DO SOMETHING Coming of Age Amid the Glitter and Doom of '70s New York

Novelist Richard Powers calls narrator Edoardo Ballerini the very best, and many listeners would agree. Ballerini's range is impressive, but he excels with the difficult, the literary, the opaque, and the autobiographical. He brings particular ease and purposefulness to this memoir by NEW YORK TIMES style critic Guy Trebay portraying his early years in Manhattan in the 1970s. Wonderfully rendered and richly detailed, this is a story many narrators would be tempted to overplay. Ballerini's great skill is that the more polished and subtle the narrative, the more natural and at ease he sounds. Effortlessly, it seems, Ballerini captures the essence of Trebay's tone and sense of perishability in a narrative that seems loosely connected yet passes to the ear in an unbroken current. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine [Published: NOVEMBER 2024]