Les Standiford has 7 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 10 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3★ across 4 ratings. The most-rated is The Man Who Invented Christmas.
The Man Who Invented Christmas
Summary
As uplifting as the tale of Scrooge itself, this is the story of how Charles Dickens revived the signal holiday of the Western world. Just before Christmas in 1843, a debt-ridden and dispirited Charles Dickens wrote a small book he hoped would keep his creditors at bay. His publisher turned it down, so Dickens used what little money he had to put out A Christmas Carol himself. He worried it might be the end of his career as a novelist. The book immediately caused a sensation. And it breathed new life into a holiday that had fallen into disfavor, undermined by lingering Puritanism and the cold modernity of the Industrial Revolution. It was a harsh and dreary age, in desperate need of spiritual renewal, ready to embrace a book that ended with blessings for one and all. With warmth, wit, and an infusion of Christmas cheer, Les Standiford whisks us back to Victorian England, its most beloved storyteller, and the birth of the Christmas we know best. The Man Who Invented Christmas is a rich and satisfying listen for Scrooges and sentimentalists alike.
©2008 Les Standiford (P)2017 Audible, Inc.
Bringing Adam Home
Summary
Before Adam Walsh, there were no faces on milk cartons, no Amber Alerts, no National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, no federal databases of crimes against children, no pedophile registry. His 1981 abduction and murder, unsolved for over a quarter of a century, forever changed America. One sunny July morning in 1981, Revé Walsh and her six-year-old son, Adam, stopped by the local Sears to pick up some new lamps. Enchanted by a video game at the store's entrance, Adam begged Revé to let him try it out while she shopped. When she returned a few minutes later, Adam was gone. The shock of Adam's murder, and of the inability of the police and the FBI to find his killer, radically altered American innocence and our ideas about childhood. Gone forever were the days when parents would allow their kids out of the house with the casual instruction "Be home by dark!" Revé and John Walsh, who would go on to create America's Most Wanted, became advocates for the transformation of law enforcement's response to and handling of such cases. Prompted by the Walshes' activism, Congress passed the Missing Children Act in 1982, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was founded in 1984. While our lives have been significantly altered by Adam Walsh's case, few of us know the whole story: how, after more than 27 years of relentless investigation, decorated Miami Beach homicide detective Joe Matthews finally identified Adam's killer. Bringing Adam Home is the definitive account of this horrifying crime.
©2011 Les Standiford and Joe Matthews (P)2011 HarperCollins Publishers
Water to the Angels
Summary
The author of Last Train to Paradise tells the story of the largest public water project ever created - William Mulholland's Los Angeles aqueduct - a story of Gilded Age ambition, hubris, greed, and one determined man whose vision shaped the future and continues to impact us today. In 1907 Irish immigrant William Mulholland conceived and built one of the greatest civil engineering feats in history: the aqueduct that carried water 223 miles from the Sierra Nevada mountains to Los Angeles - allowing this small, resource-challenged desert city to grow into a modern global metropolis. Drawing on new research, Les Standiford vividly captures the larger-than-life engineer and the breathtaking scope of his six-year, $23-million project that would transform a region, a state, and a nation at the dawn of its greatest century. With energy and colorful detail, Water to the Angels brings to life the personalities, politics, and power - including bribery, deception, force, and bicoastal financial warfare - behind this dramatic event. At a time when the importance of water is being recognized as never before - considered by many experts to be the essential resource of the twenty-first century - Water to the Angels brings into focus the vigor of a fabled era, the might of a larger-than-life individual, and the scale of a priceless construction project and sheds critical light on a past that offers insights for our future.
