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NonfictionAudio

Travels With George

Review by Maya Fleischmann

In Travels With George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy (9.5 hours), author and narrator Nathaniel Philbrick retraces his adventure, beginning in the fall of 2018, to follow the trail of George Washington’s presidential excursions after his 1789 inauguration. Through observing the landscapes and towns he visits and interviewing the people he meets, Philbrick compares and contrasts our history with our present moment, and ponders the strengths and fragility of our nation. As he recounts his travels, including fond anecdotes of his dog, Dora, Philbrick examines who Washington was—as a man, a plantation owner dependent on the labor of enslaved people and a reluctant president facing complex social issues.

A natural storyteller, Philbrick switches seamlessly between Washington’s voice and his own personal reflections, revealing a profound respect for the country, its history and the lessons it imparts to us. His fascinating journey will appeal to travelers and historians, but his likable performance as an audiobook narrator will engage even those typically averse to historical narratives. Travels With George is as insightful and thought provoking as John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley.

Read our review of the print edition of ‘Travels With George.’

Tracing the trail of Washington’s presidential excursions, Nathaniel Philbrick reveals a profound respect for the country, its history and the lessons it imparts to us.
NonfictionAudioBiography

Vanderbilt

Review by Maya Fleischmann

In Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty (9 hours), broadcast journalist Anderson Cooper joins historian and novelist Katherine Howe to recount the rich and tumultuous history of his mother’s family, the Vanderbilts. The engaging and detailed narrative explores the chaos and charm of the Vanderbilt name and the family’s social status from the 19th to the 21st century.

Cooper’s narration is even, his voice distinctly resonant and professional throughout, yet there is a notably heartfelt quality to his memories of his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt. His tender descriptions of her dignity and optimistic spirit—in spite of the public and media scrutiny that came with being a Vanderbilt—lend a touching and respectful tone to this in-depth look at an American dynasty.

This revealing family history will be especially interesting to readers who loved Cooper’s The Rainbow Comes and Goes, a book of letters between Cooper and his mother, and those who enjoy celebrity memoirs such as The Boys by Ron and Clint Howard.

Anderson Cooper’s tender descriptions of his mother’s optimistic spirit lend a touching and respectful tone to this in-depth look at the Vanderbilt dynasty.
Audio

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Lily’s Crossing (3.5 hours), performed by Mia Dillon, is a Newbery Honor Book for children ages 8-12, but it’s the kind of audio that even parents will enjoy. It’s set in the summer of 1944, at Rockaway Beach, where Lily watches troop ships begin their trek across the Atlantic — one, perhaps, carrying her beloved father — and where she meets a boy her own age, a refugee from Hungary, whose parents were killed by the Nazis and whose sister is somewhere in France. They become constant companions, sharing their fears about loss and separation, the war and the future, discovering that love and friendship make a world of difference in a very troubling world. Author Patricia Reilly Giff tells this story with simplicity, honesty, and a refreshingly clear understanding of childhood.

Lily's Crossing (3.5 hours), performed by Mia Dillon, is a Newbery Honor Book for children ages 8-12, but it's the kind of audio that even parents will enjoy. It's set in the summer of 1944, at Rockaway Beach, where Lily watches troop ships begin their…
FictionAudioHistorical Fiction

Cloud Cuckoo Land

Review by Tami Orendain

Cloud Cuckoo Land (15 hours) by Anthony Doerr chronicles the intersecting lives of an orphaned teenage girl and a village boy living in 15th-century Constantinople, an elderly librarian and a troubled teenager in present-day Idaho, and a young passenger aboard an interstellar ship generations into the future. It’s a dreamy, dynamic interweaving of stories about conflict, grief and hope.

Narrators Marin Ireland and Simon Jones make each character’s story feel personal, valid and alive—a challenging task with a cast this extensive and settings that span hundreds of years and miles. Ireland’s performances anchor every chapter in a myriad of voices and accents, surrounding the listener with an immersive experience. Between chapters, Jones playfully narrates excerpts from a fictional ancient Greek text whose relevance to each storyline is revealed gradually.

