Tom Clavin has 11 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 9 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 39 ratings. The most-rated is The Heart of Everything That Is.
The Heart of Everything That Is
Summary
The acclaimed New York Times best-selling biography of the legendary Sioux warrior Red Cloud: “a page-turner with remarkable immediacy...and the narrative sweep of a great Western” (The Boston Globe). Red Cloud was the only American Indian in history to defeat the United States Army in a war, forcing the government to sue for peace on his terms. At the peak of Red Cloud’s powers the Sioux could claim control of one-fifth of the contiguous United States and the loyalty of thousands of fierce fighters. But the fog of history has left Red Cloud strangely obscured. Now, thanks to the rediscovery of a lost autobiography, and painstaking research by two award-winning authors, the story of the 19th century’s most powerful and successful Indian warrior can finally be told. In The Heart of Everything That Is, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin restore Red Cloud to his rightful place in American history in a sweeping and dramatic narrative based on years of primary research. As they trace the events leading to Red Cloud’s War, they provide intimate portraits of the many lives Red Cloud touched - mountain men such as Jim Bridger; US generals like William Tecumseh Sherman, who were charged with annihilating the Sioux; fearless explorers, such as the dashing John Bozeman; and the memorable warriors whom Red Cloud groomed, like the legendary Crazy Horse. And at the center of the story is Red Cloud, fighting for the very existence of the Indian way of life. “Unabashed, unbiased, and disturbingly honest, leaving no razor-sharp arrowhead unturned, no rifle trigger unpulled....a compelling and fiery narrative” (USA Today), this is the definitive chronicle of the conflict between an expanding white civilization and the Plains Indians who stood in its way.
©2013 Bob Drury and Tom Clavin (P)2013 Simon & Schuster Audio
Lucky 666
Summary
From the authors of the New York Times best-selling The Heart of Everything That Is and Halsey's Typhoon comes the dramatic untold story of a daredevil bomber pilot and his misfit crew who fly their lone B-17 into the teeth of the Japanese Empire in 1943, engage in the longest dogfight in history, and change the momentum of the war in the Pacific - but not without making the ultimate sacrifice. It is 1942, the Japanese war machine has rolled up nearly all of the Pacific Theater, and American forces are clinging to what little unconquered territory remains. While US Marines claw their way across Guadalcanal, small contingents of US Army airmen make their way to the lonely, embattled Allied airbase on Papua New Guinea. Their mission: to defend Australia from invasion, harass Japanese supply lines, fly perilous bombing missions over enemy-held strongholds, and make reconnaissance runs to provide intelligence for America's nascent island-hopping campaign. Among these men are pilot Captain Jay Zeamer and bombardier Sergeant Joseph Raymond Sarnoski, whose swashbuckling reputations precede them. Zeamer, who cannot convince his superiors to give him his own plane, teams up with Sarnoski to recruit a crew of fellow misfits to rebuild a dilapidated B-17 bomber from spare parts in the base's junkyard. They christen the plane Old 666, naming it from its tail identification numbers. In June 1943, Zeamer and Sarnoski and their crew volunteer for a 1,200 mile suicide mission into the heart of the Japanese Empire that may well change the course of the war - but that only one of the two friends will survive. In Lucky 666, Drury and Clavin bring to vivid life one of the last great untold stories of World War II. Featuring personal letters, diaries, US Army Air Force after-action reports, even the translated Japanese Imperial Air Force's official account of the longest dogfight in history, Lucky 666 is a tale of friendship, heroism, and sacrifice set against the horrific backdrop of vicious aerial warfare, wounded crewmates, and a white-knuckle emergency landing in the jungles of New Guinea - a must-listen for anyone who loves pulse-pounding narrative nonfiction.
