Craig Pittman has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Oh, Florida!.
Oh, Florida!
Summary
Oh, Florida! To some people it's a paradise. To others it's a punch line. As Oh, Florida! shows, it's both of these, and, more important, it's a Petri dish, producing trends that end up influencing the rest of the country. Without Florida there would be no NASCAR, no Bettie Page pinups, no Glenn Beck radio rants, no USA Today, no "Stand Your Ground" - you get the idea. To outsiders Florida seems baffling. It's a state where the voters went for Barack Obama twice yet elected a Tea Party candidate as governor. Florida is touted as a carefree paradise, yet it's also known for its perils - alligators, sinkholes, pythons, hurricanes, and sharks, to name a few. It attracts 90 million visitors a year, some drawn by its impressive natural beauty, others bewitched by its man-made fantasies. Oh, Florida! explores those contradictions and shows how they fit together to make this the most interesting state. It is the first book to explore the reasons why Florida is so wild and weird - and why that's okay. Florida couldn't be Florida without that sense of the unpredictable, unexpected, and unusual lurking behind every palm tree. But there is far more to Florida than its sideshow freakiness.
©2016 Craig Pittman (P)2016 Tantor
The Scent of Scandal
Summary
After its Peruvian discovery in 2002, Phragmipedium kovachii became the rarest and most sought-after orchid in the world. Prices soared to $10,000 on the black market. Then one showed up at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, where every year more than 100,000 people visit. They come for the lush landscape on Sarasota Bay and for Selby's vast orchid collection, one of the most magnificent in the world. The collision between Selby's scientists and the smugglers of Phrag. kovachii, a rare ladyslipper orchid hailed as the most significant and beautiful new species discovered in a century, led to search warrants, a grand jury investigation, and criminal charges. It made headlines around the country, cost the gardens hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, and led to tremendous internal turmoil. Investigative journalist Craig Pittman unravels this tangled web to shine a spotlight on flaws in the international treaties governing trade in endangered wildlife-which may protect individual plants and animals in shipping but do little to halt the destruction of whole colonies in the wild. The Scent of Scandal unspools like a riveting mystery novel, stranger than anything in Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief or the film Adaptation. Pittman shows how some people can become so obsessed-with beauty, with profit, with fame-that they will ignore everything, even the law.
©2012 Craig Pittman (P)2012 Redwood Audiobooks
Cat Tale
Summary
“Craig Pittman has a remarkable talent for telling stories set in the Sunshine State that never fail to fascinate and entertain. Sure, Cat Tale has plenty of laughs and Florida weirdness, but Pittman has written a truly inspirational story about the panther’s brush with extinction, and the human beings who were determined to save the species. You won’t be able to put Cat Tale down.” (Gilbert King, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Devil in the Grove) It wasn’t so long ago when a lot of people thought the Florida panther was extinct. They were very nearly right. That the panther still exists at all is a miracle - the result of a desperate experiment that led to the most remarkable comeback in the history of the Endangered Species Act. And no one has told the whole story - until now. With novelistic detail and an eye for the absurd, Craig Pittman recounts the extraordinary story of the people who brought the panther back from the brink of extinction, the ones who nearly pushed the species over the edge, and the cats that were caught in the middle. This being Florida, there’s more than a little weirdness, too. An engrossing narrative of wry humor, sharp writing, and exhaustive reportage, Cat Tale shows what it takes to bring one species back and what unexpected costs such a decision brings.
©2020 Craig Pittman (P)2020 Harlequin Audio