cracks wisecracks while he cracks the case. Not so in Crais' latest and best so far, The Last Detective, read with compelling intensity by James Daniels. This case gets to Elvis in a visceral way. The 10-year-old son of his inamorata, Lucy Chenier, has been kidnapped, and the surly voice on the phone says it's payback time for something Cole did as an army Ranger in Vietnam. Desperate, disturbed Cole and his enigmatic, tough-as-nails partner, Joe Pike, can't wait to go after these guys, but to do that Cole must go into the Vietnam past he wanted to forget. When the cool Cole gets crazed and the invincible Joe shows signs of vulnerability, you know you're in for a nail-biter to the bitter end.


The key to the keystone

Four men, including the famed curator of the Louvre, have been murdered by a gargantuan albino monk who obeys a man called "the teacher." But before he died, the curator left a coded message hidden in the works of Leonardo Da Vinci, a message that brings Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbologist, and Sophie Neveu, the curator's cryptographer granddaughter, into the action. And suspenseful, fast-paced action is what you'll find in Dan Brown's pulse-pounder, The Da Vinci Code, read by Colin Stinton. One code leads to another and, racing against time and the treacherous "teacher," Langdon and Sophie must crack them all to find the keystone and its centuries-old secret, guarded by the Knights Templar and their successors—a secret that could shake the foundations of Christianity. There's much to ponder in this Byzantine thriller—but do that after your heart rate gets back to normal.


© 2003 ProMotion, inc.
www@bookpage.com