Dispatches from the Gilded Age

A Few More Thoughts on Interesting People, Far-Flung Places, and the Joys of Southern Comforts

By: Julia Reed, Everett Bexley - editor

Narrated by: Carol Monda

Dispatches from the Gilded Age is a collection of essays by Julia Reed, one of America’s greatest chroniclers.

In the middle of the night on March eleventh, 1980, the phone rang in Julia Reed’s Georgetown dorm. It was her boss at Newsweek, where she was an intern. He told her to get in her car and drive to her alma mater, the Madeira School. Her former headmistress, Jean Harris, had just shot Dr. Herman Tarnower, The Scarsdale Diet Doctor. Julia didn’t flinch. She dressed, drove to Madeira, got the story—and her first byline—and the new American Gilded Age was off and running.

The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was a time in which the high and the low bubbled furiously together and Julia was there with her sharp eye, keen wit, and uproariously clear-eyed way of seeing the world to chronicle this truly spectacular era. Dispatches from the Gilded Age is Julia at her best as she profiles Andre Leon Talley, Sister Helen Prejean, President George and Laura Bush, Madeleine Albright, and others. Listeners will travel to Africa and Cuba with Julia, dine at Le Bernardin, savor steaks at Doe’s Eat Place, consider the fashions of the day, get the recipes for her hot cheese olives and end up with the ride of their lives through Julia’s beloved South.

With a foreword by Roy Blount, Jr. and edited by Julia’s longtime assistant, Everett Bexley.

©2022 Julia Reed (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing

Great memoir, lousy rendition

Nothing about the reader’s accent (very country) or cadence worked. This is a lovely memoir. Read, don’t listen…..

A Lot is Missing -- Literally!

I'm a longtime Julia Reed fan, but as much as I love her writing, I could never quite warm up to her voice. Unfortunately, the narrator of this book has a similarly gruff voice, and judging by Monda's other audio samples she decided to ham up what she perceives as a Southern accent. But most concerning: while this is advertised as unabridged, huge chunks are missing -- the foreword, for example. And a wedding section so reduced that we never know why the union was called off.