Mark Hertling Audiobooks

If I Don't Return: a memoir shelved with history, eleven hours of first-hand account

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.6/5 average

10 listener ratings

Who is Mark Hertling?

A conditional in a title is a warning. If I Don’t Return hangs its whole proposition on a sentence nobody says lightly, and it prepares a listener for a book in which the stakes were real before they were ever written down.

Our catalogue files it under biography and memoir and again under history and heritage, a pairing that usually indicates a personal account of events large enough to belong to the public record as well. Mark Hertling works at eleven hours, the length of a full life story rather than a single episode lifted out of one.

Beyond what the recording contains, we make no assertions here.

Mark Hertling in audiobooks

Mark Chaet reads it, and a memoir handed to a professional narrator rather than voiced by its author asks for a particular kind of restraint: enough warmth to carry the personal passages, enough steadiness to let the harder ones land without decoration.

The score is strong so far, though it rests on a small body of verdicts, so take it as a promising signal rather than an established reputation. Eleven hours suits the long haul, whether that means a commute stretched across a fortnight or the sort of weekend when you would rather be somewhere else in your head.

The listing sits below.