In an intelligent, conversational tone, narrator Steven Jay Cohen leads listeners into an alternate world resembling our own--except that Al Gore wins the presidency in 2000 and medical marvels not only save lives but can, through bioregeneration, bring the dead back to life. A down-on-his-luck historian comes to question his personal and political choices when he becomes a confidant of a powerful lawyer who dies and then returns, upending both men's families and fortunes. Cohen's comfortable delivery makes the most devastating philosophical questions relating to grief, legacy, truth, and history itself--what if the South had won the Civil War?--seem intimate and accessible as the historian finds that second chances may make the most profound ripples in time. Powerful, thoughtful speculative listening.
Pub Date: May 23, 2023
Duration: 8 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593664667
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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