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The unknown terrorist [sound recording (audio book)] / Richard Flanagan ; read by Humphrey Bower.

By: Contributor(s): Material type: SoundSoundPublisher number: BAB 070862Publication details: [Melbourne] : Bolinda Audio Books, p2007.Description: 8 compact discs (approximately 9 hrs., 50 mins.) : digital ; 4 3/4 inContent type:
  • spoken word
Media type:
  • audio
Carrier type:
  • audio disc
ISBN:
  • 9781740939980
Subject(s): Genre/Form: Read by Humphrey Bower.
Audiovisual profile: Click to open in new window Fiction notes: Click to open in new window
Holdings
Item type Current library Collection Call number Copy number Status Notes Date due Barcode Item holds
Talking Books Davis (Central) Library Stack Room Stack Room FLA 1 Reference Only Temporarily unavailable for check out T00600133
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In Australia, pole dancer Gina Davies has a nightcap with a handsome stranger. Unbeknownst to her, the man is actually wanted by police for his connection with a terrorist plot. Mistaken as his accomplice, Gina is on the run and must clear her name. However, the government is in the midst of a large cover-up and plans on using Gina as its scapegoat.

Complete & unabridged.

Read by Humphrey Bower.

11 74 96

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Sydney, Australia, post-9/11, may lack Mad Max's cutthroat gasoline pirates but is no less paranoid and dark. Gina Davies, a.k.a. the Doll, already leads a life in the margins. A pole dancer at the Chairman's Lounge, she's learned to embrace life's disappointments, socking away hundred-dollar bills in a hole in her bedroom ceiling while allowing herself one dream: to buy her own home one day. A chance meeting with a handsome surfer leads to a night of drug-infused sex. When the Doll wakes up, her tenuous shot at a "normal" life has disappeared, along with her lover-whose face can be seen all over the news, a su)spected al Qaeda terrorist. The Doll is wanted for questioning, and soon the relentless media and government propaganda machine is spinning lies about every aspect of her existence, sending her up as Australia's first domestic terrorist. Flanagan's (Gould's Book of Fish) dystopic tale is raw, timely, cynical, and bleak. Recommended for mature audiences, especially for those unwilling to buy into the mass hysteria of the war on terror. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/07.]-Christine Perkins, Burlington P.L., WA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

A life quickly flames out in Flanagan's firebrand follow-up to 2002's acclaimed Gould's Book of Fish. Gina Davies, a 26-year-old nightclub pole dancer (referred to throughout as "the Doll"), leads a provincial life in Sydney, Australia, spends $2,000 a month on clothes and is given to the occasional racist rant. But after a one-night stand with a man named Tariq, she turns on the TV and learns she's been pegged as the accomplice in an attempted terrorist attack on Sydney's Olympic stadium. She's instantly the most-wanted woman in Australia and the source of a raging tabloid media feeding frenzy led by sleazy TV journalist Richard Cody. The fast-paced narrative builds to a fittingly bloody crescendo, and Flanagan drops astutely cynical observations along the way (the Doll, for instance, "realized that her life was no longer what she made of it, but what others said it was"). A true page-turner as well as a timely, pithy critique of celebrity culture and the politics of fearmongering. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Gina Davies, or the Doll, is a pole-dancer in Sydney who meets a guy, sleeps with said guy, finds out the guy might be a terrorist, and then finds out that apparently she is also a terrorist. Merely being photographed with a man whose name is Tariq and who has dubious ties to a radical Islamic cleric serves to implicate the Doll in the court of public opinion, where outrage that a homegrown Australian woman could become such a nefarious killer sends the country into a tailspin of hysteria. Never mind that no one, most of all the counterterrorism officials hunting after the Doll, seems to want to know that, really, she is just a stripper. Although the lesson may be poignant, the story never quite becomes as thrilling as it intends, and Flanagan's opaque interiors and repetitive digressions fail to mask an awfully thin plot. What remains is a timely work of almost pathological anger directed at the stupidity and vileness of society driven to hysteria by a fearmongering media whose fanaticism is neck-and-neck with religious fundamentalism itself. --Ian Chipman Copyright 2007 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

Australian novelist Flanagan's creepy, heavy-handed suspense tale develops around a Sydney stripper caught tragically in a media-frenzied terrorist hysteria. At the Chairman's Lounge, an upscale gentlemen's club in Sydney, works a 26-year-old pole-dancer known as Krystal, or more often, the Doll, though her real name is Gina Davies--a dark-skinned loner who ran away from western Australia when she was 17 and has saved nearly $50,000 from her years dancing to escape to a new life. However, a series of unfortunate events shatters that dream when she spends the night with a fabulously rich, handsome, young foreign stranger, Tariq al-Hakim, a computer programmer and cocaine smuggler, with whom she is photographed entering his apartment house. At the time, the police are looking for a suspected terrorist in the recent bombing at Homebush Olympic Stadium, and Tariq, apparently, is their man, along with his suspected lady accomplice, the Doll, whose photograph is plastered all over the news. Enter the recently demoted second-rate TV newscaster Richard Cody, who frequents the strip club and recognizes the Doll--and a way to bolster his sagging on-air ratings. He begins shamelessly to pump the story in the news so that a veritable manhunt ensues for the stripper, who out of fear and a drug-induced muddle-headedness (cocaine, Zoloft, Stemetil) rejects the idea of turning herself in, and, with the help of her friend, fellow stripper and single mom Wilder, dyes her hair blond and goes into hiding. Nothing will stop Cody, however, especially when Tariq is found dead near the Doll's apartment; and the poor stripper's fate as the Unknown Terrorist is sealed. Flanagan (Gould's Book of Fish, 2001) narrates the story from a position of godlike omniscience, making grim pronouncements on society's rampant discrimination and fear of foreigners. His tender characterization renders Gina Davies's tale mightily plausible, and terribly sad. A writer who knows his characters and setting creates a compelling, timely work. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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