Unabridged Audio Books
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| | (Single books On Sale For up to 60% -OFF MSRP) | | AUTHOR | TITLE | Unabr | SALE | New | Media |
| BOX 44B |
| MICHAEL CRICHTON | TIMELINE -
When you step into a time machine, fax yourself through a "quantum foam wormhole," and step out in feudal France circa 1357, be very, very afraid. If you aren't strapped back in precisely 37 hours after your visit begins, you'll miss the quantum bus back to 1999 and be stranded in a civil war, caught between crafty abbots, mad lords, and peasant bandits all eager to cut your throat. You'll also have to dodge catapults that hurl sizzling pitch over castle battlements. On the social front, you should avoid provoking "the butcher of Crecy" or Sir Oliver may lop your head off with a swoosh of his broadsword or cage and immerse you in "Milady's Bath," a brackish dungeon pit into which live rats are tossed now and then for prisoners to eat.
This is the plight of the heroes of Timeline, Michael Crichton's thriller. They're historians in 1999 employed by a tech billionaire-genius with more than a few of Bill Gates's most unlovable quirks. Like the entrepreneur in Crichton's Jurassic Park, Doniger plans a theme park featuring artifacts from a lost world revived via cutting-edge science. When the project's chief historian sends a distress call to 1999 from 1357, the boss man doesn't tell the younger historians the risks they'll face trying to save him. At first, the interplay between eras is clever, but Timeline swiftly becomes a swashbuckling old-fashioned adventure, with just a dash of science and time paradox in the mix. Most of the cool facts are about the Middle Ages, and Crichton marvelously brings the past to life without ever letting the pulse-pounding action slow down. At one point, a time-tripper tries to enter the Chapel of Green Death. Unfortunately, its custodian, a crazed giant with terrible teeth and a bad case of lice, soon has her head on a block. "She saw a shadow move across the grass as he raised his ax into the air." I dare you not to turn the page!
| Yes
(9T,15H) | $24 | No | T |
| MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM | THE HOURS -
The Hours by Michael Cunningham is the Pulitzer Prize winning reinterpretation of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Cunningham divides Woolf's plot into three neatly packaged interwoven stories.
The Hours by Michael Cunningham contains three interwoven stories set in three very diverse eras and geographic settings. Like Mrs. Dalloway, the novels moves through the hours of one day, however, it moves between the three stories highlighting significant events as each set of characters travel through their day from dawn to dusk. The first story focuses upon the real life Virginia Woolf. It is 1941 and set at the Woolf country home outside of London. Woolf who has suffered from bouts of depression throughout her life is once more contemplating suicide. The second story focuses in on Laura Brown, a pregnant wife and mother reading Mrs. Dalloway on the eve of her husband's birthday. It is 1949 and set in a postwar housing development outside of Los Angeles. Brown is depressed about having another child and the prospect of losing even more of herself and her precious free time for reading to the demands an additional child. Finally, the third story focuses on Clarissa Vaughan, a 52-year old book editor on the eve of a party that she is throwing for Richard, a poet friend of hers who is dying from AIDS. It is 1990 and is set in New York City. Clarissa Vaughan is an updated version of Clarissa Dalloway planning a party. Unlike Mrs. Dalloway, Vaughan is a lesbian with a more active career, but like her namesake her life at times sounds as meaningless and hollow. During the length of the day, Woolf will commit suicide, Brown will runaway and contemplate both an abortion and/or suicide, and Vaughan will blissfully walk through her day while Richard struggles with the ravages of his disease.
| Yes
(4T,6H) | $18 | No | T |
| E.L. DOCTOROW | BILLY BATHGATE -
In the poverty-stricken Bronx, under the dark cloud of the Depression, gangster Dutch Schultz spies a young boy juggling in the street and gives him a ten-spot. From that moment on, brash Billy Bathgate flies under Schultz's crooked wing. With grace and vivid realism, Billy recounts his extraordinary education in crime, love, life, and death in the dazzling and decadent world of a big-time rackets empire that is about to crumble. From crooked politicians to Park Avenue socialites, through terror and tenderness, spirited adventure and sobering cruelty, Billy rushes toward adulthood and his triumphant destiny. This is E.L. Doctorow's masterpiece, combining with stunning force his tremendous powers, illuminating history as myth, and transforming the half-understood, hauntingly-remembered materials of our culture into brilliant art. The result is one of those rare shocks of recognition that tell us how we have become what we are.
| Yes
(9T,13.5H) | $33 | No | T |
| E.L. DOCTOROW | RAGTIME -
There has never been a novel quite likeRagtime. It is the story of three remarkable American families-rich white, Harlem black, immigrant Jew-whose lives become intertwined with the likes of Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Theodore Dreiser, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata. It is a novel rich in incident, astonishingly original in plot, stunning in its vivid descriptions, an absolute joy to listen to. It is a chronicle of the shimmering, shattering forces from all walks of American life that come together in wonder and terror, in an age when all things seemed possible.
