Three narrators take listeners on a journey through the lives of nine men, whose ages range from 17 to 73. Seán Barrett, Mark Meadows, and Huw Parmenter each take on three of the men's stories. Parmenter's narration of the younger men's listless lives feels ambivalent and leaves the listener wondering if these men are going anywhere. Meadows's steady interpretation of the middle-aged men grounds the work. His voice is the strongest, giving his stories added power. Rounding out the novel, Barrett, with a gruffer sound than the others, paints a picture of the later lives of the final three men. Putting all of the stories together, ALL THAT MAN IS depicts the life of man in the 21st century.
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2016
Duration: 13 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781681685038
Publisher: HighBridge 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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