OCT 2015
AUDIO BOOK REVIEWS
by Jonathan Lowe
|
One of my favorite author interviews was Garrison
Keillor. He's the closest writer we have to Mark
Twain, and this next season is retiring from radio
after more than 40 years. He is also a great natural
storyteller with a gift for timing and tone, plus
a voice to die for. So now there is THE
40TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION of A Prairie Home Companion
on audio. Here’s an except from my interview
with him:
Jonathan
Lowe: What is audience reaction to your shows and
signings? Any anecdotes to share?
Garrison
Keillor: I did a reading in Seattle a which
a little girl in the front row fell sound asleep.
She slept for more than an hour. It was sweet. I
seem to have a God-given ability there. Some people
in the room were hooting and slapping their knees,
and she simply leaned her head against the fat lady
next to her and dozed off. It’s good to be
useful. A boy wrote me once to say that he loved
it when the news from Lake Wobegon came on the radio
because it meant that his parents stopped arguing.
That was an eye-opener for me. You work hard to
polish your act and then you find out that it does
people good in ways you couldn’t predict.
The audience is invisible and that’s good.
Somewhere my voice is drifting through a swine barn
and the sound of it seems to perk up the sows’
appetite. Or a lady is listening on headphones as
she jogs along a beach, running to my cadence. Or
a dog sits in front of the radio, head cocked, and
the sibilants excite him in some mysterious way.
A dog’s humorist, that’s me.
Keillor's Bio from publisher: Garrison
Keillor is America’s favorite storyteller.
The host of A Prairie Home Companion, he
has captivated millions of listeners with his weekly
News from Lake Wobegon monologues. A Prairie
Home Companion is heard on hundreds of public
radio stations, as well as America One, the Armed
Forces Networks, Sirius Satellite Radio, and via
a live audio webcast. Keillor is also the author
of several books and a frequent contributor to national
publications including Time, the New
Yorker, and NatGeo, in addition to
writing his own syndicated column. He has been awarded
a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment
of the Humanities. When not touring, he resides
in St. Paul, Minnesota.
|
|
 |
Margaret
Atwood is an old woman now, but she has
more insight into youth culture than any rocker
or rapper. This is because of vision: being able
to see the whole picture, not just those quickly
“forgoteen” single frames known as “Yahoo
Trends.” Her new book is THE HEART
GOES LAST. One might classify this as more
distopian science fiction, such as her masterpiece
“The Handmaid’s Tale.”
(She is also author of “The Blind
Assassin,” which won the Man Booker
Prize.) But there is more in this new novel than
in previous ones in the sense that it is a fusion
of genres infused with satire. The plot concerns
a couple having problems with their marriage in
a near future society in which the economy has collapsed,
and they are forced to live in their car, which
they frequently have to move to escape roving bands
of looters. This is a world where everyone is guilty,
and so there’s a prison for everyone called
The Positron Project, where, if you enroll, you
get to live in a shady Reader’s Digest picket-fence
company town every other month, and in prison as
forced labor to big business every other month.
But it beats being on the street! You want to feel
“safe,” right? (Kinda like most cubical
employees feel today, working for the weekend.)
Meanwhile there are factories producing sex bots,
(shades of “The Stepford Wives,”) plus
Elvis impersonators, mass societal brain-washing
(Brandwashing), compartmentalizing for control (The
Filter Bubble), separation of families (like factory
farms), and the politics of gender, race, and culture
wars. The couple, Stan and Charmaine, see Positron
as salvation at first, but, like what American culture
has become, it ends up costing them dearly. Narrators
Cassandra Campbell and Mark Deakins are
both pro voiceover actors who have appeared on TV
and on stage, and are versatile in conveying mood
and tone in order to establish the characters as
real people to listeners. A word about censorship.
There are a lot of “f” words in this
audiobook, and bizarre sexual references. Unlike
gangster rap, however, none of it is gratuitous.
Satire serves a purpose in that it holds up a mirror
to society to show us what we are actually taking
so many selfies of, and Atwood holds up and then
cracks the mirror.
|
|
 |
THE
SECRET HISTORY OF STAR WARS is the ultimate
behind the scenes biography of Lucas, an epic audiobook
with much information even the most avid fan doesn’t
know. Star Wars is one of the most important cultural
phenomena of the Western world. The tale of Luke
Skywalker, Han Solo, and the fall and redemption
of Anakin Skywalker has become modern myth, an epic
tragedy of the corruption of a young man in love
into darkness, the rise of evil, and the power of
good triumphing in the end. But it didn’t
start out that way. In this thorough account of
one of cinema’s most lasting works, Michael
Kaminski presents the true history of how
Star Wars was written, from its beginnings as a
science fiction fairy tale to its development over
three decades into the epic we now know, chronicling
the methods, techniques, thought processes, and
struggles of its creator. For this unauthorized
account, he has pored through over four hundred
sources—from interviews to original scripts—to
track how the most powerful modern epic in the world
was created, expanded, and finalized into the tale
an entire generation has grown up with. Michael
Kaminski lives and works in Toronto as a camera
technician in the film and television industry.
