Ragtime (1261) Author: E. L. Doctorow		Audio book costs 2 credits.
	Book Information Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks Book Type: Audio Cassette Members Wishing: 0 Rating: ? ISBN-13: 9780786102976 - ISBN-10: 0786102977

Doctorow's novel takes place in turn-of-the-century New York, and mingles real-life and fictional characters. The plot involves the Evelyn Nesbit-Stanford White intrigue, but also includes a black musician and his girlfriend, a Jewish peddler on the Lower East Side, and a coterie of wealthy Anglo-Saxons in pursuit of wealth. Time magazine called RAGTIME one of the 10 best books of the 1970s, and it was made into a successful musical.


AudioFile
Doctorow does a fairly nice job reading his justly celebrated portrait of 1906 America. He has a sandy, pleasant, lightly accented voice and a fine sense of the dramatic--though he strangely mispronounces words, as, for instance, "lau-DEN-um" instead of "LAU-de-num." Neither has he the comic touch as a performer to match his comic touch as a writer. More importantly, this tape suffers from the same inevitable flaw of the film and musical versions. They cannot reproduce the original's principal achievement: the stunning conjuration of ragtime music. To hear that, one must read the book silently to oneself.
[Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine]