Sukey's Favorite

The One Percent Doctrine
By Ron Suskind
Simon & Schuster Audio, $29.95
6 hours abridged, CD
ISBN 0743552024

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Just hours after the September 11 attacks, our world had changed irrevocably. America gathered itself for a response to a shadowy enemy and hoped our leaders would be "capable, courageous and sufficient to the moment." What they did, why they did it, what they've learned and what they haven't is dissected in The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of its Enemies Since 9/11. Ron Suskind's riveting, often surprising, narrative is read by Edward Herrmann, one of the best readers of serious nonfiction I've ever heard. The title comes from Dick Cheney, who early on eschewed the need for analysis or evidence beyond a one percent possibility in order to take action, actions that can have terrible consequences, high costs and inevitable blowback. And it's about the interaction between the "notables," Bush, Cheney, Rice and George Tenet, our very visible, public leaders; and the "invisibles," the "ardent" experts who are fighting the actual fight without regard for spin, votes or the power of the presidency.

Before and after

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

On June 22, 1977, the seventh day of their cross-country bike trip, Terri Jentz and her Yale roommate pitched their tent in a small park in central Oregon. Just before midnight someone deliberately drove over their tent and attacked them with an ax—life now would always be before and after. Never solved, the case was closed, but it remained open in the scars etched into Terri's skin and psyche. She went back to Oregon 15 years later to find out who did it and why he was never prosecuted, hoping to "break out of the claustrophobic confines of her memory," to make "after" a bearable place to be. Strange Piece of Paradise, read by Margaret Colin, is both Terri's brave, mesmerizing memoir and a true-crime story that will raise your hackles and questions about our violence-tolerant society.


Sibling rivalry

Hold on to your hats—Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have a new, rocket-paced, cunningly convoluted, action-packed adventure that pits FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast against his demonic younger brother, Diogenes. As The Book of the Dead begins, an Egyptian tomb, long closed and buried in the Byzantine bowels of New York's Museum of Natural History, is about to be opened to much fanfare. With the falsely accused Aloysius buried in the dangerous dungeons of a maximum-security prison, Diogenes sees this as a fine venue for an evil escapade. As plot within plot heats up, Agent Pendergast gets out, his brother gets what he deserves and we get a grand tale. This may be the final book of the Pendergast trilogy, but I'm sure we'll hear from him again. Scott Brick reads with the requisite panache.


The dead of night shift

Denise Mina's crime novels fall into that appealingly different subgenre where the whodunit and the why-dunit are not quite as important as the nuanced description of the leading character and her circumstances. Paddy (Patricia) Meehan, who made her debut last year, returns in The Dead Hour, read by Heather O'Neill in a Scots burr that would please Robby Burns. Now a crime reporter working the night beat, Paddy's still smart and smart-mouthed, still fighting an uphill battle in the tough male-dominated newspaper world, and still more interesting than the miscreants and murderers she encounters on the job. And Mina's grim, gritty early '80s Glasgow, with its "bone-cracking cold" and rampant unemployment, is still a taciturn character as well as the setting for a nasty killing, a suicide and police corruption on high. Solving this case may save Paddy's job, but it will put her in harm's way, a risk she has to take.


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