Sukey's Favorite

Upstate
By Kalisha Buckanon
Audio Renaissance, $29.95
5.5 hours unabridged, CD, ISBN 159397602X

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Powerful, raw, heart-wrenching, Upstate, Kalisha Buckanon's debut novel, takes you right onto the streets of Harlem, into the overcrowded schools, worn-down apartments, behind the walls of a New York state prison and into the lives of two teenagers aching with love for each other. Buckanon writes in Harlem street vernacular—with a grammar of its own, rough, tough and harshly expressive. Hearing it read makes the language even stronger and the readers, Chadwick Bosemann and Heather Simms, are so good that you'll forget you're listening to actors. The story is told in letters between Natasha, just 16, and Antonio, 17, when he goes to jail for killing his father. Separated, they write to each other over the next 10 years about their most intimate feelings, their anger, confusion, hopes and dreams, frustrations and longings, his intense need to cling to her, her need to get out and on with life. Upstate is an extraordinary book and an extraordinary window into a reality most of us know little of.

The Corleones continue

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

Mario Puzo, Vito Corleone, even Marlon Brando have left us, but still The Godfather Returns—and it's a fabulous return at that. Mark Winegardner was chosen to continue the saga with its huge cast of memorable, tough-talking characters, and he does it with Puzo-esque flare and bravado. Michael Corleone, Vito's smart, well-educated son has become the Godfather (a Puzo-invented title that's taken hold in our language and in our imaginations); he's trying to consolidate power and take the family into legitimate business. His brother Fredo, with his debilitating predilections and bad judgment, is a serious problem, but not nearly as dangerous as is Nick Geraci, a Corleone enforcer with big ideas and even bigger grudges. Tom Hagen, the Corleone consigliere, reappears, as does Johnny Fontane, Puzo's sleazy Sinatra-like Vegas singer and Pete Clemenza. There are also assorted bosses with Mob-minted names who mete out justice in their own special way and get as good as they give. It's a first-rate Godfather novel, with a first-rate audio performance by Joe Grifasi, and Mark Winegardner will certainly be hailed as capo di tutti sequel writers.


Tree-hugging terrorists

Michael Crichton has written a long string of edge-of-your-seat, cutting-edge techno-thrillers that have entertained and often enlightened. Now comes State of Fear, 18.5 hours of race-paced, death-defying derring-do mixed with a heavy agenda of controversial soapbox speechifying about global warming or, rather, global non-warming, read by George Wilson. Crichton's bad guys are environmentalists, proponents of the yet-to-be U.S.-signed Kyoto protocol, misguided believers in a media-hyped, nonexistent altered atmosphere. Most are muddleheaded, Gulf Stream-flying liberals, but some, like the character Nick Drake, head of NERF (the National Environmental Resource Fund), are stop-at-nothing radicals who are trying to trigger natural disasters (think tsunami) that will reinforce their multimillion-dollar fund-raising efforts. In between diatribes, the good guys (a brilliant, right-thinking ex-MIT professor and his attractive young entourage) just barely escape fatal hypothermia in the Antarctic, Solomon Island cannibals, the bite of a deadly, tiny blue-ringed octopus and much more. Crichton is surely provocative; he provoked me one way, but may provoke you another—so, why not give it a try.


Extreme adventure

For true-life derring-do, join the seven superstar kayakers who were the first to conquer Tibet's legendary Tsangpo Gorge and Tsangpo River that drops a dizzying 9,000 feet in only 150 miles. Outside magazine writer Peter Heller was embedded with the team as it attempted the most difficult river-running challenge ever and Hell or High Water is his exclusive, hair-raising account, heightened by Patrick Lawlor's action-tuned narration.


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