Sukey's Favorite

Billy Collins Live: A Performance at the Peter Norton Symphony Space
By Billy Collins
Random House Audio, $19.95
1 hour unabridged, CD
ISBN 0739320114

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I need to make two grand statements: I have a mad, albeit intellectual, crush on Billy Collins, our former U.S. Poet Laureate, and, more importantly, you don't have to like poetry or know anything about its structure or esoteric intricacies to love Collins' work. So, don't miss Billy Collins Live: A Performance at the Peter Norton Symphony Space, his first appearance on audio. I can't think of a more listener-friendly poet, a fresher voice, or a keener observer of the absurd and the poignant, the amusing and the pretentious, of our very human foibles. He allows you to see the simplest things in new ways, brighter, clearer, wreathed in gentle humor. Hearing Collins read his own work is special; here, Billy sings his own song in his own voice. Keep this single-CD recording close at hand just in case you need an instant, guaranteed-effective poetic pick-me-up.

The Spoken Word

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

Interview with a vampire seeker
If an old leather-bound book turns up on your desk and falls open to an image of a dragon with a long, looped tail: hit the road, Jack, and don't come back. Good advice not heeded by the leading characters in Elizabeth Kostova's smash-hit debut novel The Historian, presented here in a fabulous ensemble performance by six eloquent audio readers. The narrator is only 16 when this dark, atmospheric, horror-tinged tale begins, but her father's obsession with the dragon and what it stands for goes back 20 years and his university mentor's another 20 years before that. These are passionate scholars who take on the quest to find the legendary vampire, Dracula, and destroy him before he destroys them. All is revealed through letters, long-held reminiscences, obscure texts and ancient archives. The pace is fast, the landscapes exotic, the train trips extensive, the plot deliciously arcane.

A cautionary memoir
Koren Zailckas took her first drink at 14, had alcohol poisoning at 16, spent her undergraduate years binge-drinking or hung over, then sobered up for good at 23. Smashed, read here by Ellen Archer, is her moving, unflinching memoir of that "drunken girlhood." Written in spare, often poetic prose, it spares none of the devastating details of how girls use alcohol to remedy adolescent angst and anxiety. In audio form, Zailckas' tale has a mesmerizing quality that keeps you listening as her life spirals in and out of control in an excess of abuse. What's most disturbing, and what Zailckas makes explicit, is that this kind of destructive behavior is not unusual, nor is the cloak of denial that helps perpetuate it. Anyone with a teenage daughter—anyone concerned with our future—should pay close attention to this chronicle and learn from its candor and courage.

Living legends
Martin Odum is an ex-CIA operative turned slightly seedy private eye living over a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn. At least he thinks he's Martin Odum, but he may also be Lincoln Dittmann, a superb sniper and Civil War buff who, posing as an arms dealer, met with Bin Laden in Paraguay, or Dante Pippen, once an IRA dynamiter, now a trainer of Islamic militants in Lebanon. Whoever he really is, he's surely the star of Robert Littell's latest thriller, Legends: A Novel of Dissimulation, narrated by Grover Gardner, who moves nimbly through an astounding array of international accents. Littell, well-versed in the ways of espionage, spins an intriguing tale of spycraft, CIA attempts to manipulate geopolitics and post-Soviet Russians, some good, some beyond bad, one (living her own legend), who even adds a touch of romance. And he does it all with a good dose of wit, wisdom and hard-nosed scrutiny of our complex, terror-ridden world.


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