
The Big Money
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Narrado por:
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David Drummond
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De:
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John Dos Passos
The Big Money completes John Dos Passos's three-volume "fable of America's materialistic success and moral decline" (American Heritage) and marks the end of "one of the most ambitious projects that an American novelist has ever undertaken" (Time).
Here, we come back to America after the war and find a nation on the upswing. Industrialism booms. The stock market surges. Lindbergh takes his solo flight. Henry Ford makes automobiles. From New York to Hollywood, love affairs to business deals, it is a country taking the turns too fast, speeding toward the crash of 1929.
Ultimately, the novels of the U.S.A. trilogy - both individually and as a whole - paint a sweeping portrait of collective America and showcase the brilliance and bravery of one of its most enduring and admired writers.
©1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, renewed 1963, 1964 John Dos Passos (P)2010 TantorListeners also enjoyed...




















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The characters include an airplane engineer who becomes submerged in speculative ambition and hedonistic distractions; a labor activist journalist who was the daughter of a bitchy, greedy matriarch and a self-sacrificing doctor; and an orphan who ends up in Hollywood. Each is rooted in their own familial and regional histories and, by implication, in the culture and moved by the tidal forces of their moments. The pathos and promise of these characters is handled with unusual mix of sensitivity and detachment that puts Dos Passos in a rare artistic territory. The absence of a hero or even Hemingway-esque anti-hero actually increases the drama and educational power of the whole, as it gives us more history and fewer magnetic-to-sympathies archetypes than most novels do, while retaining the sense of a unique moral and creative vision, yet without blunt sermons.
The reader here, David Drummond, is enormously talented at creating different voices, and the technical consistency of the production is better than most Audible books. However, he may use his skills at cartoonish or outright absurd characters too often: many characters who should be more subtly rendered are transmogrified by Drummond into Hanna-Barbera cartoon animals. His late-middle aged men especially sound like primary colored cartoon bears intoning these lines, and several women sound like Bugs Bunny or some other cartoon knave trying to fool an antagonist by wearing a mop-head for a disguise--this strategy of reading *women* in breathy or squeaky falsetto "little girl" (yeesh) voices is not what Dos Passos' naturalist fiction needs. (The Blackstone audio reading of The Great Gatsby gets around this problem, by--who would've considered it--getting a woman to read the female parts of the novel). Drummond is skilled, but maybe too arch or cutesy for many scenes here. Drummond also sings all of the songs that are "sampled" in the collage-of-the-now "Newsreel" scenes, apparently in their original tunes. He has a gift for singing stable-on-key, which excuses most any other oddity, but his timbre is like a bass in a Peoria Methodist choir most times, and this too becomes odd in the singing of many 1920s snappy blues or flapper ditties. Since the newsreels are prose-poems, these may be better off being read than sung.
However, I wouldn't want to do without the Drummond version, but I am interested in what a) the Camera Eye collages would sound like if read like poems, straight, without so many quirky changes of voice; b) a straighter reading, with fewer Foghorn Leghorn intonations for men overall [his southern accents are plainly an outsider's guesses] and c) a real woman reading the female roles, or at least dropping the bass-voice-in-falsetto modes that the audio reader Drummond engages. Note he is enormously skilled and this is entertaining--I just have reservations about his chameleonic, sometimes cartoonish enthusiasms.
Great Novel; Reading skilled but Cartoonish
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a forgotten history of America roots.
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Dos Passos was a poet
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What I came away with was how concerted and sanctioned the effort to keep workers from organizing and how tone deaf was capital and the courts to the legitimate suffering of workers in mining and steel country.
Sadly, while many of these conditions have improved, the cooperation between commerce, government and the courts continues to make it difficult to organize. Though the labels have changed, the demonization of those who strive to organize continues.
The U.S.A. Trilogy and Big Money demonstrate that so many of the arguments for and against the capitalist system haven't improved over the last 80+ years since Dos Passos took up the subject. The characters are as relevant now as when the author conceived them. the 1,300+ pages may seem daunting, but the story moves and the characters interweave to show the complicated tapestry of this nation and the people who have always made it great, even if only minor characters.
The culmination of an amazing journey
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Would you listen to The Big Money again? Why?
Probably not as I have read the trilogy already before hearing it.What did you like best about this story?
Mac's youthful adventures on the road start the tale strongly, reminiscent of Twain. A great satire of door-to-door salesmen, and lighter in touch than much of Dos Passos before or after.What does David Drummond bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
The grainy, gritty American voices he dramatizes and the Camera Eye and Newsreels sections, difficult to energize, come alive in his command of American vernaculars and period 1920s slang.Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
No, I liked it. Dos Passos brought a detached presence to much of his prose, and it shows.Any additional comments?
Probably more valuable, like Sinclair Lewis, for the life of Americans after WWI as recorded, than for the actual stories. Almost a century after the events, it still speaks for the hopes of the little men and women and how they are crushed or warped or abandoned in the rush for survival and wealth.The start of something big
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The "Camera Eye" portion of the novel was harder to listen to, and in truth, it is difficult to read without some contextual information. These are largely stream-of-consciousness portions which Dos Passos used to describe his own memories. They are poetic at times--and like most poetry--benefit from being seen on the page.
The biography sections of the novel are fantastic, and worth the price of the book. His depictions of T. Veblen, I. Duncan, W. Hearst, The Wright Bros. (and more!) are fascinating studies of the larger-than-life historical figures whom we might have only heard about in positive ways in history books. A definite strength of the book.
His fictional portions, the characters he strings through these other portions of the book are engaging and interesting. A satisfying read, worth your time and money.
Excellent Historical (Experimental) Novel
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better known
Love it
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Finally!
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The Great American Novel by
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Conclusion of a great story.
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