THE NEW YORKER describes Ragtime as "an extraordinary deft, lyrical, rich novel that catches the spirit of this country... in a fluid musical way that is as original as it is satisfying." TIME magazine characterizes it as, "dazzling...The book never stands still for a moment... Fantastic and poetically convincing... The novelist has managed to seize the strands of actuality and transform them into a fabulous tale."
| Yes
(6T,9H) | $29 | No | T |
| E.L. DOCTOROW | WORLD'S FAIR -
A wonderfully poignant creation of a certain New York City boyhood of the 1930's, seen simultaneously through the eyes of the child himself and through those of the adult who recollects that childhood. It is a time of innocence and Depression-summer dance bands in the Catskills and comic-strip adventures in the Daily MIRROR, football games at the Polo Grounds and rumors of war in the evening news. In successively smaller Bronx apartments, with their Venetian blinds, their knickknacks, their familiar furnishings packed ever closer, a mother ekes out a precarious budget from the tenuous profits of the father's Times Square music store.
Near the schoolyard, the boy spots the German zeppelin Hindenburg looming sudden and majestic over the housetops, its nose tilted down, before it silently recedes, a speck over the Manhattan skyline. The family-the parents and their two sons-struggles to hold together and to move apart, braces against hardship, nurtures hopes of better times. And all of it leads irresistibly to the glittering, futuristic promise of the New York World's Fair of 1939, where the young protagonist at the age of nine crosses over into a future of his own.
| Yes
(7T,10.5H) | $34 | No | T |
| HARRIET DOERR | CONSIDER THIS, SENORA -
"Three North American women, aged thirty-two, forty-two and eighty-three, sit, each alone, trying to remember love." In Doerr's (Stones for Ibarra) exquisitely nuanced, elegant and wise second novel set in a little village in Mexico, the characters have briefly left the world to ponder their uncertain futures. Artist Sue Ames impulsively buys 10 acres of land in Amapola with another American, shady speculator Bud Loomis. She is fleeing a disappointing marriage to a man whose mercurial ways have tried her soul. Twice-divorced travel-writer Fran Bowles builds a house on the subdivided land to provide a haven for her latest lover--who is destined to leave her. Ursula, Fran's mother, has come back to Mexico, where she was born, to die. She is the most elegantly realized character, and the one with whom one suspects Doerr most empathizes. Living with the aching memory of conjugal love and the knowledge of imminent death, Ursula searches for the meaning of existence in "the brilliant patchwork of her never-ending past," recalled in poignant memories and crowned by a sentimental tribute to a beloved figure of her youth. In 10 chapters whose vignettes have the vividness of dreams, Doerr creates portraits of the gentle, desperately poor residents of Amapola and the courtly aristocrat Don Enrique Ortiz, who protectively observes the buyers of his ancestral estate. She paints the Mexican setting like a mural: verdant gardens, a parched plain, village houses vibrantly painted the colors of fruit, the "azure sprawl" of morning glories clambering over tombstones. In spare, lapidary prose, she evokes heat, dust and drought; drenching rain; the clarity of light; the radiance of the air; the smell of jasmine, and of rot. She observes with irony the ways in which people of different cultures exist in mutual, courteous misunderstanding. But most of all she delicately celebrates the persistence and endurance of past experience, knit by memory into the fabric of life.
| Yes
(6T,6H) | $15 | No | T |
| HARRIET DOERR | STONES FOR IBARRA -
This is the story of an anglo married couple, Richard and Sara Everton, who, in a burst of idealism, move from San Francisco to an old family home and abandoned mine in Mexico. Why, in the face of vociferous objections and concern from all their friends, would they move to a house they know has no electricity or water and aren't even sure is still standing? Richard and Sara go "in order to extend the family's Mexican history and patch the present onto the past. To find out if there was still copper underground and how much of the rest of it was true, the width of sky, the depth of stars, the air like new wine, the harsh noons and long, slow dusks. To weave chance and hope into a fabric that would clothe them as long as they lived." Their years as Ibarra's only foreigners - Richard's work, his illness, Sara's work, her care of Richard, their neighbors and friends, the constantly surprising landscape, the stones - is a story told with affectionate and patient wisdom. Perhaps it is a story a long time coming: Harriet Doerr got her BA at age sixty-seven and published this (her first) book a year later.