©2015 Les Standiford (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers
Miami Noir
Summary
Brand-new stories by: James W. Hall, Barbara Parker, John Dufresne, Paul Levine, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, Tom Corcoran, Christine Kling, George Tucker, Kevin Allen, Anthony Dale Gagliano, David Beaty, Vicki Hendricks, John Bond, Preston L. Allen, Lynne Barrett, Jeffrey Wehr. From the introduction by Les Standiford: "The truth is that Miami, though naturally lovely, is a frontier town, perched on the border between the known and the rarely before experienced. The poet Richard Hugo once said that the natural place for the writer was on the edge, and 'edge' might well be the definitive word when it comes to this city... We are not only on the edge of the continent, we are to this country what New York was in Ellis Island's heyday, what the West Coast was in the middle of the 20th century. This is where the new arrivals debark these days, and it is no mistake that during the last decade of the last century, commentators as diverse as Joan Didion, David Rieff, and T.D. Allman devoted entire volumes to Miami's role as the harbinger for America's future... But for now, the novel of crime and punishment is the perfect vehicle to convey the spirit and the timbre of this brawling place to a wider world."
©2012 Akashic Books (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Desperate Sons
Summary
A groundbreaking narrative - a historical political thriller - that explores the role of the Sons of Liberty in the American Revolution. More than 200 years ago, a group of British colonists in America decided that the conditions under which they were governed had become intolerable. Angry and frustrated that King George III and the British Parliament had ignored their lawful complaints and petitions, they decided to take action. Knowing that their deeds - often directed at individuals and property - were illegal, and punishable by imprisonment and even death, these agitators plotted and conducted their missions in secret to protect their identities as well as the identities of those who supported them. Calling themselves the Sons of Liberty, they gathered together in a radical society committed to imposing forcible change. Those determined men - including second cousins Samuel and John Adams, Paul Revere, Patrick Henry, and John Hancock - saw themselves as patriots. Yet to the Crown, and to many of the Sons' fellow colonists, the revolutionaries were terrorists who deserved death for their treason. In this gripping narrative, Les Standiford reveals how this group of intelligent, committed men, motivated by economics and political belief, began a careful campaign of interlocking events that would channel feelings of vague injustice into an armed rebellion of common cause, which would defeat an empire and give birth to a radical political experiment - a new nation known as the United States.
©2012 Les Standiford (P)2013 HarperCollins Publishers
Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, and the Rise of America's Xanadu
Summary
Looking at the island of Palm Beach today, with its unmatched mansions, tony shops, and pristine beaches, one is hard pressed to visualize the dense tangle of Palmetto brush and mangroves that it was when visionary entrepreneur and railroad tycoon Henry Flagler first arrived there in April 1893. Trusting his remarkable instincts, within less than a year he had built the Royal Poinciana Hotel, and two years later what was to become the legendary Breakers - instantly establishing the island as the preferred destination for those who could afford it. Over the next 125 years, Palm Beach has become synonymous with exclusivity - especially its most famous residence, "Mar-a-Lago." As Les Standiford relates, "the high walls of Mar-a-Lago and other manses like it were seemingly designed to contain scandal within as much as keep intruders out." With the authority and narrative prose style that has gained Standiford's work widespread acclaim, Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, and the Rise of America's Xanadu tells the history of this fabled landscape intertwined with the colorful lives of its famous protagonists.
©2019 Les Standiford (P)2019 Tantor
Meet You in Hell
Summary
Two founding fathers of American industry. One desire to dominate business at any price. “Masterful...Standiford has a way of making the 1890s resonate with a 21st century audience.” (USA Today) “The narrative is as absorbing as that of any good novel - and as difficult to put down.” (Miami Herald) The author of Last Train to Paradise tells the riveting story of Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the bloody steelworkers’ strike that transformed their fabled partnership into a furious rivalry. Set against the backdrop of the Gilded Age, Meet You in Hell captures the majesty and danger of steel manufacturing, the rough-and-tumble of the business world, and the fraught relationship between “the world’s richest man” and the ruthless coke magnate to whom he entrusted his companies. The result is an extraordinary work of popular history. Praise for Meet You in Hell “To the list of the signal relationships of American history...we can add one more: Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick...The tale is deftly set out by Les Standiford.” (Wall Street Journal) “Standiford tells the story with the skills of a novelist...a colloquial style that is mindful of William Manchester’s great The Glory and the Dream.” (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review) “A muscular, enthralling read that takes you back to a time when two titans of industry clashed in a battle of wills and egos that had seismic ramifications not only for themselves but for anyone living in the United States, then and now.” (Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River)
©2005 Les Standiford (P)2005 Books on Tape, Inc.