Listening to Cloud Cuckoo Land will transport you. It is magical and comforting, and likely to leave you with a new perspective on the power of resilience and the meaning of human connection.

Read our starred review of the print edition of ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land.’

As an audiobook, Cloud Cuckoo Land is a transportive experience, likely to leave listeners with a new perspective on the power of human connections.
FictionAudioLiterary Fiction

Once There Were Wolves

Review by Mari Carlson

Like her hit 2020 debut, Migrations, Charlotte McConaghy’s second novel spirals into the recesses of the heart, exploring climate change and human behavior through the story of one woman’s fraught life.

In Once There Were Wolves (8.5 hours), Inti keeps more company with animals than with people. Her work involves releasing wolves into the Scottish Highlands, a controversial venture that arouses suspicion—and then violence—from farmers. The wolves’ presence will allow forests to regrow by forcing deer to keep moving, but the local villagers can’t see beyond the threat to their lives and livestock. Having grown up between a hardline, back-to-the-land father and a mother whose professional expertise is in domestic abuse, Inti’s nurtured cynicism competes with the kindness and goodness she experiences from her sister and a handful of other close relationships.

In the audiobook, master voice actor Saskia Maarleveld keeps the book’s intrigue high. Her breathless delivery captures Inti’s sensitivity and other characters’ misgivings of one another, heightening the tension between domesticity and wildness. Maarleveld also drives home the book’s global expanse through a medley of expert accents, including Canadian, Australian and Scottish.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of the print edition of ‘Once There Were Wolves’.

Master voice actor Saskia Maarleveld keeps the intrigue high in Charlotte McConaghy’s second novel, which spirals into the recesses of the heart.
NonfictionAudioBiography

All In

Review by Mari Carlson

In her autobiography, All In (18 hours), Billie Jean King tells of her triumphs and struggles both on and off the tennis court, from her hardscrabble childhood in Long Beach, California, to her present-day life in New York City.

Growing up in the 1960s, King’s inquisitive and rebellious spirit reflected the era, as she refused to wear white skirts as a young player. Later, she launched the Women’s Tennis Association and built a career with her husband and business partner. But years of keeping her sexual orientation a secret took a toll on King, physically and emotionally. Her book celebrates the honesty, hard work and love that bolstered her and encouraged her to fight for inclusion and equity.  

In the energetic audio production, King brings her punchy, passionate personality to her percussive narration. Her voice is compassionate and down-to-earth as she relates her experiences of forging relationships with a colorful cast of characters who have joined her in her journey. In moments of pain and joy, King connects deeply with her audience through audible tears and laughter, culminating in an inspiring and cathartic listening experience.

In the energetic audiobook edition of her autobiography, Billie Jean King connects deeply with her audience through audible tears and laughter.
NonfictionAudioMemoir

A Carnival of Snackery

Review by Anna Zeitlin

A Carnival of Snackery (17 hours) collects highlights from David Sedaris’ diaries from 2003–2020, read by the author and British-born actor Tracey Ullman. Sedaris’ diary entries reflect much of what we love most about his short stories and essays—observations about the unusual people he meets on his travels, anecdotes about awkward situations and tales about his family—all filtered through the lens of the last two decades, with backdrops that range from Brexit to protests against the Iraq War and George Floyd’s murder.

In the introduction, Sedaris explains that Ullman will narrate the portions of the audiobook set in England, to capture the local charm in a way he cannot. She does a wonderful job portraying Sedaris and the broad range of accents he encounters while across the pond, from a haughty horseback rider to a teenage troublemaker. Sedaris hardly needs help: He doesn’t perform as many voices in his sections, but his emphasis and timing get right to the humor at the heart of his diaries.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of the print edition of ‘A Carnival of Snackery.’

