Claire Bloom - director has 9 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 24 ratings. The most-rated is The Captive Mind.
The Captive Mind
Summary
The best-known prose work by the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature examines the moral and intellectual conflicts faced by men and women living under totalitarianism of the left or right. Written in the early 1950s, when Eastern Europe was in the grip of Stalinism and many Western intellectuals placed their hopes in the new order of the East, this classic work reveals in fascinating detail the often beguiling allure of totalitarian rule to people of all political beliefs and its frightening effects on the minds of those who embrace it.
©2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc. (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Seared
Summary
A reluctant prince After more than 300 years on Earth, Prince Ralan has finally returned to Moranaia. But with his wicked brother Kien on the loose, the homecoming is a short one. A dire vision sends Ralan back to Earth to save his soulbonded from his dark brother. The problem? Ralan's Sight grows more erratic by the moment even as danger closes in on every side. A woman far from home Ever since a failed alliance ruined her family, Cora has lived on Earth. Far from discontent, her days are spent running her clothing shop and helping newly arrived fae adapt to mundane life. Then a golden-eyed prince strides into her store, trouble stalking his heels. Big trouble. A fate foretold Ralan's Sight might be broken, but one thing remains clear - stopping Kien will mean Ralan's death. So how could the Gods choose now to introduce his soulbonded? As Ralan and Cora search for Kien, their relationship grows stronger. Unfortunately, so does the threat. Now Ralan must choose between his own life and the fate of all their worlds.
©2018 Bethany Adams (P)2018 Skyboat Media, Inc.
Sundered
Summary
A life in shambles Lyr might be a powerful elven lord in charge of thousands, but his personal life is a disaster. Just the month before, a daughter he'd never known existed arrived from Earth, giving him news of his lost love's death. Since then he has been betrayed, captured, and almost murdered. And though his enemy was defeated, Lyr's wounds never seem to heal. He certainly doesn't need more conflict. A perilous journey Amid the glittering perfection of Alfheim, Meli is a dismal failure. Haunted by visions of people and places she's never seen, she struggles to find her place. So when her king orders her to lead an expedition to another world, Meli is caught between shock and terror. How can she navigate the veil between worlds with no magic of her own? But with Alfheim threatened by strange, dark energy, she has no choice. A threat that spans worlds The last thing Lyr expects is the arrival of the Ljósálfar, the reclusive Norse elves of Alfheim. More surprising? One among them, Meli, is a possible soulbounded, a link he'd believed lost with his previous love. But wounded and besieged with problems on every side, he can't let himself be distracted. Poisoned energy is flooding into the closely connected realms of the fae, causing sickness, and Lyr must rush to find the source of the threat. Only Moranaia remains untouched - leading Lyr to suspect one of his own people might be to blame.
©2016 Bethany Adams (P)2017 Skyboat Media, Inc.
The Last Jew of Treblinka
Summary
Quickly becoming a cornerstone of Holocaust historiography, this is a devastatingly stark memoir from one of the lone survivors of Treblinka. Why do some live while so many others perish? Tiny children, old men, beautiful girls - in the gas chambers of Treblinka, all are equal. The Nazis kept the fires of Treblinka burning night and day, a central cog in the wheel of the Final Solution. In the tradition of Elie Wiesel's Night and Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved, Rajchman provides the only survivors' record of Treblinka. Originally written in Yiddish in 1945 without hope or agenda other than to bear witness, Rajchman's account shows that sometimes the bravest and most painful act of all is to remember.
©2009 Chil Rajchman (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The House of Government
Summary
On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction. The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman's Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine's gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin's purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children's loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union. Completed in 1931, The House of Government, later known as The House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building's residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some 800 of them were evicted from the house and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.
©2017 Yuri Slezkine (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Dancing Bears
Summary
For hundreds of years, Bulgarian Gypsies trained bears to dance, welcoming them into their families and taking them on the road to perform. In the early 2000s, with the fall of Communism, they were forced to release the bears into a wildlife refuge. But even today, whenever the bears see a human, they still get up on their hind legs to dance. In the tradition of Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski, award-winning Polish journalist, Witold Szablowski uncovers remarkable stories of people throughout Eastern Europe and in Cuba who, like Bulgaria’s dancing bears, are now free but who seem nostalgic for the time when they were not. His on-the-ground accounts provide a fascinating portrait of social and economic upheaval and a lesson in the challenges of freedom and the seductions of authoritarian rule.
