Narrator Christian Baskous's sonorous tone and soft Southern accent capture this heartfelt story of social conflict in rural Tennessee just as the nation emerges from the Depression. Nathan helps engineer the monumental task of constructing the dam that brings electricity and economic prosperity to the area. Baskous lets a worrisome note creep into his delivery as he introduces characters motivated by greed who are opposing those who would like to hold onto their heritage. The author knows the South and infuses his characters with hope in the future and dread of a world irrevocably changed by progress. Baskous intuits the inner conflicts of Nathan and Claire, a housewife who is struggling with newfound freedom and the realization that change brings both positives and negatives to her life, much like the electricity from the dam.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
Duration: 9 hrs, 30 mins
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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