The Ticking Is the Bomb

A Memoir

By: Nick Flynn

Narrated by: Scott Brick

Length: 5 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

Critic reviews

"Flynn's life is so volcanic and his writing style so kinetic and punchy that others will be drawn into this gripping personal narrative." (Publishers Weekly)

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)

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.

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.