Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Private Audiobook by Frank D. Gilroy
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Private Audiobook by Frank D. Gilroy
Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.
Title: Private
Author: Frank D. Gilroy
Narrator: Jones Allen
Format: Unabridged
Length: 1 hr and 14 mins
Language: English
Release date: 11-25-13
Publisher: Audible Studios
Ratings: 1.5 of 5 out of 2 votes
Genres: History, Military
Publisher's Summary:
From Frank D. Gilroy - a prolific and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (The Subject Was Roses), screenwriter (Desparate Characters), novelist (From Noon Till Three) and, most recently, author of a best-selling Kindle Single (Lake) - comes this chilling memoir of a young soldier in World War II confronting the nightmare of death. This isn't the battle cry of a war hero; it's the confessions of a young man pressed into service and searching for answers. In Gilroy's spare yet muscular prose, this saga of a young private's journey becomes a universal story of manhood and military life, told from the ground level of combat.
Editorial Reviews:
A stream-of-consciousness dirge depicting one man's wartime experience, Frank D. Gilroy's Private finds a suitably brooding benefactor in the strains of voice actor Jones Allen. Indeed, with his deft role playing and gloomy atmospherics, Allen brings an element of cohesion to a work widely considered one of Gilroy's more inaccessible. The fictional memoir follows Gilroy's 18-year-old protagonist, recently rejected from Yale, through the conscription process to the front lines of World War II. In the tradition of All Quiet on the Western Front, Private paints a wartime landscape devoid of heroism or humor, its characters stilted and numbed by the omnipresence of death.
Members Reviews:
Still compelling after three years
There are some books that simply have to be read; a reviewer can only detract from their power and clarity.
This is such a book.
Short, snappy paragraphs.
Images fly off the page.
Poetry doesn't sell so this is called non-fiction or autobiography or memoir.
But it is poetry, blank verse if you prefer:
***
"The first meal is lamb stew.
KP's scrape the remains from each tray into garbage cans.
The task repels me.
"The ventilator purrs.
He and I, in adjoining beds, whisper far into the night.
I go to sleep.
He shakes me:
'I didn't want you to miss anything.'
"Ravaged penises parade the screen in a variety of affliction.
The impact on virgins (me) is four stars.
"Someone says it takes seven men behind the lines to sustain one man at the front.
I find the odds consoling."
***
I found the book compelling.
Robert C. Ross
April 2012
revised 2015
A Soldier Remembers, And Tells Us.
An engrossing and ultimately sad story of what war forces on young and old alike. It is Gilroy's personal story/confession/personal examination. The story is of interest by itself as that of a WW2 soldier who can tell us what it was like for him, but it is of universal value as well. It speaks of what war does to people - us - of how war and what happens changes us irrevocably: takes our innocence; shows us things which are hard to believe; astounds us with what we and our fellow man accepts/does in times of such mind-numbing stress - what we ignore, what we take part in; what we are left with when it is over.
'Private' is told in progressive scenes, like in a movie, with snippets of conversation, thoughts of the moment, intimate confessions which would probably never be spoken aloud - for who in person listening would know how to respond? - yet those confessions can be admitted on the safety of the page. There was one scene, of a recovered thin and weary American prisoner of war seeking chocolate from an unresponsive group of American soldiers, which I found myself shocked at.
View all episodes
By DOWNLOAD FULL AUDIOBOOKS FOR FREE ON HOTAUDIOBOOK.COMPlease open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.
Title: Private
Author: Frank D. Gilroy
Narrator: Jones Allen
Format: Unabridged
Length: 1 hr and 14 mins
Language: English
Release date: 11-25-13
Publisher: Audible Studios
Ratings: 1.5 of 5 out of 2 votes
Genres: History, Military
Publisher's Summary:
From Frank D. Gilroy - a prolific and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (The Subject Was Roses), screenwriter (Desparate Characters), novelist (From Noon Till Three) and, most recently, author of a best-selling Kindle Single (Lake) - comes this chilling memoir of a young soldier in World War II confronting the nightmare of death. This isn't the battle cry of a war hero; it's the confessions of a young man pressed into service and searching for answers. In Gilroy's spare yet muscular prose, this saga of a young private's journey becomes a universal story of manhood and military life, told from the ground level of combat.
Editorial Reviews:
A stream-of-consciousness dirge depicting one man's wartime experience, Frank D. Gilroy's Private finds a suitably brooding benefactor in the strains of voice actor Jones Allen. Indeed, with his deft role playing and gloomy atmospherics, Allen brings an element of cohesion to a work widely considered one of Gilroy's more inaccessible. The fictional memoir follows Gilroy's 18-year-old protagonist, recently rejected from Yale, through the conscription process to the front lines of World War II. In the tradition of All Quiet on the Western Front, Private paints a wartime landscape devoid of heroism or humor, its characters stilted and numbed by the omnipresence of death.
Members Reviews:
Still compelling after three years
There are some books that simply have to be read; a reviewer can only detract from their power and clarity.
This is such a book.
Short, snappy paragraphs.
Images fly off the page.
Poetry doesn't sell so this is called non-fiction or autobiography or memoir.
But it is poetry, blank verse if you prefer:
***
"The first meal is lamb stew.
KP's scrape the remains from each tray into garbage cans.
The task repels me.
"The ventilator purrs.
He and I, in adjoining beds, whisper far into the night.
I go to sleep.
He shakes me:
'I didn't want you to miss anything.'
"Ravaged penises parade the screen in a variety of affliction.
The impact on virgins (me) is four stars.
"Someone says it takes seven men behind the lines to sustain one man at the front.
I find the odds consoling."
***
I found the book compelling.
Robert C. Ross
April 2012
revised 2015
A Soldier Remembers, And Tells Us.
An engrossing and ultimately sad story of what war forces on young and old alike. It is Gilroy's personal story/confession/personal examination. The story is of interest by itself as that of a WW2 soldier who can tell us what it was like for him, but it is of universal value as well. It speaks of what war does to people - us - of how war and what happens changes us irrevocably: takes our innocence; shows us things which are hard to believe; astounds us with what we and our fellow man accepts/does in times of such mind-numbing stress - what we ignore, what we take part in; what we are left with when it is over.
'Private' is told in progressive scenes, like in a movie, with snippets of conversation, thoughts of the moment, intimate confessions which would probably never be spoken aloud - for who in person listening would know how to respond? - yet those confessions can be admitted on the safety of the page. There was one scene, of a recovered thin and weary American prisoner of war seeking chocolate from an unresponsive group of American soldiers, which I found myself shocked at.