Ken Burns has 8 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 10 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 170 ratings. The most-rated is The Vietnam War.
The Vietnam War
Summary
From the award-winning historian and filmmakers of The Civil War, Baseball, The War, The Roosevelts, and others: a vivid, uniquely powerful history of the conflict that tore America apart - the companion volume to the major multipart PBS film to be aired in September 2017. More than 40 years after it ended, the Vietnam War continues to haunt our country. We still argue over why we were there, whether we could have won, and who was right and wrong in their response to the conflict. When the war divided the country, it created deep political fault lines that continue to divide us today. Now, continuing in the tradition of their critically acclaimed collaborations, the authors draw on dozens and dozens of interviews in America and Vietnam to give us the perspectives of people involved at all levels of the war: US and Vietnamese soldiers and their families, high-level officials in America and Vietnam, antiwar protestors, POWs, and many more. The book plunges us into the chaos and intensity of combat, even as it explains the rationale that got us into Vietnam and kept us there for so many years. Rather than taking sides, the book seeks to understand why the war happened the way it did and to clarify its complicated legacy. Beautifully written, this is a tour de force that is certain to launch a new national conversation.
©2017 Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (P)2017 Random House Audio
Baseball
Summary
The companion to Ken Burns’s magnificent PBS television series—updated and expanded to coincide with the broadcast of a new, two-part "Tenth Inning" directed with Lynn Novick. The authors of the acclaimed and best-selling The Civil War, Jazz, and The War turn to another uniquely American phenomenon: baseball. Geoffrey C. Ward's and Ken Burns’s moving and fascinating history of the game goes beyond stolen bases, double plays, and home runs to demonstrate how baseball has been influenced by, and has in turn influenced, American life. The audiobook covers every milestone of the game, from the rules drawn up in 1845 by Alexander Cartwright to the American League’s introduction of the designated hitter in 1973; from the 1924 Negro World Series to Jack Roosevelt Robinson’s major-league debut; from the first curve ball in 1867 to Nolan Ryan’s seventh and last no-hitter in 1991. This new edition brings the authors’ monumental work into the 21st century: steroids, home-run records, the rise of Latino players, the long-awaited Red Sox World Series victory, and so much more. Baseball is an audiobook that speaks to all Americans.
©2010 Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns (P)2010 Random House Audio
Country Music
Summary
The rich and colorful story of America's most popular music and the singers and songwriters who captivated, entertained, and consoled listeners throughout the 20th century - based on the upcoming eight-part film series to air on PBS in September 2019 This deeply researched and hugely entertaining history begins where country music itself emerged: the American South, where people sang to themselves and to their families at home and in church, and where they danced to fiddle tunes on Saturday nights. With the birth of radio in the 1920s, the songs moved from small towns, mountain hollers, and the wide-open West to become the music of an entire nation - a diverse range of sounds and styles from honky tonk to gospel to bluegrass to rockabilly, leading up through the decades to the music's massive commercial success today. But above all, Country Music is the story of the musicians. Here is Hank Williams' tragic honky tonk life, Dolly Parton rising to fame from a dirt-poor childhood, and Loretta Lynn turning her experiences into songs that spoke to women everywhere. Here, too, are interviews with the genre's biggest stars, including the likes of Merle Haggard to Garth Brooks to Rosanne Cash. Rife with endlessly fascinating anecdotes, the stories in this sweeping yet intimate history will captivate longtime country fans and introduce new listeners to an extraordinary body of music that lies at the very center of the American experience.
©2019 Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns (P)2019 Random House Audio
Jazz
Summary
Here are the stories of the extraordinary men and women who made the music: Louis Armstrong, the fatherless waif whose unrivaled genius helped turn jazz into a soloist's art and influenced every singer, every instrumentalist who came after him; Duke Ellington, the pampered son of middle-class parents who turned a whole orchestra into his personal instrument, wrote nearly two thousand pieces for it, and captured more of American life than any other composer. Bix Beiderbecke, the doomed cornet prodigy who showed white musicians that they too could make an important contribution to the music; Benny Goodman, the immigrants' son who learned the clarinet to help feed his family, but who grew up to teach a whole country how to dance; Charlie Parker, who helped lead a musical revolution, only to destroy himself at thirty-four; and Miles Davis, whose search for fresh sounds made him the most influential jazz musician of his generation, and then led him to abandon jazz altogether. But Jazz is more than a mere biography. The history of the music echoes the history of twentieth-century America. Jazz provided the background for the giddy era that F. Scott Fitzgerald called the Jazz Age. The irresistible pulse of big-band swing lifted the spirits and boosted American morale during the Great Depression and World War II. The virtuosic, demanding style called bebop mirrored the stepped-up pace and dislocation that came with peace. During the Cold War era, jazz served as a propaganda weapon - and forged links with the burgeoning counterculture. The story of jazz encompasses the story of American courtship and show business; the epic growth of cities, and the struggle for civil rights and simple justice that continues into the new millennium.
©2000 by The Jazz Film Project, Inc. (P)2000 Random House, Inc. Random House AudioBooks, A Division of Random House, Inc.
