Narrator Bronson Pinchot brings a healthy dose of bravado and vulnerability to Alex Gilvarry's disarming new novel. The book is a study of the kind of bushy cold war masculinity that dominates America's past and is notably less venerated in contemporary times. Pinchot is careful to treat the protagonist/narrator with enough humor and puerility to balance Eastman's veneer of trumpeting masculinity and quiet underbelly of corrosive self-doubt. The female characters, who are pivotal in the novel, are portrayed in disappointingly similar tones at times, but then again, in a narrative that is knowingly wound around its misogynistic antihero, this proves a complementary approach. Crucially, Pinchot never overstates his characterization, leaving it to the listener to cast judgment on the complex figure of Eastman.
Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
Duration: 10 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781524778941
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
American colleges are favorable locales for ghastly event and hair-tearing circumstance. There is, for instance, a good deal of pleasure to be had out of professor and past-prodigy Grady Tripp's awful life, as portrayed by Michael Chabon in WONDER BOYS. There is a certain amount of slapstick here, but it's balanced by Chabon's superb portrait of a gale-force mid-life crisis, a soul-destroying albatross of an unfinished novel and the mind-numbing inconsequence of writers' conferences. David Colacci sounds a little starved for oxygen in his reading, but that's not exactly out of keeping with Grady Tripp's personal gestalt.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: N/A
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
Class lurks in varying degrees behind every great English comedy, its ineffable code being so endlessly conducive to ironic subtlety. QUEEN LUCIA, the first of the great Lucia novels of E.F. Benson, is imbued with it. Nonetheless, social striving rather than class per se gives the novel its real comic force. At its center is Lucia, the regnant, self-appointed social and cultural leader of a genteel, middle-class circle. She’s a schemer and poser of awesome theatricality and self-delusion. Although the narrative is conducted in the third person, the characters’ doings, most especially Lucia’s, are as often as not reported in the light in which the perpetrators hope to be viewed. Still, the true facts and motivations, usually base, shine luminously through. Geraldine McEwen’s reading truly enhances the work, being a model of cultivated discretion and ironic pacing.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: 9 hrs
Publisher: ISIS Audio Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
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