BookOpinion

BookOpinion has compiled the last 10 podcast audiobook reviews from AudioFile magazine. Each book below is linked to the audio review where you can hear samples of the book and comments from the AudioFile editors. 

GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING by Tracy Chevalier, read by Ruth Ann Phimister

AudioFile says: “This reminiscence is a voyage of time and culture. Filled with characters from all strata of society, the setting is the seventeenth century Dutch household of Vermeer. The overall flow of the performance is charming and engrossing.” Listen to Review Here

TRAVEL TEAM by Mike Lupica, read by Oliver Wyman

AudioFile says: “A good basketball story, rich in sports detail–enhanced by the excellent narration of Oliver Wyman. Listeners follow seventh-grader Danny and his father, Richie, a former NBA star, as they overcome obstacles to a winning season.” Listen to Review Here

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS by Sara Gruen, read by David LeDoux and John Randolph Jones

AudioFile says: “2007 Audies Finalist Who doesn’t love a circus? Two narrators portray the life-view of Jacob Jankowski, a circus vet during the Depression. Jacob’s youthful passion is finely captured by David LeDoux, and Jacob at 90 brilliantly done by John Randolph Jones. A personal favorite and ‘best of the best’ audio.” Listen to Review Here

WORLD WAR Z by Max Brooks, read by a Full Cast

AudioFile says: “2007 Audies Winner, Multi-Voiced Performance. Zombies are among us. In a series of journalistic-style interviews and monologues, Max Brooks follows the intrepid survivors of the collapse of civilization. Alan Alda, Carl Reiner, Mark Hamill, and other celebs march in and out of the program delivered in the grand tradition of War of the Worlds.” Listen to Review Here

TEACHER MAN by Frank McCourt, read by Frank McCourt

AudioFile says: “2007 Audies Winner, Biography/Memoir. Teaching high school is a tough gig. In McCourt’s brogue, the challenges of New York’s urban classrooms are devilishly amplified. His thirty-year teaching career is punctuated with small triumphs, pitfalls, and difficult choices, all delivered with his indomitable flair as a storyteller.” Listen to Review Here

INSPIRED BY . . . THE BIBLE EXPERIENCE read by Angela Bassett, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Samuel L. Jackson, et al.

AudioFile says: “This 2007 Audiobook of the Year bypasses many previous Bible recordings with a full show of music, sound effects, and a dazzling array of celebrity voices. A cast of more than 80 African-American actors delivers a rich, diverse rendering of the contemporary Today’s New International Version (TNIV) translation in gospel-meeting style.” Listen to Review Here

THIS I BELIEVE by Jay Allison, Dan Gediman [Eds.], read by Multiple Readers

AudioFile says: “For NPR listeners, ‘This I Believe’ will be a familiar broadcast program. Mixed in here are archival programs from the 1950s hosted by Edward R. Murrow. The essays, each read by the author, surprise, inspire, and touch the heart. A must-listen.” Listen to Review Here

RABBIT EARS: TALL TALES by Various Authors, read by Nicolas Cage, Anjelica Huston, Garrison Keillor, Jonathan Winters

AudioFile says: “Have you heard this one? Delight in the Rabbit Ears twist on these tall tales–Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, Rip Van Winkle, and Davy Crockett with celebrity readers like Jonathan Winters and Garrison Keillor, and original scores to match.” Listen to Review Here

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee, read by Sissy Spacek

AudioFile says: “This powerful American classic never fades as the timeless issues of kindness and cruelty, inclusion and prejudice are played out. Sissy Spacek uses a soft, subtle accent to tell the story from young Scout’s point of view.” Listen to Review Here

DAY OF TEARS by Julius Lester, read by Various Readers

AudioFile says: “Transported to the largest slave auction in U.S. history, listeners feel the anguish of riven families, the greed of buyers and sellers. Written like a play, Dion Graham takes the lead narration with others telling their role in the 1859 auction in the voices of adults and children, onlookers, slaves and the auctioneer.” Listen to Review Here

BookOpinion has compiled two of the early book reviews that have come out on J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” We won’t include spoilers on this page and just limited plot information. If you want further details, use the links to the full reviews.

The two early reviews that hit the media and irked Rowling and her publisher are from U.S. newspapers, one from the N.Y. Times and one from the Baltimore Sun. Neither gives key plot questions away, but they do touch on some details of the story. If you don’t want to know even the slightest details, we’ve tried to limit what we’ve quoted…but you should probably stop here.

