In the late 1930s, Ernst Vogler is working for Hitler's art-collecting department. His assignment is to go to Rome, pick up the marble statue THE DISCUS THROWER, and transport it across the border to German-held lands. All has been arranged, including Ernst's escort of two Italian policemen, who happen to be identical twins. Owing to language barriers and the brothers' personal agendas, the trip is anything but short and simple. Dan Butler narrates with reserved emotion. He limits his use of accents to the dialogue, cuing listeners in to the characters' nationalities. Butler's narrative choices complement listeners' own responses rather than guide them, allowing for a more personal audio experience. Vogler’s story is one of awakening—to self-acceptance, love, and the evil of the Third Reich.
Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2012
Duration: 8 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780792784210
Publisher: AudioGo
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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