Paul O'Brien has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 566 ratings. The most-rated is Under the Black Hat.
Under the Black Hat
Summary
From legendary wrestling announcer Jim Ross comes a candid, colorful memoir about the inner workings of the WWE and the personal crises he weathered at the height of his career. If you've caught a televised wrestling match anytime in the past 30 years, you've probably heard Jim Ross' throaty Oklahoma twang. The beloved longtime announcer of WWE is already an icon to generations of wrestling fans, and he's not slowing down, having just signed on as the announcer of the starry new wrestling venture All Elite Wrestling. In this follow-up to his best-selling memoir Slobberknocker, he dishes about not only his long career, which includes nurturing global stars like Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, and John Cena, but also about the challenges of aging and disability, his split from collaborator Vince McMahon, and the sudden death of his beloved wife, Jan. The result is a gruff, endearing, and remarkably human-scale portrait, set against the larger-than-life backdrop of professional wrestling. Ross' ascent in WWE mirrors the rise of professional wrestling itself from a DIY sideshow to a billion-dollar business. Under the Black Hat traces all the highs and lows of that wild ride, in which Jim served not only as on-air commentator, but talent manager, payroll master, and even occasional in-ring foil to threats like Paul "Triple H" Levesque and Undertaker. While his role brought him riches and exposure Jim never dreamed of growing up in a small town in Oklahoma, he chafed against the strictures of a fickle corporate culture and what he saw as a narrow vision of what makes great wrestlers - and great story lines. When suddenly stricken with Bell's palsy, a form of facial paralysis that makes it impossible to smile, he stared down his greatest fear - being cast out of the announcing booth for good. Picking up where Slobberknocker left off and ending on the cusp of a new career in a reimagined industry, Under the Black Hat is the triumphant tale of a country boy who made it to the top, took a few knocks, and stuck around - just where his fans like him.
©2020 Jim Ross (P)2020 Simon & Schuster
Slobberknocker
Summary
There are few people who have been in the wrestling business longer than Jim Ross. And those who have made it as long as he has (half a century to be exact) probably made enemies or burned bridges. But that's just not JR. Slobberknocker is the story of how an Oklahoman farm kid with a vivid imagination and seemingly unattainable dreams became "The Voice of Wrestling" to record TV audiences and millions of fans around the world. Jim opens up about his life as an only child on a working farm, who became obsessed with professional wrestling having first seen it on his grandparents' TV. Even though the wrestling business was notoriously secretive and wary of "outsiders", he somehow got a foot in the door to start a historic career, one where he held almost every job in the business - from putting up the ring to calling matches, from driving his blind, drunk boss toward revenge to consoling two naked 600-pound brothers in the shower room after a rough match. With all those adventures and responsibilities, he's also recognized as the man who built and nurtured a once-in-a-generation talent roster that took the WWE to new heights, including "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, Brock Lesnar, and The Rock, to name a few. Listeners will finally get the opportunity to hear never-before-told stories about the politics, wackiness, and personalities of all the biggest stars. But this isn't just a wrestling story. It's a story about overcoming adversity and achieving your dreams, as success did not come without significant costs and unforeseen challenges to JR, including multiple bouts of severe facial paralysis called Bell's palsy. Currently he is the host of the podcast The Ross Report. Any fan of wrestling- from the territory days to today - will be enthralled with stories from the road and behind the scenes. Slobberknocker is the first time Ross tells his story - and you don't want to miss it!
©2017 Jim Ross with Paul O'Brien (P)2017 Novel Audio Inc.
Underworld
Summary
Our lives, our half century. Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence. Don DeLillo's mesmerizing novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in New York in 1951. The glorious outcome - the home run that wins the game is called the Shot Heard Round the World - shades into the grim news that the Soviet Union has just tested an atomic bomb. The baseball itself, fought over and scuffed, generates the narrative that follows. It takes the reader deeply into the lives of Nick and Klara and into modern memory and the soul of American culture - from Bronx tenements to grand ballrooms to a B-52 bombing raid over Vietnam. A generation's master spirits come and go. Lennny Bruce cracking desperate jokes, Mick Jagger with his devil strut, J. Edgar Hoover in a sexy leather mask. And flashing in the margins of ordinary life are the curiously connectecd materials of the culture. Condoms, bombs, Chevy Bel Airs and miracle sites on the Web. Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times - Don DeLillo's greatest and most powerful work of fiction.
©1997 Don DeLillo (P)2011 Simon & Schuster