©2016 Bob Drury and Tom Clavin. All rights reserved. (P)2016 Simon & Schuster
Dodge City
Summary
Dodge City, Kansas, is a place of legend. The town that started as a small military site exploded with the coming of the railroad, cattle drives, eager miners, settlers, and various entrepreneurs passing through to populate the expanding West. Before long Dodge City's streets were lined with saloons and brothels, and its populace was thick with gunmen, horse thieves, and desperadoes of every sort. By the 1870s Dodge City was known as the most violent and turbulent town in the West. Enter Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. Young and largely self-trained men, the lawmen led the effort that established frontier justice and the rule of law in the American West and did it in the wickedest place in the United States. When they moved on, Wyatt to Tombstone and Bat to Colorado, a tamed Dodge was left in the hands of Jim Masterson. But before long Wyatt and Bat, each having had a lawman brother killed, returned to that threatened Western Kansas town to team up to restore order again in what became known as the Dodge City War before riding off into the sunset. Number-one New York Times best-selling author Tom Clavin's Dodge City tells the true story of their friendship, romances, gunfights, and adventures along with the remarkable cast of characters they encountered along the way (including Wild Bill Hickock, Jesse James, Doc Holliday, Buffalo Bill Cody, John Wesley Hardin, Billy the Kid, and Theodore Roosevelt) that has gone largely untold, lost in the haze of Hollywood films and Western fiction, until now.
©2017 Tom Clavin (P)2017 Macmillan Audio
Wild Bill
Summary
“The first thing you will notice about this engaging and delightful biography is that [narrator Johnny Heller] sounds like a character actor who moseyed off the set of an old-fashioned oater. His voice is a little scratchy, a little seasoned and perfectly suits this biography of larger-than-life Bill Hickok and his pals, from Calamity Jane to Buffalo Bill Cody and General Custer.” (The Berkshire Edge) This program includes a bonus interview with the author. The definitive true story of Wild Bill, the first lawman of the Wild West, by the number-one New York Times best-selling author of Dodge City. In July 1865, "Wild Bill" Hickok shot and killed Davis Tutt in Springfield, Mo., - the first quick-draw duel on the frontier. Thus began the reputation that made him a marked man to every gunslinger the Wild West. James Butler Hickock was known across the frontier as a soldier, Union spy, scout, lawman, gunfighter, gambler, showman, and actor. He crossed paths with General Custer and Buffalo Bill Cody, as well as Ben Thompson and other young toughs gunning for the sheriff with the quickest draw west of the Mississippi. Wild Bill also fell in love - multiple times - before marrying the true love of his life, Agnes Lake, the impresario of a traveling circus. He would be buried however, next to fabled frontierswoman Calamity Jane. Even before his death, Wild Bill became a legend, with fiction sometimes supplanting fact in the stories that surfaced. Once, in bar in Nebraska, he was confronted by four men, three of whom he killed in the ensuing gunfight. A famous Harper’s Magazine article credited Hickok with slaying 10 men that day; by the 1870s, his career-long kill count was up to 100. The legend of Wild Bill has only grown since his death in 1876, when cowardly Jack McCall famously put a bullet through the back of his head during a card game. Best-selling author Tom Clavin has sifted through years of Western lore to bring Hickock fully to life in this rip-roaring, spellbinding true story. "[Narrator Johnny Heller] ensures that Western aficionados will enjoy listening to the life of Wild Bill." (AudioFile Magazine)
©2019 Tom Clavin (P)2019 Macmillan Audio
Tombstone
Summary