David Sedaris and actor Tracey Ullman get right to the humor at the heart of his diaries in the audio edition of A Carnival of Snackery.
NonfictionAudioHistory

The Verge

Review by Deborah Mason

A Spanish queen. A Florentine printer. An English wool merchant. A disgruntled German monk. A Genoese explorer. According to Patrick Wyman, author and narrator of The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World (11.5 hours), these are among the actors who gave birth to the modern world. Wyman argues that from 1490 to 1530, a series of economic, religious and state-building revolutions transformed Europe from a backwater into the dominant global power. And like the song says, it was money—in the form of increasingly available credit—that made the world go round.

Creator of the podcast series Tides of History and Fall of Rome, Wyman is a skilled performer with obvious enthusiasm for his subject. His reading is also enhanced by the book’s structure: Each chapter focuses on a particular historical figure who in some way acted as a midwife to the new age, and Wyman’s narration emphasizes their humanity, warts and all. As a result, he makes this economic history of Europe an entertaining and informative audiobook.

Podcaster Patrick Wyman skillfully narrates his engaging economic history of Europe.
FictionAudioHistorical Fiction

The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All

Review by Deborah Mason

Thirteen-year-old Weldon Applegate (as remembered by 99-year-old Weldon Applegate) is the unlikely hero of Josh Ritter’s The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All (7 hours). Set in Cordelia, Idaho, a lumber town at the end of the lumberjack era, and populated by ghosts, witches and demons, this rollicking tall tale is as true and honest as the honed edge of a jack’s favorite ax.  

Ritter is a renowned singer-songwriter, and his language is exquisite, especially when describing the grandeur of a winter forest or the subtle evil of a greedy man. His nuanced narration gives an authentic voice to both young and ancient Weldon, endowing him with wisdom, humor and valor while never losing sight of the terrible beauty of his vanished world. Ritter’s talents as a ballad singer make this audiobook, which includes an original song, a special pleasure.

Josh Ritter’s talents as a ballad singer make this audiobook, which includes an original song, a special pleasure.
FictionAudioLiterature

A seminal novel turns 50

Feature by Lacey Galbraith

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is more than a literary classic; it’s a 50-year testament to the ways a well-told story can inspire readers and impact a culture.

Oprah Winfrey has called it America’s “national novel,” and Tom Brokaw remembers the “electrifying effect” it had on the country the year it debuted. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961, and in 1962 a movie adaptation garnered three Academy Awards (having been nominated for eight). Today, this treasured gem has sold more than 30 million copies.

To Kill a Mockingbird was first published in the summer of 1960 when its author, Nelle Harper Lee, was 35 years old. Living in a cold-water flat in New York City’s Yorkville neighborhood, she had been supporting herself with a series of odd jobs, from sales clerk in a bookstore to ticket agent for Eastern Airlines. For years, her ambition had been to become a writer. Her childhood friend Truman Capote (who appears in the book as the character Dill) had done it, but for Lee, any future literary success was contingent upon her ability to carve out time in the evenings after work to write.

Those close to Lee, like best friends Joy and Michael Martin Brown, believed in her though, and on Christmas Day, 1956, they presented Lee with an envelope. Inside was a note reading, “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” Free to devote herself full time to her writing, Lee produced a bestseller.

To honor Lee’s achievement and celebrate the novel’s 50 years of enduring popularity, publisher HarperCollins is organizing events across the country—from readings to live re-enactments—and publishing several new editions of the classic. There’s an elegance to the To Kill a Mockingbird slipcased edition, while the 50th-anniversary hardcover is especially lovely with its vintage reproduction of the original book jacket. Also available is a mass market paperback.

Paying tribute to the novel’s lasting legacy is Mary McDonagh Murphy’s Scout, Atticus & Boo, a collection of 26 interviews with mostly well-known Americans reflecting on how the book has touched their lives. Included are Anna Quindlen, Jon Meacham, Allan Gurganus, Mary Badham (the actress who played Scout in the movie) and even Lee’s sister, Alice Lee.

