This bleak, thoughtful look at the brutality and futility of war is masterfully narrated by Ed Sala. In the summer of 1916, an inexperienced group of "America's eager export of losers, deadbeats, cutthroats, dilettantes, and murderers," led by veteran officer Napoleon Childs, travels into Mexico to pursue Pancho Villa. After an ambush, most of the men are killed. Childs, beaten, bloodied, devastated, and left to die, begins both a trek for survival and an inward journey as he attempts to understand himself and his experiences. Robert Olmstead (COAL BLACK HORSE) writes cowboy-lean prose, and Sala delivers each gritty exchange with exceptional honesty. His interpretations of greenhorn cowboys and Mexican villagers ring with authenticity, and Childs's near-death delusions are convincing, thanks to Sala's sensitive performance.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2009
Duration: 6 hrs, 30 mins
Publisher: Recorded Books/ Southern Voices 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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