Three narrators bring to life historical figures connected to Ravensbruk concentration camp. Their superb accents and emotional shifts track the characters’ changes over two decades. Cassandra Campbell narrates the part of socialite Caroline Faraday, who approaches charity work with a cocksure, stony attitude that changes to dedicated compassion for those who have suffered. Herta Oberheuser, portrayed by Kathrin Kana, begins as an ambitious young medical student slighted by gender and class discrimination. She grows colder and callous as a German doctor at Ravensbruk. Kathleen Gati recounts the heartbreaking narrative of 15-year-old Polish teen Kasia Kuzmerick. Her horror at the brutalities around her deepens when she becomes one of the “Rabbits” chosen for experimentation. Postwar-Kasia is presented with that bitterness and rage result from her experiences until a significant event finally brings her peace.
Pub Date: April 5, 2016
Duration: 17 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781101889596
Publisher: Random House 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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