Bronson Pinchot delivers this sprawling, incandescent historical novel. His performance gives the mostly immigrant Finns' lives veracity and dignity. The listener encounters the stresses, hardships, and majesty of these struggling new arrivals who live in Washington state near a river that has a strong presence in their lives. Pinchot's twin gifts--an extraordinary ear for language and an actor's nuanced delivery--enliven the prose. The novelist's careful study of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century life amid the rugged terrain reveals the hard and dangerous work of loggers and the challenges of farmers. Here is the America of the Wobblies, the Espionage Act, of long labor for little pay. Yet these taciturn people dance, romance and capture the heart of the listener.
Pub Date: July 2, 2019
Duration: 26 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781538540329
Publisher: Blackstone 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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