Lewis & Clark
Summary
The companion audiobook to Ken Burns's PBS documentary film. In the spring of 1804, at the behest of President Thomas Jefferson, a party of explorers called the Corps of Discovery crossed the Mississippi River and started up the Missouri, heading west into the newly acquired Louisiana Territory. The expedition, led by two remarkable and utterly different commanders - the brilliant but troubled Meriwether Lewis and his trustworthy, gregarious friend William Clark - was to be the United States' first exploration into unknown spaces. The unlikely crew came from every corner of the young nation: soldiers from New Hampshire and Pennsylvania and Kentucky, French Canadian boatmen, several sons of white fathers and Indian mothers, a slave named York, and eventually a Shoshone Indian woman, Sacagawea, who brought along her infant son. Together they would cross the continent, searching for the fabled Northwest Passage that had been the great dream of explorers since the time of Columbus. Along the way they would face incredible hardship, disappointment, and danger; record in their journals hundreds of animals and plants previously unknown to science; encounter a dizzying diversity of Indian cultures; and, most of all, share in one of America's most enduring adventures. Their story may have passed into national mythology, but never before has their experience been rendered as vividly, in words and pictures, as in this marvelous homage by Dayton Duncan. Plentiful excerpts from the journals kept by the two captains and four enlisted men convey the raw emotions, turbulent spirits, and constant surprises of the explorers, who each day confronted the unknown with fresh eyes. An elegant preface by Ken Burns, as well as contributions from Stephen E. Ambrose, William Least Heat-Moon, and Erica Funkhouser, enlarge upon important threads in Duncan's narrative, demonstrating the continued potency of events that took place almost two centuries ago. And a wealth of paintings, photographs, journal sketches, maps, and film images from the PBS documentary lends this historic, nation-redefining milestone a vibrancy and immediacy to which no American will be immune.
©2012 Dayton Duncan (P)2012 Random House
The War
Summary
Here is the audio companion to the magnificent seven-part PBS series. The individuals featured in this audiobook are not historians or scholars. They are ordinary men and women who experienced - and helped to win - the most devastating war in history, in which between 50 and 60 million lives were lost. Focusing on the citizens of four towns - Luverne, Minnesota; Sacramento, California; Waterbury, Connecticut; and Mobile, Alabama - The War follows more than 40 people from 1941 to 1945. Woven largely from their memories, the compelling, unflinching narrative unfolds month by bloody month, with the outcome always in doubt. The iconic events are here, but we also move among prisoners of war, defense workers, and schoolchildren, and families who struggled simply to stay together. An intimate, profoundly affecting chronicle of the war that shaped our world, The War captures the American experience of World War II through the words and deeds, thoughts and feelings of those who made history on the battlefields and on the home front.
©2007 American Lives Film Project LLC (P)2007 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.
Mark Twain
Summary
Ernest Hemingway called Huckleberry Finn "the best book we've ever had. There was nothing before. There's been nothing as good since." Critical opinion of this book hasn't dimmed since Hemingway uttered these words. Mark Twain was the most famous American of his day, and remains in ours the most universally revered American writer. From Ken Burns, Geoffrey Ward, and Dayton Duncan (authors of Jazz, Lewis and Clark, Baseball and The Civil War) comes this audio companion to the PBS film of the same name. It pulls together material from a variety of published and unpublished sources. It examines not merely Twain's justly famous novels, stories, travelogues, and lectures, but also his diaries and letters. The authors take us from Samuel Langhorne Clemens' boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri, to his time as a riverboat worker - when he adopted the sobriquet "Mark Twain." Twain believed that "The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven." This paradox fueled his hilarity and lay at the core of this irreverent yet profoundly serious author. With essays by Russell Banks, Jocelyn Chadwick, Ron Powers, and John Boyer, as well as an interview with actor and frequent Twain portrayer Hal Holbrook, this audio provides a full and rich portrayal of the first figure of American letters.Listen to a conversation with Ken Burns.
©2001 The American Lives Film Project (P)2001 Random House Inc., Random House Audio, a Division of Random House Inc.
The National Parks
Summary
Audie Award, Nonfiction, 2010 The companion volume to the 12-hour PBS series from the acclaimed filmmaker behind The Civil War, Baseball, and The War. America’s national parks spring from an idea as radical as the Declaration of Independence: that the nation’s most magnificent and sacred places should be preserved, not for royalty or the rich, but for everyone. In this evocative and lavishly illustrated narrative, Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan delve into the history of the park idea, from the first sighting by white men in 1851 of the valley that would become Yosemite and the creation of the world’s first national park at Yellowstone in 1872, through the most recent additions to a system that now encompasses nearly 400 sites and 84 million acres. The authors recount the adventures, mythmaking, and intense political battles behind the evolution of the park system, and the enduring ideals that fostered its growth. They capture the importance and splendors of the individual parks: from Haleakala in Hawaii to Acadia in Maine, from Denali in Alaska to the Everglades in Florida, from Glacier in Montana to Big Bend in Texas. And they introduce us to a diverse cast of compelling characters - both unsung heroes and famous figures such as John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and Ansel Adams - who have been transformed by these special places and committed themselves to saving them from destruction so that the rest of us could be transformed as well. The National Parks is a glorious celebration of an essential expression of American democracy.
©2009 Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns (P)2009 Random House