Challenging and rewarding.
Narrator Bahni Turpin invites listeners into Toni Morrison’s Princeton University classroom for the Nobel laureate’s course Studies in African Americanism. Under Morrison’s guidance, listeners tackle the white American canon, engaging with the works of Poe, Melville, Stowe, Twain, and others while grappling with what Morrison calls the “Africanist presence” that pervades their writings. Turpin, so fluent in her narration of fiction, memoir, and journalism, stumbles a bit with the language of academia but hits her stride before long. Given the nature of these texts, utterances of the unexpurgated N-word are frequent. Listeners with a solid grounding in the works under discussion will naturally get the most out of this audiobook, but even those without will find this time with Morrison profoundly stimulating.
Challenging and rewarding.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
Duration: 8 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9798217174270
Publisher: Random House Audio
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
Narrator Lisa Flanagan has a wonderful vocal personality--lithe with a broad palette of pitch patterns and a range of believable emotional tones. Her friendly voice works well with this lighthearted overview of how dramatically the Internet has changed the world in the past 30 years. Though being digitally connected has improved life in many ways, the author says we've lost many of the interpersonal experiences that used to sustain us. We have less privacy, don't need all those reference books, and have largely forgotten how to have vocal conversations with other people. The audiobook is entertaining nostalgia for anyone who feels incompetent navigating the World Wide Web, and a soothing reminder that those of us who miss the simplicity of the pre-Internet era are not alone.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
Duration: 5 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593418055
Publisher: Random House Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
Craig Brown tickled our ear with 99 GLIMPSES OF PRINCESS MARGARET, a brisk, irreverent assembly of tiny chapters that ran a satisfactory 12+ hours. For the Beatles, he adds 51 more glimpses and another eight hours, with a proportionally diluted effect. Brown himself, Kate Robbins, and Mark McGann share the narration, which is interesting, insightful, well performed, and packed with some new and a lot of old information. All of it is shaped by Brown's propensity for "easing sense into nonsense." The self-mocking Beatles are harder to deflate than a pretentious princess, but Brown's accounts of touring Beatles sites in Liverpool and his histories of Beatles contemporaries swept up--and aside--by their spectacular rise will amaze and beguile listeners.
Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
Duration: 20 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781250770127
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
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