|
Audio explorations of art world revelations
REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD
By Jonathan Harr Random House Audio, $29.95 unabridged, CD ISBN 0739313940
By Ross King Audio Renaissance, $49.95 16.5 hours unabridged, CD ISBN 1593978774
The mind of a killer
By Patricia Cornwell Penguin Audio, $39.95 14 hours unabridged, CD ISBN 0143058266
|
Support your 
Audio presentations of history are a special pleasure; you're learning while being entertained, getting smarter without much effort. Two uncommonly interesting new books about the art world are guaranteed to make that pleasure even more special. Jonathan Harr, prize-winning author of A Civil Action, takes on a very different subject in The Lost Painting: The Search for a Caravaggio Masterpiece, read by Campbell Scott. It sounds like a complex thriller, where detective work by young art historians in the dusty archives of a decaying palazzo leads to nail-biting, exciting chases (albeit, only paper chases) and where the intriguing convergence of chance and scholarship may actually lead to the lost treasure. But with a skill rarely found in thrillers, Harr seamlessly weaves a picture of Caravaggio's life and his world into this enthralling story.
Ross King, whose books on Renaissance art and artists were surprise bestsellers, now jumps a few centuries to the Paris of the 1860s where Impressionism was about to burst onto the scene, revolutionizing art as only the Renaissance had before. Written with his unique delight in detail, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism, narrated by Tristan Layton, follows the careers of Ernest Meissonier, a super-successful painter of traditional, uplifting historical scenes, now all but forgotten, and Edouard Manet, who was ridiculed and reviled for his radical approach to painting. King paints brilliant portraits of these two and of many other artists—Monet, Degas, Cézanne, Pisarro, Renoir and Morisot, among them—and critics, especially Emile Zola, who forever changed the way we look at art.
Everyone seems to be grumpy—or worse—in Predator, Patricia Cornwell's 14th foray into forensics, with subplots galore, admirably read by Kate Reading. Kay Scarpetta, now with the National Forensic Academy in Florida, her brilliant niece Lucy's superb state-of-the-art training and research center, can't get her old sleuthing pal Pete Marino to behave; can't get Lucy, sullen and a bit off her game, to communicate; and midway through has a falling out with forensic psychologist Wesley Benton, her old flame and colleague in crime-solving. But the personal stuff doesn't keep any of them from their appointed rounds, rounds that entangle them in a series of intertwined murders, old and new, in steamy Florida and snowbound Boston, and in trying to understand how the mind of a serial killer (or "compulsive murderer," as Benton prefers) works. Cornwell has a lot of balls in the air, but if you listen closely the baffling connections between the murders begin to emerge in all their gory detail.