Audio Books - Scrambling the data sets

A new kind of nonfiction is becoming increasingly popular. Look at Malcolm Gladwell atop the best-seller lists with The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers (all available on Hachette Audio, with a boxed set coming in May). The formula is to take previously unorganized data, look at it with fresh eyes, and come up with astounding coincidences and salient facts that demonstrate that we were all too stupid to see them in the first place.

Welcome to Nurtureshock by two Newsweek magazine journalists, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman (Hachette Audio, $34.98). They have a field ripe for re-analysis: the burgeoning world of child-development with all its theories, experiments, hustles and merchandising.

Their conclusions? High self-esteem doesn't help students improve their grades. Teaching tolerance and promoting diversity also don't seem to work. Or they play out in unintended and sometimes disastrous ways, in which more diversity turns into more division. Dropout programs aren't effective, and neither is DARE, the most prevalent and long-standing school anti-drug program in the country. Baby Einstein is a waste of time and money. Most important, Bronson and Merryman have multiple studies to back up their detailed assertions.

It's all thought-provoking and intriguing, but ultimately I felt I was being lectured to, once again, about how I had done everything wrong in raising my own family. After eight hours of listening to the hectoring tone of co-author Bronson's narration, reciting new facts that will be disproved (maybe by Malcolm Gladwell?) in some future revelatory tome, I was ready to do penance.

The traditional still works for some people, one of them being Richard Matheson, who has won just about every award for which he's eligible: the Hugo, the Edgar, the Spur and the Writers Guild of America for his film and TV work. Matheson has been a little movie studio of inspiration in his own right: I Am Legend and What Dreams May Come, among other titles, derive from his work.

Sure enough, Matheson's latest collection, headlined The Box, also made it to the silver screen in a movie version that starred Cameron Diaz. This short but effective title story needed considerable stretching to fit feature-film length, but Matheson provided a great twist. A couple is given the chance to earn $50,000 by pushing a freestanding, giant red button. Somewhere in the world someone will die, but it will be no one they know, guaranteed. Or will it?

Grover Gardner, an audio-voice stalwart, does a fine job of posing this and other Mathesonian moral dilemmas, which constitute the bulk of these four CDs. The stories are rarely distinctive in style or story, but the writing is very workmanlike, American middle-class in its subjects and scope. The occasional tale such as "Words," which has a first-person perspective of a child raised not with language but with telepathic thought, is as haunting as Matheson's ethical red button.

After Matheson's high-concept plot twists, it was a simple pleasure to hear a well-written and well-delivered audio book. Anita Shreve is a finely tuned writer, and her newest novel A Change in Altitude (Hachette Audio, $34.98) slowly moves you, the listener, through the repercussions of small decisions made by a couple living in 1970s Kenya.

Margaret, an American photojournalist, and Patrick, a British doctor, have been married only a couple of months when they decide to live in Africa for a year. Margaret and Patrick are constantly being pulled between the luxurious expat British society and the African servant and shantytown existence they inhabit.

They experience a series of robberies, apparently an accepted part of the Nairobi culture-clash. A decision, agreed to but not initiated by them, to climb Mount Kenya proves devastating as they deal with the aftermath of a death on the mountain.

Ann Stone, the reader, chronicles the deconstruction of a marriage, flowing among American, Brit, African and even Pakistani accents with pleasant ease. By they end, it is humbling to listen to the endless minutiae of all lives -- British, American and African -- juxtaposed against the powerful symbol of Mount Kenya: huge, unforgiving, dangerous and eternally unconcerned about the small humans trying to conquer it.

Dale Pollock, a former dean at the School of Filmmaking at the N.C. School of the Arts, now teaches film there.