Sean Rohani gives an upbeat narration of this fictionalized insider's view of the lead-up to the marriage of John Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier. The story is told by Lem Billings, a real-life close friend of Jack and Jackie, whose homosexuality was well hidden. According to Lem, Kennedy patriarch Joe Kennedy pressured Jack to marry to advance Jack's career in politics. Rohani delivers a scorching description of Jackie's first encounter with the highly competitive Kennedys, as recounted by Lem. And Rohani's bitchy tone is spot-on as Lem recalls Ethel Kennedy's classist nastiness. Lem reveals his own irritation when JFK asks him to advise Jackie that their prospective marriage would be a business arrangement, not a love match. Rohani's soft, fragile voice fits Jackie's, and, amazingly, he makes Jack sound different from Bobby--Massachusetts accents and all.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2022
Duration: 8 hrs, 15 mins
Publisher: Workman 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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