An all-star cast of narrators takes turns performing the "testimonies" of fictional characters who share stories about Robert Oppenheimer, head of the U.S. atomic bomb project. We hear from his students, friends, and colleagues at various points in his life--when he worked at the Los Alamos research facility and at Princeton as well as when he underwent a brutal loyalty interrogation in the McCarthy era. There are no weak links in this group of narrators, though not all of the women succeed in rendering the deeper male voices in dialogue. Each character reveals a different aspect of Oppenheimer, a complex man who was inconsistent in his feelings about atomic weapons. An underlying theme is how women were treated in the 1940s and how they coped with their limited choices.
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
Duration: 9 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062865373
Publisher: Harper 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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