To End All Wars

Just how much a successful audiobook depends on the match of voice to text is demonstrated by Arthur Morey's excellent rendering of Hochschild's history of individual Britons' response to WWI. Initially, Morey may seem too mellow a voice for a military history, but Hochschild looks at loyalists as well as opponents to the war, and Morey wisely lets their words and the author's speak for themselves. Even those who know the history of The Great War will feel the anger and heartache build here. Best known as the author of KING LEOPOLD'S GHOSTS, the most damning of all books on the evils of European imperialism in Africa, Hochschild is an impressive historian and prose stylist. He requires, and gets in Morey, a narrator who measures feeling with restraint and can articulate every word clearly at the author's own pace. Hochschild focuses on individuals, but this is a book that encompasses the whole history of the war, its origins, and its awful toil. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine