Thomas Dyja has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 246 ratings. The most-rated is To Sleep in a Sea of Stars.
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
Summary
"Narrator Jennifer Hale's outstanding performance brings this story of alien invasion to life.... Hale's range of differentiation is masterly as she animates all the quirky characters Kira meets. From the rough, snarky slang of ex-military woman to the half-mad musings of a human 'ship mind,' every unique voice enhances the listening experience." (AudioFile magazine, Earphones Award winner) This program includes an afterword read by Christopher Paolini, as well as a bonus conversation between Christopher Paolini and Jennifer Hale. To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is a brand new epic novel from New York Times best-selling author Christopher Paolini. This program is read by Jennifer Hale, a Canadian American actress and singer who has appeared in hundreds of cartoon episodes and taken on roles in well over 185 video games, winning multiple awards. Her varied roles include Commander Shepard in Mass Effect, Rosalind Lutece in BioShock Infinite, Cinderella in both games and animation, Kronika in MK11, Naomi Hunter in the Metal Gear series, several roles in The Powerpuff Girls, Justice League, Avengers Assemble, the Emmy Award-winning Lost in Oz, Jean Grey/Phoenix in both games and animated series, and dozens more. This is her first audiobook. Kira Navárez dreamed of life on new worlds. Now she's awakened a nightmare. During a routine survey mission on an uncolonized planet, Kira finds an alien relic. At first she's delighted, but elation turns to terror when the ancient dust around her begins to move. As war erupts among the stars, Kira is launched into a galaxy-spanning odyssey of discovery and transformation. First contact isn't at all what she imagined, and events push her to the very limits of what it means to be human. While Kira faces her own horrors, Earth and its colonies stand upon the brink of annihilation. Now, Kira might be humanity's greatest and final hope.... Barnes & Noble Best New Books of the Year - 2020 Goodreads Choice Awards - 2020 Amazon.com Best Books of the Year - 2020 NYPL Best Books of the Year - 2020 A Macmillan Audio production from Tor Books PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2020 Christopher Paolini (P)2020 Macmillan Audio
Frozen 2
Summary
Join Elsa and Anna and their friends Kristoff, Sven, and Olaf, the lovable snowman, as they embark on a perilous journey to follow a mysterious voice and save Arendelle! Relive all the magic of their epic adventure with this deluxe junior novel movie retelling, which contains additional story details.
©2019 Disney Press (P)2019 Disney
Play for a Kingdom
Summary
May, 1864. In a moment of quiet during the endgame between Grant and Lee, a Union and a Confederate company meet, not entirely by accident. The Union soldiers are a motley company of Irish, English, and German stock, all ragged and worn from the Battle of the Wilderness. Left behind to guard their army's flank, they decide to relax with a baseball and bat when, as if by magic, a company of Alabama infantry appears from the woods. These ordinary soldiers determine to play baseball with the enemy, perhaps for diversion, perhaps to remind themselves that they are still human.In the ensuing days, Brooklyn meets Alabama four more times on the playing field, even their armies collide in the horror now known as Spotsylvania. As every game and skirmish bring them closer to a violent end, what began as a game turns into a business as serious as death and dishonor, and each soldier realizes the price and the prize that betrayal offers.
©1997 Thomas Dyja (P)1997 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Third Coast
Summary
A cultural history of Chicago at midcentury, with its incredible mix of architects, politicians, musicians, writers, entrepreneurs, and actors who helped shape modern America Though today it can seem as if all American culture comes out of New York and Los Angeles, much of what defined the nation as it grew into a superpower was produced in Chicago. Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop there, and this flow of people and commodities made it America’s central clearinghouse, laboratory, and factory. Between the end of World War II and 1960, Mies van der Rohe’s glass-and-steel architecture became the face of corporate America, Ray Kroc’s McDonald’s changed how people eat, Hugh Hefner unveiled Playboy, and the Chess brothers supercharged rock and roll with Chuck Berry. At the University of Chicago, the atom was split and Western civilization was packaged into the Great Books. Yet even as Chicago led the way in creating mass-market culture, its artists pushed back in their own distinct voices. In literature, it was the outlaw novels of Nelson Algren (then carrying on a passionate affair with Simone de Beauvoir), the poems of Gwendolyn Brooks, and Studs Terkel’s oral histories. In music, it was the gospel of Mahalia Jackson, the urban blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and the trippy avant-garde jazz of Sun Ra. In performance, it was the intimacy of Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, the “Chicago School” of television, and the improvisational comedy troupe Second City whose famous alumni are now everywhere in American entertainment. Despite this diversity, racial divisions informed virtually every aspect of life in Chicago. The chaos - both constructive and destructive - of this period was set into motion by the second migration north of African Americans during World War II. As whites either fled to the suburbs or violently opposed integration, urban planners tried to design away "blight" with projects that marred a generation of American cities. The election of Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1955 launched a frenzy of new building that came at a terrible cost - monolithic housing projects for the black community and a new kind of self-satisfied provincialism that sped up the end of Chicago’s role as America’s meeting place. In luminous prose, Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story of the city in its postwar prime and explains its profound impact on modern America.
©2013 Kelmsott Ink, Inc. (P)2013 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
New York, New York, New York
Summary
A lively, immersive history by an award-winning urbanist of New York City’s transformation and the lessons it offers for the city’s future. Dangerous, filthy, and falling apart, garbage piled on its streets and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble; New York’s terrifying, if liberating, state of nature in 1978 also made it the capital of American culture. Over the next 30-plus years, though, it became a different place - kinder and meaner, richer and poorer, more like America and less like what it had always been. New York, New York, New York, Thomas Dyja’s sweeping account of this metamorphosis, shows it wasn’t the work of a single policy, mastermind, or economic theory, nor was it a morality tale of gentrification or crime. Instead, three New Yorks evolved in turn. After brutal retrenchment came the dazzling Koch Renaissance and the Dinkins years that left the city’s liberal traditions battered but laid the foundation for the safe streets and dotcom excess of Giuliani’s Reformation in the ‘90s. Then the planes hit on 9/11. The shaky city handed itself over to Bloomberg, who merged City Hall into his personal empire, launching its Reimagination. From Hip Hop crews to Wall Street bankers, D.V. to Jay-Z, Dyja weaves New Yorkers famous, infamous, and unknown - Yuppies, hipsters, tech nerds, and artists; community organizers and the immigrants who made this a truly global place - into a narrative of a city creating ways of life that would ultimately change cities everywhere. With great success, though, came grave mistakes. The urbanism that reclaimed public space became a means of control, the police who made streets safe became an occupying army, technology went from a means to the end. Now, as anxiety fills New Yorker’s hearts and empties its public spaces, it’s clear that what brought the city back - proximity, density, and human exchange - are what sent COVID-19 burning through its streets, and the price of order has come due. A fourth evolution is happening, and we must understand that the greatest challenge ahead is the one New York failed in the first three: The cures must not be worse than the disease. Exhaustively researched, passionately told, New York, New York, New York is a colorful, inspiring guide to not just rebuilding but reimagining a great city.
©2021 Kelmscott Ink, Inc. All rights reserved. (P)2021 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.