The New York Times wrote and extensive review that outlined some plot details. Here’s an excerpt from their review:

…It is Ms. Rowling’s achievement in this series that she manages to make Harry both a familiar adolescent — coping with the banal frustrations of school and dating — and an epic hero, kin to everyone from the young King Arthur to Spider-Man and Luke Skywalker. This same magpie talent has enabled her to create a narrative that effortlessly mixes up allusions to Homer, Milton, Shakespeare and Kafka, with silly kid jokes about vomit-flavored candies, a narrative that fuses a plethora of genres (from the boarding-school novel to the detective story to the epic quest) into a story that could be Exhibit A in a Joseph Campbell survey of mythic archetypes.

In doing so, J. K. Rowling has created a world as fully detailed as L. Frank Baum’s Oz or J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, a world so minutely imagined in terms of its history and rituals and rules that it qualifies as an alternate universe, which may be one reason the “Potter” books have spawned such a passionate following and such fervent exegesis. With this volume, the reader realizes that small incidents and asides in earlier installments (hidden among a huge number of red herrings) create a breadcrumb trail of clues to the plot, that Ms. Rowling has fitted together the jigsaw-puzzle pieces of this long undertaking with Dickensian ingenuity and ardor. Objects and spells from earlier books — like the invisibility cloak, Polyjuice Potion, Dumbledore’s Pensieve and Sirius’s flying motorcycle — play important roles in this volume, and characters encountered before, like the house-elf Dobby and Mr. Ollivander the wandmaker, resurface, too…

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The Baltimore Sun also launched a review and liked how the series concluded. They write:

When you have read the last sentence on the last page of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” — no, we’re not going to reveal any plot twists — you will say, “Of course.”

That’s how inevitable the conclusion to the seven-book series seems. And it’s a tribute to author J.K. Rowling’s skill that, once you have finished “Hallows,” no other ending seems possible.

The ending incorporates so many of the speculations, many opposing, that have been rampant on the Web for years.

Taken as a whole, the Harry Potter series is a classic bildungsroman, a coming-of-age tale about the title character. In each of the six previous books, Harry has learned one important valuable life lesson — about the importance of choosing well, about the importance of learning to trust others, about the importance of recognizing the humanity in enemies.

Book 7, which goes on sale at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, is about coming to terms with death. (I read the book in advance.) As she attempts to grapple with the inevitable, Rowling evokes everything from learning to accept and even embrace that eventuality, to Christian notions of resurrection and redemption.

At the start of this final book, Harry and his two best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, set out to…

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“The Secret Servant” by Daniel Silva is due in bookstores in a few days. Although the book does not come out until July 24, it is currently No. 12 on Amazon’s list of new releases. BookOpinion has compiled reviews, an excerpt from the novel and a recent six-part interview with Silva.

This is Silva’s seventh novel to feature Gabriel Allon, a wayward son of Israeli intelligence.

“Why it’s hot: Allon is Israel’s Jack Bauer,” writes USA Today. “In true Bauer fashion, shootouts, kidnappings and international terror plots follow him wherever he goes.”

Publisher’s Weekly summarizes the plot of The Secret Servant: “When Solomon Rosner, a professor in Amsterdam who’s also a secret Israeli asset, is assassinated for his strident reports and articles detailing the dangers of militant Islam within the Netherlands, Gabriel gets the job to clean out the professor’s files. In Amsterdam, the Israeli agent and his old partner, Eli Lavon, unearth a plot that leads to the kidnapping by Islamic extremists of the daughter of the U.S. ambassador in London. While most intelligence agencies consider Gabriel persona non grata because of his unorthodox methods and the trail of bodies he leaves in his wake, he once again proves invaluable as he and his stalwart team hunt down some of Israel’s—and the world’s—most violent enemies.”

We have also found a recent multi-part interview with the Daniel Silva. It’s lengthy, but in-depth.

Daniel Silva Interview - Part 2
Daniel Silva Interview - Part 3
Daniel Silva Interview - Part 4
Daniel Silva Interview - Part 5
Daniel Silva Interview - Part 6

The following is an excerpt from Silva’s “The Secret Servant.”

1
Amsterdam

It was Professor Solomon Rosner who sounded the first alarm, though his name would never be linked to the affair except in the secure rooms of a drab office building in downtown Tel Aviv. Gabriel Allon, the legendary but wayward son of Israeli intelligence, would later observe that Rosner was the first asset in the annals of Office history to have proven more useful to them dead than alive. Those who overheard the remark found it uncharacteristically callous but in keeping with the bleak mood that by then had settled over them all.

