This short dual-narrated audiobook imagines what the imprisoned Mata Hari was thinking while awaiting either her execution or her pardon from the French government for being a German spy in WWI. Hillary Huber uses an indeterminate European accent to voice Mata Hari's thoughts, which is fitting for the young Dutch woman who was dead set on making Paris her home. Huber's performance highlights Mata Hari's many layers, including her naïve trust in men and her passion to live life on her own terms. Paul Boehmer's believable French accent, colored with sorrow and frustration, is appropriate for the accused woman's lawyer, Edouard Clunet. This brief story of the famous dancer's rise and fall sheds little light on the supposed spy's innocence or guilt.
Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
Duration: 4 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781524752286
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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