Famed American singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie wrote a powerful portrait of Dust Bowl-era Texas in 1947. Recently discovered, the novel was published on the centennial anniversary of Guthrie's birth. Douglas Brinkley performs the novel's lengthy introduction, cowritten and edited by Johnny Depp. The material provides historical context for both The Great Depression and Guthrie himself, who was "living his art" by championing the dignity of the downtrodden. Narrator Will Patton enlivens the novel with a vernacular twang and a range of expression that makes Guthrie’s characters fully believable. In the arid Texas Panhandle, a young couple struggles to build an adobe home on a plot of leased land. Agribusiness and banks foil their endeavors. Patton provides a good flow to the vivid descriptions of rural realism and progressive activism, peppered with sexually explicit passages.
Pub Date: March 19, 2013
Duration: 6 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062263025
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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