Jeanne Marie Laskas has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 19 narrators. The most-rated is Concussion (Movie Tie-in Edition).
Hidden America
Summary
Five hundred feet underground, Jeanne Marie Laskas asked a coal miner named Smitty, “Do you think it’s weird that people know so little about you?” He replied, “I don’t think people know too much about the way the whole damn country works.” Hidden America intends to fix that. Like John McPhee and Susan Orlean, Laskas dives deep into her subjects and emerges with character-driven narratives that are gripping, funny, and revelatory. In Hidden America, the stories are about the people who make our lives run every day—and yet we barely think of them. Laskas spent weeks in an Ohio coal mine and on an Alaskan oil rig; in a Maine migrant labor camp, a Texas beef ranch, the air traffic control tower at New York’s LaGuardia Airport,a California landfill, an Arizona gun shop, the cab of a long-haul truck in Iowa, and the stadium of the Cincinnati Ben-Gals cheerleaders. Cheerleaders? Yes. They, too, are part of hidden America, and you will be amazed by what Laskas tells you about them: hidden no longer.
©2012 Jeanne Marie Laskas (P)2012 Penguin
To Obama
Summary
President Barack Obama received 10,000 letters a day from his constituents. This is the story of the private and profound relationship with letter writers that shaped his presidency. Their voices combine to reveal a diary of a nation. Every evening for eight years, at his request, President Obama was given 10 handpicked letters written by ordinary American citizens - the unfiltered voice of a nation - from his Office of Presidential Correspondence. He was the first president to interact daily with constituent mail and to archive it in its entirety. The letters affected not only the president and his policies but also the deeply committed people who were tasked with opening and reading the millions of pleas, rants, thank-yous, and apologies that landed in the White House mailroom. In To Obama, Jeanne Marie Laskas interviews President Obama, the letter writers themselves, and the White House staff who sifted through the powerful, moving, and incredibly intimate narrative of America during the Obama years: There is Kelli, who saw her grandfathers finally marry - legally - after thirty-five years together; Bill, a lifelong Republican whose attitude toward immigration reform was transformed when he met a boy escaping MS-13 gang leaders in El Salvador; Heba, a Syrian refugee who wants to forget the day the tanks rolled into her village; Marjorie, who grappled with disturbing feelings of racial bias lurking within her during the George Zimmerman trial; and Vicki, whose family was torn apart by those who voted for Trump and those who did not. They wrote to Obama out of gratitude and desperation, in their darkest times of need, in search of connection. They wrote with anger, fear, and respect. And together, this chorus of voices achieves a kind of beautiful harmony. To Obama is an intimate look at one man’s relationship to the American people, and at a time when empathy intersected with politics in the White House. Full list of narrators includes: Macleod Andrews, Paula Christensen, Michael Crouch, Donna Coltharp, Sheryl Cousineau, Shane Darby, Ramon De Ocampo, Robert Fass, Lauren Fortang, Kyla Garcia, Heba Hallak, Marnie Hazelton, Lacey Higley, Tom Hoefner, Hillary Huber, Bobby Ingram, Marjorie McKinney, Thomas Meehan, Bob Melton, Alex Myteberi, Adenrele Ojo, Bill Oliver, Christine Reisman, Tara Sands, Vicki Shearer, Marc Thompson, and Emily Woo Zeller.
©2018 Jeanne Marie Laskas (P)2018 Random House Audio
Briefe an Obama
Summary
Lebendige Zeitgeschichte: Briefe an und von Barack Obama
Was tut ein US-Präsident, wenn er wissen will, wie es um sein Land steht? Er liest die Briefe von Menschen, die dort leben. Während der Amtszeit von Barack Obama gingen täglich Zehntausende Briefe im Oval Office ein. Keiner blieb unbeantwortet, einigen schrieb Obama persönlich. Zu Wort kommen Obama-Anhänger ebenso wie politische Gegner, vom Schulkind bis zum Kriegsveteranen. Obama antwortet auf ihre Sorgen: die Folgen der Finanzkrise, die geplante Gesundheitsreform, soziale Gerechtigkeit, Bildungschancen und Start-up Ideen, das Schicksal der Soldaten im Auslandseinsatz und auch ganz praktische Anliegen wie Hausaufgaben.
©2019 Goldmann Verlag, München. Übersetzung von Thorsten Schmidt und Nathalie Lemmens (P)2019 Der Hörverlag
Concussion (Movie Tie-in Edition)
Summary
New York Times Best Seller The riveting, unlikely story of Dr. Bennet Omalu, the pathologist who first identified CTE in professional football players, a discovery that challenges the existence of America’s favorite sport and puts Omalu in the crosshairs of football’s most powerful corporation: the NFL Jeanne Marie Laskas first met the young forensic pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu in 2009, while reporting a story for GQ that would go on to inspire the movie Concussion. Omalu told her about a day in September 2002, when, in a dingy morgue in downtown Pittsburgh, he picked up a scalpel and made a discovery that would rattle America in ways he’d never intended. Omalu was new to America, chasing the dream, a deeply spiritual man escaping the wounds of civil war in Nigeria. The body on the slab in front of him belonged to a 50-year-old named Mike Webster, a.k.a. “Iron Mike”, a Hall of Fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers, one of the greatest ever to play the game. After retiring in 1990, Webster had suffered a dizzyingly steep decline. Toward the end of his life, he was living out of his van, tasering himself to relieve his chronic pain, and fixing his rotting teeth with Super Glue. How did this happen? Omalu asked himself. How did a young man like Mike Webster end up like this? The search for answers would change Omalu’s life forever and put him in the crosshairs of one of the most powerful corporations in America: the National Football League. What Omalu discovered in Webster’s brain - proof that Iron Mike’s mental deterioration was no accident but a disease caused by blows to the head that could affect everyone playing the game - was the one truth the NFL wanted to ignore. Taut, gripping, and gorgeously told, Concussion is the stirring story of one unlikely man’s decision to stand up to a multibillion-dollar colossus, and to tell the world the truth. Praise for Concussion “A gripping medical mystery and a dazzling portrait of the young scientist no one wanted to listen to...a fabulous, essential read.” (Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks) “The story of Dr. Bennet Omalu’s battle against the NFL is classic David and Goliath stuff, and Jeanne Marie Laskas - one of my favorite writers on earth - makes it as exciting as any great courtroom or gridiron drama. A riveting, powerful human tale - and a master class on how to tell a story.” (Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit) “Bennet Omalu forced football to reckon with head trauma. The NFL doesn’t want you to hear his story, but Jeanne Marie Laskas makes it unforgettable. This book is gripping, eye-opening, and full of heart.” (Emily Bazelon, author of Sticks and Stones)
©2015 Jeanne Marie Laskas (P)2015 Random House Audio