In Brief
- Voice: Reed Smith is the sole credited reader, and across a reading this long the casting question is stamina rather than range
- Big ideas: Missionary vocation, inherited wealth given away, early death, missionary biography
- Atmosphere: Earnest, devotional, quietly sad
- Worth it?: Durable Christian biography whose audio listing is still wearing the paperwork of its print edition.
Two fields on this listing point somewhere other than an audiobook: a page count of 207, and a release date of March 1, 1988. Both belong to a print edition of a book that was circulating long before anybody thought to record it. What you are actually buying is ten hours and forty-five minutes read by Reed Smith, and very little on the page acknowledges that, including the five written responses, all of which grade a book to be read rather than a recording to be heard.
Ordinary Phrases Carry Weight at Conversational Pace
William Borden died at twenty-five, in Egypt, in 1913, of cerebral meningitis, having graduated from Yale, attended Princeton Seminary and trained for work among the Kansu people of China. He never reached the mission field. That is the entire shape of the story, and the book has stayed in circulation for decades because the shape is what people respond to: a young man from a wealthy family who spent his short adult life preparing for a place he never arrived at, and whose death made the newspapers instead.
One response from 2016 puts the appeal plainly. A homeschooling household favorite, tracked down secondhand years afterward, dirty enough that it needed washing before it could go back on a shelf. Such is the life this title has had. It circulates inside Christian home education, gets loaned, gets replaced, and arrives at an audio edition carrying decades of that quiet history rather than any recent publishing push behind it.
Approaching it now means approaching a devotional biography about a 1913 death, which puts two layers of distance between a listener and the material, and the copy softens neither. It talks about the heathen world, and about the widows, orphans and cripples of the Chicago back streets. Those phrases were ordinary in the book's own moment. Spoken at conversational pace they carry a weight that a reader skimming a page can slide past without registering.
Smith Must Mark Each Handoff With Voice Alone
Letters carry the book. A 2014 entry singles exactly that out: correspondence to friends and family quoted at length, plus letters written back, adding up to what that response calls a good insight into life in the last century and into the seriousness of young men at Yale in days of old. For an audio edition it is the structural fact that matters most, because quoted correspondence is among the hardest material to read aloud convincingly.
Nearly eleven hours runs longer than the plot strictly requires, and the letters explain the difference. A biography assembled from primary documents slows down every time it hands the floor to a document, and Reed Smith has to mark each of those handoffs with voice alone, since audio has no italics. Handled cleanly, the book turns into something close to a two-hander between a biographer and a dead correspondent. Handled flatly, it turns into a wall.
Kenneth Taylor supplies the foreword, and the sentence lifted from it sits at the very top of the description: this book changed the course of my life, spiritually speaking. Publishers lead with that kind of testimony when the subject is not famous, and Borden is not famous outside a fairly specific readership. If the name means nothing to you, the foreword is the publisher naming who vouches for the thing.
A Husband's Name Stands In for the Author
Accuracy inside the response column is worth checking against the copy. The single four-star describes Borden as the heir to the Borden milk products fortune and calls him a missionary to Muslims in China, while the publisher's own text places his training toward the Kansu people and his death in Egypt. The milk connection appears nowhere in that text, and nothing on the page settles it. Take the biography from the book rather than from the column.
Print paperwork is the second issue. A paperback page count sits on an audio record, the release date reads March 1, 1988, the publisher line arrives with an invisible formatting character wedged in front of it, and the price field has been mangled into three zeros. The description also spells foreword as forward. None of it touches the content, but together it says the audio edition was bolted onto an old print record rather than built fresh.
Then the byline. The author is credited as Mrs. Howard Taylor, which was standard practice in its period and is a real obstacle now, because a listener who wants to know who wrote this is handed a husband's name instead. Worth knowing before you go searching. The score reads 4.6 across 77 grades while the five readable entries average higher than that, so seventy-two verdicts you cannot see are pulling the number down.
A Strange, Quiet Way to Spend a Week
Nothing here operates as neutral history. The book is devotional from its first line, and the column agrees: a 2024 entry describes being convicted by it and writes about sacrifice in capital letters. That is the experience on offer, honestly labeled. Listeners who want the missionary movement examined rather than admired should go to a historian, because this one is written from inside the tradition and never pretends otherwise.
For Christian listeners, and especially for homeschooling families already treating it as a text, the recording solves a practical problem. A book that gets read aloud anyway now has an edition that reads itself, at a length that fits comfortably into two weeks of shared evenings. Young adults weighing vocational decisions are the obvious audience, since the book was built to sit inside precisely that conversation.
Everyone else can still take the letters, which are the most durable element and the least hortatory. Set expectations around period vocabulary, a byline that conceals its author, and a listing assembled from paperwork older than the recording sitting on it. The best part of eleven hours with a man who ran out of time at twenty-five makes for a strange, quiet way to spend a week, and the book does not pretend to be anything livelier.