| Yes
(6T,9H) | $24 | No | T |
| MYLENE DRESSLER | THE DEADWOOD BEETLE -
This European-flavored novel Dressler's second, after The Medusa Tree tells, in a taut and occasionally elliptical first-person voice, the story of entomologist Tristan Martens, who has devoted his adult life to the study of beetles, the "janitors" who diligently clean up the planet's waste. An atheist, he is estranged from his only child, a troubled boy who grows up to be a gun-stockpiling member of the radical religious right, who accepts his father's Christmas checks but won't let him see his grandson. Divorced, and recently retired from a New York City university, Martens is settling into a life of isolation, despite the efforts of his last graduate student, the exuberant and enthusiastic Elida Hernandez. Then, in an antique store, he stumbles across the blackened pine sewing table that once belonged to his mother. On it is written, in childish handwriting, a Dutch inscription meaning "When the Jews are gone, we will be the next ones." To the owner of the store, the elegant Cora Lasher Lowenstein, this is a "child's warning," as "clear and honest" as the famous one made during World War II by Pastor Niem”ller. To Martens, however, the statement is both ambiguous and dangerous. The table is not for sale, but as Martens embarks on a campaign to persuade Cora to remove it from display, he finds himself on a journey into his childhood during the Nazi occupation. Along the way, Martens begins to learn how to deal with the detritus of personal and political life, which human beings cannot dispose of as cleanly and neatly as beetles dispose of organic leftovers. European world-weariness mingles with American optimism in this accomplished novel, dense with the scrap material of the past. | Yes
(4T,6H) | $9 | No | T |
| UMBERTO ECO | THE ISLAND OF THE DAY BEFORE -
Eco, an Italian philosopher and best-selling novelist, is a great polymathic fabulist in the tradition of Swift, Voltaire, Joyce, and Borges. The Name of the Rose, which sold 50 million copies worldwide, is an experimental medieval whodunit set in a monastic library. Foucault's Pendulum, Eco's second novel, is a bit irritating. The plot consists of three Milan editors who concoct a series on the occult for an unscrupulous publishing house that Eco ridicules mercilessly. The work details medieval phenomena including the Knights Templar, an ancient order with a scheme to dominate the world.
The Island of the Day Before is an ingenious tale that begins with a shipwreck in 1643. Roberta della Griva survives and boards another ship only to find himself trapped. Flashbacks give us Renaissance battles, the French court, spies, intriguing love affairs, and the attempt to solve the problem of longitude. It's a world of metaphors and paradoxes created by an entertaining scholar.
| Yes
(11T,16.5H) | $49 | No | T |
| UMBERTO ECO | THE NAME OF THE ROSE -
Set in Italy in the Middle Ages, this is not only a narrative of a murder investigation in a monastery in 1327, but also a chronicle of the 14th century religious wars, a history of monastic orders, and a compendium of heretical movements.
One after the other, half a dozen monks are found murdered in the most bizarre of ways. A learned Franciscan who is sent to solve the mysteries finds himself involved in the frightening events.
| Yes
(14T,21H) | $59 | No | T |
| LAURA ESQUIVEL | LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE -
The #1 bestseller in Mexico in 1990, LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE is a romantic, poignant tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico.
Tita is the youngest daughter of Mama Elena, the tyrannical owner of the De la Garza ranch. As the youngest, she is expected to remain single and stay at home to care for her mother. So when Tita falls in love, Mama Elena arranges for Tita's older sister to marry Tita's young man.
As punishment, Tita is forced to bake the wedding cake. The bitter tears Tita weeps while stirring the batter provoke a remarkable reaction among the guests who eat the cake. It's apparent then that Tita's culinary talents are unique.
| Yes
(7T,7H) | $24 | No | T |
| NICHOLAS EVANS | THE HORSE WHISPERER -
His name is Tom Booker. His voice can calm wild horses, his touch can heal broken spirits. And Annie Graves has traveled across a continent to the Booker ranch in Montana, desperate to heal her injured daughter, the girl's savage horse, and her own wounded heart. She comes for hope. She comes for her child. And beneath the wide Montana sky, she comes to him for what no one else can give her: a reason to believe...
| Yes
(8T,12H) | $34 | No | T |
| NICHOLAS EVANS | THE LOOP -
A pack of wolves makes a sudden savage return to the Rocky Mountain ranching town of Hope, Montana, where a century earlier they were slaughtered by the thousands. Now shielded by law as an endangered species, they reawaken an ancient hatred that will tear a family, and ultimately the town, apart.
