Kent Russell has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is In the Land of Good Living.
In the Land of Good Living
Summary
A wickedly smart, funny, and irresistibly off-kilter account of an improbable thousand-mile journey on foot into the heart of modern Florida, the state that Russell calls "America Concentrate". In the summer of 2016, Kent Russell - broke, at loose ends, hungry for adventure - set off to walk across Florida. Mythic, superficial, soaked in contradictions, maligned by cultural elites, segregated from the South, and literally vanishing into the sea, Florida (or, as he calls it: "America Concentrate") seemed to Russell to embody America's divided soul. The journey, with two friends intent on filming the ensuing mayhem, quickly reduces the trio to filthy drifters pushing a shopping cart of camera equipment. They get waylaid by a concerned citizen bearing a rifle; buy cocaine from an ex-wrestler; visit a spiritual medium. The narrative overflows with historical detail about how modern Florida came into being after World War II, and how it came to be a petri dish for life in a suddenly, increasingly diverse new land of minority-majority cities and of unrivaled ethnic and religious variety. Russell has taken it all in with his incomparably focused lens and delivered an audiobook that is both an inspired travelogue and a profound rumination on the nation's soul - and his own. It is an audiobook that is wildly vivid, encyclopedic, erudite, and ferociously irreverent - a deeply ambivalent love letter to his sprawling, brazenly varied home state.
©2020 Kent Russell (P)2020 Random House Audio
I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son
Summary
Locked in battle with both his adult appetites and his most private childhood demons, Kent Russell hungers for immersive experience and revelation, and his essays take us to society's ragged edges, the junctures between savagery and civilization. He pitches a tent at an annual four-day music festival in Illinois, among the misunderstood, thick-as-thieves fans who self-identify as Juggalos. He treks to the end of the continent to visit a legendary hockey enforcer, the granddaddy of all tough guys, to see how he's preparing for his last foe: obsolescence. He spends a long weekend getting drunk with a self-immunizer who is willing to prove that he has conditioned his body to withstand the bites of the most venomous snakes. And in the piercing interstitial meditations between these essays, Russell introduces us to his own raging and inimitable forebears. Blistering and deeply personal, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son records Russell's quest to understand, through his journalistic subjects, his own appetites and urges, his persistent alienation, and, above all, his knotty, volatile, vital relationship with his father.
©2015 Kent Russell (P)2015 Tantor