This story follows a true crime murder case from New York in 1906. Clyde Griffiths is the impoverished young man from a family of street preachers who dreams of bettering his station in life. However, his dream ends in murder and he is subsequently arrested and put on trial-putting the media in a frenzy. "Demonstrate[s] Gardner's subtle expertise as a narrator. A master performer, he elevates this naturalistic novel, an account of the strivings and disappointments of Clyde Griffiths, a flawed but fascinating protagonist…[and] its precisely chiseled anti-capitalist details of a stratified collar factory with its nepotistic organization and its evocation of prison life-rigid, punitive, and unyielding-which will make even the most hard-hearted listener yearn for restorative justice. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award." "Dreiser's massive 1925 masterpiece, a thrillingly detailed social panorama onto which a vivid, sobering tale of ambition and murder and their consequences is painstakingly grafted…It's America's Crime and Punishment." "Scene by scene, he's a great storyteller, like Dickens before him."
