J. Jansen
- 2
- reviews
- 1
- helpful vote
- 29
- ratings
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New York 2140
- By: Kim Stanley Robinson
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, Robin Miles, Peter Ganim, and others
- Length: 22 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 2,218
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,993
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Story4 out of 5 stars 1,992
New York Times best-selling author Kim Stanley Robinson returns with a bold and brilliant vision of New York City in the next century. As the sea levels rose, every street became a canal. Every skyscraper an island. For the residents of one apartment building in Madison Square, however, New York in the year 2140 is far from a drowned city. There is the market trader, who finds opportunities where others find trouble. There is the detective, whose work will never disappear—along with the lawyers, of course.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Complex, believable, nuanced, riveting
- By Lois on 04-07-17
Fun premise, disappointing execution
Reviewed: 07-24-23
A work of eco fiction with a fun premise that weaves a story with many layers. I enjoyed the detailed accounts of a future NYC with submarine zones, intertidal residences, sky villages, 300 ft tall super scrapers, and more imagined future tech. That part of the world building was creative, engaging, and quite believable as far as sci-fi goes. The narrative jumps that weave in past history also accentuated the strongest part of the book, the love letter to New York.
However, the way the author chose to explore the themes of finance, capitalism , socialism, urban development, political economy, and economics was extremely tedious. Most of these themes are explored via dialogue or internal monologues that read closer to a screed than a nuanced and revealing unfolding. I love that the author attempted to work with these themes, but I found myself bored with what ended up sounding like a tired political stump speech. Dozens of plot points and lengthy dialogues basically just repeat some version of:
* Capitalism is evil, collective action is good.
* Finance is bad, coops and public servants are good.
Boring. Then the plot builds up to a large political action where the government nationalizes banks, institutes wealth taxes (up to 91%), funds free health care and college, boost wages, and enacts a long laundry list of progressive legislation and everyone lives happily ever after. What a waste! If you want to tackle such interesting policy issues with narrative fiction, why not spend some more time exploring the nuance and tradeoffs that reveal the complexities that are part of human nature and complex human societies. Instead we get a simplified fairy tale.
I would recommend avoiding the audio version produced by Hachette Audio. I listened to that version on Audible and am probably negatively biased by the strange production choices. The audio version has nine voice actors who each are responsible for a different character's point of view. I liked all of the voice performers who really made the characters come alive with very different voices and performances. However, as the main characters all start to overlap in each other's story a production choice was made to let the chapter reader voice all characters (instead of the voice actor for that character). This is extremely distracting as the characters' voices and performances change almost each chapter in the last half of the book.
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Sunny's Nights
- Lost and Found at the Bar at the End of the World
- By: Tim Sultan
- Narrated by: Robert Malloch
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 30
Imagine that Alice had walked into a bar instead of falling down the rabbit hole. In the tradition of J. R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar and the classic reportage of Joseph Mitchell, here is an indelible portrait of what is quite possibly the greatest bar in the world—and the mercurial, magnificent man behind it. The first time he saw Sunny’s Bar, in 1995, Tim Sultan was lost, thirsty for a drink, and intrigued by the single bar sign among the forlorn warehouses lining the Brooklyn waterfront.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Visiting an Era
- By Carolyn on 03-01-16
- Sunny's Nights
- Lost and Found at the Bar at the End of the World
- By: Tim Sultan
- Narrated by: Robert Malloch
Fantastic narration, expertly told tales
Reviewed: 07-31-16
the narrator, renewed Sunny personally, does a fantastic job with Tim Sultan's tales of Red Hook throughout the 20th century.
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1 person found this helpful