Evan Thomas has 6 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 3 ratings. The most-rated is Being Nixon.
Being Nixon
Summary
The landmark New York Times best-selling biography of Richard M. Nixon, a political savant whose gaping character flaws would drive him from the presidency and forever taint his legacy. “A biography of eloquence and breadth... No single volume about Nixon’s long and interesting life could be so comprehensive.” (Chicago Tribune) One of Time’s Top 10 Nonfiction Books of the Year In this revelatory biography, Evan Thomas delivers a radical, unique portrait of America’s 37th president, Richard Nixon, a contradictory figure who was both determinedly optimistic and tragically flawed. One of the principal architects of the modern Republican Party and its “silent majority” of disaffected whites and conservative ex-Dixiecrats, Nixon was also deemed a liberal in some quarters for his efforts to desegregate Southern schools, create the Environmental Protection Agency, and end the draft. The son of devout Quakers, Richard Nixon (not unlike his rival John F. Kennedy) grew up in the shadow of an older, favored brother and thrived on conflict and opposition. Through high school and college, in the navy and in politics, Nixon was constantly leading crusades and fighting off enemies real and imagined. He possessed the plainspoken eloquence to reduce American television audiences to tears with his career-saving “Checkers” speech; meanwhile, Nixon’s darker half hatched schemes designed to take down his political foes, earning him the notorious nickname “Tricky Dick.” Drawing on a wide range of historical accounts, Thomas’ biography reveals the contradictions of a leader whose vision and foresight led him to achieve détente with the Soviet Union and reestablish relations with communist China, but whose underhanded political tactics tainted his reputation long before the Watergate scandal. A deeply insightful character study as well as a brilliant political biography, Being Nixon offers a surprising look at a man capable of great bravery and extraordinary deviousness - a balanced portrait of a president too often reduced to caricature. Praise for Being Nixon “Terrifically engaging...a fair, insightful and highly entertaining portrait.” (The Wall Street Journal) “Thomas has a fine eye for the telling quote and the funny vignette, and his style is eminently readable.” (The New York Times Book Review)
©2015 Evan Thomas (P)2015 Random House Audio
John Paul Jones
Summary
John Paul Jones, at sea and in the heat of battle, was the great American hero of the Age of Sail. He was to history what Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey and C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower are to fiction. Ruthless, indomitable, clever; he vowed to sail, as he put it, "in harm's way." John Paul Jones is more than a great sea story. Jones is a character for the ages. John Adams called him the "most ambitious and intriguing officer in the American Navy." The renewed interest in the Founding Fathers reminds us of the great men who made this country, but John Paul Jones teaches us that it took fighters as well as thinkers, men driven by dreams of personal glory as well as high-minded principle to break free of the past and start a new world. Jones' spirit was classically American. Evan Thomas brings his skills as a biographer to this complex, protean figure whose life and rise are both thrilling as a tale of dauntless courage and revealing about the birth of a nation.
©2003 Evan Thomas (P)2003 Tantor Media, Inc.
Ike's Bluff
Summary
Upon assuming the presidency in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower came to be seen by many as a doddering lightweight. Yet behind the bland smile and apparent simplemindedness was a brilliant, intellectual tactician. As Evan Thomas reveals in his provocative examination of Ike's White House years, Eisenhower was a master of calculated duplicity. As with his bridge and poker games he was eventually forced to stop playing after leaving too many fellow army officers insolvent, Ike could be patient and ruthless in the con, and generous and expedient in his partnerships. Facing the Soviet Union, China, and his own generals, some of whom believed a first strike was the only means of survival, Eisenhower would make his boldest and riskiest bet yet, one of such enormity that there could be but two outcomes: the survival of the world, or its end. This is the story of how he won.
©2012 Evan Thomas (P)2012 Hachette Audio
Sea of Thunder
Summary
Based on oral histories, diaries, correspondence, and post-war testimony from both American and Japanese participants, Evan Thomas provides an almost cinematically suspenseful account not only of the great culminating sea battle and the Pacific naval war, but of the contrasting cultures pitted against each other. The book focuses on four naval commanders, two American, two Japanese, whose lives collided at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944 - a clash involving more ships (almost 300), more men (nearly 200,000) and covering a larger area (more than 100 thousand square miles, roughly the size of the British Isles) than any naval battle in recorded history. Sea of Thunder is the story of the titanic and grotesque cultural misunderstanding between people who consistently misjudged and underestimated each other.
©2006 Evan Thomas (P)2006 Recorded Books, LLC.
Robert Kennedy
Summary
Traditionally, Robert F. Kennedy has been viewed as either the "Good Bobby", who saw wrong and tried to right it, or the "Bad Bobby" of countless conspiracy theories. Evan Thomas' achievement is to realize RFK as a human being, to bring to life an extraordinarily complex man who was at once kind and cruel, devious and honest, fearful and brave. The portrait that emerges is unvarnished but sympathetic, packed with new details about Kennedy's early life and his behind-the-scenes machinations. In a clear and fast-paced narrative, Thomas cuts through the mythology to reveal a character who, though he died young and just as he was reaching for ultimate power, remains one of the century's most fascinating men.
©2000 Evan Thomas (P)2006 Blackstone Audio Inc.
The War Lovers
Summary
On February 15, 1898, the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor. Although there was no evidence that the Spanish were responsible, yellow newspapers such as William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal whipped Americans into a frenzy by claiming that Spain's "secret infernal machine" had destroyed the battleship. Soon after, the blandly handsome and easily influenced President McKinley declared war, sending troops not only to Cuba but also to the Philippines, Spain's sprawling colony on the other side of the world. As Evan Thomas reveals in his rip-roaring history of those times, the hunger for war had begun years earlier. Depressed by the "closing" of the Western frontier and embracing theories of social Darwinism, a group of warmongers that included a young Teddy Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge agitated loudly and incessantly that the United States exert its influence across the seas. These hawks would transform American foreign policy and, when Teddy ascended to the presidency, commence with a devastating war without reason, concocted within the White House - a bloody conflict that would come at tremendous cost. Thrillingly written and brilliantly researched, The War Lovers is the story of six men at the center of a transforming event in U.S. history: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, McKinley, William James, and Thomas Reed, and confirms once more that Evan Thomas is a popular historian of the first rank.
©2010 Evan Thomas (P)2010 Hachette Audio