Savvy science, notable novels, mischievous memoirs

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

James Gleick, one of our finest science writers, has the ability to make a complicated subject totally understandable and thoroughly intriguing. In Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, he tackles the endless ramifications of our time-obsessed culture as it, and we, gather speed, shaving nanoseconds from our multi-tasking lives, already awash in a glut of information delivered by ever-faster, ever-better technology. With enormous erudition, wonderfully free of jargon, Gleick connects an eclectic array of elements in our present, past, and possible future, letting us look at the elusive evolution of acceleration while allowing us to contemplate the consequences of the eternal jet-lag we find ourselves in now. I only wish that the publisher had had the time to record an unabridged version, and I had had the time to listen. Mr. Gleick reads his book well and, thankfully, in real time.


Real life Catch-22

Fred Rochlin survived WWII -- his good fortune and now ours. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, he grew up in Arizona, enlisted in the Army Air Corps when he was 19, and was sent to Italy as a navigator on B-24s. A few years ago, when he was 70, he took a storytelling workshop with Spalding Gray; Old Man in a Baseball Cap: A Memoir of World War II, a collection of vivid first-person vignettes, is the welcome result. Told in small takes on that large, horrendous war, it's funny, poignant, earthy, and honest. Fred's voice sounds young, and his memories sound as fresh and raw as they would have been if we were sitting with him after a bombing mission knocking back brandy and bourbon. (Beware, foul G.I. lingo and scenes of slaughter are part and parcel of these tales.) There's insight here, mixed with a little hindsight, as his original naivete and enthusiasm give way to the realization that war is hell, and that it's also pure insanity. Fred Rochlin has given us an unusual book and an entertaining audio.


Better than ever

When author James Lee Burke and actor Will Patton pair up, the resulting audio is always outstanding. Heartwood, Burke's latest novel, performed by Patton, finds this duo at their individual and collective bests. Billy Bob Holland, a former Texas Ranger, is now a defense attorney in his small hometown north of Austin. Edgy, restraining a reservoir of rage, and with the odd habit of taking advice from the ghost of his former partner, Billy Bob is a tenacious, tough, and formidable fighter for what he thinks is right. What he thinks is wrong here is an arrogant town big shot (who delights in swindle and destruction), a corrupt police chief, and some young Mexican gangbangers. Burke is a master at setting mood and setting the scene, and Patton's voice and delivery, punctuated with guitar riffs, intensify both -- you can feel Billy Bob's anger and his lingering love for a woman he can't have, and you see the heat lightning crackling across the hills.


Long before the fall

As a reporter, Ward Just spent time in Vietnam before the war became a divisive, national nightmare. A Dangerous Friend, his 12th novel, is set in those early days. It's movingly evocative of that time before innocence turned to shame, and that place when it was still mysterious and compelling. The well-drawn main characters, two American foreign service officers, one with a bad conscience and one with no conscience at all, and a French couple who live in a seemingly parallel world, anticipate the catastrophic conflict that is to come. Author Just knows this world and these people and looks at them with a journalist's understanding of events and a novelist's understanding of what drives people to do what they do. This is an uncommonly fine novel, read with nuanced feeling by the author. Listeners with literary leanings should latch on to this one.


Glorious Gloria

At 89 -- and proud of it -- Gloria Stuart is a world-class optimist, a class act, and a true trooper. Most of us saw her for the first time as Old Rose in that titan of box office blockbusters, Titanic. But Gloria had a movie career long before that. As part of the studio system in the Hollywood of the 1930s and '40s, she made 42 "forgettable" films and as an early, dedicated member of the Screen Actors' Guild and wife of a well-known screen writer, the stars that glittered in Beverly Hills glittered at her dinner table, too -- you name 'em, she knew 'em. Though she became an accomplished painter, designer, and printer in the 33 years after she gave up acting, Gloria never gave up hoping for that great role. Then that epic role came her way when she was 86. In her candid, delightfully gossipy memoir, Gloria! I Just Kept Hoping, written with her daughter Sylvia Thompson, Gloria tells it like it was and like it is. Gloria and her memoir give growing older, fully and gracefully, a new definition.


Underwater anxiety

Dead zones in the ocean that shift and disappear, abalone divers dying fast, agonizing deaths as their flesh scalds and bubbles, a drifting freighter with no one left alive, disease-ravaged sea lions. Are these random scenes of inexplicable horror, or is there something lurking in the Pacific Ocean, possibly heading for Seattle -- a mega-menace as malevolent as they come? You'll get the deadly truth and high adventure on the high seas in Sea Change by James Powlik, read by Jameson Parker. Powlik, an oceanographer himself, knows his stuff and knows how to tell a ripping, gripping tale with accurate scientific detail and fast-paced action.


Sukey Howard reports on spoken word audio each month.

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