The fact that we still know names like Mrs. O'Leary and Lizzie Borden, dramatic figures from the late nineteenth century, speaks loudly of their collective influence. FEVER takes on the story of Mary Mallon, who was known to the media of her time as Typhoid Mary. This novelization of the life of a hardworking Irish immigrant is tough to resist, largely due to the professionalism of Candace Thaxton's narration. Thaxton transitions fluidly between Mallon's brogue and the rest of the narrative, presenting a clear-eyed view of the time period and its people. Details of life in New York City and its environs are fascinating, and Mary herself is a complex character. At times, the story slows, but Thaxton gets it going again with her steady delivery.
Pub Date: March 12, 2013
Duration: 10 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781442360884
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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