PARTLY CLOUDY PATRIOT

This is one of those rare tapes you want to talk back to. Public radio commentator and bestselling author Sarah Vowell has a disarmingly intelligent and conversational way of reading her penetrating, humorous, and wide-ranging commentaries. She jumps from the topics of Thanksgiving with her parents to Carlsbad Cavern to the Salem witch trials with an intimacy and ease learned from delivering her work over the airwaves. Vowell is irreverently reverent about the one subject she often returns to--what it means to be an American. Here she doesn't aim for easy laughs. She's much more interested in uneasy truths. Conan O'Brien and Norman Lear, among others, make cameo appearances. Not only fun and entertaining, but thought-provoking, as well. B.P.
(c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine [Published: FEB/ MAR 04]