Laurence Leamer has 6 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 1.8★ across 6 ratings. The most-rated is Mar-a-Lago.
Mar-a-Lago
Summary
Where Trump learned to rule. To know Donald J. Trump - to understand what makes the 45th president of the US tick - it is best to start in his natural habitat: Palm Beach, Florida. It is here he learned the techniques that took him all the way to the White House. Painstakingly, over decades, he has created a world in this exclusive tropical enclave and favorite haunt of billionaires where he is not just president but a king. The vehicle for his triumph is Mar-a-Lago, one of the greatest mansions ever built in the US. The inside story of how he became king of Palm Beach - and how Palm Beach continues to be his spiritual home even as president - is rollicking, troubling, and told with unrivaled access and understanding by Laurence Leamer. Never before has an American president overseen a club where access to him can be bought. In Mar-a-Lago, the listener will learn: How Donald Trump bought a property now valued by some at as much as $500 million for less than $300,000 of his own money. Why Trump was blackballed by the WASP grandees of the island and how he got his revenge. How Trump joined forces with the National Enquirer, headquartered nearby, and engineered his own divorce. How by turning Mar-a-Lago into a private club, Trump was the unlikely man to integrate Palm Beach’s restricted country club scene, and what his real motives were. What transpires behind the gates of today’s Mar-a-Lago during “the season”, when President Trump and assorted DC power players fly down each weekend. In addition to copious interviews and reporting from inside Mar-a-Lago, Laurence Leamer brings an acute and unparalleled understanding of the society of Palm Beach, where he has lived for 25 years. He has delivered an essential audiobook for understanding Donald Trump’s inner character in the place where he can most be himself.
©2019 Laurence Leamer (P)2019 Macmillan Audio
The Lynching
Summary
The New York Times best-selling author of The Kennedy Women chronicles the powerful and spellbinding true story of a brutal race-based killing in 1981 and subsequent trials that undid one of the most pernicious organizations in American history - the Ku Klux Klan. On a Friday night in March 1981, Henry Hays and James Knowles scoured the streets of Mobile in their car, hunting for a black man. The young men were members of Klavern 900 of the United Klans of America. They were seeking to retaliate after a largely black jury could not reach a verdict in a trial involving a black man accused of the murder of a white man. The two Klansmen found 19-year-old Michael Donald walking home alone. Hays and Knowles abducted him, beat him, cut his throat, and left his body hanging from a tree branch in a racially mixed residential neighborhood. Arrested, charged, and convicted, Hays was sentenced to death - the first time in more than half a century that the state of Alabama sentenced a white man to death for killing a black man. On behalf of Michael's grieving mother, legendary civil rights lawyer and cofounder of the Southern Poverty Law Center Morris Dees filed a civil suit against the members of the local Klan unit involved and the UKA, the largest Klan organization. Charging them with conspiracy, Dees put the Klan on trial, resulting in a verdict that would level a deadly blow to its organization. Based on numerous interviews and extensive archival research, The Lynching brings to life two dramatic trials, during which the Alabama Klan's motives and philosophy were exposed for the evil they represent. In addition to telling a gripping and consequential story, Laurence Leamer chronicles the KKK and its activities in the second half the 20th century and illuminates its lingering effect on race relations in America today.
©2016 Laurence Leamer (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers
Three Chords and the Truth
Summary
Never before has country music been so compellingly honest. In Three Chords and the Truth, Laurence Leamer unfolds the passionate lives of the greatest stars in country music. You'll hear from the full spectrum of country music and its process of stardom: the inner life of Garth Brooks, Wynonna's troubled career, Vince Gill's love of music, Shania Twain's struggle to stardom, and much more. Every June, in gratitude to their devoted fans, the stars of country music appear at the annual Fan Fair on the Tennessee State Fair Grounds to sign autographs and perform. Fan Fair is the setting for this ground-breaking mosaic that traces country music from its grass-roots beginning to the renaissance it is experiencing today. In the tight-knit community of Nashville, Leamer was given full access, traveling with the bands and becoming a trusted ear. Here are the sensations: LeAnn Rimes, Mindy McCready, and superstars Mary Chapin Carpenter, Brooks and Dunn, and Alan Jackson. Their stories reflect country music itself: intense, emotional, filled with joy and disappointment, passion and dismay, laughter and tears. Here, in colorful detail, are the reasons why country music is the most listened-to music in the nation. Three Chords and the Truth is a revelation, and promises that you will never look at country music the same way again.
