Maybe Hannah Elias is not the ideal subject for a school Black history report, but she was a remarkable Black woman who became a millionaire during America's Gilded Age. Hannah's story is told by Golden Voice narrator Robin Miles. After a horrific childhood, Hannah worked in brothels in Philadelphia and New York and then re-created herself as a grand courtesan who used not only her body but also her business acumen to become as wealthy as many of the high-society men around her. A lot happens in this work of historical fiction, including Hannah's notorious extortion trial. This audiobook is crammed with details, some extraneous, and there are countless characters, all expertly depicted by Miles. Her skill at creating accents and speech patterns is outstanding. Listeners will be intrigued.
Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
Duration: 15 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780063020030
Publisher: Harper 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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