Mark Bramhall’s warm, textured voice is a perfect vehicle for this spare, if flawed, meditation on guilt and innocence, parenthood, and the sins of fathers and sons. The technical challenges include Yiddish, German, and various “New Yawk” accents; Bramhall is completely at ease with these. The emotional challenge is something else—conveying the anguish of journalist Yedidyah as he covers the murder trial of a young German, Werner Sonderberg, who pleads “Guilty, and Not Guilty” in the death of his elderly relative. Yedidyah comes to understand that his own life has been more shattered than he ever knew by the tragedy that befell European Jewry during the Holocaust. As Yedidyah pursues the truth about Sonderberg’s case and his own, Bramhall’s sensitive, focused performance serves the text respectfully, and shines.
Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2010
Duration: 5 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780307734648
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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