No foolin', April is definitely the month for audio

Sukey's Favorite

Paradise, Toni Morrison's new novel, is dense and dark, luminous and lyric -- not something to be listened to casually. Your attention will be held not just by the superbly drawn characters, the intense evocation of love and hate, fear and forgiveness, tolerance and intolerance, and the intricately woven threads of the narrative, but by the author's voice. Ms. Morrison's reading is sonorous, sensitive, sometimes seductive, always rhythmic, with a poetic cadence that mesmerizes. The story is set in Ruby, Oklahoma, a tiny all-black town determined to keep the outside out and its founding father's pride and principles in. The challenge to Ruby's self-contained certainty comes from a former convent on the edge of town that has become a refuge for a few women, odd and unwanted stragglers, from lives they had to abandon. Vivid and powerful, this is masterful Morrison.

Paradise
By Toni Morrison
Random House Audiobooks, $25.95, 6.5 hours
ISBN 0375401792

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REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

There's more soul in The Street Lawyer, John Grisham's current blockbuster, than usual. Michael Brock, a young attorney racing down the fast track in one of D.C.'s best, mega-money-making law firms, is sure to make partner if he keeps working 12 hours a day and keeps his eye on the prize -- big bucks, power, and privilege. Then something happens. After a terrifying incident with a distraught but articulate homeless man, Michael suddenly sees his life and his high profile career in a very different light. And, unlike so many of us, he does something about it. It's a good story, I only wish that it were true and that, perhaps, Mr. Grisham would practice what he preaches, or at least donate the proceeds of this book and the movie that will undoubtedly follow to the cause he champions here. Michael Brock, accomplished reader of many previous Grisham novels, maintains his high standards in this reading.


Misdemeanors? Hardly

The High Crimes that gradually emerge in Joseph Finder's high tension thriller are high indeed. Claire Heller Chapman, Harvard law professor and brilliant criminal defense attorney, and her husband, Tom, a handsome, successful financial advisor, are the picture of the "power couple" who has it made. Then suddenly it turns out that Tom isn't Tom, he's Ron Kubick, a former member of a super-covert military squad, wanted for desertion and 87 counts of wanton murder. Tom/Ron claims innocence, insisting that he's the scapegoat for his Colonel, now a four-star general, while the army insists that he's their man. Claire desperately wants to believe and defend the man she loves -- but is he telling the truth or furthering an already many-splendored lie? I won't tell, it would ruin the pulse-pounding, courtroom suspense.


Fact stranger than fiction

If this were a novel, most readers and listeners would dismiss it as too far-fetched, too cruelly savage. Yet, the bizarrely awful happenings that Ann Rule, noted narrator of true crime, details in Bitter Harvest are all too real. On an October night in 1995 in an affluent Kansas City suburb, the luxurious home of Dr. Debora Green and her husband, Dr. Michael Farrar, went up in flames. Two of their three children died in the fire. The events that led up to this catastrophe, Debora's gradual decline, the disintegration of the marriage, and the denial on all sides of the extent of their troubles, makes for compelling listening. Mary Beth Hurt's finely tuned reading makes this modern day Medea, and the people she destroyed, palpably real.


Fact more thrilling than fiction

There's a lot going on in Howard Blum's The Gold of Exodus, and it's all true. In the early '80s the Saudis with immense wealth and moderate stealth were doing their all to get nuclear weapons. At the same time, two Americans, a millionaire treasure hunter and a gutsy, retired SWAT team member, were determined to get into Saudi Arabia. Their quest: to find the true site of Mount Sinai and with it, the priceless treasure Moses and his people brought with them from Egypt. Little did they know that they were being used by the Saudis and the Israelis in an international espionage game of the highest and deadliest order. And little did they know that what they found in the Arabian desert might change our understanding of the holiest place in the Bible. Narrator Boyd Gaines is a terrific performer with great pacing and a phenomenal range of accents.


Fact more disturbing than fiction

Alex Kotlowitz grapples with hard problems and brings to them even perspective, enormous compassion, and a good reporter's eye -- and ear -- for the truth. In The Other Side of the River, read by Stanley Tucci, Kotlowitz deals with racism and the legacy of the legends and myths that inform and shape our feelings about it. In 1992, he heard the story of a 16-year-old black boy who was found dead, floating in the St. Joseph river, between Benton Harbor, Michigan, a poor, black town and St. Joseph, its prosperous, white opposite.

Increasingly obsessed with the incident, Kotlowitz spent the next five years searching for answers. He didn't find them, but his intense investigation, reported here in short takes that add up to a full and fascinating picture of these two small towns, illuminates the racial problems that beset America.


Brief encounters

The Best of NPR: Biography & Autobiography brings back five provocative interviews with the biographers of some of this century's most inspiring, complicated, and enigmatic characters; Edmund Morris on Ronald Reagan, Stephen Ambrose on Richard Nixon, James Gleick on Richard Feynman, Otto Friedrich on Glenn Gould, Peter Guralnick on Elvis Presley, and five authors on the special challenges of autobiography, including Frank McCourt, Mary Karr, Cyra McFadden, James McBride, and the elusive M.F.K. Fisher. These short segments are just long enough to whet your appetite and remind you how very good National Public Radio can be. (Proceeds support NPR programming.)


Sukey Howard reports on spoken word audio each month. Don't miss her reviews on CNN's Sunday Morning.

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