More Top Picks Best Building Block Sets
player ready...Dear Leader by Jang Jin-sung, read by Daniel York, Simon & Schuster, 11:43, $23.99
Jang Jin-sung’s “Dear Leader: Poet, Spy, Escapee — A Look Inside North Korea” provides a startling insider’s view of the globe’s most secretive and unpredictable nation. Propelling the story forward is Jang’s run for his life across North Korea’s northern border into China, where he hopes to find a way to asylum in South Korea.
Actor Daniel York narrates the audiobook, his first, with naturalness and sensitivity, creating a character as complex as Jang’s life demands, from his status as favored young poet through his desperate struggle to stay alive and find asylum in China. Alternately pursued by officials for phony murder charges and chased off by the ethnic Koreans he thought would help him, Jang spends 35 desperate days looking for a way into South Korea.
In his 20s, Jang gained recognition from Kim Jong Il as a young propagandizing poet and was accepted into the nation’s most privileged political cadre. Although up to 3 million North Koreans died of starvation between 1994 and 1998, Jang and other cadre members are showered with foreign goods. But Jang’s pride of place drains away as he learns the truth about the regime he serves. He sees a man executed for stealing a bag of rice, and a starving woman sell her daughter for 100 won, which she uses to buy the girl a loaf of bread. By the time he’s assigned to help manufacture North Korea’s official history, his disillusionment is complete.
But it’s not until a mistake puts his life in danger that he flees. He lives today in South Korea.
Don’t Try to Find Me by Holly Brown, read by Hillary Huber, Angela Goethals, James Fouhey; Harper Audio; 12:22; $24.99-$44.99
Pity the author whose book is compared to a previous blockbuster. Several promotional pieces have named “Don’t Try to Find Me” this year’s “Gone Girl,” and it’s not a kindness. The similarities between this book and Gillian Flynn’s 2012 thriller are in someone’s imagination, but sadly, not in author Holly Brown’s.
This story begins when Rachel Willits arrives home to find the words “Don’t try to find me,” scrawled on the kitchen whiteboard by her 14-year-old daughter, Marley. While the parents worry their daughter’s disappearance is foul play, readers suffer no such suspense as we travel cross-country by bus with Marley, who is off to start her new life with a man she met on Facebook. The man turns out to be older and weirder than she expected, but more troubled than evil — a nice bit of subtlety by the author, if not much comfort for Marley or her parents.
Hillary Huber’s narration of the mess that is Rachel is flavorful, with interesting notes coloring her anguish and irritation. Her voice takes some of the sting out of the character’s paranoid self-involvement. Sadly, the paranoia is too transparently mistaken to provide much suspense. Rachel seems determined to dismantle her marriage and make herself look guilty, both by her actions during her husband’s media and Internet campaign to bring back their daughter, and through her involvement with her daughter’s manipulative and equally self-involved therapist.
While Rachel is always with us, it is Marley, voiced a little too breathlessly by Angela Goethals, who is the strong center of this book, a believable 14-year-old desperately trying to find out if she’s worth noticing.
Factory Man by Beth Macy, read by Kristin Kalbli, Hachette, 13:51, $25.98
Cheap hardwood, abundant labor and mass manufacturing allowed the Bassett family in Virginia to steal the furniture industry from Grand Rapids, Mich., where companies were more concerned with craftsmanship than the Bassetts would ever be. By the late 20th century, furniture companies throughout the Blue Ridge, including Bassett Furniture, surrendered to a similar strategy, as cheaper goods flooded in from China. The influx put thousands out of work and closed factories throughout the region.
With “Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local — and Helped Save an American Town,” Beth Macy tells the richly detailed story of John Bassett III, who decided to do what no other American furniture executive considered: He fought the imports and saved his Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Co. in Galax, Va. JBIII, as everyone calls him, had already proved to be a determined man. Pushed out of leadership of the firm his grandfather said he would one day run, he left the family business and revived the desperate Galax plant.
Kristin Kalbli has narrated many books, including several nonfiction titles. Her clear voice and measured reading provide a smooth ride to carry this unique story.
Jenni Laidman is a frequent Printers Row Journal contributor.