Shooting Ghosts: A U.S. Marine, a Combat Photographer, and Their Journey Back from War

This audiobook employs the voices of two voice actors—Chamberlain and Lawrence—to stand in for the authors, who describe the hell they encountered in Afghanistan and their friendship that resulted. Brennan and O’Reilly, a retired Marine Corps sergeant and a photojournalist, respectively, were thrown together when O’Reilly was assigned to cover Brennan’s squad in a remote outpost in Afghanistan. For O’Reilly, the assignment is simply another job; for Brennan, it means another person to worry about. But when Brennan is injured by a bomb, it starts a chain of events that has a profound effect on both men’s lives. Actor Chamberlain presents Brennan’s narrative with a simple, straightforward delivery that allows the author’s words to carry the emotional weight of the prose. Actor Lawrence embellishes Brennan’s parts of the narrative with a tough-sounding Massachusetts accent that is more distracting than anything else. He also attempts different voices for various people in Brennan’s life. The vast differences between the narrators’ styles creates an imbalance that distracts from the content of the book. A Viking hardcover. (Aug.)