©1997 Laurence Leamer (P)1999 HarperCollins Publishers
The Kennedy Men
Summary
In this triumphant new work already hailed as a powerful American epic, Laurence Leamer chronicles the Kennedy men and their struggle to become the most powerful family in the United States. The Kennedy Men brings to life five bold, ambitious men. The Kennedy patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., was one of the richest, strongest men in America's history. Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. was a handsome, gregarious youth who died a hero's death. John F. Kennedy picked up his brother's fallen mantle and carried it all the way to the White House. Robert F. Kennedy was an attorney general of unprecedented power. Edward M. Kennedy was a fun-loving athlete who reluctantly headed up the hard road to power. Combining powerful dramatic narrative with impeccably researched detail, The Kennedy Men illuminates their aspirations and love of family, their accomplishments and failures, their heroism and frailty, their loves and passions, and their patriotism and selfishness. Filled with startling revelations, it is a spellbinding personal history of individuals and a journey of character through time. Audio includes excerpts from President Kennedy's secret White House recordings of phone conversations and private meetings.
©2001 Laurence Leamer (P)2001 HarperCollins Publishers
Sons of Camelot
Summary
From renowned biographer and New York Times best-selling author of The Kennedy Women and The Kennedy Men comes The Sons of Camelot, the second volume in a multi-generational history bound to be considered an American epic. Almost a year before publication, The Sons of Camelot: The Fate of an American Dynasty was already being widely discussed and debated in the media. Based on exclusive interviews with many Kennedy family members, their closest friends and associates, and five years of research, The Sons of Camelot is neither tabloid fodder nor a sanitized authorized biography but a stunningly revealing, deeply truthful account with intimate new information. In this outstanding continuation of The Kennedy Men, his powerful American epic of the Kennedy family, Laurence Leamer chronicles the lives of the Kennedy sons and grandsons after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and their struggle to fulfill the family legacy. These lives make for a book of overwhelming drama full of exalted aspirations, notable achievements, and the most spectacular mishaps, excesses, and tragedies. For the most part, these Kennedy men fell far short of the great vision that Joseph P. Kennedy had for his sons and grandsons. Their lives have been a bewildering juxtaposition of the most notable achievements and the most spectacular failures. There have been needless deaths, crippling accidents, drug addiction, alcoholism, and allegations of rape. Their pratfalls, mishaps, excesses, and tragedies have been one of the most certain forms of American popular entertainment for the last four decades. Yet among them are those who have helped Americans to have better health care, to sail on clean waters, to raise the rights and lives of those with mental retardation, to assist the poorest of African nations, to enable those with disabilities to lead normal lives, and to give health care givers opportunities. In Leamer's passionate narrative, each Kennedy man becomes not the passive victim of the happenstance of birth and upbringing, but a full participant in his own fate. The good that the Kennedy sons have done is amply chronicled, and so is the bad and the tragic. John F. Kennedy Jr.’s life is a thread running through the pages of The Sons of Camelot. Some may be drawn to the book largely to listen about the definitive portrait based largely on the full cooperation of his eight closest friends. Others may come intrigued to listen about the intimate story of Senator Edward Kennedy or the stirring tale of Timmy Kennedy Shriver's rise to the head of Special Olympics International. But whatever draws the listeners, they will listen on driven by the powerful dramatic narrative with its impeccably researched details. Some of this audio is inspiring, some is shocking, but all is truthful. The Sons of Camelot is a spellbinding history of individuals and a family, a journey of character through time told by a brilliant, masterful writer.
©2004 Laurence Leamer (P)2004 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
The Price of Justice
Summary
This nonfiction legal thriller traces the 14-year struggle of two lawyers to bring the most powerful coal baron in American history to justice.
Don Blankenship, head of Massey Energy since the early 1990s, ran an industry that provides nearly half of America’s electric power. But wealth and influence weren’t enough for Blankenship and his company, as they set about destroying corporate and personal rivals, challenging the Constitution, purchasing the West Virginia judiciary, and willfully disregarding safety standards in the company’s mines - mines in which scores died unnecessarily.
As Blankenship hobnobbed with a West Virginia Supreme Court justice in France, his company polluted the drinking water of hundreds of citizens; he himself fostered baroque vendettas against anyone who dared challenge his sovereignty over coal country. Just about the only thing that stood in the way of Blankenship’s tyranny over a state and an industry was a pair of odd-couple attorneys, Dave Fawcett and Bruce Stanley, who undertook a legal quest to bring justice to this corner of America. From the backwoods courtrooms of West Virginia they pursued their case all the way to the US Supreme Court and to a dramatic decision declaring that the wealthy and powerful are not entitled to purchase their own brand of law.
The Price of Justice is a story of corporate corruption so far-reaching and devastating it could have been written a hundred years ago by Ida Tarbell or Lincoln Steffens. And as Laurence Leamer demonstrates in this captivating tale, because it’s true, it’s scarier than fiction.
©2013 Laurence Leamer (P)2013 Blackstone Audio, Inc.