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Man walks into a pub...
REVIEWS BY BY SUKEY HOWARD
By Martha Grimes Penguin Audio, $39.95 11 hours unabridged, CD ISBN 0143058452
A Brooklyn boy returns
By Paul Auster HarperAudio, $39.95 10 hours unabridged, CD ISBN 0060838787
Sukey's favorites
By Elizabeth Kolbert Simon & Schuster Audio, $29.95 5 hours unabridged, CD ISBN 0743555643
By Timothy Egan Tantor, $34.99 12 hours unabridged, CD ISBN 1400102200
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Superintendent Richard Jury of Scotland Yard had never been to The Old Wine Shades, a venerable London pub and the title of Martha Grimes' expertly crafted, 20th Richard Jury mystery, expertly narrated by John Lee. A wine-loving regular, the charming, elegant Harry Johnson sits down next to Jury and starts telling him a story, and an intriguing story it is. Nine months ago Harry's dear friend's wife went house hunting in Surrey, with their son and dog. The dog came back, but not the wife and son. They vanished—no bodies, no ransom note, no nothing. Jury, absorbed by the tale, fascinated by Harry and his asides on quantum mechanics and superstring theory (listen up, you'll get smart), begins to check out the details. But he finds that nothing about the story or about Harry is as it seems, that reality here lies in murder, malice and madness.
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These days, most serious novels claim "redemption" as key to the narrative's resolution, yet that redemption is often contrived or elusive. Not so in Paul Auster's latest, The Brooklyn Follies. The narrator, Nathan Glass, a former insurance salesman, admitted lousy husband and indifferent father to his only daughter, with an iffy lung cancer prognosis, retires from his job and from life. Brooklyn, his birthplace, will be his last retreat and he'll fill his remaining days documenting all of his very human foibles and failings in a book of follies. When, after a few Brooklyn weeks, Nathan runs into his long-lost nephew, working in a local bookstore instead of working on his assumed-to-be brilliant dissertation, life begins to change with gathering speed, bringing Nathan back into the vibrancy of ordinary, everyday human dependency. He is redeemed, even happy, and listeners have heard a helluva good story. Auster, a wonderful reader of his own words, gives Nathan the voice he was meant to have.
Many scientists have seen global warming as a clear and present danger for years; still there are those who want to deny it, to say that we need more studies, that remedies would put an unfair burden on business and the First World. Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change makes a strong, well-reasoned case for what is truly at stake—the very survival of our world and the colossal civilization we've built on it. Not a diatribe in any sense, this is a fascinating, comprehensible look at what's actually happening in Alaska, Iceland and Greenland, at retreating arctic sea ice, thawing permafrost, warming oceans, melting glaciers and the redistribution of species like the golden toad in Costa Rica, butterflies in the North of England and mosquitoes in New Jersey. We go with her as she travels to places where changes can be seen, listen as she talks with the scientists who are documenting these changes, and get an understanding of the politics involved, of what we know and what we refuse to know about global warming. Because Kolbert's account is presented without rant, it's all the more persuasive and disquieting, all the more important. Kolbert reads her introduction and Hope Davis continues the narration with calm authority.
Environmental catastrophe on a grand scale not only can happen here, it did happen here. In The Worst Hard Time, a brilliantly realized cautionary tale that captures the devastation and horror Dust Bowl survivors lived through, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Timothy Egan illustrates how reckless abuse of the land led to the ecological collapse of the Southern Great Plains during the Depression.