Michael Paterniti has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Love and Other Ways of Dying.
Love and Other Ways of Dying
Summary
In this moving, lyrical, and ultimately uplifting collection of essays, Michael Paterniti turns a keen eye on the full range of human experience, introducing us to an unforgettable cast of everyday people. Michael Paterniti is one of the most original and empathic storytellers working today. His writing has been described as "humane, devastating, and beautiful" by Elizabeth Gilbert, "spellbinding" by Anthony Doerr, and "expansive and joyful" by George Saunders. In the 17 wide-ranging essays collected for the first time in Love and Other Ways of Dying, he brings his full literary powers to bear, pondering happiness and grief, memory and the redemptive power of human connection. In the remote Ukranian countryside, Paterniti picks apples (and faces mortality) with a real-life giant; in Nanjing, China, he confronts a distraught jumper on a suicide bridge; in Dodge City, Kansas, he takes up residence at a roadside hotel and sees, firsthand, the ways in which the racial divide turns neighbor against neighbor. In each instance Paterniti illuminates the full spectrum of human experience, introducing us to unforgettable everyday people and bygone legends, exploring the big ideas and emotions that move us. Paterniti reenacts François Mitterrand's last meal in a rustic dining room in France and drives across America with Albert Einstein's brain in the trunk of his rental car, floating in a Tupperware container. He delves with heartbreaking detail into the aftermath of a plane crash off the coast of Nova Scotia, an earthquake in Haiti, and a tsunami in Japan - and, in searing swirls of language, unearths the complicated, hidden truths these moments of extremity teach us about our ability to endure and to love. Michael Paterniti has spent the past two decades grappling with some of our most powerful subjects and incomprehensible events, taking an unflinching point of view that seeks to edify as it resists easy answers.
©2015 Michael Paterniti (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
The Telling Room
Summary
Audie Award Finalist, Non-Fiction, 2014In the picturesque village of Guzmán, Spain, in a cave dug into a hillside on the edge of town, an ancient door leads to a cramped limestone chamber known as "the telling room". Containing nothing but a wooden table and two benches, this is where villagers have gathered for centuries to share their stories and secrets - usually accompanied by copious amounts of wine. It was here, in the summer of 2000, that Michael Paterniti found himself listening to a larger-than-life Spanish cheesemaker named Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras as he spun an odd and compelling tale about a piece of cheese. An unusual piece of cheese. Made from an old family recipe, Ambrosio’s cheese was reputed to be among the finest in the world, and was said to hold mystical qualities. Eating it, some claimed, conjured long-lost memories. But then, Ambrosio said, things had gone horribly wrong.... By the time the two men exited the telling room that evening, Paterniti was hooked. Soon he was fully embroiled in village life, relocating his young family to Guzmán in order to chase the truth about this cheese and explore the fairy tale-like place where the villagers conversed with farm animals, lived by an ancient Castilian code of honor, and made their wine and food by hand, from the grapes growing on a nearby hill and the flocks of sheep floating over the Meseta. What Paterniti ultimately discovers there in the highlands of Castile is nothing like the idyllic slow-food fable he first imagined. Instead, he’s sucked into the heart of an unfolding mystery, a blood feud that includes accusations of betrayal and theft, death threats, and a murder plot. As the village begins to spill its long-held secrets, Paterniti finds himself implicated in the very story he is writing. Equal parts mystery and memoir, travelogue and history, The Telling Room is an astonishing work of literary nonfiction by one of our most accomplished storytellers. A moving exploration of happiness, friendship, and betrayal, The Telling Room introduces us to Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras, an unforgettable real-life literary hero, while also holding a mirror up to the world, fully alive to the power of stories that define and sustain us.
©2013 Michael Paterniti (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Driving Mr. Albert
Summary
This extraordinary travel book tells the true story of how in 1997 writer Michael Paterniti agreed to take a road trip from New Jersey to California, reuniting the preserved brain of the great scientist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) with his granddaughter Evelyn. Paterniti's improbable travelling companion is 84-year-old Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who not only removed Einstein's brain from his head during the autopsy but purloined it from Princeton Hospital also! Storing the great scientist's brain in Tupperware zipped inside a grey duffel-bag, they rent a Buick Skylark, and drive from New Jersey to Ohio, Kansas City to Dodge City, Los Alamos to Las Vegas, finally achieving their bizarre reunion in Berkeley, California. A singular journey - and a unique book.
©2000 Michael Paterniti (P)2013 Audible, Inc.