Four Bears

Gorbachev has always been a hero of mine

Revisado: 03-17-18

Real insight into what was going on in Russia. I always only saw him from the outside. Russian names are hard even when you know how to pronounce them. Too many characters I knew nothing about. I once tried to see him in SF, though I'm not usually one to follow celebrities.

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Loved it but think I'd get tired of a whole series

Revisado: 07-11-14

The reader is perfect: understated, deadpan voIce which suits the character perfectly. There is no hard-boiled detective here. Very civilized.

The main character is a writer of mystery books, a Brit, currently stuck on a significant detail of his latest MS . And he's also a thief. He meets an American in Amsterdam who asks him to steal two statues (2 of the 3 monkey see no evil trio) from the homes of two men he's just been talking to. He gives our hero the addresses and exact locations in the domicile. Has to be done immediately. Our guy hesitates but does it, chatting comfortably with the reader as he does so.

But of course things go wrong. The man who hired him turns up dead and our hero is arrested for his murder. He gets a very helpful lawyer from the Embassy, who eventually turns out not to be as he seems. Other characters are not who they seem either. The plot twists and turns agreeably.

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It's read too fast and it's a confusing abridgment

Revisado: 07-11-14

It's the rare author who is even a passable reader of his or her own work and even those who do a good job (like Barbara Kingsolver ) fall short of a professional reader. Cook reads way too fast—it's too fast when I crank it down to half time—and her voIce is grating.

I have read thie 2 volumes of this book and liked it so much I suggested it for a bookgroup (vol I only) so I'm listening to this abridged version to refresh my memory. But I think the abridgment is poor too. The time sequence isn't clear ( she missed when FDR ran for VP) and really important parts of ER's life are given short shrift (eg. Allenwood and Madame Souvestre who was so influential, the details of Franklin's initial illness, the roles of the aunts in her life). These are critical to understanding ER, more critical than all the detail of her political life. I haven't quite finished it, but she left out Louie Howe coaching her to speak in public too.

I heartily recommend this book, but not this recording and not this abridgment.

To audible editors: surely you realize that "story" is an inappropriate term in nonfiction.

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Escaping Orwell

Revisado: 12-09-11

1Q84 s a book about parallel universes. Not in the SCIFI sense so much as in the moral and a human sense (though there are SCIFI elements). A book about what happens to people (in this case, Aomame and also Tengo) who get off the track in their lives and have to go through some scary stuff in order to get back. It starts with Aomame in a taxi on a freeway in a traffic jam (listening to Janacek's Sinfonetta--which becomes a theme) choosing to get out of the cab and climb down an emergency access stairs to the surface. When she leaves, the cab driver tells her to remember that appearances to the contrary there is just one reality.

But soon it appears that's not true and the world she climbs down into seems different. Her first clue is that the police have different uniforms and are carrying heavier fire power than she remembers. Eventually the icon of the "alternative world" dubbed 1Q84 instead of 1984 (references to Orwell intended) is the second moon in the sky, smaller than the "real" moon, slightly lopsided and green.

Aomame is a serial killer ... of sorts. She happened into that line of work though an elderly rich woman who becomes a client (Aomame is a physical therapist and trainer). Together they target men whose crimes (often but not always crimes against women) that seem not likely to be addressed by the legal system. Aomame's work with the body has put her on to a spot on the back of the neck where she can kill someone instantly leaving no marks. Her job often calls her out to use her skills to help busy people relax which gives her opportunity. She's devised a weapon--a thin needle she keeps in a pouch in her purse. The Dowager identifies the targets and arranges access. Aomame is convinced once the Dowager coaxes her that the men they target deserve to die.

Tengo was a math prodigy in school but has lost interest in math and is playing around with being a writer. He's not published anything yet, but he writes on his days off from the cram school where he teaches math, though on one day a week he frolics with his married lover. He as no friends and few others he sees or talks to. He lives in a old, slightly run down apartment building, cooks for himself and writes in his spare time. When the novel opens, he has been working with Komatsu, the literary editor of a periodical that awards a prize for young and new writers. Tengo has contributed in the past and impressed Komatsu but has never won a prize. This time Komatsu shows Tengo an unusual manuscript which has caught his attention and which he thinks might win not only this prize but a bigger, more prestigious award if it's edited some (actually re-written). The author is a 17-year old girl. Komatsu wants to make into a "star" out of her which will bring money to his publishing house--and to himself and Tengo. Tengo is more that a little skeptical--after all it will be fraud--but he's a relatively passive young man and Komatsu is compelling. Besides Tengo is fascinated by the manuscript of Air Chrysalis.

