JANUARY 2020 - AudioFile
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. B.G. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
The Mail on Sunday (London)
Tackles meaty themes and tricky parallels . . . Wonderfully imaginative.
Irish Examiner (Cork)
[A] brave and complex book.
The Sydney Morning Herald
"This is, charmingly, a book by an old man about two other old men, all three acutely aware of mortality and each making the old man's declaration: "I will talk how I want to talk for as long as I choose about whatever I want to talk about." It's quite glorious really. The whole book is a hymn to idealism, and to human development."
The Times (London)
"Uncovers a rich hidden seam in Australian history...Passionate and heartfelt.
The Saturday Paper (Australia)
"A rather brave book. This impressive sketch of ghostly affinities between a man who makes images at once artistic and real out of the life he records and shapes, and another who conjures and kills and wills himself on the tightrope of justice and mercy in a time that Keneally is very adept at animating."
The Herald (Glasgow)
This is a story of how to die but also of how to live . . . Consistently engaging, provocative and original . . . Keneally’s art is to make the profound accessible. The important is rendered seamlessly . . . The simple message is that there is a communality to the human experience that spans forty-two thousand years.
Daily Mail (London)
"Vigorous, bighearted and terrifically direct.
The Australian
A blunt meditation on last things, but still electric with life, passion and appetite...The account of two exceptional men who have lived ordinary lives: ordinary in the sense that they may be viewed as universal, as experiences of what it is to be a man, with all the virtues and humiliations that attend that station, across time and space...[An] intensely personal, hugely inventive and often moving novel.
JANUARY 2020 - AudioFile
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. B.G. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
