This audio edition of Trumbo's classic 1939 novel of war's insanity begins as a bit of a slog because of the lengthy padding at its start. With two introductions, from Cindy Sheehan and Ron Kovic, that attempt to place the novel in the context of more recent armed conflicts in both Iraq and Vietnam, it is the better part of a disc before the book properly begins. Once it does, though, the slog ceases. Trumbo's novel is spine-tingling in its immediacy and horror, and William Dufris (while occasionally fumbling around in his bag of voices) mostly gives the words room to breathe. For this book, little more is necessary. A Citadel paperback.(Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Though fiction has always featured characters with physical disabilities—Tiny Tim, Captain Ahab, and Philip Carey among them—they are still wildly underrepresented on the page. And that’s a shame: when a character has a physical limitation, it often serves to add another layer of complexity, authenticity, and diversity to the story. What contemporary fiction has started to get right […]