F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, was both a product of, and epitaph for, the Jazz Age of the Roaring ’20s. Journey to West and East Egg again, as your host Rick Reiman narrates one of the great American novels of the twentieth (or any other) century.
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The Georgia Indictment against Donald J. Trump may be the first indictment against Trump to go to trial. It also may be the only trial of Trump to be televised, and televised live. Unabridged audio narrations of the indictment are numerous online, but to my knowledge, this unabridged recording by your host, Rick Reiman, which still clocks in at nearly 75 minutes, is the only one that limits the attention to the charges against Trump and the narrative of the acts of which he is accused in the indictment. For those with limited time, this may be the ideal narration to which to listen. Of course, all listeners are encouraged to read or listen (or both) to the complete indictment, widely available online through a simple Google search.
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This is your host on “Audibly Speaking,” Rick Reiman. Today, March 31, 2023, is the 60th anniversary of the taking of the famous backyard photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald, holding the rifle he would later use to kill President Kennedy and the pistol he would use to murder Officer J.D. Tippit forty-five minutes after that awful act in American history. This is a classic case of how historians untangle facts from allegations, and how the facts in the JFK assassination are imagined away and replaced by the will-of-the-wisp of “What-Ifs.” Let this year, the 60th anniversary of that dark day be the year we start listening to most historians, rather then the inhabitants of “Dallas in Wonderland,” with their absurd conspiracy theories. Thanks for listening–and please share this with others if you like it!
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In this unabridged audio narration, I read my article for The Journal of Perpetrator Research (2019) Vol: 2 Issue: 2. There were only three actual “shots” in Dealey Plaza on that dark day, of course. They were the bullets fired by Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building. But photographs are also metaphoric “shots,” and three were captured in the same seconds that the rifle blasts rang out, by the Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder with his 35-millimeter Bell and Howell Zoomatic camera. Three frames from this 26-second film represented the key photographs in this case, and they were to reverberate throughout American culture for decades to come. They were at once reflections, projections and evidence, as this article reveals.
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This is my audio narration of my book review of Paul R. Gregory’s The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee, a newly published account of Gregory’s brush with Lee and Marina Oswald in 1962, a year before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Listeners can read the full review, of which this is an unabridged recording, at http://www.washingtondecoded.com.
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Join Holmes and Watson, and a sound show of horses hooves, Watson typing, and a crackling fire on a stormy night in Baker Street, as Holmes and Watson embark on one of their creepiest mysteries of the Sherlock Holmes canon!
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In 2006, Prof. Aleida Assmann, the premier authority in the field of Cultural Memory, explained how memory works at different levels and in different formats. Here is a summary of her 2006 article, “Reframing Memory,” which dissects the different kinds of memory and how it is a special view to argue, as some academics have, that there is, and can be, no such thing as collective memory. This is my summary of her argument. Any errors in “translation” are mine alone. –Richard Reiman
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Capital and Labor
This is a reading of Chapter 16, on Capital and Labor, of The American Yawp, a free Open Educational Resource U.S. History textbook. This reading is by Dr. Richard Reiman, Ph.D., History.
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Reconstruction
This is a reading of Chapter 15, on Reconstruction, of The American Yawp, a free Open Educational Resource U.S. History textbook. This reading is by Dr. Richard Reiman, Ph.D., History.
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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n this brief essay we review your textbook’s list of causes of the French Revolution.
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Arthur Conan Doyle intended this story to be his final official entry in the Holmes canon. He later added “The Adventure of the Second Stain” (also in this narrated collection) to serve that distinctive role. Holmes and Watson spar over the latter’s dramatic depiction of Holmes’s detective methods and Holmes uncharacteristically gets on Watson’s nerves. Holmes’s brilliance is nevertheless on full display in this entry. Watson should have remembered that Sherlock Holmes is a package deal; if you want the genius, you must accept the eccentricity. As the final entry in my series of narrations of the Holmes stories (for awhile) this one naturally is the most skillfully done. Since one learns to improve with each effort, how could it not be? On a personal note, as I now know, the first half of the recording was made on the eve of my first positive test for Covid-19. The second half of the recording was made while emerging from the ordeal. I could not allow Covid to stop me; after all, “the game was afoot,” in the words of Sherlock Holmes!
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Read by Rick Reiman. In this story, one of Doyle’s favorites, Sherlock Holmes must avert a European war by solving a mystery absolutely befuddling to all but this greatest “consulting detective” of all time. At once full of high tension and broad comedy, the autistic Holmes must navigate through the tangling murky politics of sexual relations, diplomacy and, yes, international politics itself.
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Read for you by Rick Reiman. This excellent addition to the Sherlock Holmes canon contains many of the aspects that delight his readers. It is set in a macabre and romantic setting, the moors of Cornwall; it has Holmes pitting himself against the common feeling that there must be something supernatural afoot. These traces of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” are not all that recommend it. People go from normal to mad in a matter of minutes. The villain of the story wastes Holmes’s time with an attempted diversion that the detective must dispose of through his amazing talent for ratiocination. The story is slyly autobiographical as well, because Doyle has Holmes attempt a possibly-fatal experiment that Doyle himself had practiced at the risk of his own life. In this story, Holmes and Watson come as close as they ever do to calling each other by their first names. This was a conceit that the Granada TV series (1984-1994) employed when it had Holmes cry out to Watson, “John!”
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READ FOR YOU BY RICK REIMAN. In this story by Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes must represent a client being blackmailed by the notorious criminal, Charles Augustus Milverton. Once again, Holmes uses the practices of the criminal himself, something he seems all too eager to employ in more than one of the stories in the Sherlock Holmes canon. Watson joins in the effort and the result is an action story piled upon a mystery tale.
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Here I share some insights into what I have learned about the hidden Sherlock Holmes, from reading and narrating the Conan Doyle stories. To do this I use one of his most popular stories by way of illustration, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” You can listen to my narration of this classic short story elsewhere on AudiblySpeaking.com.
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Narrations by Rick Reiman on Audibly Speaking of:
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Once again, as in “A Study in Scarlett,” Arthur Conan Doyle reaches across the pond for material for a Sherlock Holmes story. In this case, it is a short story, about the long reach of the past and the legacy of the Ku Klux Klan in America. Three generations of Englishman face death from the grandfather’s involvement in the racist activities of the Klan. This is one of the few stories where, although Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery, he is late, much too late, in doing so.
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Madame Defarge discovers that her prey, Lucy, Little Lucy and Dr. Manette, have fled her clutches and are on the country roads of France, fleeing for England, What she does not know is that her most important enemy, Charles Darnay, is with them, having exchanged places in Laforce prison with Sidney Carton. Standing between Madame DeFarge and death for the fleeing prey is Miss Pross. Who will win the battle to the death? Listen to find out.
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Dickens’s most atypical novel grows still darker, even for him, in this terrifying chapter from A Tale of Two Cities. Lucy travels into the chaotic streets of revolutionary Paris to try to catch a glimpse of her beloved Charles in the Bastille. She runs into a wood-sawyer, enraptured by La Guillotine and bent on revenge against aristocrats. Will Charles survive the night, or the chapter? It is announced herein that his trial begins tomorrow.
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