Narrating this novel about the Chinese-American experience, James Chen delivers the characters’ personalities without falling into caricature. His success is especially evident in his respectful rendering of the Pidgin English used by Chinese immigrants in four significant time periods, starting with the building of our nation’s first transcontinental railroad in the 1860s. Besides focusing on immigration issues and prejudice in early Hollywood and 1980s Detroit, the story dramatizes first-generation Chinese-Americans' conflicting desires: meeting their filial duties versus assimilating into Western culture. Chen's understated portrayals help listeners understand that, although circumstances have clearly changed since the mid-1800s, Chinese-American concerns, even in the 21st century, have remained unexpectedly constant. The audiobook provides an interesting perspective on the current immigration debate in America.
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
Duration: 11 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781531824358
Publisher: Brilliance 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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