Oct 25, 2018

[Books] The Rainbow Comes and Goes Audible Review

Apart from my monthly audiobook credit, Audible often challenges me to consider other titles when they launch their member-only sales and so I tend to experiment with different titles. My initial focus was biographies but I've since expanded to some fictional works, especially full cast productions.

The Rainbow Comes and Goes fell more under the biography side of things as I figured it would be interesting to learn more about Anderson Cooper's family. What I was not anticipating was how this book would not turn out to be a great audiobook experience despite the strength of the text.

The key challenge here is Anderson Cooper's career as a reporter and news anchor and how familiar we've become with his way of reading out the news and hearing that in this book wasn't the best thing.

Synopsis: The Rainbow Comes and Goes is part biography, part correspondence between a mother and son as written by Anderson Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt. This review covers the Audible audiobook edition.

After a bit of a health scare Anderson Cooper and his mother Gloria Vanderbilt decide to start a running email conversation where they really start talking to one another and share more about their lives. Over the course of these messages, his mother shares more about her life and her side of the story for some now-infamous events that she was involved in.

Before the fame that came with her line of fashion, perfumes and household goods, Gloria Vanderbilt was more remembered because of her being the subject of a high-profile custody battle between her mother Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt and her paternal aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. That's a weird legacy to carry around plus the burden of a massive trust fund that naturally fascinated the public. And this book peels away a lot of the layers that have obscured what can be considered to be the truth behind many things.

What I Liked: Gloria Vanderbilt is a fascinating woman and to hear her story in her own words does make for quite an interesting reading experience, so to speak. She doesn't exactly go into full detail every step of the way but on the whole the tone of her writings is very open and honest and she covers quite a lot of her personal history. This is, after all, a conversation between her and her son and if you can't be honest then, then when else, right?

And there's more to her life than her colorful childhood and the book steadily progresses through her life to cover more and more of it. We learn of her relationships and other such ventures and how she came to her eventual career. She's more than just some spoiled heiress who waited for her trust fund to come along. She made her own life and the money was just incidental to all that.

What Could Have Been Better: As this was based on a series of letters and emails, there's a bit of a back and forth between her and her son Anderson Cooper. But as an audiobook, it ends up sounding like a somewhat awkward conversation that doesn't feel like it's really between a mother and her son. And that sort of hurts the overall listening experience.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that Anderson goes through the text in the same news reading voice that we have become so accustomed to hearing on CNN. That works well enough for the news and it's a steady, respectable cadence. But for an exchange between a mother son it's oddly cold and seems to lack a bit of authenticity. There are questions thrown about back and forth but the way things were read doesn't make it all sound organic. It all just sounds odd and I might have been better reading this as an actual book instead of an audiobook experience.

TL;DR: The Rainbow Comes and Goes is an honest and interesting sharing between a mother and son with the bonus that the mother's life was a very interesting and eventful one. But seriously, don't go for the audiobook and just get the actual text to avoid the awkward experience that makes it feel like these two don't have a great relationship, which they probably do by now. And thus he audiobook gets a fair 3 revelations about Gloria's turbulent childhood out of a possible 5.

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