San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Listening in
I’ve been an audiobook fan since 1992, when I lived on a farm in Maryland, a 20-minute drive from everywhere. Back then, my husband and I would read to our children each night before lights-off, yet still it surprised me how lovely it was to be read to myself. The form has evolved in the intervening decades, from a relatively few best-sellers found in a library and carried in a glove box — cassette tapes in danger of melting in summer heat — to thousands of stories carried in a pocket, read to us as we drive or cook or exercise or even, as in childhood, fall asleep. Audiobooks are among the fasting growing segments of the book market, with nearly half of Americans now listening and some of the world’s most famous actors pitching in to read. I’m delighted to be introducing here a monthly look at new books across all genres, and the voices bringing them alive.
In Anne Tyler’s “Clock Dance,” protagonist Willa Drake reads to her younger sister “in their father’s furry voice” — one narrator Kimberly Farr delivers with delightful softness and that hint of Southern that comes with “dropping her final g’s just the way he did.” Tyler, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1988 novel “Breathing Lessons,” covers familiar marriage-and-family turf here in a story that opens with the 1967 disappearance of Willa’s mother and follows Willa through college and young widowhood to an odd phone call in 2017.
The story turns on the moment of that phone call. Willa, somewhat weary of retirement with her second husband, flies with him from Arizona to Maryland to care for her son’s ex-girlfriend’s daughter, who is no blood relation to her, as the girl’s mother recovers from an accidental shooting. When Peter heads home, Willa stays behind, first on the excuse of a dinner with her inattentive son, and then on another excuse, and another.
As is so often the case with Tyler, Willa’s story should make no sense, and yet it does. And as so often with Tyler, it is full of wisdom about relationships, delivered in gorgeous language and with considerable charm.
“Valley of Genius” provides a look at “the most told, retold, and talked-about stories” in Silicon Valley, from the early days of the Homebrew Computer Club, through Apple, Netscape and “the dot bomb,” and on to Google and Facebook. After an introduction read by the author, Adam Fisher (who remembers adding a chip to an early computer to allow typing in lowercase letters as well as caps), Pete Larkin takes over the reading of group interviews with the hackers, geeks and geniuses who made Silicon Valley.
The book treads ground that previous Silicon Valley histories have covered well. Readers of Leslie Berlin’s “Troublemakers” and Walter Isaacson’s “The Innovators” will know the funny Atari stories, the Jobs and Woz woes, and the tales of Homebrew and Xerox PARC. The narrative style of those books might be easier for listeners less versed in the names of the Silicon Valley famous than the interview style of “Valley of Genius,” which comes with a 33page “Cast of Characters” PDF — and leaves one longing to hear the actual audio clips from the interviews, for the speakers’ words in their own voices.
But for listeners willing to go with the flow of not always knowing who each of the many speakers is, the rewards include Steve Jobs, after seeking enlightenment in India, showing up at Atari in a saffron robe, shaved head, barefoot and with a Ram Dass book in hand to ask for his job back; Jim Barksdale’s wife working on Netscape’s Marc Andreessen’s table manners; and Mark Zuckerberg, at early-days Facebook parties, toasting “Domination,” a chant taken up in tent-revival style, and literally tearing up a $1.2 billion offer from Yahoo (which was, by the time of the act, worth only $800 million due to Yahoo’s fall from grace). Sergey Brin talks about his first primitive search engine, “BackRub.” Scott Hassan describes creating a more sophisticated Google search with Brin over shockingly few weeks, coding from 2 to 6 in the morning to avoid getting yelled at by Hassan’s boss “because building a search engine was not considered research.” Google’s founders steal computers and crash the Stanford network, too, following the path of so many Silicon Valley successes, built from little more than creativity, know-how and guts.
If a listener has time for only one audiobook this month, though, it should be Pulitzer Prizewinning critic Michiko Kakutani’s “The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of
Trump.” Kakutani brings a deep understanding of literature, history and politics to her examination of the cultural forces undermining our democracy and threatening our world order in this blessedly concise, under-four-hour read, beautifully delivered by Tavia Gilbert in a crisp voice.
Kakutani identifies trends in traditional and social media, academia and politics that are destroying the American public’s faith in fact and science through nine sections on the fall of reason, culture wars, subjectivity, vanishing reality, the co-opting of language, tribalism, attention deficit, fake news and trolls. She examines each through an impressive knowledge of literature and history, and she does not hold back.
She begins the language section, for example, with a quote from John le Carré: “Without clear language, there is no standard of truth.” She turns to Orwell and James Carroll to identify and explain the disorientation provoked by “the stream of lies issued by the Trump White House.” Trump, she shows us, uses language as a tool to sow distrust and discord, as authoritarian regimes have done throughout history in order to “control not just how people communicate but also how they think.” She finds parallels in the language of the Nazis, who used idioms, phrasing and repetition as “‘tiny doses of arsenic’ to poison and subvert the German culture from within,” showing how alarmingly quickly autocrats “can weaponize language to suppress critical thinking, inflame bigotry, and hijack a democracy.”
Each short section is as detailed, as incisive and as disquieting.
Kakutani concludes, after quoting Washington, Jefferson and Madison, that “Without truth, democracy is hobbled. The founders recognized this, and those seeking democracy’s survival must recognize it today.” She leaves us with no doubt of the imminent risks we face, and the need to push past news exhaustion and outrage fatigue.
Meg Waite Clayton is the author of six novels, including “Beautiful Exiles,” published in June. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com