Simon Garfield has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 8 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 3 ratings. The most-rated is In Miniature.
Dog's Best Friend
Summary
“A fascinating, informative and highly entertaining expedition through the highways and byways of dogdom.” (John Bradshaw, New York Times best-selling author of Dog Sense) A charming meditation on the relationship between humans and dogs, drawing upon history, science, art, and personal experience to illuminate a magical bond that has endured millennia - from the New York Times best-selling author of Just My Type. "Ludo is now an elderly gentleman, and we would do almost anything to ensure his continued happiness. We schedule our days around his needs - his mealtimes, his walks, the delivery of his life-saving medication (he has epilepsy, poor love). We spend a bizarrely large amount of our disposable income on him, and he never sends a card of thanks. When he's not with us for a few days, the house feels extraordinarily empty. I feel so fortunate to know him." Ludo is a dog - Simon Garfield's beloved black Labrador retriever, one of millions of canines who have become integral parts of our lives. But how did the dog become top dog? How did these faithful animals come to assist us not only in hunting, but in bomb disposal and cancer detection - and ultimately become our closest companions? Dog's Best Friend examines how this bond developed over the centuries, and how it has transformed countless lives, both human and canine. Garfield begins with the earliest visual representations - dogs depicted in ancient rock art - and ends at the laboratory that first sequenced the canine genome. Along the way, we meet the legendary Corgis of Buckingham Palace, the dogs of the Soviet space program, the world's first labradoodle, and a border collie that can identify more than a thousand different plush toys. Garfield reveals the secrets of the world’s best dog trainers, takes us inside the wild world of dog breeding and dog shows, and unearths the deep psychological roots of the human-dog link. And Ludo pops his snout in from time to time as well. A celebration of this deep interspecies connection, delivered with Simon Garfield’s inimitable wit, Dog’s Best Friend offers delights and insights for anyone who has ever loved a dog.
©2020 Simon Garfield (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers
In Miniature
Summary
Best-selling, award-winning writer Simon Garfield returns with an enthralling investigation of humans’ peculiar fascination with small things - and what small things tell us about our larger world. “[Simon Garfield is] an exuberant truffle-hound of the recondite and delightful factoid.” (Sunday Times, London) Simon Garfield creates works that shine a light on aspects of the everyday world in order to reveal the charms and eccentricities hiding in plain sight around us. After beguiling fans with books about everything from typography to time, from historic maps to the color mauve, he’s found his most delightful topic yet: miniatures. Tiny Eiffel Towers. Platoons of brave toy soldiers. A doll’s house created for a queen. Diminutive crime scenes crafted to catch a killer. Model villages and minuscule railways. These are just a few of the objects you will discover in the audiobook In Miniature. Bringing together history, psychology, art, and obsession, Garfield explores what fuels the strong appeal of miniature objects among collectors, modelers, and fans. The toys we enjoy as children invest us with a rare power at a young age, conferring on us a taste of adult-sized authority. For some, the desire to play with small things becomes a desire to make small things. We live in a vast and uncertain world, and controlling just a tiny, scaled-down part of it restores our sense of order and worth. As it explores flea circuses, microscopic food, ancient tombs, and the Vegas Strip, In Miniature changes the way we perceive our surroundings, encouraging all of us to find greatness in the smallest of things.
©2019 Simon Garfield (P)2019 Simon & Schuster
Our Hidden Lives
Summary
In 1936 anthropologist Tom Harrison, poet and journalist Charles Madge and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings set up the Mass Observation Project. The idea was simple: ordinary people would record, in diary form, the events of their everyday lives. An estimated one million pages eventually found their way to the archive - and it soon became clear this was more than anyone could digest. Today, the diaries are stored at the University of Sussex, where, remarkably, most remain unread. In Our Hidden Lives, Simon Garfield has skilfully woven a tapestry of diary entries in the rarely discussed but pivotal period of 1945 to 1948. The result is a moving, intriguing, funny, at times heartbreaking audiobook - unashamedly populist in the spirit of Forgotten Voices or indeed Margaret Forster's Diary of an Ordinary Woman.
©2016 Simon Garfield (P)2016 Random House AudioBooks