The Ticking Is the Bomb
A Memoir
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Narrated by:
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Scott Brick
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By:
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Nick Flynn
About this listen
In 2007, during the months before Nick Flynn's daughter's birth, his growing outrage and obsession with torture, exacerbated by the Abu Ghraib photographs, led him to Istanbul to meet some of the Iraqi men depicted in the photos. Haunted by a history of addiction and a longing to connect with his mother who committed suicide, Flynn artfully interweaves in this memoir passages from his childhood, his relationships with women, and his growing obsession - a questioning of terror, torture, and the political crimes we can neither see nor understand in post 9/11 American life.
The time bomb of the title becomes an unlikely metaphor and vehicle for exploring the fears and joys of becoming a father. Here is a memoir of profound self-discovery, of being lost and found, of painful family memories and losses, of the need to run from love, and of the ability to embrace it again.
Nick Flynn is an award-winning poet and author most recently of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.
©2010 Nick Flynn (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Editorial reviews
Does Nick Flynn’s book, The Ticking Is the Bomb, really qualify as a memoir? Yes, if we accept Gore Vidal’s definition: “a memoir is how one remembers one's own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked.” So, yes, a memoir and, by turns, a dream, a hallucination, or the painting of one man’s internal landscape a la Salvador Dali.
This is not to infer that any of the facts recounted here by Flynn are hazy, in particular the facts surrounding the horrific prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in 2004 or the 2007 revelation that torture was sanctioned by the United States. The grisly details of these public stories are woven together with tales of domestic terror from Flynn’s personal history throughout the book: the violent suicide of his mother, the mental illness and subsequent homelessness of his father, alongside less grave memories of teaching jobs, past relationships, and the happy anticipation of the birth of his first child.
The surrealistic quality of the book is further established by Flynn’s disordered use of dates to pin the events of his life to some invisible calendar, by his fluid movement between what is most ugly and most beautiful in human behavior, and by the voice of narrator Scott Brick, whose benthic voice pulls you down, down, down into the warm water.
Brick invites us to sit on the couch as Nick paws through a box of unsorted photos, sliding each one onto our laps and intoning meaningfully, “1987, Boston”, or, “2008, Wrong Ocean”. You follow his voice into the room where Flynn, sick to his stomach, listens to an ex-detainee of Abu Ghraib painfully relive the details of his torture. You follow his voice to Vietnam, with Flynn’s stepfather Travis, a Vietnam Vet, and watch as Travis kisses the hand of a My Lai survivor and begs her forgiveness. Much later, you follow the sound of him singing softly in his daughter’s small bedroom, in their haphazardly renovated barn, reminding Lulu that “all you need is love”.
Which date, or place, or event will prove to be the most critical in shaping Flynn’s life? Is he destined for a tragedy similar to those he’s witnessed all his life, or a happy ending? We are compelled to keep listening for the answers. Lisa Duggan
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By: Hisham Matar
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Stories
- All-New Tales
- By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, Al Sarrantonio - editor, Joe Hill, and others
- Narrated by: Anne Bobby, Jonathan Davis, Katherine Kellgren, and others
- Length: 18 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: "And then what happened?" The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal.
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Something for Everyone
- By Nicole on 05-24-17
By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, and others
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Learning to Die in Miami
- Confessions of a Refugee Boy
- By: Carlos Eire
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Carlos Eire's story of a boyhood uprooted by the Cuban Revolution quickly lures us in, as eleven-year-old Carlos and his older brother Tony touch down in the sun-dappled Miami of 1962 - a place of daunting abundance where his old Cuban self must die to make way for a new, American self waiting to be born. In this enchanting new work, narrated in Eire's inimitable and lyrical voice, young Carlos adjusts to life in his new country.
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Excellent memoir of a forgotten time in history
- By BRB on 03-23-15
By: Carlos Eire
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The Red-Haired Woman
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee, Katharine Lee McEwan
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before - not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world.
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Drags On
- By T. Conrad on 10-25-17
By: Orhan Pamuk
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The Darling
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Mary Beth Hurt
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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The Darling is Hannah Musgrave's story, told emotionally and convincingly years later by Hannah herself. A political radical and member of the Weather Underground, Hannah has fled America to West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends and colleagues of Charles Taylor, the notorious warlord and now ex-president of Liberia. When Taylor leaves for the United States in an effort to escape embezzlement charges, he's immediately placed in prison.
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Complex and compelling
- By Ellen H. Anderson on 02-05-05
By: Russell Banks
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Abandon Me
- Memoirs
- By: Melissa Febos
- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In her critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos laid bare the intimate world of the professional dominatrix, turning an honest examination of her life into a lyrical study of power, desire, and fulfillment. In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection - with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery.
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This journey is captivating to say the least!
