Robert Kolker has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 211 ratings. The most-rated is Hidden Valley Road.
Hidden Valley Road
Summary
Oprah's Book Club pick Number one New York Times best seller One of the New York Times Top 10 Books of the Year One of the Wall Street Journal Top 10 Books of the Year Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Time, Slate, Smithsonian, The New York Post, and Amazon The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with 12 children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease. Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their 12 children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins - aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony - and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the 10 Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family? What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations. With clarity and compassion, best-selling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family's unforgettable legacy of suffering, love, and hope.
©2020 Robert Kolker (P)2020 Random House Audio
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Summary
Pulitzer Prize Winner, General Nonfiction, 1998 In this groundbreaking work, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns. It is a story that spans 13,000 years of human history, beginning when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Guns, Germs, and Steel is a world history that really is a history of all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human life.
©1997 Jared Diamond (P)2001 HighBridge Company
Lost Girls
Summary
New York Times best seller Soon to be a Netflix film. The best-selling account of the lives of five young women whose fates converged in the perplexing case of the Long Island Serial Killer. “Rich, tragic...monumental...true-crime reporting at its best.” (Washington Post) One late spring evening in 2010, Shannan Gilbert - after running through the oceanfront community of Oak Beach screaming for her life - went missing. No one who had heard of her disappearance thought much about what had happened to the 24-year-old: She was a Craigslist escort who had been fleeing a scene - of what, no one could be sure. The Suffolk County police, too, seemed to have paid little attention - until seven months later, when an unexpected discovery in a bramble alongside a nearby highway turned up four bodies, all evenly spaced, all wrapped in burlap. But none of them Shannan’s. There was Maureen Brainard-Barnes, last seen at Penn Station in Manhattan three years earlier, and Melissa Barthelemy, last seen in the Bronx in 2009. There was Megan Waterman, last seen leaving a hotel in Hauppauge, Long Island, just a month after Shannan’s disappearance in 2010, and Amber Lynn Costello, last seen leaving a house in West Babylon a few months later that same year. Like Shannan, all four women were petite, in their 20s, and had come from out of town to work as escorts, and they all had advertised on Craigslist and its competitor, Backpage. Long considered “one of the best true-crime books of all time” (Time), Lost Girls is a portrait of unsolved murders in an idyllic part of America, of the underside of the Internet, and of the secrets we keep without admitting to ourselves that we keep them.
©2013 Robert Kolker (P)2013 HarperCollins Publishers