David Sheff has 6 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 11 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.9★ across 98 ratings. The most-rated is Beautiful Boy.
Beautiful Boy
Summary
David Sheff's story is a first: a teenager's addiction from the parent's point of view, a real-time chronicle of the shocking descent into substance abuse and the gradual emergence into hope. Before meth, Sheff's son, Nic, was a varsity athlete, honor student, and award-winning journalist. After meth, he was a trembling wraith who stole money from his eight-year-old brother and lived on the streets. With haunting candor, Sheff traces the first warning signs, the attempts at rehabilitation, and, at last, the way past addiction. He shows us that, whatever an addict's fate, the rest of the family must care for one another, too, lest they become addicted to addiction.
©2007 David Sheff (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Buddhist on Death Row
Summary
The number one New York Times best-selling author of Beautiful Boy explores the transformation of Jarvis Jay Masters, who became one of America’s most respected Buddhist practitioners during his two decades in solitary confinement in San Quentin. Jarvis Jay Masters’ early life was a horror story whose outline we know too well. Born in Long Beach, California, his house was filled with crack, alcohol, physical abuse, and men who paid his mother for sex. He and his siblings were split up and sent to foster care when he was six, causing him to progress quickly to juvenile detention, car theft, armed robbery, and ultimately San Quentin. While in prison, he was set up for the murder of a prison guard, a crime that landed him on death row, where he’s been since 1986. At the time of his murder trial, he was also in solitary confinement and spent 22 years in a five-foot-by-11-foot cell. This is where The Buddhist on Death Row takes off. With uncanny clarity, David Sheff describes Masters’ path to enlightenment - from being sullen and violent to discovering how easy and how hard it is to just sit and breathe, how those minutes spawn heightened perception and deepened compassion, the right way to remember one’s pain, and much more. Sheff does a brilliant job of portraying Masters’ gradual but profound transformation from a man who was once dedicated to hurting others to instead stopping brawls in the prison yard, talking prisoners out of suicide, and counseling high school kids by mail. Along the way, Masters becomes drawn to the principles that Buddhism espouses - compassion, sacrifice, and living in the moment - and he gains the attention of prominent Buddhist practitioners, including Pema Chodron, the most popular Buddhist cleric after the Dalai Lama. And while he is still in San Quentin and still on death row, he is a renowned Buddhist thinker who shows us how to ease our everyday suffering, relish the light that surrounds us, and endure the tragedies that befall us all.
©2020 David Sheff (P)2020 Simon & Schuster Audio
Clean
Summary
Addiction is a preventable, treatable disease, not a moral failing. As with other illnesses, the approaches most likely to work are based on science - not on faith, tradition, contrition, or wishful thinking.
These facts are the foundation of Clean, a myth-shattering look at drug abuse by the author of Beautiful Boy. Based on the latest research in psychology, neuroscience, and medicine, Clean is a leap beyond the traditional approaches to prevention and treatment of addiction and the mental illnesses that usually accompany it. The existing treatment system, including Twelve-Step programs and rehabs, has helped some, but it has failed to help many more, and David Sheff explains why. He spent time with scores of scientists, doctors, counselors, and addicts and their families to learn how addiction works and what can effectively treat it. Clean offers clear, cogent counsel for parents and others who want to prevent drug problems and for addicts and their loved ones no matter what stage of the illness they’re in. But it is also a book for all of us - a powerful rethinking of the greatest public-health challenge of our time.
©2013 David Sheff (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
High
Summary
Just say know! With drug education for children more important than ever, this nonfiction book draws on the experiences of the New York Times best-selling father-and-son team of David and Nic Sheff to provide all the information teens and 'tweens need to know about drugs, alcohol, and addiction. From David Sheff, author of Beautiful Boy, and Nic Sheff, author of Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines, comes the ultimate resource for learning about the realities of drugs and alcohol for middle-grade listeners. This book tells it as it is, with testimonials from peers who have been there and families who have lived through the addiction of a loved one, along with the cold, hard facts about what drugs and alcohol do to our bodies. From how to navigate peer pressure to outlets for stress to the potential consequences for experimenting, Nic and David Sheff lay out the facts so that middle grade readers can educate themselves. Number-one Amazon.com best seller in Children's Substance Abuse Books. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2019 David Sheff and Nic Sheff (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Tom Stoppard
Summary
One of our most brilliant biographers takes on one of our greatest living playwrights, drawing on a wealth of new materials and on many conversations with him Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary genres: theater, radio, film, TV, journalism, and fiction. His most acclaimed creations - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Shakespeare in Love - remain as fresh and moving as when they entranced their first audiences. Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard escaped the Nazis with his mother and spent his early years in Singapore and India before arriving in England at age eight. Skipping university, he embarked on a brilliant career, becoming close friends over the years with an astonishing array of writers, actors, directors, musicians, and political figures, from Peter O'Toole, Harold Pinter, and Stephen Spielberg to Mick Jagger and Václav Havel. Having long described himself as a "bounced Czech", Stoppard only learned late in life of his mother's Jewish family and of the relatives he lost to the Holocaust. Lee's absorbing biography seamlessly weaves Stoppard's life and work together into a vivid, insightful, and always riveting portrait of a remarkable man.
©2021 Hermione Lee (P)2021 Random House Audio
Alone Together
Summary
Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort During the Time of COVID-19 is a collection of essays, poems, and interviews to serve as a lifeline for negotiating how to connect and thrive during this stressful time of isolation as well as a historical perspective that will remain relevant for years to come. Ms. Haupt rallied a diverse roster of more than 90 authors to contribute their work to Alone Together, free of charge, including Kwame Alexander, Jenna Blum, Andre Dubus III, Jamie Ford, Nikki Giovanni, Pam Houston, Jean Kwok, Major Jackson, Caroline Leavitt, Ada Limón, Dani Shapiro, David Sheff, Garth Stein, Luis Alberto Urrea, Steve Yarbrough, and Lidia Yuknavitch. Alone Together is divided into five sections: What Now?, Grieve, Comfort, Connect, and Don't Stop. The overarching theme is how this age of isolation and uncertainty holds the possibility of changing us as individuals and a society. Narrated by a full cast, including Edoardo Ballerini, January LaVoy, Dion Graham, Julia Whelan, Adenrele Ojo, Emily Woo Zeller, Thérèse Plummer, Ron Butler, Adjoa Andoh, Christian Barillas, Almarie Guerra, Cynthia Farrell, and Dawn Harvey.
©2020 Podium Audio (P)2020 Podium Audio