Gaining a million more readers every year, To Kill a Mockingbird’s enduring success can be traced both to the novel’s subjects—Scout’s coming-of-age, the trial of Tom Robinson—and to Lee’s storytelling. The book tackles the injustice of racism, takes a stand for what is right, yet thankfully lacks any tone of self-righteousness or high-minded piety. Lee’s characters are wonderfully crafted, so vivid and alive. Her prose is beautifully languid, her descriptions sharp-eyed and her humor smart.

Harper Lee accomplished something great with To Kill a Mockingbird, and with every passing decade, another generation of readers is wholly, and completely, captivated by its magic.

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is more than a literary classic; it’s a 50-year testament to the ways a well-told story can inspire readers and impact a culture.

Oprah Winfrey has called it America’s “national novel,” and Tom Brokaw remembers the “electrifying effect” it…

Audio

Bringing a book to life with the magic of the spoken word

Feature by Adriana Trigiani

Someone once told me that the only difference between a child who grows up to make it in life and one who doesn’t is that the successful adult was read to—that’s right, someone curled up at bedtime and read aloud to her, filling her head with images, ideas and stories before she went off to dreamland and schemed her own. 

There’s a craze in the world of books right now that no one predicted: Adults are buying coloring books. They buy sleeves of colored pencils and fill in complex line drawings making their own grown-up works of art, Pre-K style. It would only stand to reason that the audiobook, sometimes called the audible, would be surging, too. We like the hands-free reading experience. We enjoy listening to a story interpreted by a skilled actor. It’s soothing, comforting, entertaining and can even be educational. And if you’re someone who has less time than chores, you can elevate your mind while you paint your house, clean your closet or make that long commute. 


Adriana Trigiani

 

Authors take the production values and narrator of the audio version of their books seriously. When your novel is edited, and around the time you are polishing the bells and testing the whistles, the subject of the selection of the narrator of the audio version of your book comes up. Through the years I’ve had some glittering stars, including my honorary brother Mario Cantone, who took the novel Rococo and turned it into his own personal opus, with the female voices conjured by him from the MGM leading lady roster during the golden age of Hollywood. 

The process of casting the reader for an audiobook is every bit as serious as casting a major Hollywood film. You are looking for the perfect match in vocal tone, cadence and delivery for the time period and setting of your story. You hope for an actor who can bring the book to life and dramatize the journey of the characters against the backdrop you’ve written. You want to feel the emotions of the characters, their longing and yearning, heartache and grief, and joy and connection. The actor has to make the story clear and lead the listener through the action. All she has is her voice and her ability to connect through that instrument—she has no props, costumes, music or fellow actors. She hasn’t a sleeve of colored pencils, only her own interpretation of the words before her and her particular ability to distill them for the listener.

It’s a one-woman show. Recording an audiobook is a camp-out under a relentless spotlight in a glass box with headphones snapped over her ears and hundreds of double-spaced pages on a music stand, read, interpreted and flipped in near silence as she digs deeply into the text. A director will stop and start the action, keeping an ear on the flow, pace and energy. The director is also looking for colors, shading, electricity in the performance when called for, and smooth endings to chapters, plus big swells to their beginnings.

For the actor, it’s intense work, a lot of consecutive days of staying in the moment, remaining focused, soothing the voice by biting into green apples and downing lemon and honey in warm water. There’s no physical release, as there is in acting onstage. Recording an audiobook is the interpretation through the voice; it’s mental, a soul connection. It’s hard work, but it can never sound like it. The characters have to dance through the air in the imagination of the listener as the actor reads their words aloud. 

When it came time to cast All the Stars in the Heavens, we needed an actor who could play a feast of great actors and actresses of all ages from the early days of American movies. I could only think of one woman who could skate between exchanges between Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young, or David Niven and Clark Gable, and bring a poor nun in a halfway house to life. We needed an actor with scope and range, but one whose voice was both velvet and gingham, who could conjure burlap and old rum. We needed youth and world weary, glorious and shabby, the kind of actor who can play it all, and frankly has. Blair Brown possesses all of these qualities, but she is also original, fresh and unwraps the words with delight. You keep listening because she is invested in the story, and you must know what happens. 

