It's hard to imagine a better narrator for Stefano Massini's novel in verse than Edoardo Ballerini. Ballerini delivers this massive fictional history with accurate accents, subtlety, and nuance. The German-Jewish immigrant experience is magnified through the lens of the Lehman brothers--Henry, Emanuel, and Mayer--and their descendants, whose rise from grocers to cotton traders to international banking circles shows them to be sometimes ruthless, often relentless, but always focused on the prize: social acceptance and financial freedom. A wonderful translation enhances Massini's outstanding use of language, particularly his incantatory rhythms and intentional repetition. All highlight the Lehmans' tenacity and determination to achieve success. Ballerini's dazzling performance of Massini's stunning lyrical descriptions and poetic ambience results in an exceptional listening experience.
Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
Duration: 13 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062940483
Publisher: Harper 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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