MASTERPIECES OF ADVENTURE Stories of Desert Places

This fascinating audio collection of desert stories was compiled by an early-twentieth-century female editor. The wide-ranging cast of lively characters listeners meet through these works requires a top-notch narrator, and Jack de Golia delivers. He's as comfortable singing in Spanish as he is parlaying rowdy ranch gossip, emoting the gruffness of the wilderness, or setting a creepy mood on a dark and stormy night. (Thomas Hardy has never sounded more suspenseful.) But it is the blithe cruelty, the caustic casualness, with which de Golia delivers talk of the U.S. "Indian extermination" policy that feels most chillingly realistic. Listeners can't help but ponder the geographical and metaphorical experience of life in these isolated landscapes. J.T. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine [Published: JULY 2021]