Anesthesiologist Adrian Mandrick is addicted to bird-watching and prescription drugs. He feeds his drug addiction by cadging opioids from his hospital workplace. David Aaron Baker's intelligent narration makes Adrian's birding adventures, with their well-researched descriptions, completely absorbing. Adrian has the third-longest bird-watching "life list" in North America, and, after a rival's sudden death, the number two spot has opened. Adrian heads off to the Florida's swamps to search for the rare, possibly extinct, ivory-billed woodpecker. After Adrian's mother dies, troubling memories from his childhood bubble up, and Baker delivers his anguish with understated urgency. The story keeps us listening, and Baker builds each personality as fully as possible but is limited by author Chris White's thin character sketches. Baker's performance enhances an audiobook that never quite satisfies.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2018
Duration: 8 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781501977671
Publisher: Recorded Books Inc.
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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