Ted Conover has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 5 ratings. The most-rated is Newjack.
Newjack
Summary
National Book Critics Circle, Nonfiction, 2001 Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing is the story of Conover's rookie year as a guard at Sing Sing. It is a nerve-jangling account of his passage into the storied prison and the culture of its guards - both fresh-faced "newjacks" like Conover and brutally hardened veterans. As he struggles to be a good officer, Conover angers inmates, dodges blows, works to balance decency with toughness, and participates in prison rituals - strip frisks, cell searches, cell "extractions" - that exact a toll on inmates and officers alike. The tale begins with the corrections academy and ends with the flames and smoke of New Year's Eve on Conover's floor of the notorious B-Block. Along the way, Conover also recounts the history of Sing Sing, from draconian early punishment, to fame as the citadel of capital punishment, to its present status as New York State's "bottom of the barrel" prison. This book will become a landmark of American journalism - the definitive presentation of the impasse between the need to imprison criminals and the dehumanization of inmates and guards - that almost inevitably takes place behind bars.
©2001 Ted Conover (P)2005 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Rolling Nowhere
Summary
"I crouched quietly in the patch of tall weeds. Around me fell the shadow of the viaduct that carried a highway over the railroad yards. From the edge of the yards, I squinted as I watched the railroad cars being switched from track to track. Cars and trucks were rolling over the viaduct, but what occupied my attention was the dark, cool corridor underneath it, where I hoped to intercept my train."
Riding the rails, Ted Conover tasted the life of a tramp with companions like Pistol Pete, BB, and Sheba Sheila Sheils. From them he learned survival skills - how to "read" a freight train, scavenge for food and clothing, avoid the railroad "bulls." He was initiated into the customs of their unique, shadowy society - men and women bound together by a mutual bond of failure, camaraderie, and distrust.
Sixty-five freight trains, 12,000 miles, and 15 states later, Conover chronicles his impressions of their lives in this fascinating piece of first-hand reporting that becomes a thoughtful story of self-discovery.
©2001 Ted Conover (P)2005 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
The Routes of Man
Summary
Roads bind our world—metaphorically and literally—transforming landscapes and the lives of the people who inhabit them. Roads have unparalleled power to impact communities, unite worlds and sunder them, and reveal the hopes and fears of those who travel them. With his marvelous eye for detail and his contagious enthusiasm, Ted Conover explores six of these key byways worldwide. In Peru, he traces the journey of a load of rare mahogany over the Andes to its origin, an untracked part of the Amazon basin soon to be traversed by a new east-west route across South America. In East Africa, he visits truckers whose travels have been linked to the worldwide spread of AIDS. In the West Bank, he monitors highway checkpoints with Israeli soldiers and then passes through them with Palestinians, witnessing the injustices and danger borne by both sides. He shuffles down a frozen riverbed with teenagers escaping their Himalayan valley to see how a new road will affect the now-isolated Indian region of Ladakh. From the passenger seat of a new Hyundai piling up the miles, he describes the exuberant upsurge in car culture as highways proliferate across China. And from inside an ambulance, he offers an apocalyptic but precise vision of Lagos, Nigeria, where congestion and chaos on freeways signal the rise of the global megacity. A spirited, urgent book that reveals the costs and benefits of being connected—how, from ancient Rome to the present, roads have played a crucial role in human life, advancing civilization even as they set it back.
©2010 Ted Conover (P)2010 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
The Fair Ophelia
Summary
How do you go from being one of several children of wealthy, celebrity parents to, as Dr. Jim Yong Kim, the president of Dartmouth College, has called her, "one of the great human beings walking the earth right now"? Ophelia Dahl traveled from Buckinghamshire to Haiti in 1983 and fell in love with the country and with Paul Farmer, a recent graduate of Duke who would become a famous doctor. With others they founded Partners in Health, the groundbreaking global health organization. Then came the split, new partners, new disaster in Haiti, and a search for solutions that might, in Tracy Kidder's words, "heal the world". Ophelia, who seldom consents to interviews, is the daughter of author Roald Dahl (Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach) and Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal (Hud). This is a brief story of her family's tragic past and of her own passage to womanhood, motherhood, and meaningful work. Ted Conover is the author of Newjack, Coyotes, The Routes of Man, and other books. He publishes in The New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker and is a writer-in-residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University.
©2011 Ted Conover (P)2015 Audible, Inc.