The true story of the Earp brothers, Doc Holliday, and the famous Battle at the OK Corral, by the New York Times best-selling author of Dodge City and Wild Bill. On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, eight men clashed in what would be known as the most famous shootout in American frontier history. Thirty bullets were exchanged in 30 seconds, killing three men and wounding three others. The fight sprang forth from a tense, hot summer. Cattle rustlers had been terrorizing the back country of Mexico and selling the livestock they stole to corrupt ranchers. The Mexican government built forts along the border to try to thwart American outlaws, while Arizona citizens became increasingly agitated. Rustlers, who became known as the cow-boys, began to kill each other as well as innocent citizens. That October, tensions boiled over with Ike and Billy Clanton, Tom and Frank McLaury, and Billy Claiborne confronting the Tombstone marshal, Virgil Earp, and the suddenly deputized Wyatt and Morgan Earp and shotgun-toting Doc Holliday. Best-selling author Tom Clavin peers behind decades of legend surrounding the story of Tombstone to reveal the true story of the drama and violence that made it famous. Tombstone also digs deep into the vendetta ride that followed the tragic gunfight, when Wyatt and Warren Earp and Holliday went vigilante to track down the likes of Johnny Ringo, Curly Bill Brocius, and other cowboys who had cowardly gunned down his brothers. That "vendetta ride" would make the myth of Wyatt Earp complete and punctuate the struggle for power in the American frontier's last boom town. A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press “With a former newsman’s nose for the truth, Clavin has sifted the facts, myths, and lies to produce what might be as accurate an account as we will ever get of the old West’s most famous feud." (Associated Press)
©2020 Tom Clavin (P)2020 Macmillan Audio
Valley Forge
Summary
The number-one New York Times best-selling authors of The Heart of Everything That Is and Lucky 666 return with an unforgettable and perhaps the most underappreciated chapter in American history - the inspiring, pause-resisting account of Valley Forge, the Continental Army winter camp where George Washington turned the tide of the American Revolution. On December 19, 1777, some 12,000 members of America’s nascent Continental Army staggered into Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, a small encampment 23 miles northwest of British-occupied Philadelphia. The starving and half-naked force was reeling from a string of demoralizing defeats at the hands of the King George III’s army and barely equipped to survive the coming winter. Their commander in chief, the focused and forceful George Washington, was at the lowest ebb of his military career. With the Continental Congress in exile and its treasury depleted, the American Revolution appeared lost. As the days and weeks passed, however, Washington embarked on a mission to transform his troops from a bobtail army of citizen soldiers into a professional fighting force. Keeping a wary eye out for a British attack, he was aided by a trio of homegrown generals as well as a young coterie of American advisors and foreign volunteers led by Alexander Hamilton, John Laurens, and the Marquis de Lafayette. Within six months, Washington had achieved his miracle. Valley Forge is the riveting true story of an underdog US toppling an empire. Using new and rarely seen contemporaneous documents - and drawing on a cast of iconic characters and remarkable moments that capture the innovation and energy that led to the birth of our nation - the New York Times best-selling authors Bob Drury and Tom Clavin provide a breathtaking account of this seminal and previously undervalued moment in the battle for American independence. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2018 Bob Drury, Tom Clavin (P)2018 Simon & Schuster Audio
Halsey's Typhoon
Summary
December 1944, the Pacific Theater. General Douglas MacArthur has vowed to return to the Philippines. He will need the help of Admiral William "Bull" Halsey's Pacific Fleet. But at the height of the invasion, Halsey's ships are blindsided by a typhoon of unprecedented strength and scope. Battleships are tossed like toys, fighter planes are blown off carriers, destroyers are capsized, and hundreds of sailors are swept into the roiling, shark-infested sea. Only now, thanks to documents that have been declassified after 60 years and scores of firsthand accounts from survivors, can the story finally be told. Informed by years of rigorous research and narrated with the immediacy of an action movie, Halsey's Typhoon is an enthralling true tale of courage and survival against impossible odds and one of the finest untold World War II sagas of our time.
