Remembering

Andy Catlett's right hand has been cut off by a corn-picking machine. "Detached" might be a better description since the accident sends Andy into a state of general detachment and malaise. He travels to San Francisco to speak at a meeting of agricultural experts and as he roams the city streets at night, his missing hand becomes a portal into all things missing--love, descendants, and even the family farms that are being replaced by agribusiness. (The book is set in 1976.) There's a spirituality hovering over the proceedings and, like Andy's missing hand, it permeates everything without making itself seen. The audiobook's power has a lot to do with Michael Kramer's narration. Kramer reads as if he were painting, applying sentences like minimalist brush strokes. The result is a meditative, hypnotizing audiobook. R.W.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

August 29, 1990
In the course of a single day in 1976, the span of this elegiac novel, while in San Francisco attending a conference on agricultural technology, an emotionally troubled journalist wanders through pre-dawn streets reflecting on the early days of his marriage, on his parents and their love of the land. ``Berry writes with grace and eloquence of the beauty in handed-down lives,'' declared PW.