This audiobook tells a haunting and haunted story of a late-nineteenth-century Alaskan expedition to the uncharted Wolverine River, a territory full of physical and psychic, even supernatural, dangers. It is vividly imagined and cleverly structured, juxtaposing diaries, letters, and official expedition reports with the contemporary voices of those, white and Native Alaskan, involved in preserving and curating those documents. Unfortunately, the voice of the expedition leader, Col. Allen Forrester, a battle-hardened Civil War veteran and western campaigner, is given in a soft, whispery tone, more Mr. Rogers than John Wayne. The letters and diary of his young wife, Sophie, are marred differently, by a faux-fancy "Masterpiece Theater" accent that serves no purpose. Still, the story is original and compelling, well worth the listen.
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
Duration: 13 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781478952251
Publisher: Hachette 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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