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Audiobooks for the best road trip ever

NonfictionAudio

Travels With George

Review by Maya Fleischmann

In Travels With George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy (9.5 hours), author and narrator Nathaniel Philbrick retraces his adventure, beginning in the fall of 2018, to follow the trail of George Washington’s presidential excursions after his 1789 inauguration. Through observing the landscapes and towns he visits and interviewing the people he meets, Philbrick compares and contrasts our history with our present moment, and ponders the strengths and fragility of our nation. As he recounts his travels, including fond anecdotes of his dog, Dora, Philbrick examines who Washington was—as a man, a plantation owner dependent on the labor of enslaved people and a reluctant president facing complex social issues.

A natural storyteller, Philbrick switches seamlessly between Washington’s voice and his own personal reflections, revealing a profound respect for the country, its history and the lessons it imparts to us. His fascinating journey will appeal to travelers and historians, but his likable performance as an audiobook narrator will engage even those typically averse to historical narratives. Travels With George is as insightful and thought provoking as John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley.

Read our review of the print edition of ‘Travels With George.’

Tracing the trail of Washington’s presidential excursions, Nathaniel Philbrick reveals a profound respect for the country, its history and the lessons it imparts to us.
NonfictionAudioBlack History

How the Word Is Passed

Review by Autumn Allen

Writer, poet and educator Clint Smith narrates the audio edition of How the Word Is Passed (10 hours), a timely reckoning with America’s past dependence on the cruel institution of chattel slavery. Smith brings the listener on a tour of locations with fraught ties to the transatlantic slave trade, from his hometown of New Orleans to Senegal. He reads his smooth, journalistic prose in a weighty, measured cadence. Listeners will find themselves paying closer attention and appreciating the author’s perspective even more because of how Smith’s narration lends gravity to his experiences and purpose to their telling.

Those who appreciate a good documentary will feel most at home with this audiobook. The content is heavy, at times nearly overwhelming, but Smith’s factual storytelling voice, with fitting but muted inflection throughout, models the courage and fortitude required to take it all in. This book is a generous gift to a nation struggling to define itself.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: From a Louisiana native to a D.C. high school teacher to a Harvard Ph.D. candidate to a staff writer for The Atlantic—Clint Smith shares the journey that led to his brilliant nonfiction debut.

Clint Smith’s narration of How the Word Is Passed models the courage and fortitude required to face this timely reckoning with America’s past.
NonfictionAudioBlack History

We Are Each Other’s Harvest

Review by Mari Carlson

The audiobook of Natalie Baszile’s We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy (13.5 hours) explores farming by Black Americans, past and present, through essays, interviews and poetry from farmers and historians, wordsmiths and activists. The expansive project, born out of Baszile’s extensive research for her 2014 novel, Queen Sugar, is bookended by the author’s own words about her family and her creative process. In between, we learn about the Black community’s enduring connection to the land despite slavery’s disenfranchisement and northern and urban migration, among other factors.

Tina Lifford, an actor in the TV adaptation of Queen Sugar as well as the series “Parenthood” and “South Central,” captures the book’s soulful tone through her deep voice, slow delivery and an array of accents. Her performance pays tribute to the Black community’s oral history tradition, which is referenced throughout the book. 

With rich descriptions of crops, recipes, family meals and current efforts to revitalize Black farming and land ownership, this audiobook inspires, empowers and enlightens through the spoken word.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of the print version of We Are Each Other’s Harvest.

With rich descriptions of crops, recipes, family meals and more, this audiobook inspires, empowers and enlightens through spoken word.
AudioScienceHistory

Empire of Pain

Review by G. Robert Frazier

New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe’s exhaustive research for Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (18 hours) makes him the natural choice to narrate his own audiobook. Keefe knows exactly which points to stress for listeners of this story, which he calls “the taproot of the opioid epidemic” in America—not that added emphasis is really needed, as the book’s content is shocking enough.

In jaw-dropping detail, Keefe recounts the greed, deception and corruption at the heart of the Sackler family’s multigenerational quest for wealth and social status. Renowned for their philanthropy, the Sacklers built their fortune through the pharmaceutical industry in the 1940s and ’50s, making calculated moves in medical advertising and with the Food and Drug Administration. Keefe brilliantly traces the Sacklers’ path toward developing controversial pharmaceutical products such as the anti-anxiety medicine Valium and the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin via their company, Purdue Pharma.

The 18-plus hours that it takes to listen to this mind-blowing history may seem intimidating at first, but Keefe’s masterful storytelling makes it worth every minute.

New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe’s exhaustive research for Empire of Pain makes him the natural choice to narrate his own audiobook.
NonfictionAudioSocial Science

The Sum of Us

Review by Norah Piehl

A wide-ranging examination of racial inequity in America, written by the former head of a progressive think tank, might not be the most obvious audiobook choice for your next road trip. But to write The Sum of Us (11 hours), Heather McGhee traveled across the country—from coastal Washington and rural Kentucky to an evangelical church in Chicago and a Nissan plant in Mississippi—to understand the roots of white America’s zero-sum attitude toward racial equity and how this mistaken belief system damages everyone.

McGhee, who narrates the audiobook, brings the same thoughtfulness to her reading as to her writing. Listeners can hear the despair in her voice as she describes the atrocities of white plantation owners and the devastation caused by predatory housing lenders, as well as her hopefulness when she introduces listeners to coalitions succeeding in confronting voter suppression. From health care policy and environmental justice to the ongoing legacy of segregation, McGhee places urgent topics in a new framework, supported by research and illustrated by stories of Black and white Americans from across the country.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of the print version of The Sum of Us.

Heather McGhee, who narrates the audiobook for The Sum of Us, brings the same thoughtfulness to her reading as to her writing

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