An Introduction to My Antonia by Willa Cather, written and produced by Dan Stone

Here’s  a recent find by my colleague, Connie:
My book group decided to revisit some of the classics. I picked My Antonia to read. This story by Willa Cather is about a young immigrant girl and her family who settle in the American plains during the Western Expansion a century ago.
While I was [...]

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As Luck Would Have It, by Joshua Piven

Piven’s name may be familiar to anyone who has seen or read the
wildly popular Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook series (co-written with David Borgenicht).
This book is a series of stories about people who have experienced both good and bad luck, and the way that they dealt with their situations, along with some analysis of luck, probability, [...]

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Selected Shorts – Lots of Laughs

The Selected Shorts series is a collection of both older classic and newer short stories read by some talented actors. A good number of the stories have appeared in New Yorker magazine. These dramatic readings were recorded live and aired on public radio nationwide.
I started off the Selected Shorts series by listening to Vol. XVIII, [...]

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Funny in Farsi: a memoir of growing up Iranian in America, by Firoozeh Dumas

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this entertaining memoir by Firoozeh
Dumas. The book begins when Dumas’ father accepts a temporary job and moves the family to California in 1972. Firoozeh was 7 years old.
They remained in the States for two years and then went back to Iran for a few years before returning to California just before the Shah was [...]

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The Ride of Our Lives: Roadside Lessons of an American Family, by Mike Leonard

I am a big fan of audio memoirs and this book is no exception. The author, an NBC Today Show correspondent, decides to cheer his aging parents up by taking them on a 8,000-mile, month-long RV trip with his three grown children and daughter-in-law. This is either a very brave or very stupid man.
What ensues [...]

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The Woman Who Can’t Forget, by Jill Price

The subtitle of this book is The Extraordinary Story of Living With the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science. What, I wondered, would it be like to have near-perfect recall?
As it turns out, Jill Price’s remarkable memory pertains to mostly autobiographical information. From about the age of ten on she can tell you what happened [...]

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Driveway Moments 2: Radio Stories That Won’t Let You Go

The subtitle says it all:Radio Stories That Won’t Let You Go.
I love short stories and thought I’d give this audio collection of previously aired National Public Radio segments a try. I listen to NPR every now and then and have enjoyed many of their programs, but it was great to just have a collection of [...]

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Ice Trap, by Kitty Sewell

This mystery is the story of Dafydd Woodruff, a Welsh surgeon, who seeks to escape from a tragic event by taking a temporary job in the sub-Arctic region of Canada. He assists in a medical clinic for a short period of time and then returns to Wales and marries.
The story begins many years later, when [...]

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The Best of the Abbott and Costello Show

The two CDs in this set from the Great Radio Shows series provide over two hours of hilarious classic sketches of Abbott and Costello working their comic genius.
Bud Abbott (the straight man) worked vaudeville for many years before teaming up with Lou Costello in 1929. They started performing on radio shows in 1938 and had [...]

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The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman

I listened to this book on audio narrated by Adam Grupper (10 sound discs, 12 hours).
Let me start off by saying I have absolutely no science background, but I found this book full of fascinating scenarios. The book is based on an essay “Earth Without People” published in Discover magazine in February 2005. It was [...]

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