Brothers K
Review "A family drama of the highest order...Look no further for some of the most fallible, lovable, and utterly absorbing characters in modern literature."-- "Powells.com Staff Pick""A stunning work: a complex tapestry of family tensions, baseball, politics, and religion, by turns hilariously funny and agonizingly sad."-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)""Duncan is a wonderfully engaging writer."-- "Los Angeles Times""If John Irving reimagined The Brothers Karamazov as one of his kooky families and Thomas Pynchon did a rewrite, the result might be something close to this...it scores a home run."-- "Library Journal""Marvelously detailed and poignant, and a garden of delights for baseball lovers."-- "Kirkus Reviews""The pages of The Brothers K sparkle!"-- "New York Times Book Review""This ambitious book succeeds on almost every level and every page."-- "USA Today" Product Description This touching, uplifting novel spans decades of loyalty, anger, regret, and love in the lives of the Chance family. Here there is a father whose dreams of glory on a baseball field are shattered by a mill accident, a mother who clings obsessively to a religion as a ward against the darkest hour of her past, and four brothers who come of age during the seismic upheavals of the sixties and who each choose their own way to deal with what the world has become. About the Author David James Duncan, novelist, essayist, and fly fisherman, is the award-winning author of two bestselling novels, as well as a collection of short stories and a memoir. His novel The Brothers K won the American Library Association Best Books Award and was a New York Times Notable Book. His work has appeared in Harper's, Sierra, and Gray's Sporting Journal. He lives with his family beside a Montana trout stream.Robertson Dean has played leading roles on and off Broadway and at dozens of regional theaters throughout the country. He has a BA from Tufts University and an MFA from Yale. His audiobook narration has garnered ten AudioFile Earphones Awards. He now lives in Los Angeles, where he works in film and television in addition to narrating. From AudioFile A book in need of an editor makes a special problem for a narrator. If you fall in love with a story on the page but tire of the fact that the characters' voices, written or spoken, are improbably sentimental and all share the same tics, you can skip or skim for plot. But the narrator has to read out every tedious repetition, and if you happen not to have fallen in love with the story, every unnecessary "I mean" becomes sand in the spinach. Robertson Dean performs with patience and sincerity. The real problem, for this listener anyway, is that Duncan swings hard at baseball, family love, mysticism, fly-fishing, and Vietnam as if he were rivaling Dostoyevsky but completely fails to compel belief. B.G. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine