Books of the Times – Audibly Speaking: A Site of History and Memory

And now for something completely different…

Here is an audio introduction to the English literary critic, A.C. Bradley, and his legendary lectures on the high tragedies of William Shakespeare: the plays of Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear.  Bradley has been mute too long, buried in the mass of materials not properly advertised or displayed to the public in Project Gutenberg. If to live in the light is to to live in the light of Shakespeare, to hear the light of truth is to listen to A.C. Bradley.  These obscure podcast episodes of mine will hardly rescue either the Bard or Bradley. But if you enjoy this episode please let me know with a brief note to [email protected] and I will record more of the great lectures on Shakespeare of A.C. Bradley.  Signed, your narrator, Rick Reiman.

In this year of 2025, we celebrate the centennial of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.  I have recorded the first three chapters of the heartbreaking novel, and the latest chapter is out today!  I have links to all three chapters below should you wish to listen to them in order.  Perhaps you, too, admire the green light on the far horizon.  Watch out, because it may be the chimera of the “American Dream,” an apparition best left in quotation marks as airy as the cocktails on Gatsby’s West Egg veranda.

Chapter One of The Great Gatsby

Chapter Two of The Great Gatsby

Chapter Three of The Great Gatsby (Below!)

Continuing the series of JFK assassination episodes in this, the 60th year since the assassination, we look not at the thinking of the CIA, FBI, Warren Commission, Mob, Cuba, Russia or any of the other institutions that have been falsely imagined as being behind it, but inside the mind of the man who actually did it, and did it alone: Lee Harvey Oswald.  It may not be the most popular theory, but facts don’t have to be popular. They only need to be true.  This is an essay by myself, Rick Reiman, and narrated by myself, in response to the excellent insights of Burt Griffin, who wrote the new book, JFK, Oswald, Ruby: Politics, Prejudice and Truth. A staff member on the Warren Commission (1963-1964). Griffin challenges historians to take the assassination seriously as history, something that is simple to understand once contextualized in history.  Frankly, historians have not recognized their responsibility in this regard.  Historians, when are you going to do your jobs, and take this intersection of the Cold War and cvil rights, which is what the assassination was, seriously as history?  Until they do, this will continue to be a blot, a stain and a disgrace for the historical profession, as it has been for sixty years.

Rick Reiman reviews “King Richard,” Michael Dobbs’s just-published micro-history of a selected phase of the Watergate scandal, now approaching its Fiftieth anniversary.