Tree of Smoke
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Will Patton
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By:
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Denis Johnson
About this listen
Once upon a time there was a war . . . and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That's me.
This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature.
Tree of Smoke is Denis Johnson's first full-length novel in nine years, and his most gripping, beautiful, and powerful work to date.
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Critic reviews
- Audie Award Winner, Literary Fiction, 2008
“Patton is outstanding...[his] performance is quiet, powerful, and gut-wrenching....This is MUST listening.” —AudioFile Magazine
“This is the very talented Will Paton's greatest performance as a reader so far. His range of voices and evocation of character--the hopeful, the innocent, the cynical, the despairing and the mad--bring the tale to even more terrible and blistered life than the book itself, making it a 23-hour excursion into mesmerizing darkness.” —The Washington Post
“Will Patton's reading of \"Tree of Smoke\" is superb...The experience overall is one of hallucinatory horror, laugh-out-loud outrage, of sadness at the tremendous waste of lives, money and the national pride that went into Vietnam and did not return.” —Sarasota Herald-Tribune
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- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Wolff here returns with fresh revelations - about biding one's time, or experiencing first love, or burying one's mother - that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary. A retired Marine enrolls in college while her son trains for Iraq. A lawyer takes a difficult deposition. An American in Rome indulges the Gypsy who's picked his pocket.
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Great
- By chris on 04-11-08
By: Tobias Wolff
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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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The Confessions of Al Capone
- By: Loren D. Estleman
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 19 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1944 Al Capone, the most notorious Mob boss in history, has already been released from prison. Though Capone is no longer the enormously powerful force who dominated Chicago’s underworld for years, he is still a thorn in the side of J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI chief knows that if he can somehow manage to get Capone to reveal details of crimes he and his Outfit committed, the Bureau has a good chance of nailing key members who now are active in the wartime black market.
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Interesting story
- By Michael on 02-07-17
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Continental Drift
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Zach Villa
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Now available for the first time in audiobook format, a powerful literary classic from one of contemporary fiction's most acclaimed and important writers. Russell Banks' Continental Drift is a masterful novel of hope lost and gained and a gripping, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and the seductions and realities of the American dream.
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Give up and die
- By AI on 12-09-21
By: Russell Banks
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Hawke: Three Black Ops
- Alex Hawke Series
- By: Ted Bell
- Narrated by: John Shea
- Length: 6 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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This set includes Crash Dive, What Comes Around, and White Death, three Alex Hawke novellas never available before on audio. In Crash Dive, Alex Hawke is on a highly covert mission to enter another nation’s airspace undetected and find a way to avert a global war. In What Comes Around, two CIA officers are found dead. Hawke discovers that the victims are connected through one man: Spider Payne, a rogue intelligence officer. In White Death, M16 suspects a bizarre conspiracy when two bankers are found dead, and vast sums are plundered from the Queen of England’s accounts.
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Scam
- By Anonymous User on 10-10-18
By: Ted Bell
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Koko
- Blue Rose Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Peter Straub
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 22 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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KOKO. Only four men knew what it meant. Now they must stop it. They are Vietnam vets — a doctor, a lawyer, a working stiff, and a writer. Very different from each other, they are nonetheless linked by a shared history and a single shattering secret. Now, they have been reunited and are about to embark on a quest that will take them from Washington, D.C., to the graveyards and fleshpots of the Far East to the human jungle of New York.
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7 hours in and I am done
- By bionichands on 01-26-12
By: Peter Straub
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The Last King of Scotland
- By: Giles Foden
- Narrated by: Mirron E. Willis
- Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Shortly after his arrival in Uganda, Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan is called to the scene of a bizarre accident: Idi Amin, careening down a dirt road in his Maserati, has hit a cow. When Garrigan tends to Amin, the dictator, obsessed with all things Scottish, appoints him as his personal physician. So begins a fateful dalliance with the African leader whose Emperor Jones-style autocracy would transform into a reign of terror.
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Worst Production Ever
- By James on 01-24-07
By: Giles Foden
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Oil on Water
- By: Helon Habila
- Narrated by: Richard Allen
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the oil-rich and environmentally devastated Nigerian Delta, a British oil executive's wife has been kidnapped. Two journalists - a young upstart, Rufus, and a once-great, now disillusioned veteran, Zaq - are sent to find her. In a story rich with atmosphere and taut with suspense, Oil on Water explores the conflict between idealism and cynical disillusionment in a journey full of danger and unintended consequences.
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Entertaining and Timely
- By Lynn on 07-16-11
By: Helon Habila
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The Yiddish Policemen's Union
- A Novel
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrated by: Peter Riegert
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
For 60 years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the federal district of Sitka, a temporary safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the district is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.
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Didn't finish...
- By Ann E O'Connor on 10-16-17
By: Michael Chabon
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Utterly beautiful!
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As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica: an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal "office kit" and a plaque that reads "Still Anal After All These Years".
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Bolaño Poetic Gyre
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10:04
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In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water.
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When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.
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Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
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Ann Patchett’s award winning, New York Times best-selling Bel Canto balances themes of love and crisis as disparate characters learn that music is their only common language. As in Pratchett’s other novels, including Truth & Beauty and The Magician’s Assistant, the author’s lyrical prose and lucid imagination make Bel Canto a captivating story of strength and frailty, love and imprisonment, and an inspiring tale of transcendent romance.
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All Aunt Hagar's Children
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Returning to the city that inspired his first prize-winning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens.
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I JUST DON'T KNOW ABOUT THIS!
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On Beauty
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Overall
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Story
This wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.
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Somewhat Disappointed
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What listeners say about Tree of Smoke
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Cliff
- 05-02-08
Better read than heard
My rating reflects the audiobook, not the book itself. I think that Tree of Smoke might be a very good book to read, but it is a difficult book to listen to. It's not the narrator's fault: he does a superb job of capturing the mood and aiding in characterization.
I'm a big reader, and I like marking in important books. I like underlining important, repeated phrases and flipping back to earlier passages when I sense the author making allusions. I kept wanting to do this with Tree of Smoke, but I couldn't! Specifically, I remember a significant folk tale that is related early in the book that may be a key to understanding the whole, but it occurred so early in this rather long book that I couldn't remember the details of the tale by the end of the book. I needed to be able to flip back and read the folk tale again!
Here's the upshot of my too long review: I would recommend that someone read this book, but I do not recommend the audiobook.
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11 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Aaron
- 04-18-10
Well crafted; perfectly realized
Big and challenging and expertly narrated. One of the better books I've downloaded.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Suman Amarnath
- 12-10-12
Disneyland on Acid
This is not an easy book to listen. And perhaps, read. It is long and fragmented and Johnson is not trying (at all) to make it easy. Then what is he trying to do here? Vietnam - really? - after Kubrick, Coppola and Greene - is there another new word left to say? Apparently yes. In his prose Johnson manages not only to show us Vietnam but he manages to put you inside Vietnam, in a war that was never completely war but managed to suck everyone associated with it inside out. This book should not be classified prose, cause really is poetry - page after page, line after line of words you'd want to hang around - even if they make you cringe. That takes talent. I suggest you listen to this book in increments of 0.5 hours at one go and by the end of it you'd want to turn back to line 1. Like I did.
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- Susan
- 02-01-13
Harrowing yet a story that needs to be heard
I have a personal interest in the history of WW1 & WW11 and devour literature that paints a picture of the events that shaped these episodes of human history. I downloaded Tree of Smoke mostly because I liked the title, but also because of the reviews I'd read.
I was not prepared. This book left me ashamed that I have neglected to acquire an adequate picture of the events in Vietnam, the evolution of the capacity of humans to remain standing in a world that rarely makes a distinction between what is right and wrong, regardless of politics.
I will be listening to this book again, I feel I must.
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- boredinSD
- 07-03-24
Writing is ok. Story goes nowhere.
This isn’t a Vietnam war story. It’s kind of a love story. There’s very little excitement. All in all it’s ok. If you want a love story or sad story but not a war story or spy thriller.
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Overall
- Michael
- 02-16-08
In-depth, intense
I really liked this novel and I thought the narrator did a good job, too.
I'll admit it, it's not an easy novel to swallow. The plot lines roam about and the over-arching logic is elusive. It's not a typically structured novel. It's more like if Thomas Pynchon or Don Delillo wrote a novel about Psy-Ops in Vietnam. Denis Johnson has his own distinctive voice, but the winding and sometimes paranoid logic reminds me of those authors. The novel explores some very dark themes concerning war and truth and spirituality. And it doesn't pull any punches when it comes to action or language.
The narrator skillfully navigated the difficult text and provided unique voice to the characters in a way that, quite honestly, didn't annoy me at all. Just so you know though, the narrator tries to sort of play different characters.
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10 people found this helpful
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Overall
- gbreite
- 04-13-08
Still disturbing after all this time
Missed the original and want to experience the Viet Nam war? Denis Johnson does a remarkable job of recreating this psychotic episode in American history. If you're looking for understanding, you might not find it here -- though the forest spirit hypothesis works for me. If you're looking for closure, I'd look elsewhere.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Peter
- 06-22-17
Simply amazing
One of the best books i've heard or read stupendous the writing is amazing lyrical an nuanced. Captures a time and place like nothing else I've read or seen
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- Bulk
- 07-30-18
Expert narration
This lengthy book is worth the time, as Patton takes us on a wild ride over 10 years, from the Philippines to Vietnam
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- Brenna L Sater
- 03-08-24
great narration
The narrator was great. The story was even better. Gritty and unapologetic the narrative captures the senselessness and futility of fighting a war against an idea. The chaotic and everchanging nature of the conflict leave those caught in its grip finding enemies everywhere, even on their own side.
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