- By Ilanna on 08-11-17
By: Melissa Febos
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The Company You Keep
- By: Neil Gordon
- Narrated by: Donald Corren, Hillary Huber, Kirby Heyborne, and others
- Length: 15 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Set against the rise and fall of the radical antiwar group the Weather Underground, The Company You Keep is a sweeping American saga about sacrifice, the ecstatic righteousness of youth, and the tension between political ideals and family loyalties. When Jason Sinai, one of the last Vietnam-era fugitives still wanted on murder charges for a robbery gone wrong in 1974, encounters a young newspaper reporter in search of a story, he must abandon years of safe underground life for the dangerous life of the road.
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Audiobook of the Year
- By connie on 05-13-12
By: Neil Gordon
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A Girl's Guide to Missiles
- Growing Up in America's Secret Desert
- By: Karen Piper
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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The China Lake missile range is located in a huge stretch of the Mojave Desert, about the size of the state of Delaware. It was created during the Second World War, and has always been shrouded in secrecy. But people who make missiles and other weapons are regular working people, with domestic routines and everyday dilemmas, and four of them were Karen Piper's parents, her sister, and - when she needed summer jobs - herself.
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DNF on chapter 10 when Piper is 10
- By NMwritergal on 08-15-18
By: Karen Piper
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I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This
- A Memoir
- By: Nadja Spiegelman
- Narrated by: Nadja Spiegelman
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers - French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly - exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja's body changed and "began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand", their relationship grew tense.
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Aweful
- By Haley Abreu on 07-05-17
By: Nadja Spiegelman
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Nine Continents
- A Memoir In and Out of China
- By: Xiaolu Guo
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Xiaolu Guo has traveled further than most to become who she needed to be. Now, as she experiences the birth of her daughter in a London maternity ward surrounded by women from all over the world, she looks back on that journey. It begins in the fishing village shack on the East China Sea where her illiterate grandparents raised her, and brings her to a rapidly changing Beijing, full of contradictions: a thriving underground art scene amid mass censorship, curious Westerners who held out affection only to disappear back home.
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must read
- By Jeff Darlington on 10-22-17
By: Xiaolu Guo
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After the Eclipse
- A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search
- By: Sarah Perry
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 13 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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A fierce memoir of a mother's murder, a daughter's coming-of-age in the wake of immense loss, and her ultimate mission to know the woman who gave her life.
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True crime memoir
- By Julie on 11-03-17
By: Sarah Perry
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Fire in the Belly
- The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz
- By: Cynthia Carr
- Narrated by: Cynthia Barrett
- Length: 25 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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David Wojnarowicz was an abused child, a teen runaway who barely finished high school, but he emerged as one of the most important voices of his generation. His circle of East Village artists moved into the national spotlight just as the AIDS plague began its devastating advance, and as right-wing culture warriors reared their heads. Fire in the Belly is the untold story of a polarizing figure at a pivotal moment in American culture - and one of the most highly acclaimed biographies of the year.
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Why did they let this person read?
- By Wendell Ricketts on 12-11-18
By: Cynthia Carr
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Maya's Notebook
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Maria Cabezas
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Neglected by her parents, 19-year-old Maya Nidal has grown up in Berkeley with her grandparents. Her grandmother Nini is a force of nature, a woman whose formidable strength helped her build a new life after emigrating from Chile in 1973. Popo, Maya's grandfather, is a gentle man whose solid, comforting presence helps calm the turbulence of Maya's adolescence. When Popo dies of cancer, Maya goes completely off the rails, turning to drugs, alcohol, and petty crime in a downward spiral that eventually bottoms out in Las Vegas.
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Narrator ruins this book
- By R.J. Mulder on 05-13-14
By: Isabel Allende
What listeners say about The Ticking Is the Bomb
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Angie Peacock
- 12-12-14
Excellent book, Audiobook not so much
I read this book twice and LOVED IT! I got the audio version so I could listen while traveling (because that's how much I love it). But... the narrator ruins the story, the flow, the energy of the book. It's just over dramatic and not smooth compared to the way it is read from the book itself. I have to say my audiobook collection is quite large now, and I've noticed that when the author doesn't read it themselves, it kind of takes away from the original writing. Like the author's voice is ESSENTIAL to really enjoying the audio version. (Just my humble opinion and it's not personal to Nick Flynn's narrator)
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- Mark E. White
- 04-28-15
Memoir of a selfish man
This is a book about gilt and blame. Most of the time the author blames his behavior on his parents, the torturers at Abu Greib, etc. from his higher moral position as a disciple of Buddism.
He takes no responsibility for his promiscuity, though he metes out a little blame for himself as he nurtures his parents.
The answer for his life is that it is his nature.
The lesson I took from the book is this is what happens when you don't take responsibility for your own actions. Just like the torturers he so berates, he ignores the gratuitous pain he causes others. Don't be like this.
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- John
- 06-28-16
Hawgjohn
It's hard to gauge the merits of this book in audio format. Scott Brick's singsong and melodramatic reading of the text is so over-the-top that I found myself shouting at him to chill out. I soldiered on (pun entirely inadvertent). The connection between the author's dysfunctional life prior to entering twelve-step recovery and the phenomena of torture and brutality in war was tenuous at best. He attempts to sew these themes together at the conclusion -- in my view with very little success.
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