When you contemplate the remains of ancient humans, don't you wish they could somehow talk to you? In this deeply satisfying audiobook, it happens. Australian filmmaker Shelby Apple is obsessed with a 46,000-year-old skeleton called Learned Man. Apple's story alternates with Learned Man's, as he tells us who he was, what he did, and what his death at Lake Learned meant. In Paul Haley's fine performance the two are voiced identically, presumably to emphasize the uncanny resonances between the men's challenges and intentions, in spite of the vast differences in their circumstances. Both stories are richly dramatic and moving. The production is marred by scores of rough edits resulting in shifts in tone and level, but one overlooks the distraction, grateful for marvelous storytelling.
Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
Duration: 9 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781508286103
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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