At the center of the storm is Helen Ross, a twenty-nine-year-old wolf biologist sent alone into the hostile countryside to protect the wolves from those who seek to destroy them.
The Loop charts her struggle, and her dangerous love affair with the son of her most powerful opponent, the brutal and charismatic rancher Buck Calder.
A haunting exploration of man's conflict with nature and the wild within himself, an epic story of deadly passions and redemptive love set against the grandeur of the American West, The Loop is destined to capture the hearts and imaginations of listeners everywhere.
| Yes
(10T,15H) | $39 | No | T |
| P.D. JAMES | AN UNSUITABLE JOB FOR A WOMAN -
Handsome Cambridge dropout Mark Callender died hanging by the neck with a faint trace of lipstick on his upper lip. When the official verdict is suicide, his wealthy father hires fledgling private investigator Cordelia Gray to find out what led him to self-destruction. What she discovers instead is a twisting trail of secrets and sins — and the strong scent of murder.
"P.D. James is unbeatable." —Ottawa Citizen
| Yes
(7T,10.5H) | $34 | No | T |
| JONATHAN KELLERMAN | DEVIL'S WALTZ -
Kellerman's psychologist/sleuth Alex Delaware nimbly executes tricky steps of his own when called in to consult on the mysterious ailments afflicting a baby being seen at his training hospital in Los Angeles. In his seventh appearance (after Private Eyes ), Delaware is in top form, carefully pursuing the possibility that 21-month-old Cassie Jones may be the victim of Munchausen's Disease by Proxy, a complex syndrome in which a parent, usually the mother, secretly causes the symptoms that endanger the child. That Cassie is the only grandchild of the hospital's new CEO, a corporate hotshot who has demoralized the staff with cutbacks and a new administration of "paramilitary types," adds political twists to the case's knotty psychological aspects. After a doctor involved in computer research is murdered in the hospital parking lot, Delaware calls on his friend Milo, a gay LAPD homicide cop currently serving as an input clerk. They link an earlier murder to the hospital and then key into a secret federal investigation, all the while trying to keep Cassie safe. With familiar characters, including Delaware's woodworking girlfriend Robin, and some well-developed new ones, notably the hospital's thuggish security head and an uptight pediatric nurse, Kellerman steadily turns up the suspense, reserving some surprises to spring near the end of this intricate tale, the best of recent Alex Delaware stories.
| Yes
(9T,13.5H) | $39 | No | T |
| JONATHAN KELLERMAN | TIME BOMB -
After a sniper opens fire at an elementary school in an L.A. suburb, LAPD Detective Milo Sturgis calls in his friend, child psychologist Alex Delaware (seen last in Silent Partner ). None of the children is hurt, but the shooter, a young woman named Holly Burden, is killed by the bodyguard of one of two politicos visiting the school. While helping the kids overcome the trauma of the shooting, Delaware becomes involved with the edgy, dedicated principal, Linda Overstreet. He also agrees to Holly's father's request to do a "psychological autopsy" to clear his daughter's name. As racist-motivated vandalism at the school accelerates, Milo discovers that a black friend of Holly's was recently killed by police; then one of the politicians is gunned down. Alex's life is threatened as he traces events to a revival of the German American Bund and an unexpected political alliance with roots in an explosion of 20 years earlier, echoed in the fiery resolution here. Kellerman's meticulously constructed thriller, while leaning hard on the anti-Semitic component of its plot, again demonstrates how well the role of sleuth fits that of therapist; Alex, a little lost without former girlfriend Robin, speaks with a a unique, convincing voice.
| Yes
(11T,16.5H) | $49 | No | T |
| ED MCBAIN | GOLDILOCKS -
Goldilocks is a tale of adultery and murder. And everbody in the book seems to be lying. When Maureen Purchase and her daughters are found savagely murdered, her husband's alibi doesn't check out. Playing cards? At A bar? Telling his lover he was going to leave his wife? His 1st wife is glad the 2nd is dead, his son is claiming credit for the murders and his lover claims to not know him. When his lawyer, Matthew Hope tries to get to the bottom of things, he can't tell the lies from the alibis and indeed Matthew Hope is lying to himself, as he promises HIS lover that he will leave HIS wife. All of this makes a compelling mystery and as delivered by Ed McBain, it is a great start to another series from the master of the police procedural.
| Yes
(6T,9H) | $19 | No | T |
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