©2018 Witold Szablowski, Antonia Lloyd-Jones (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Kingdom
Summary
A sweeping fictional account of the early Christians, whose unlikely beliefs conquered the world. Gripped by the tale of a Messiah whose blood we drink and body we eat, the genre-defying author Emmanuel Carrère revisits the story of the early Church in his latest work. With an idiosyncratic and at times iconoclastic take on the charms and foibles of the Church fathers, Carrère ferries listeners through his "doors" into the biblical narrative. Once inside, he follows the ragtag group of early Christians through the tumultuous days of the faith's founding. Shouldering biblical scholarship like a camcorder, Carrère recreates the climate of the New Testament with the acumen of a seasoned storyteller, intertwining his own reckoning of the central tenets of the faith with the lives of the first Christians. Carrère puts himself in the shoes of Saint Paul and above all Saint Luke, charting Luke's encounter with the marginal Jewish sect that eventually became Christianity and retracing his investigation of its founder, an obscure religious freak who died under notorious circumstances. Boldly blending scholarship with speculation, memoir with journalistic muckraking, Carrère sets out on a headlong chase through the latter part of the Bible, drawing out protagonists who believed they were caught up in the most important events of their time. An expansive and clever meditation on belief, The Kingdom chronicles the advent of a religion and the ongoing quest to find a place within it.
©2017 Emmanuel Carrère and John Lambert (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
A Murder on Long Island: The Last Advocate
Summary
Real estate developer Harold Longworth is facing life in prison for the murder of his wife in their Sagaponack, Long Island home. Just hired by the defense attorneys, former NYPD detective Giuseppe "Joey" Mancuso realizes that for a whole year before the trial, the attorneys have bungled the investigation. Was it on purpose? Are the attorneys covering something up? Joey and his half-brother, Father Dominic O'Brian, have 10 days before the end of the trial to find the real murderer. The day of the murder, a year ago, Suffolk PD homicide detectives found Mr. Longworth, alone in the home, sitting by his wife's body after he called 911. Her blood was on his clothes. His bloody prints were on the murder weapon. Gunshot residue on his arms and hands. The prosecution is on the last days of their presentation. They have proven opportunity on the part of Longworth. As for motivation, they are about to show that Mrs. Longworth, the victim, was asking for a divorce and settlement on a $75 million estate. Further, they uncovered that Mr. Harold Longworth suspected his wife of having an affair. As Mancuso and Father O'Brian begin working the case from their center of operations, Captain O'Brian's Pub and Cigar Bar at the corner of Beaver and Hanover Streets in the Financial District of Manhattan, they find that there could be a lot more to this murder. The Longworth Foundation, a $100 million nonprofit organization, is under FBI probe and IRS audit for potential tax schemes, money laundering, and colluding with foreign governments. Mancuso, in his admitted Sherlock Holmes style, likes to look beyond the obvious. To observe things others looked at, but did not see. Can Mancuso and O'Brian save Mr. Longworth from a life sentence? Will they be able to unravel a possible fraudulent tax scheme being concocted by the foundation executives? Or, is it simply a case where the husband did it out of jealousy?
©2017 Skyboat Media, Inc. (P)2017 Skyboat Media, Inc.
I, Judas
Summary
From a number-one New York Times best-selling author comes the story of Judas Iscariot - and the stunning betrayal that changed the course of history. One of the great dramas of the biblical era is brought to thrilling, new life in this epic novel told from the unique perspective of Judas Iscariot himself. This is the story of Judas the myth, condemned by Dante to the most terrifying circle of Hell; Judas the man, the son of wealth and power who fought to suppress the lusts of the flesh and the sin of pride to become one of the 12 original disciples of Jesus Christ; and Judas the apostle, victim of a diabolical lie, history's arch-traitor, who sold his Lord for 30 pieces of silver, and sealed his fate with a kiss. From Judas' years as the young rebel of an affluent family undone by his own idealism to his victimization by Pontius Pilate to the crucifixion and Christ's resurrection, I, Judas is one of the most powerful and revelatory works of religious fiction ever published.
©2019 Taylor Caldwell and Jess Stern (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.