Maria Riva has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is You Were There Before My Eyes.
You Were There Before My Eyes
Summary
A woman leaves her Italian village and enters a new world as an immigrant in Detroit in this sweeping novel by a New York Times best-selling author. In a small village in Italy at the turn of the 20th century, Jane chafes at stifling routine and tradition. So when an opportunity presents itself to immigrate to America, her hunger for escape compels her to leave everything behind. Far away, in Henry Ford's factories in Michigan, a new kind of life is taking shape, and it offers gleaming promise for Jane and her young husband. Determined to survive, and even thrive, she will find herself seeking fulfillment and building a family while navigating not just a new language and country, but a world poised on the edge of economic and social revolution, with the Great War looming on the horizon. From the chaos of Ellis Island to the melting pot of a Midwestern industrial city, You Were There Before My Eyes is rich with colorful characters and vivid period details, an authentic portrait of the immigrant experience that poignantly captures the ever-evolving nature of the American dream, and "[A] dazzling historical saga of love, adventure, war, hardship, and discovery" (Allan Levine).
©2017 Maria Riva (P)2020 Tantor
Marlene Dietrich
Summary
With intimate detail, author Maria Riva reveals the rich life of her mother, Marlene Dietrich, the charismatic star of stage and screen whose career spanned much of the 20th century. Opening with Dietrich's childhood in Schöneberg, Riva's biography introduces us to an energetic, disciplined, and ambitious young actress whose own mother equated show business with a world of vagabonds and thieves. Dietrich would quickly rise to stardom on the Berlin stage in the 1920s with her sharp wit and bisexual mystique, and wearing the top hat and tails that revolutionized our concept of beauty and femininity. She comes alive in these pages in all her incarnations: muse, collaborator, bona fide movie star, box-office poison, lover, wife, and mother. During World War II, Dietrich would stand up to the Nazis and galvanize American troops, eventually earning the Congressional Medal of Freedom. There were her artistic relationships with Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel, Morocco, Shanghai Express), Colette, Erich Maria Remarque, Noël Coward, and Cole Porter, as well as her heady romances. And in her final years, Dietrich would make herself visibly invisible, devoting herself to the immortality of her legend.
©2017 Maria Riva (P)2020 Tantor