A graduate of Vancouver Film School, he is a member
of the International Cinematographers Guild. Josh
Robert Thompson is a comedian, voice, and
television actor known for his celebrity impressions
and outrageous original characters. He is best recognized
as the voice of Craig Ferguson’s robot skeleton
sidekick, Geoff Peterson, on CBS’s The Late
Late Show. As a voice actor, he has been featured
on Disney Channel television shows and a number
of popular video games that include Final Fantasy
XIII and James Cameron’s Avatar.
|
|
 |
It
has long been argued that the singularity of artificial
intelligence may either save us or destroy us.
MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE by John Markoff explores
the former hope. Two separate labs at the Pentagon
are researching how either to recreate the human
brain or to augment it, and as George Lucas once
put it, “Our technology is going up like a
rocket ship, but our social progress is a flat line.”
So while a super intelligence may decide to exterminate
us in order to save species we are exterminating,
it may also help us overcome our ego delusions with
technology to restore what we are destroying via
pollution and overpopulation, and make our lives
infinitely better in the process. Markoff interviews
computer scientists and business people alike to
lay out the whole history of our relationship with
automation and machines to arrive at some conclusions
about where we may be heading. The development of
robots, both autonomous and software programs like
SIRI, enter into the picture, and narrator
George Newbern is host for this in-depth
overview of the subject, guiding listeners into
the hallways of MIT and Silicon Valley to the personal
home robots that are coming faster than anyone expects.
|
|
|
TO
LIVE FOREVER by Jack Vance is a fascinating
classic science fiction novel on audio for the first
time this month, superbly narrated by Kevin
Kenerly. The plot has city-set elements
reminiscent of the movie A.I., but predates it.
This is not about robots, but a society in which
the length of your life depends on your merit and
contributions to society. There are four levels
of longevity, leading to Amaranth, which is achieved
by a rare few who reach immortality. You can live
out your short life normally, or you can register
to work on your “slope,” in order to
move up in class. There are assassins to keep things
in line, and there is an unlawful underground where
people prey on or pay to kill animals and people.
One of the means Gavin Waylock intends to use to
move “up slope” is to help seizure prone
patients used for cloning who are kept in cocoons
of mesh so they can’t hurt themselves. But
then he is targeted for exclusion by the Amaranth
Society for criminal knowledge of how to evade a
mind scan. The brain science of surrogates and others
is but one element in this unique novel involving
psychology, sociology, culture, the effects of technology,
and the limitations of progress due to human nature.
In this world there are drugs that can erase selective
memory, and balance of a population is achieved
without regard to race or sex or war, but uniquely
and simply by control of natural death. Narrator
Kenerly is a member of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival,
and has read other books, including “The Running
Man” by Stephen King. His narration is always
engaging, and possessed of a gift for timing and
appropriate tone in both male and female characters.
Jack Vance, who died in 2013, has won multiple Hugo
awards and a World Fantasy award. He is a favorite
of George RR Martin, author of A Game of Thrones.
“To Live Forever” was one of the inspirations
for my novel “The Methuselah Gene,”
and am proud to say it was my suggestion to the
publisher late last year that has resulted in this
Vance production now. The audiobook is available
as download to iPhone or other device, or on CDs,
or on a single Mp3-CD.
|
|
 |
Finally,
for Halloween, THE HORROR OF IT ALL:
Pop culture history meets blood-soaked memoir as
a horror film aficionado and screenwriter recalls
a life spent watching blockbuster slasher films,
cult classics, and everything in between. Horror
films have simultaneously captivated and terrified
audiences for generations, racking up billions of
dollars at the box office and infusing our nightmares
with unrelenting zombies, chainsaw-wielding madmen,
and myriad incarnations of ghosts, ghouls, and the
devil himself. Despite evolving modes of storytelling
and the fluctuating popularity of other genres,
horror endures. The Horror of It All is
a memoir from the front lines of the industry that
dissects (and occasionally defends) the hugely popular
phenomenon of scary movies. Author Adam
Rockoff traces the highs and lows of the
horror genre through the lens of his own obsessive
fandom, born in the aisles of his local video store
and nurtured with a steady diet of cable trash.
From Siskel and Ebert’s crusade against slasher
films to horror’s Renaissance in the wake
of Scream, Rockoff mines the rich history of the
genre, braiding critical analysis with his own firsthand
experiences. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
|
|
|
