Narrator Phylicia Rashad gives such a vivid portrayal of the characters in this audiobook that you feel you are in the same room with them, only you’ve turned your head and don’t happen to be seeing them. It’s as if she’s known every one of them personally. Ivoe Williams is a capable and determined daughter of early-twentieth-century Jim Crow Texas. As a young woman, she starts an African-American newspaper, JAM ON THE VINE, in Kansas City, Missouri. Barnett’s writing is gorgeous, and Rashad revels in it. The book is a hymn to personal courage, love, and the fourth estate, and you will admire, remember, and care about these characters long after you finish, thanks in no small part to Rashad’s glorious and heartfelt performance.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2015
Duration: 11 hrs, 15 mins
Publisher: Audible, 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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