Audiobooks: Thomas Friedman live and on CD
Foreign affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times, who has a enormous following in Baltimore, understands globalization and the interdependence of nations probably better than anyone out there.
He demonstrated that in The World is Flat, in which he described how 9/11, Katrina and the Internet have combined to bring climate and energy issues to Main Street America.
He continues this discussion in his new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded, his new book, in which he argues that America needs to go green in order to survive, prosper and remain secure.
It is complex argument, but Friedman delivers it in a conversational manner (through the congenial voice of Oliver Wyman, who also read The World is Flat.)
Friedman will deliver these thoughts in person this week at Goucher College, where he will appear as the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Visiting Professor speaking in Goucher College’s Kraushaar Auditorium on Friday, October 3, at 8 p.m.
Trouble is, demand was so great, tickets are sold out! So it is back to the CD player in the dashboard, people!
A couple of posts ago, I talked about what a refreshing pleasure it was to take a break from some pretty heavy-duty "listening" and visit Agatha Christie's Miss Marple in her cozy but murderous village of St. Mary Mead. 
The Intellectual Devotional - a daily dose of knowledge modeled after religious and inspirational readings - debuted in 2006 and was an instant best-seller. David Kidder, who is an entrepreneur and marketing genius and not a professor, and Noah Oppenheim, a Today show producer no less, followed its success with The Intellectual Devotional: American History. We are now anxiously awaiting the fall release of The Intellectual Devotional: Modern Culture.
Will kids develop an interest in reading by listening to books? 
Those who have read David Sedaris' bizarre essays in The New Yorker and who have also heard him read on NPR's "This American Life" will understand why the recording of Sedaris reading his latest collection, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, is such a hoot.
If you want to wean your college-aged daughter off of her iPod, this might be the summer to do it. 
The New York Times carried an obituary last week for the cassette tape, a staple for audiobook fans since the late 1970s and the introduction of the Sony Walkman. 
Sometimes you just need pictures to go with the words.
Perhaps the biggest distraction when listening to a recorded book is the over-eager efforts of a reader to give characters different voices. I am thinking of Anna Fields' attempts to give Emily's father a Southern baritone when reading Anne Rivers Siddons' Sweetwater Creek. She sounded absolutely silly. 
Susan Reimer's away, so I'm subbing on the topic of audiobooks -- sort of. I confess that I've only listened to one: Cuba Libre by Elmore Leonard. And though it did make the utterly boring drive between Baltimore and Pittsburgh go faster, I found it hard to follow the thriller's action and plot. Since then, I've stuck to paper. 
Rick Bragg's final book in the trilogy of his family life that began with All Over But the Shoutin' demonstrates perfectly the quandry faced by those of us who love audiobooks.
Each of the three novellas in The Third Angel could stand alone, but the prolific Alice Hoffman, in this her 20th book, has deftly woven together the lives of three women in a family saga across three decades and against the backdrop of a haunted London hotel.
If you are one of the estimated 6 million people who have watched the Web video of Carnegie-Mellon professor Randy Pausch's "last lecture," you know how compelling it was. Pausch, who grew up in Columbia and graduated from Oakland Mills High School in Howard County, is dying of pancreatic cancer, and he prepared this lecture - a kind of academic tradition - as a message to his three very young children about how to live their lives.
Jennifer Weiner is back with a book about a teenage daughter's reaction to a scandalous book her mother wrote years earlier, which happens to be very much like the book Weiner wrote in 2001, called Good in Bed. Certain Girls is told in the voices of Candace Shapiro, the heroine of Good in Bed, and her daughter, Joy, a 13-year-old on the cusp of young adulthood. 
As if your summer reading list was not long enough, here are some audio book award-winners and others that caught the attention of the editors at People magazine. The winners of the 2008 Audie Awards, honoring spoken word entertainment and presented by the Audio Publishers Association, are:
Barbara Walters blazed a trail for women in news and in television, but it is her voice that is her signature. So it makes sense that she would be the reader on the audio version of her new book, Audition.
I can't recommend that you take a cassette player to the beach so you can listen to a title from your summer reading list. 
I once confessed in my column for The Sun that if I didn’t listen to books, I wouldn’t read at all. 
While she always preferred The Hardy Boys to Nancy Drew, 