Last Girl Before Freeway: The Life, Loves, Losses and Liberation of Joan Rivers

Leslie Bennetts, read by Erin Bennett. Hachette Audio, , unabridged, 15 CDs, 16 hrs., $35 ISBN 978-1-4789-8763-5

Bennett does her best with this biography of Joan Rivers, the comedian who is credited with forcing open late-night TV and stand-up comedy clubs to women. Bennett tries to liven up the prose by imitating Rivers’s style and delivery when quoting her brash onstage humor and recounting numerous offstage anecdotes about her neuroses, sinking defeats, and soaring successes, but she mostly just plows through the book sentence by sentence. Anyone interested in Rivers’s life and career will find this audio edition worthwhile. [em]A Little, Brown hardcover. (Nov.) [/em]

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