This is history for the modern listener, clear, efficient, and reliable.
There’s something calming about listening to ancient history, as this well-researched audiobook amply demonstrates. Mark Elstob’s polished, quietly nuanced narration maintains distance and balance while giving full weight to the narrative’s many fine details. Elstob has narrated two of Goldsworthy’s previous audiobooks, companion histories of the long competition between Rome and Persia. He perfectly matches this prolific popular historian’s lucid and impartial narrative style and his knack for balancing a panoramic view with a close recreation of place and action. The long, contentious rivalry between Athens and Sparta turned victory over Persia into division and civil strife.
This is history for the modern listener, clear, efficient, and reliable.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
Duration: 20 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781549135439
Publisher: Hachette Audio
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
Carol Matthau epitomizes a glamour and lifestyle not associated with the 1990's. Here is a life of privilege, tragedy and worry about what friends would think of her new frock or lover. Matthau possesses a voice and delivery that simply could not be improved on. In her coy whisper, she tells compelling stories involving everyone from William Saroyan (husband #1) and Truman Capote to Carson McCullers, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Walter Matthau (husband #2). This excellent audio presentation will leave you wanting to read the entire book to discover what juicy tidbits were left out.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: 3 hrs
Publisher: The Publishing Mills
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
A fascinating, well-conceived history.
In a series of highly focused but expansive chapters, author Willetts shows how a society reveals itself through its night life. That focus proves especially dramatic in revealing the anxieties underlying the surface gaiety of Paris' belle epoque and Berlin's Weimar Republic. Earlier examples, such as Japan’s floating world and Georgian London’s pleasure gardens, seem more elegant and more genuinely pleasurable as compared to Willetts’ studies of more recent cases, such as Warhol’s Factory and Studio 54 in New York. Narrator Emily Pennant-Rea has a British accent and a tendency to crowd her words. But the narrative is absorbing enough to reward close listening.
A fascinating, well-conceived history.Pub Date: July 14, 2026
Duration: 12 hrs, 38 mins
DD ISBN: 9781668192160
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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