I’m the daughter of a librarian who played story-time records for us when we were children. We heard Danny Kaye read classic fairy tales, my first audiobook on an LP. When I went to college and majored in theater, I went straight to the library when studying the classics and listened to the Shakespeare plays recorded by Nigel Hawthorne and Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Laurence Olivier. I loved listening to plays read aloud. But it wasn’t all academia and serious drama—one of my favorite audiobook memories is picking up Underboss: Sammy the Bull Gravano’s Story of Life in the Mafia by Peter Maas at the Cracker Barrel on Route 81 in the hills of Virginia. It was read by the great Philip Bosco. I laughed in a car with my dad for eight hours straight as we listened to Mr. Bosco cuss and wheel and deal as only an organized crime rat can do. You see, audiobooks are part of the happy memories with my family. They’re wonderful, and they fill us up as only a good story can. 

A playwright, TV writer/producer and film director, Adriana Trigiani is the author of 16 books, including her beloved debut, Big Stone Gap. Trigiani’s latest novel, All the Stars in the Heavens, is a fictional take on the real-life romance between two stars of Hollywood’s golden age: Loretta Young and Clark Gable.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Someone once told me that the only difference between a child who grows up to make it in life and one who doesn’t is that the successful adult was read to—that’s right, someone curled up at bedtime and read aloud to her, filling her head with images, ideas and stories before she went off to dreamland and schemed her own.
NonfictionAudio

A chorus of celebrity voices gives life to an author’s words

Feature by Sheila Nevins

When I finally finished writing my collection of essays and poetry, You Don’t Look Your Age . . . and Other Fairy Tales, I realized there would be an audio version, and it would have to be read. But the thought of reading my own book, admitting my own stories, telling my secrets, was more than I could handle.

I discussed this problem ferociously with my friends and even let my psychiatrist in. The conclusion was that rather than keeping the audiobook so close to myself, I should ask others to read it. So who were these others to be and where would I find them?

It all started at the 80th birthday party for playwright and gay rights hero Larry Kramer. The party was in my home, and actress Christine Baranski came to celebrate this great man. A flash occurred! Why not read a poem from the book to Larry (“The Larry Kramer”) and see if he liked it, and at the same time, ensnare Christine into reading it for the audio? “What a good idea,” I thought. “How terrifying!”

At first, I read parts of the poem to Larry’s husband, David Webster: “I loved that he fought to get healthy, defying odds once again. I will not die, he seemed to say, I will not be forgotten, he seemed to say. Yet death hovered and he was challenged. . . .” David teared up and said it seemed fine and that I should give the whole poem to Larry to read. I saw Larry quietly seated, eating his birthday cake alone. I walked over to him, gave him a big kiss and handed him the entire poem. He read it and sweetly smiled. He said that he liked what I had written, that he was flattered. I kissed him again. I then took another deep breath and got the courage to find the beautiful Christine. She loves Larry as I do. I asked her if she would read my poem about Larry for the audiobook. She said of course she would! And then a bell went off in my head. If the likes of Larry liked my poem, and the likes of Christine would read my poem, maybe I could get other celebrities to read my stories. This would distance the book from me, give me a role as Madame Le Directeur, and hopefully be something special to present.

“I never called an agent, I never called a manager. I went direct. And one by one, almost all said yes.”

And so it began, this long journey seeking stardom. Why not the great Rosie O’Donnell, why not the revered gossip columnist Liz Smith, why not the authentic Alan Alda, why not the actress of all actresses, Ellen Burstyn? Why not even dare to ask Meryl Streep? And so I did—by email, by phone, by letter—ask these luminaries to be part of my first book and tell a part of my written and imaginary life. I never called an agent, I never called a manager. I went direct. And one by one, almost all said yes. And one by one, I recorded, nervously directed and always felt grateful as these special folk gave life to my musings.

