Listeners may be tempted to bypass this magnificent audiobook with its unfamiliar character names and sprinkling of Yiddish words. That would be a mistake. This story is universal in its community feeling, challenging parent-child relations, marital troubles, and eternal struggle between tradition and modernity. At a basic level, the story is about a Polish village in the early 1930s, where a rabbi is disheartened by the paths chosen by his 5 children. But it's really the story of a Jewish community--its many flawed and generous characters, all portrayed with precision, nuance, and vitality by Rob Shapiro. His tour-de-force narration will have listeners convinced they're witnessing an actual place and time--a vibrant way of life that was tragically obliterated only a few years later.
Pub Date: March 25, 2025
Duration: 28 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9798217018611
Publisher: Random House 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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