David Laskin has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is The Children's Blizzard.
The Children's Blizzard
Summary
January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air was calm; the next the sky exploded in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-force winds. Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped through the center of the continent. By Friday morning, January 13, some 500 people lay dead on the drifted prairie, many of them children who had perished on their way home from country schools. In a few terrifying hours, the hopes of the pioneers had been blasted by the bitter realities of their harsh environment. Recent immigrants from Germany, Norway, Denmark, and Ukraine learned that their free homestead was not a paradise but a hard, unforgiving place governed by natural forces they neither understood nor controlled.
©2004 David Laskin (P)2016 Tantor
The Family
Summary
The author of the The Children's Blizzard delivers an epic work of 20th-century history through the riveting story of one extraordinary Jewish family. With cinematic power and beauty, best-selling author David Laskin limns his own genealogy to tell the spellbinding tale of the three drastically different paths that his family members took across the span of 150 years. In the latter half of the 19th century Laskin's great-great-grandfather, a Torah scribe named Shimon Dov HaKohen, raised six children with his wife, Beyle, in a yeshiva town at the western fringe of the Russian empire. The pious couple expected their sons and daughters to carry the family tradition into future generations. But the social and political upheavals of the 20th century decreed otherwise. The HaKohen family split off into three branches. One branch emigrated to America and founded the fabulously successful Maidenform Bra Company; one branch went to Palestine as pioneers and participated in the contentious birth of the state of Israel; and the third branch remained in Europe and suffered the Holocaust. In tracing the roots of his own family, Laskin captures the epic sweep of 20th-century history. A modern-day scribe, Laskin honors the traditions, the lives, and the choices of his ancestors: revolutionaries and entrepreneurs, scholars and farmers, tycoons and truck drivers. The Family is an eloquent masterwork of true grandeur - a deeply personal, dramatic, and universal account of a people caught in a cataclysmic time in world history.
©2013 David Laskin (P)2013 Penguin Audio
The Long Way Home
Summary
The United States has always been a nation of immigrants - never more so than in 1917, when the nation entered the First World War. Of the 2.5 million soldiers who fought with U.S. armed forces in the trenches of France and Belgium, some half a million - nearly one out of every five men - were immigrants. In The Long Way Home, David Laskin, author of the prize-winning history The Children's Blizzard, tells the stories of 12 of these immigrant heroes. Starting with their childhoods in Europe, Laskin unfolds the saga of their journeys to Ellis Island, their struggles to start over in the land of opportunity, and the ordeal of their return to Europe in uniform to fight - and win - a war that had already killed tens of millions. Three of these soldiers died on the battlefield; two won the Congressional Medal of Honor; all were transformed forever by their experiences in combat. It is a transformation that continues to be felt in the pride and pain and cherished memories of immigrant families that have long since assimilated. In tracing the lives of these 12 men, Laskin tells the story of an immigrant generation - a generation that streamed into this country in unprecedented numbers around the turn of the last century, that sweated to support their families through back-breaking physical labor, and that fought loyally for their adopted country on the battlefields of Belleau Wood, Soissons, St. Mihiel, and the Argonne forest. Based on stories, letters, and diaries passed on by descendants - as well as Laskin's personal interviews with two foreign-born Doughboys who were still alive at the time he was researching the book, The Long Way Home is a reverent work of history and a deeply moving evocation of the dreams and sacrifice at the heart of the American experience.
©2010 David Laskin (P)2010 Tantor
What Sammy Knew
Summary
"Laskin's narrative captures it all - the fervor, the drugs, the sex, the politics, the magic, the tragedy of the 60s and 70s and most of all the angst of that wonderful, terrible time. A fun, transporting, and evocative read." (Daniel James Brown, New York Times best-selling author of The Boys in the Boat) A turbulent coming-of-age novel about a young man who loses his innocence and finds his soul in the ferment of New York City in 1970 On the brink of a new decade, as the radical 1960s turns to the 1970s, 17-year-old Sam Stein is about to grow up in a hurry. Raised in a cushy Long Island suburb where his parents consign him to the care of Tutu Carter, their live-in housekeeper, Sam is learning uncomfortable truths about his place and privilege in his relationship with Tutu and in the world. When he stumbles into a New Year's party and meets firebrand Kim Goodman, his life is changed forever. In short order, he falls in love and flees with her to the drug-soaked East Village of Manhattan, and gets swept up in the revolutionary political movements of the time. An aspiring writer, Sam bears witness to the seismic upheavals of the day while remaining utterly blind to a high-stakes plot that Kim and her comrades are executing right under his nose. As seemingly unrelated events click into place, what Sammy knew and what Sammy didn't know become matters of life and death - not only for himself and Kim, but for Tutu and her grandson, Leon, in Harlem, and for the radical protest movement teetering between disillusion and revolution. Compulsively listenable, peopled by unforgettable characters, crackling with wit and suspense, What Sammy Knew brilliantly evokes a chaotic, dangerously polarized, and historically important moment in America.
©2021 David Laskin (P)2021 Penguin Audio