Phil's Staff Picks

Tad Friend's family is nothing if not illustrious: his father was president of SwarthmoreCollege, and at Smith his mother came in second in a poetry contest judged by W.H. Auden--to Sylvia Plath. For centuries, Wasps like his ancestors dominated American life. But then, in the '60s, their fortunes began to fall. As a young man, Tad noticed that his family tree, for all its glories, was full of alcoholics, depressives, and reckless eccentrics. Yet his identity had already been shaped by the family's age-old traditions and expectations. Part memoir, part family history, and part cultural study of the long swoon of the American Wasp, Cheerful Money is a captivating examination of a cultural crack-up and a man trying to escape its wreckage.

Novelist Chabon, with distinctive vision and an elegiac, graceful style, spins a story about alienated youth that, while serving up some familiar details of sex, alcohol and drugs, fully engages the reader in the lives of an appealing cast of characters.

The original blueprint for realpolitik, The Prince shocked
sixteenth-century Europe with its advocacy of ruthless tactics for
gaining absolute power and its abandonment of conventional morality. For
this treatise on statecraft, Machiavelli drew upon his own experience
of office under the turbulent Florentine republic, rejecting traditional
values of political theory and recognizing the complicated, transient
nature of political life. Concerned not with lofty ideals, but with a
regime that would last, this seminal work of modern political thought
retains its power to alarm and to instruct.

It would be difficult to imagine richer material for an audiobook reader, comedically speaking, than Joseph Heller's classic novel of wartime madness. Sanders is the lucky actor chosen to read Heller's masterpiece, and he does well by it, proceeding gamely through the novel's staggering array of comic set pieces and deliriously woozy dialogue. Heller's humor is straight-faced, requiring little more than a steady, sure voice, and Sanders offers just that. Line by line, joke by joke, Sanders reels through the marvelous phantasmagoria of Heller's World War II, tongue planted firmly in cheek. Caedmon's impressive package includes a 1970s-era recording of Heller reading selections from his book. Heller is a delightful contrast to Sanders, his slight lisp accentuating a marvelous Brooklyn accent. Heller reads as if with cigar perched on his lip and turns his novel into an extended borscht belt comic's riff.