“I’ve never wanted to be an audiophile of literature, certainly not of Hemingway. His sentences were in my head, my ear. I didn’t need people reading him to me, not even Donald Sutherland or Stacy Keach or William Hurt or Brian Dennehy. Or so I thought.

Take that wavery masterpiece, ‘Big Two-Hearted River,’… As read here, the story is wonderful. Keach’s voice takes on a spooky darkness that is somehow simultaneously light and hopeful…The word ‘war’ never appears. But now with Keach, his voice sometimes in a whisper, I seemed to be hearing that word, or the implications of that word, in almost every line. ‘It could not all be burned,’ the author wrote. ‘He felt all the old feeling.’ And, yes, ‘It was all back of him.’ And, yes, ‘The river was there.’ Such an elegant, elemental Hemingway sentence.”

–Paul Henrickson, NY TIMES, May 17, 2013