In 1940, thousands of Jews in France tried to escape the Holocaust, their flights financed by wealthy American Jews. Edoardo Ballerini narrates this fictional account of Varian Fry, the real-life American journalist who bravely orchestrated the journeys of thousands of European Jews from France. The intensity of actual events is beautifully reconstructed in the author's poignant prose, and Ballerini's graceful, powerful narration does it justice. Ballerini portrays Fry's agony at having to choose which artists and intellectuals would be selected for deliverance. Ballerini gives Fry a more sensitive tone for his dialogues with Grant, his homosexual lover (who may or may not be entirely fictional), but Ballerini's greatest contribution to this audiobook is his subtle portrayals of desperate German and French Jews.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
Duration: 19 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781980032304
Publisher: Recorded Books Inc.
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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