The backdrop for Rosner’s demise was not Israel, where violent death occurs all too frequently, but the normally tranquil quarter of Amsterdam known as the Old Side. The date was the first Friday in December, and the weather was more suited to early spring than the last days of autumn. It was a day to engage in what the Dutch so fondly refer to as gezelligheid, the pursuit of small pleasures: an aimless stroll through the flower stalls of the Bloemenmarkt, a lager or two in a good bar in the Rembrandtplein, or, for those so inclined, a bit of fine cannabis in the brown coffeehouses of the Haarlemmerstraat. Leave the fretting and the fighting to the hated Americans, stately old Amsterdam murmured that golden late-autumn afternoon. Today we give thanks for having been born blameless and Dutch.

Solomon Rosner did not share the sentiments of his countrymen, but then he seldom did. Though he earned a living as a professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam, it was Rosner’s Center for European Security Studies that occupied the lion’s share of his time. His legion of detractors saw evidence of deception in the name, for Rosner served not only as the center’s director but was its only scholar in residence. Despite those obvious shortcomings, the center had managed to produce a steady stream of authoritative reports and articles detailing the threat posed to the Netherlands by the rise of militant Islam within its borders. Rosner’s last book, The Islamic Conquest of the West, had argued that Holland was now under a sustained and systematic assault by jihadist Islam. The goal of this assault, he maintained, was to colonize the Netherlands and turn it into a majority Muslim state, where, in the not-too-distant future, Islamic law, or sharia, would reign supreme. The terrorists and the colonizers were two sides of the same coin, he warned, and unless the government took immediate and drastic action, everything the freethinking Dutch held dear would soon be swept away.

The Dutch literary press had been predictably appalled. Hysteria, said one reviewer. Racist claptrap, said another. More than one took pains to note that the views expressed in the book were all the more odious given the fact that Rosner’s grandparents had been rounded up with a hundred thousand other Dutch Jews and sent off to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. All agreed that what the situation required was not hateful rhetoric like Rosner’s but tolerance and dialogue. Rosner stood steadfast in the face of the withering criticism, adopting what one commentator described as the posture of a man with his finger wedged firmly in the dike. Tolerance and dialogue by all means, Rosner responded, but not capitulation. “We Dutch need to put down our Heinekens and hash pipes and wake up,” he snapped during an interview on Dutch television. “Otherwise, we’re going to lose our country.”

The book and surrounding controversy had made Rosner the most vilified and, in some quarters, celebrated man in the country. It had also placed him squarely in the sights of Holland’s homegrown Islamic extremists. Jihadist websites, which Rosner monitored more closely than even the Dutch police, burned with sacred rage over the book, and more than one forecast his imminent execution. An imam in the neighborhood known as the Oud West instructed his flock that “Rosner the Jew must be dealt with harshly” and pleaded for a martyr to step forward and do the job. The feckless Dutch interior minister responded by proposing that Rosner go into hiding, an idea Rosner vigorously refused. He then supplied the minister with a list of ten radicals he regarded as potential assassins. The minister accepted the list without question, for he knew that Rosner’s sources inside Holland’s extremist fringe were in most cases far better than those of the Dutch security services.
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Simply Audiobooks has compiled 10 recommended audiobooks from AudioFile magazine’s founder and editor, Robin Whitten.

1. Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
   by Frank McCourt
2. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: Volume One: The Pox Party
   by M. T. Anderson
3. Burning Bright
   by Tracy Chevalier
4. Dogs of Riga
   by Henning Mankell
5. Inspired By…the Bible Experience New Testament-TNIV
   by Zondervan Publishing
6. The Lightning Thief
   by Rick Riordan
7. Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South
   by Roy Blount Jr.
8. Teacher Man: A Memoir
   by Frank McCourt
9. The Tortilla Curtain
   by T.C. Boyle
10. Traveler
    by Ron McLarty

Each of these books is available for immediate download at:

With the release of the final book of the Harry Potter series just days away, millions of Potter fans wonder who will die? Author J.K. Rowling has said that some characters will die. Will one be Harry Potter himself?

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution tackles this question:

Our bushy-haired protagonist faces his evil nemesis Voldemort in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the final installment of the seven-book series, to be released Friday at midnight.

