Audibly Speaking: Listening to History

Twitter Facebook Here is my review of the blockbuster movie by Christopher Nolan, “Oppenheimer.”  It is a tour de force for so many reasons, but gaps in Oppenheimer’s biography still remains, as I try to show in this review. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook In 1940, American democracy was gravely threatened as never before, and only the American people stood against it as a reliable line of defense.  Could we say the same today if American democracy were similarly threatened?  Here is an analysis of the famous “Arsenal of Democracy” speech, annotated by your host,  Rick Reiman Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook A Russian Count and his mysterious son make an appointment with a doctor to examine the Count for catalepsy.  Catalepsy being the doctor’s speciality, it makes sense.  But the resident patient who lives at the doctor’s office may have a lively, or is it deadly, interest in the Russian visitors, unbeknownst to the doctor. What could possibly go wrong?  Ev...

Twitter Facebook Your audio narrator, Rick Reiman, takes you from London to the English Midlands, as we journey with Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson and “the stockbroker’s clerk,” in quest of the solution to a mystery and a hideous crime.  Sherlock Holmes solves it only at the very end, and only with the aid of one of the criminals involved. See, or rather hear, if you can beat...

Twitter Facebook The odyssey is almost complete: Virtually the entire canon of Sherlock Holmes stories by Conan Doyle have now been recorded, available free to the public, by the work and from the voice of audio narrator Rick Reiman. You can also catch the classic Hound of the Baskervilles , either here on AudiblySpeaking (available at the podcast by that name on Apple Podcasts) or at Librivox.org...

Twitter Facebook You listened to the sneak preview of this Arthur Conan Doyle classic a few days ago. Now here is the complete recording to enjoy. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook Other than horse-racing, this is is the only Sherlock Holmes story featuring sports. In this case it is a missing football player, not a race horse, that confounds Holmes. Listen to this preview now. The complete audio narration will be released on June 1. Get the jump with this swift and breezy preview, now. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook Inspector Lastrade of Scotland Yard informs Holmes that someone is robbing people’s houses of their busts of Napoleon and smashing them to bits in situ or a little distance away. What can be the meaning of this? Lastrade only really becomes interested when the affair is entangled in murder–the burglar knifed an Italian on his way out of a burgled house, and the dead ma...

Twitter Facebook Peter Carey, an English Sea Captain, with the reputation of being tyrannical and hard-hearted, is given the name “Black Peter” before he is killed by an unknown visitor to his home. Sherlock Holmes must help the novice detective, Stanley Hopkins, unravel the mystery of Peter Carey’s strange ending. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sprinkles clues to enable the reader the u...

Twitter Facebook “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” was the last short story published in Conan Doyle’s first book-length collection of short stories, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892). It does not follow the usual pattern of opening with a brief Sherlock Holmes deduction that shows his brilliance, but focuses on Holmes’s tendency toward morose depression. Holmes...

Twitter Facebook Here is my “take” on one of the most famous novels of all time, “A Tale of Two Cities,” by Charles Dickens. Why is it so great? What the dickens was Dickens up to when he wrote it? And what should be our takeaway today. Tune in here, and listen, learn and, most importantly, enjoy! I have narrated the ENTIRE novel, for Librivox. Listen to the whole thing her...

Twitter Facebook In this, our second episode of “Puzzle Pieces,” in which we examine a separate mystery in American history, we look at the weaknesses of the Warren Commission’s efforts in 1964. This first investigation of the JFK assassination suffered from mistakes of its own making and errors over which it had little if no control whatsoever. Weaknesses could sometimes later b...

Twitter Facebook Your host, Rick Reiman, narrates “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb,” by Arthur Conan Doyle. This is rather one of the more graphic of the Sherlock Holmes tales, not for the faint of heart. But it contains several of Holmes’s most ingenious deductions along the way. My narrations of the Holmes stories must be nearing an end, since there are few of them...

Twitter Facebook 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...

Twitter Facebook Your host on this podcast, “Audibly Speaking,” Rick Reiman, narrates this classic by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. That master of all detectives in literature, Sherlock Holmes, has once again to deal with the imbecility of the Scotland Yard detective, Lastrade, and the amateur cluelessness of the otherwise-devoted John Watson. Holmes once again defends an accused suspect who...

Twitter Facebook 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,&#8221...

Twitter Facebook 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....

Twitter Facebook Here is my audio narration of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.” This is Doyle’s Dickensian Christmas time story, one of many in which Holmes at first believes no crime has occurred, and later introduces a note of Christian charity in his resolution of the case. It involves a Christmas goose and a mystery unlocked in the frosty air of s...

Twitter Facebook 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! Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook 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 c...

Twitter Facebook This new version of a recording only published last week features audio enhancements and sound effects that put you in the time and place of the story, more dramatically than ever. One of the most popular, and certainly most socially-conscious, of the Sherlock Holmes stories is “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” by Arthur Conan Doyle. A man disappears, a beggar enters the...

Twitter Facebook Conan Doyle’s choice for second favorite short story in his collection of 56 Sherlock Holmes tale was “The Red-Headed League.” In this brief introduction and commentary on this story, I point out its distinction as one of the most light-hearted and merry entries into the Holmes canon, a perfect “gift” for the present holiday season. Elsewhere on this...

Twitter Facebook About the Vacancy in the “Red-Headed League” In this, one of the funniest of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes must unravel a preposterous tale of a charity for red-headed men, in order to foil a bank robbery of enormous proportions. Truly, this is one of the favorites in the Sherlock Holmes canon. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook In this, the final chapter, Holmes explains to Dr. Watson how he cracked the case of the Hound of the Baskervilles, and how all the proverbial loose ends may be tied up–once and forever. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook In this, the penultimate chapter of the novel, Holmes and Watson together solve the crime and save Sir Henry Baskerville. Twitter Facebook