Salon.com > Kyle Minor

Tim O’Brien tries to make sense of wartime chaos

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Tim O’Brien is best known as the writer of “The Things They Carried” and “In the Lake of the Woods” — two works of fiction about the Vietnam War and its aftermath that can be safely counted among the most accomplished, affecting, important, troubling and pleasurable documents of the 20th century.

The foundation for those books was laid in Vietnam itself, where he began writing his first book, “If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home,” a memoir, in the last hour or two of daylight, from the foxhole he had dug to keep himself alive, a story he recounts in an interview bundled with the newly released 40th anniversary audiobook edition of the memoir. By the end of his tour, he had accumulated, by his count, 30 or 40 handwritten pages, which represented the beginning of a lifelong reckoning with what O’Brien now calls “that terrible decision”: “What do you do when you get a draft notice and you think a war is wrong? And I struggled with that for months prior to my being inducted into the army, and I’m still struggling with it, 40 years later.”

How Christopher Hitchens proved that nothing is sacred

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 15:25:00 +0000

In the foreword to "The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice," Christopher Hitchens imagined the question he invited by writing the book: “Who would be so base as to pick on her, a wizened, shriveled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute?”

The short version of Hitchens’s answer: Me.

His longer version: The implied question “Is nothing sacred?” must always be answered “with a stoical ‘No.’”

This fierce stance was central to Hitchens’s work, and now that he has been dead for a year, and Mother Teresa has been dead for 15 years, the reissue of "The Missionary Position" as an audiobook is less an opportunity to revisit the history of their disagreement (his explicit, hers implicit) than it is an opportunity to remember the value of Hitchens’s great pugnacious willingness to examine, in cold detail, the things the culture has enshrined, and to “scorn to use the fear of death to coerce and flatter the poor.”

Getting extremely loud, incredibly close with Hunter Thompson

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 20:30:00 +0000

It is an oft-repeated maxim that the best literary books don’t always make for pleasurable listening when they become audiobooks, and that books that sometimes seemed thin in print can be redeemed by the ear. Perhaps this is because the audiobook, as a form, is better suited to entertainment than to weightiness, to brevity than to length, to raucous event than to expansive reflection.

So it is with Hunter S. Thompson’s “Screwjack,” a brief, loud, sometimes incoherent miscellany in print, which becomes, in the audio edition, a pleasurable way to fritter away an hour.

The audiobook benefits from a strong performance by Scott Sowers, a prolific narrator notable for his ability to change his delivery, and even the quality of his voice, from book to book. In mainstream novels of sensation, such as John Grisham’s “The Confession” or Douglas Preston’s “Impact,” Sowers modulates his cadences up and down to fit the rises and falls of the action, veering from restraint to urgency. In Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward Angel,” his delivery turns stately, to match Wolfe’s elegiac tone.

Why “don’t ask, don’t tell” matters

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 17:00:00 +0000

Bronson Lemer’s “The Last Deployment: How a Gay, Hammer-Swinging Twentysomething Survived a Year in Iraq,” is a dispatch from the years of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” Bill Clinton’s stopgap measure, which was meant to allow gays, lesbians and bisexuals to serve in the military, but not openly.

The audiobook is ably narrated by Kevin Pierce, whose delivery is clear and true, and whose voice, like Lemer’s, steadily avoids special pleading and melodrama.

“The Last Deployment” begins at the end of the story, after Lemer’s unexpected year-long deployment to Iraq has disrupted his plans to leave the North Dakota National Guard, which he had joined so he could pay for college. Now he is meeting “the only man I’ve ever loved” in a restaurant outside Boston, hoping to rekindle what the war took from them.

But too much has changed, or, rather, Lemer has changed, and his ex-lover hasn’t. In the intervening years, Lemer has lived “the hot summer of 2003, the begging children who swarmed my platoon’s trucks in Baghdad, the scorpions the other soldiers and I caught and released on the Kuwaiti sand, the silly mustaches ...”

“There Was a Country,” Chinua Achebe’s long-awaited memoir of Biafra

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 20:00:00 +0000

“There Was a Country” is a book title that is loaded with sadness because of its use of the past tense: There was a country, but it is a country no longer. The country in question is Biafra, the losing side in the Nigerian civil war of 1967–1970. Chinua Achebe was its leading poet and cultural ambassador, and, now, its defining historian.

Achebe’s history is rooted in the personal, a choice that begins to seem a moral rather than an aesthetic one as “There Was a Country” proceeds. History, he seems to be saying, is something that happens to human beings, to individuals, to families, to cultures. The fates of empires and great leaders are not insignificant, but the significance of empires and great leaders is rooted not in their power, glory or reach, but rather in the disruptions and occasional blessings they visit upon individuals, families and cultures.

So Achebe, fittingly, doesn’t begin with war. He begins with memoir and family history, in the spirit of the Igbo proverb that says that “a man who does not know where the rain began to beat him cannot say where he dried his body.”

“Create Dangerously”: Edwidge Danticat’s profound meditation on art in exile

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 19:15:00 +0000

The most vibrant thing happening in American literature in the last 30 years or so has been the rise of writers belonging to various immigrant diaspora, writers who can fluently navigate more than one culture, who are greatly aware of the troubles and dislocations of distant and recent history, and know that these troubles aren’t exotic objects for entertainment, but that they are, instead, the crucible in which a tentative understanding of our increasingly mobile, global world might be forged.

To my taste, the greatest of these writers is Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian-American who has worked in many genres: the novel, the short story, the memoir, the children’s book.

In "Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work," Danticat is interested in history, in politics, in culture, in memory, in violence, in risk, in bravery, in reading, in writing, in what it takes to make things true, and most of all in understanding how the circumstances in which things are made can give rise to whatever great power they might achieve.

In mid-career, she has achieved a clear, singular and strong voice that would require something special of an audiobook narrator who wished to do it justice, and, fortunately for listeners, Kristin Kalbli, whose delivery is equally clear, singular and strong, is up to the task.

“The Adventures of Cancer Bitch”: Memoir of a sassy survivor

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 14:22:00 +0000

“I love pink M&M’s,” S.L. Wisenberg writes, near the beginning of her diaristic memoir “The Adventures of Cancer Bitch.” “I eat them every day. That’s all I eat. If I eat enough of them my cancer will go away. Won’t it? Isn’t that what they promise?”

It’s a virtuosic half-paragraph, a feat of tonal control that is amplified by the pleasingly plainspoken Texan almost-drawl of audiobook narrator Jennifer Teague, whose delivery radiates the complicated stew of virtues Wisenberg’s prose offers all at once: Sassy intelligence, social conscience, humor, feminist willfulness and indignation at the stream of reductive corporate can-do logic and self-help wall-poster language that patients must endure daily alongside their cancer.

The audiobook begins not with an author note, but with a section titled “About the Bitch,” a name chosen not for the author’s bitchy qualities, but rather because the blog that preceded it “should be called Cancer Something, and Babe was too young and Vixen was already taken.” Then, this news: “No animals were harmed in the production of this book except a few mice, and they were home invaders.”

Joan Didion, Diane Keaton bring ’60s alive

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 19:53:00 +0000

Forty-four years ago, in the preface to her first book, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan Didion wrote: “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”

It was an appropriate opening salvo for a writer who would become — and who remains — the most consistently interesting and quotable essayist in the English language. At the beginning of her career, Didion announced herself as the owner of two voices: the voice of the throat and the body, which stumbles in service of the other voice, the writer’s voice, the register of the interior life, which has asserted itself ever since with a great and intelligent ferocity.

The writer’s voice, which has been heard for so many years only in the intimate space created by the reader’s imaginative engagement with the words on the page, has now found a richly appropriate vessel in the narration of Diane Keaton. Keaton's delivery is fluid enough to accommodate not only the stately elegance of the sentences belonging to Didion, but also the many emotional colors of the other voices Didion embeds throughout her stories.

Behind the David Foster Wallace myth

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 19:58:00 +0000

David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008, and in the four years that have passed since his death, his life and work have been a subject of constant discussion in American magazines, on Internet discussion groups and literary gossip sites, and among readers who gather wherever readers gather to talk about books.

He rose to prominence as a writer of formally daring novels, stories and essays that did their best to interrogate American culture, including the culture of entertainment, while also — in a pleasurably idiosyncratic and sometimes difficult manner — succeeding on their own merits as entertainments.

In his best work — showcased in his hyperbolic literary reportage for Harper’s and the New York Times Magazine, in stories such as “Good Old Neon” and “Adult World,” and in the novel “Infinite Jest,” his masterpiece — he seemed not only to crack open and display the candy-coated sophistication of his own brain, but also to do it in a way that invited a certain kind of reader to imagine that Wallace’s hyper-kinetic, hyper-associative and hyper-insightful page persona was something the reader could share in, because Wallace’s voice was somehow an analogue for the reader’s own interior life. In addition to everything else Wallace’s writing was, it was also, at its core, a virtuoso performance of seduction.

Communists, mathematicians and temps

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 20:30:00 +0000

Few books are as ready-made for the audiobook as Josh Kornbluth’s “Red Diaper Baby,” a collection of three interconnected monologues that have already enjoyed a long life on the stage, as a book and as two concert films (“Red Diaper Baby” and “The Mathematics of Change”) and one theatrical release (“Haiku Tunnel”).

The opening section tells the story of Kornbluth’s upbringing, as the child of two more-or-less harmless American Communists in New York. Kornbluth’s parents are not likely candidates to inspire a violent revolution. His father is a schoolteacher who is fired from job after job for cursing out the principal. He wakes his son every morning by singing the “Internationale” – “Arise ye prisoner of starvation ...” – which Kornbluth interprets as a call to breakfast, a call made less appetizing because Kornbluth’s father refuses to wear anything but talcum powder in the house.

Denver was almost annihilated

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 18:15:00 +0000

Prior to 1951, American nuclear bombs were custom-built at the famous Los Alamos laboratory. The plutonium was produced in eastern Washington state, and the uranium enriched in Oak Ridge, Tenn. But the Cold War was on, and with it an arms race with the Soviet Union. The time had come for American nuke-making to move out of the boutique business and into mass-production.

The Atomic Energy Commission spread the labor among 13 sites across the country. Arguably, the most critical was the secret plant operated by Dow Chemical in Rocky Flats, Colo., which smelted, purified and shaped the plutonium trigger at the core of every American nuclear bomb manufactured between 1952 and 1989. Seventy-thousand triggers, and each one, as Kristen Iversen writes in “Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats,” containing “enough breathable particles of plutonium to kill every person on earth.”

Dave Eggers still the “King”

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 19:45:00 +0000

Dave Eggers’ “A Hologram for the King” is one of those books that is particularly well-suited for an audiobook adaptation. Eggers writes in short, punchy sections. He has long since put aside the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sentences of “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” in favor of a stripped-down and accessible lyricism that is one part Michael Chabon, one part Stephen Elliott, and which feels not unlike a conversation with an intelligent friend. Most of all, the book owes something to the theatrical tradition. Its most immediately recognizable forebears aren’t novels so much as they are plays of American commerce such as Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” and David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross.” And the book’s sly epigraph (“It is not every day that we are needed”) is taken from Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”