Anticipation is even more feverish than usual, for two reasons: The book caps a 10-year journey for Harry Potter, the “boy who lived.”

And the boy who lived might die.

A worldwide audience, promised dire events by enigmatic author J.K. Rowling, waits on tenterhooks to see who survives. Web sites are churning with theories.

Evil conquers good?

Some readers say that the death of Harry would violate a basic principle of the story. If Harry died in the finale, “I would be devastated,” said Sharyn Briscoe, 35, assistant principal at Morningside Elementary School. On Monday, Briscoe was rereading Book 6 (”Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”) to be better prepared when she buys Book 7 at midnight Friday.

If she discovers that Harry perishes, “I would feel that evil had won over good,” she said. For that reason, she doesn’t think it’s going to happen.

A fit ending

Some readers think that death is the proper coda in the Harry Potter symphony. “It will be the best for the plot,” said Jessica Smith, 25, who has planned a Friday devoted to Pottering. Once she gets the book at the Mall at Stonecrest, “I won’t go to sleep.”

Younger readers are also prepared for a less-than-happy resolution. “I think it would be a nice tie-up for the story if he died,” said Cristy Stovall, 14, of Roswell. “It would be final; it wouldn’t leave room for more stories afterward.”

That sort of finality appeals to those who feel cheated when others have cobbled sequels to books that never should have had sequels.

Durable heroes

Historically, the hero often outlives the tale.

Odysseus survived “The Odyssey.” Beowulf lived into old age.

Since readers are expecting Harry to triumph, marry Ginny Weasley and sire numerous offspring, perhaps Rowling will let them have that cake and eat it too.

“It would be interesting if she cheated the system,” said Megan Linehan, a Borders bookstore employee in Silver Spring, Md.

Linehan wrote her thesis at American University on themes in the Harry Potter series. She suggests Rowling may allow Potter to beat the bad guy, then tack on a last chapter in which he ages and dies happily, in bed, with plenty of dark-haired children around him.

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Alibris has sent us a couple of coupon codes for BookOpinion users for the month of July.

These offers expire at midnight on Sunday, July 22, 2007.

Save $3 off a purchase of $30 or more using Coupon Code: EVANOVICH

Save $10 off a purchase of $100 or more using Coupon Code: PLUM

Click here to go!

James Lee Burke’s newest novel, “The Tin Roof Blowdown,” will be released to bookstores this week. The 16th Dave Robicheaux novel explores crime in the aftermath of Katrina. The book is already at No. 19 on Amazon’s list of bestselling new releases. BookOpinion has compiled reviews and an excerpt from the book.

Publisher’s Weekly summarizes the storyline of The Tin Roof Blowdown: “When Detective Robicheaux’s department is assigned to investigate the shooting of two looters in a wealthy neighborhood, he learns that they had ransacked the home of New Orleans’s most powerful mobster. Now he must locate the surviving looter before others do, and in the process he learns the fate of a priest who disappeared in the ill-fated Ninth Ward trying to rescue his trapped parishioners.” 

Booklist gave the novel a strong review: “…Katrina was no fictional event, and Burke writes about its aftermath as vividly and powerfully as any nonfiction chronicler. The plot itself, the investigation of the murder of two black men in the ninth ward, hinges on familiar Burke tropes–the powerless caught in a web of circumstance; surprising acts of nobility from the least likely people; unfathomable evil prompting eruptions of Robicheaux’s thinly suppressed rage–but the novel’s power comes from the way it explores the tragedy of Katrina in a way that is perfectly in tune with the series, a kind of perfect storm brought together by the confluence of fictional and nonfictional realms.”

The L.A. Times also ran an equally strong review:

…Burke’s flair for concocting fictional evil has not been completely compromised by his sadness and anger over the Crescent City’s fate. In a serpentine plot that winds from the drowning of a drug-addicted priest in the flooded Lower 9th Ward through the looting and vandalizing of a crime czar’s deserted uptown McMansion, to a slam-bang conclusion in the lawman’s hometown of New Iberia, La., we’re introduced to an assortment of villains. They include the vindictive czar, Sidney Kovick, a civic-minded, churchgoing florist who, Robicheaux tells us, “could snuff your wick and sip a glass of burgundy while he did it”; Bobby Mack Rydel, an expert in torture; Ronald Bledsoe, a clever and sadistic psychopath who sets his sights on Robicheaux’s daughter, Alafair; an assortment of racists and men and women of bad will; and, finally, Bertrand Melancon, a young black thief, rapist and murderer, who (in the sort of perverse twist favored by the author) takes on a nearly angelic presence before the book ends.

