4 adventurous audiobooks for a summer of exploration

Travelers play a major role in each of the four audiobooks on the agenda this month.  All titles are available to download from www.audible.com.

2. "In The Unlikely Event," by Judy Blume

(Read by Kathleen McInerney; Random House Audio; 11 CDs; 14 hours)

Best known for breaking taboo subjects with her material for young adults, here Blume tackles her first adult novel by delving into the three plane crashes that rattled residents of her hometown, Elizabeth, N.J., in the early 1950s. These crashes killed residents, destroyed lives, and left deep psychological scars.

Blume conveys the emotional agony of these events with fictionalized characters, but uses so many points of view that the listener gets lost and eventually starts to wander away. Narrator McInerney does an admirable job of capturing the myriad of voices and various points of view, flexing her voice to include youngsters, elderly men, and middle-aged women. 

Grade: B Plus

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

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If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

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The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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