This is how it came to be, this audiobook narrated by 25 stars, including: Bob Balaban, Kathy Bates, Glenn Close, Katie Couric, Blythe Danner, Lena Dunham, Edie Falco, Tovah Feldshuh, Diane von Furstenberg, Whoopi Goldberg, Gayle King, Diane Lane, Sandra Lee, Judith Light, Jenna Lyons, Audra McDonald, Janet Mock, RuPaul, Lesley Stahl, Martha Stewart, Marlo Thomas, Lily Tomlin, Gloria Steinem and Gloria Vanderbilt.

I hope this performance audio gives life to the book. I hope this feels like a theatrical presentation of the spoken word, with original music by the genius Michael Bacon and the audio perked to perfection by Scott Sherratt and my colleague Rob Forlenza. I present my orchestrated audiobook. Here it is! Voila! 

The president of HBO Documentary Films, Sheila Nevins has produced more than a thousand documentaries, many of which have been honored with Academy Awards, Emmy Awards and Peabody Awards. Her wry and poignant autobiographical collection, You Don’t Look Your Age . . . and Other Fairy Tales, charts her course from Barnard College to Hollywood with candid reflections on face-lifts, frenemies and many other topics.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Sheila Nevins tells us how she assembled the star-studded cast of readers for her collection of essays, You Don’t Look Your Age . . . and Other Fairy Tales.
NonfictionFictionAudio

Audio: policing and prejudice

Feature by Sukey Howard

Matthew Horace doesn’t pull punches, and as a black man and a cop, he’s seen it all. A career law enforcement officer, he spent 28 years at the federal and local levels, ultimately becoming a senior executive at the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Explosives and later a CNN contributor. In The Black and the Blue, his powerful, probing, unvarnished assessment of racial injustice in law enforcement today, he comes out as a “champion of wholesale police reform in the United States,” unafraid to offer prescriptive advice on how to address the racism, prejudices, biases and the lethal “cops don’t tell on cops” tradition ingrained in police culture. Using in-depth interviews and his own experiences, Horace presents the vivid on-the-ground actuality of police brutality, misconduct, malfeasance and the needless, heedless shootings that capture headlines and snuff out lives all over America. Horace narrates like a pro with both passion and control.

HOME JOURNEY
Adjoa Andoh performs much of Housegirl, Michael Donkor’s accomplished, affecting debut novel, in sparkling Ghanaian English, immersing listeners in the world of Ghana and the Ghanaian diaspora. At 17, Belinda leaves her village and her mother behind to work as a housegirl for a wealthy couple who returned to their native Ghana to retire in luxury after making their fortune in London. Belinda finds solace in the daily domestic grind and in Mary, the charming, irrepressible 11-year-old housegirl-in-training who becomes like a little sister to her. But Belinda is uprooted again when close Ghanaian friends of her employers take Belinda to London, where she is tasked with befriending and providing a positive influence on their sullen teenage daughter, a student at an exclusive, mostly white private school. Surprisingly, their friendship blossoms after a few bumps, just as tragedy takes Belinda back to her homeland. At its core, Housegirl is a warmly perceptive look at female friendship as well as the angst, melodrama and confusion of coming of age in two clashing cultures.

TOP PICK IN AUDIO
Nelson Mandela, one of the great moral heroes of our time and an icon of human resilience, spent 27 years in jail, 18 of them in an 8-by-7 cell on grim Robben Island in South Africa. In all that time he never faltered, never gave up hope for the future and an end to apartheid, never stopped fighting for his own dignity and that of his fellow prisoners, never stopped yearning for his wife, family and friends. How he endured and persevered is made clearer in the many letters he wrote during that time. The 255 published in The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela, edited by Sahm Venter, are now available on audio, perfectly rendered by Atandwa Kani, whose flawless pronunciation of Xhosa names and phrases makes listening a totally engaging experience. There is lawyerly composure in Mandela’s letters describing his unrelenting quest for the rights of political prisoners. Yet also evident in these powerful and inspiring letters is the raw emotion and deep love of a man determined, against all odds, to remain a strong father and husband.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Matthew Horace doesn’t pull punches, and as a black man and a cop, he’s seen it all.

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