In this audiobook, Israeli novelist Yoel Blum visits the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, where he stumbles upon a video image of his family during WWII. His shock at seeing another boy in the footage compels him to dig into his family's past. Narrator Jonathan Davis artfully portrays Yoel's intelligent introspection as he uncovers stunning truths about his family and racial heritage. Davis's gravitas lends credence to Yoel's emotional journey, and to the deplorable persecution of Jews in Holland during the war. Yoel parlays his research into a new novel, and passages from his book about his mother's endeavors in Amsterdam in the 1940s are interspersed with Yoel's own experiences in contemporary times. Transitions between timeframes aren't well delineated, resulting in a muddled storyline--but a compelling listen, nonetheless.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
Duration: 10 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781797102382
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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