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Listen up for the holidays
REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD
By Garrison Keillor Highbridge, $24.95 2 hours unabridged, CD ISBN 1565119851 "Just As I Am"
By Steve Turner Blackstone, $29.95 10 hours unabridged, CD ISBN 0786177764 Inside the culture wars
By Zadie Smith Penguin Audio, $44.95 10 hours unabridged, CD ISBN 0143058002
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For Garrison groupies and just plain fans of the folks on "A Prairie Home Companion," The Christmas Companion is the perfect stocking stuffer. You'll find Christmas music from "Wise Men Blues" to "Silent Night" performed by Renée Fleming, Ricky Skaggs, Diana Krall, Sarah Jessica Parker and Musica Sacra. You'll go to a Christmas party with the ever-cool, never-say-no sleuth Guy Noir and attend an interview with Santa, who has become more of a trim, tough, craven capitalist than a jolly, chimney-shimmying purveyor of presents. You'll hear new versions of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" and "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," be charmed anew by two Keillor-crafted monologues and reminded of the healing power of Bebopareebop Rhubarb Pie. All the segments come from live broadcasts on National Public Radio and all are worthy of repeat visits.
Johnny Cash is an American legend, an American icon—"His voice was America's voice, just as America's voice was his." Though he took on mythical proportions, the flesh and blood Cash was a complex and compelling figure who never hid his shortcomings. And though The Man Called Cash is an authorized biography, author Steve Turner reveals the real man, forged by his failings and his faith. For more than four decades, this sharecropper's son shaped country music and set a standard of integrity for all popular music. He lived with pain—physical and emotional, he struggled with drugs and alcohol, but rose above it all, turning his rough, gritty life into music that spoke to everyone, using his musical force to give support to those in need, becoming "an inspiration to prisoners and presidents." Narrator Rex Linn has just enough country in his voice to catch the Cash spirit.
In her third novel, On Beauty, Zadie Smith has done something quite extraordinary. While she spins a rangy tale of parents and children, husbands and wives, domestic distress and acrimonious academic politics, she takes an incisive look at race and class and the divisive politics surrounding them in America today and does so with non-racist humor and grace. Your sympathies may shift as members of two academic families (I'll leave you the fun of discovering their details) ensconced at a prestigious liberal arts college make their way, make their mistakes, espouse their views and irritate their spouses, but your interest will hold. Peter Francis James' fabulous performance sounds like a full cast recording, without a false note whether the voice is black or white, British, Trinidadian or American, male or female, warm or pompous.