So we have two basically decent 30-year-olds who have been drifting and two determined and manipulative adults who influence them. It's important that neither Komatsu nor the Dowager is particularly evil. Each has a strong sense of morality and a determination to take matters into their own hands. Both demand (and in most ways deserve) loyalty. Both are loyal in return.

Finally, there's a religious cult called Sakigaki that professes just to be a farming community in the countryside. No one knows much about them, but we learn from Professor Ebbesuno, who's informal guardian to the girl who wrote the manuscript, that she evidently ran away from Sakigaki at age 10 and came to live with the professor who was a friend to her parents. She will not talk about Sakigaki or her parents who have never tried to contact her.

The major portion of the novel consists of sections devoted to Aomame and Tengo alternately. Not exactly first person narratives, mostly third person with the first person (thoughts mainly) printed in italics. We assume after the early chapters that there's some connection between the two but it's a long way into the novel before we learn that Tengo once held her hand when Aomame was a 10-year old girl ostracized in school because her family was associated with a strict religious group. Neither has ever forgotten that. Both somehow assume that the other (if they can find the person after 20 years) is the only person they can be close too, can love. And we learn that Aomame left her parents and their strict Seven-Day-Adventist-type religion at age 10. Tengo believes his strict father is not his real father and has only one enigmatic memory of his mother.

Both eventually discover that they are living in an alternative world, one with two moons and a few others things askew. What happens in this alternative world (in 1Q84) can be impossible in the reality that we know and that they have known. Aomame first and then Tengo seem to recognize that they must meet in the present before either can escape back to the "real world".

It's a multi-layered story which is at once a page turner and a story to contemplate.

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Disappointed

Revisado: 11-23-10

I've been looking for this everywhere, but was disappointed. It was repetitive and tedious and the uplifting ending was not justified by what went before. I guess I was expecting time travel rather than a wishy-washy "influence" from the past.

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Foul

Revisado: 11-23-10

This is a good book. I'm fascinated by London during the Blitz so read everything--fiction or nonfiction--I can find about it. I also read Doomsday Book years ago (and bought a paperback recently to reread it) and was fascinated by the vision of historical research done by actually visiting the past. BUT this book leaves the reader totally up in the air. Clearly the situation is resolved in the follow-up book, All Clear, but novels need to have some internal integrity which this one does not, ending as it does--or not ending as it does. As it is, it reeks of the marketplace--how to ensure that the reader buys the second book. Even serial novels written for kids have more internal integrity in each novel. That said, I just put All Clear in my cart....

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I hate abridged books

Revisado: 10-19-10

I listened to unabridged versions of the first two volumes of this work and loved every word. This was got very confusing and I missed the detail. I have the book and I guess I'll have to read it. Never again will I try abridged versions.

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Contrived

Revisado: 10-19-10

I'd have been more impressed when I was younger, but somehow this escaped me and I'd never read it. Of course, I knew basically what is was all about. Now it seems awfully contrived--interesting as a moral tale but not so much as a novel. What I liked best: the wonderfully witty dialog. What I like least: the narrator. He hadn't a clue how to pronounce anything English--names of people and places were wrong and the pacing was off too.

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Propoganda

Revisado: 06-21-08

The narrator is excellent, sounds Afghani, but I hated the book. I'll grant the author has a talent for story telling but for this one I can only assume that he made a list of all the horrible things that could happen to a female in Afghanistan and then outlined a novel to include every one of them. It feels like propoganda to me. I've read personal accounts by Afgani women where the story is what happened to them. That's honest. I've read articles about woman under the Taliban with some egegious examples. That's honest. But this novel is dishonest. It takes advantages of people's desire to read about atrocity after atrocity and it assumes that readers in English are so uninformed that they can't get information except when it's also entertainment.

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Narrator spoils this one

Revisado: 12-09-07

I liked the book a lot but hated the narrator. I agree with the last reviewer than a male reader would have been better. But in addition, this reader dragged on--I wished I had a control to speed her up. I will not choose this reader again.

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