Tying all of these characters together along with Robicheaux and his mighty, loose-cannon comrade in arms, Clete Purcell, are a bagful of blood diamonds that, like the Idol’s Eye or the Maltese Falcon, carry a curse. Just as the gems prompted ghastly mutilation and death during their theft in Africa, they continue to encourage torture and murder in post-Katrina Louisiana.

Like the 15 previous Robicheaux novels, this one is written in an almost hypnotic style, filled with poetic description (”The wind was blowing hard out of the south, the surface of the bayou wrinkling like old skin”), street wisdom (”In any American slum, two enterprises are never torched by urban rioters: the funeral home and the bondsman’s office”), the occasional hard-boiled flourish (”When Rydel bounced off the mirror, Clete hit him again, breaking his lips against his teeth”) and a sort of woozy neo-existentialism (”Like Clete says, going up or coming down, it’s only rock ‘n’ roll”). The unique combination makes for an extraordinarily satisfying reading experience.

Burke usually adds a few otherworldly touches to his novels — visits from the departed or prophetic signs and portents. Here it’s a witness’ report of glowing lights under the waters of the Lower 9th, where the junkie priest and others perished. Robicheaux searches for the source of the lights but comes up short on solving that mystery…

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The following in an excerpt from “The Tin Roof Blowdown,” which releases on July 17:

My worst dreams have always contained images of brown water and fields of elephant grass and the downdraft of helicopter blades. The dreams are in color but they contain no sound, not of drowned voices in the river or the explosions under the hooches in the village we burned or the thropping of the Jolly Green and the gunships coming low and flat across the canopy, like insects pasted against a molten sun.

In the dream I lie on a poncho liner, dehydrated with blood expander, my upper thigh and side torn by wounds that could have been put there by wolves. I am convinced I will die unless I receive plasma back at battalion aid. Next to me lies a Negro corporal, wearing only his trousers and boots, his skin coal-black, his torso split open like a gaping red zip-per from his armpit down to his groin, the damage to his body so grievous, traumatic, and terrible to see or touch he doesn’t understand what has happened to him.

“I got the spins, Loot. How I look?” he asks.

“We’ve got the million-dollar ticket, Doo-doo. We’re Freedom Bird bound,” I reply.

His face is crisscrossed with sweat, his mouth as glossy and bright as freshly applied lipstick when he tries to smile.

The Jolly Green loads up and lifts off, with Doo-doo and twelve other wounded on board. I stare upward at its strange rectangular shape, its blades whirling against a lavender sky, and secretly I resent the fact that I and others are left behind to wait on the slick and the chance that serious numbers of NVA are coming through the grass. Then I witness the most bizarre and cruel and seemingly unfair event of my entire life.

As the Jolly Green climbs above the river and turns toward the China Sea, a solitary RPG streaks at a forty-five-degree angle from the canopy below and explodes inside the bay. The ship shudders once and cracks in half, its fuel tanks blooming into an enormous orange fireball. The wounded on board are coated with flame as they plummet downward toward the water.

Their lives are taken incrementally—by flying shrapnel and bullets, by liquid flame on their skin, and by drowning in a river. In effect, they are forced to die three times. A medieval torturer could not have devised a more diabolic fate.

When I wake from the dream, I have to sit for a long time on the side of the bed, my arms clenched across my chest, as though I’ve caught a chill or the malarial mosquito is once again having its way with my me-tabolism. I assure myself that the dream is only a dream, that if it were real I would have heard sounds and not simply seen images that are the stuff of history now and are not considered of interest by those who are determined to re-create them.

I also tell myself that the past is a decaying memory and that I do not have to relive and empower it unless I choose to do so. As a recovering drunk, I know I cannot allow myself the luxury of resenting my govern-ment for lying to a whole generation of young men and women who be-lieved they were serving a noble cause. Nor can I resent those who treated us as oddities if not pariahs when we returned home.

When I go back to sleep, I once again tell myself I will never again have to witness the wide-scale suffering of innocent civilians, nor the betrayal and abandonment of our countrymen when they need us most.

But that was before Katrina. That was before a storm with greater im-pact than the bomb blast that struck Hiroshima peeled the face off south-ern Louisiana. That was before one of the most beautiful cities in the Western Hemisphere was killed three times, and not just by the forces of nature.