Outside a Biloxi convenience store, a paraplegic veteran stands and walks. The world marvels; headlines are made. In this fictional investigative report, Edoardo Ballerini skillfully moves between narration styles as he sifts through the layers of the story. When portraying the journalist, he is matter-of-fact, cutting deftly through a dense thicket of information in order to maintain momentum. Ballerini voices the miraculous Cameron and his sister, Tanya, with a charisma peculiar to well-drawn Southern characters, never letting the facts or their circumstances get in the way of a good tale. He has the knack of perfectly delivering the many deadpan observations generated by this larger-than-life story and embodies its wide cast of believers and skeptics with a vibrancy that pulls the listener irresistibly along.
Pub Date: March 13, 2018
Duration: 14 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780525496823
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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