©2007 Bob Drury and Tom Clavin (P)2007 HighBridge Company; 16 9
Reckless
Summary
From the racetracks of Seoul to the battlegrounds of the Korean War, Reckless was a horse whose strength, tenacity, and relentless spirit made her a hero among a regiment of US Marines fighting for their lives on the front lines. Her Korean name was Ah-Chim-Hai, meaning Flame-of-the-Morning. Af our-year-old chestnut-colored Mongolian racehorse with a white blaze down her face and three white stockings, she once amazed the crowds in Seoul with her remarkable speed. But the star racer was soon sold to an American marine and trained to carry heavy loads of artillery shells up and down steep hills under a barrage of bullets and bombs. The marines renamed her Reckless. Reckless soon proved fearless under fire, boldly trekking alone through the fiery gauntlet, exposed to explosions and shrapnel. For months, her drive and determination kept the marines' guns blazing, while inspiring them with her singular charm. During one day of battle alone, she made 51 trips up and down a crucial hill, covering at least 25 miles in the heat of combat. On some of her uphill treks, Reckless shielded human reinforcements. The Chinese, soon discovering the unique bravery of this magnificent animal, made a special effort to kill her. But Reckless never slowed. As months passed and the enemy grew bolder, the men came to appreciate her not just as a horse but as a weapon and, eventually, as a fellow marine. In Reckless, Tom Clavin, national best-selling coauthor of Halsey's Typhoon, tells the unlikely story of a racehorse who truly became a war hero, beloved by the US Marine Corps and decorated for bravery. A moving reminder of the unbreakable bond between people and animals, Reckless is a powerful tale of courage,survival, and even love in the face of overwhelming odds.
©2014 Tom Clavin (P)2014 Blackstone Audio
Gil Hodges
Summary
Due to his achievements as a player and manager, as well as his sterling character, Gil Hodges deserves to be in the Hall of Fame more than any other player. A towering figure during the Golden Era of the 1950s, Hodges was the Brooklyn Dodgers’ powerful first baseman who, alongside Jackie Robinson, helped drive his team to six pennants and a thrilling World Series victory in 1955. Fans never booed the beloved home run hitter from Indiana who married a Brooklyn girl and settled in their borough, and they famously prayed for him when he slumped. Dutifully following the Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1958, Hodges longed to return to New York City. He joined the original Mets team in 1962, and he finished his playing career with them. In 1968, he took over the manager’s spot on their bench. Under his steady hand, the Mets went from a joke to World Champions in 1969 - the Miracle Mets. Yet behind his stoic demeanor lay a man prone to anxiety and worry. Hodges was scarred by combat on Tinian and Okinawa during World War II, and his inner turmoil was exacerbated by tight pennant races and excruciating defeats. His sudden death in 1972 shocked his friends and family, and left a void in the hearts of baseball fans everywhere. Acclaimed authors Tom Clavin and Danny Peary delve into one of baseball’s most overlooked stars, shedding light on a fascinating life and career that even his most ardent fans never knew. An exciting biography that paints a portrait of an amazing era of baseball as much as it does an admirable player, Gil Hodges is sure to please fans of America’s pastime.
©2012 Tom Clavin and Danny Peary (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
All Blood Runs Red
Summary
The incredible story of the first African-American military pilot, who went on to become a Paris nightclub impresario, a spy in the French Resistance and an American civil rights pioneer Eugene Bullard lived one of the most fascinating lives of the 20th century. The son of a former slave and an indigenous Creek woman, Bullard fled home at the age of 11 to escape the racial hostility of his Georgia community. When his journey led him to Europe, he garnered worldwide fame as a boxer, and later as the first African-American fighter pilot in history. After the war, Bullard returned to Paris a celebrated hero. But little did he know that the dramatic, globe-spanning arc of his life had just begun. All Blood Runs Red is the inspiring untold story of an American hero, a thought-provoking chronicle of the 20th century, and a portrait of a man who came from nothing and by his own courage, determination, gumption, intelligence, and luck forged a legendary life.
©2019 Phil Keith and Tom Calvin (P)2019 Harlequin Enterprises, Limited
The Last Stand of Fox Company
Summary
November 1950, the Korean Peninsula. After General MacArthur ignores Mao's warnings and pushes his UN forces deep into North Korea, his 10,000 First Division Marines find themselves surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by 100,000 Chinese soldiers near the Chosin Reservoir. Their only chance for survival is to fight their way south through the Toktong Pass, a narrow gorge in the Nangnim Mountains. It will need to be held open at all costs. The mission is handed to Captain William Barber and the 246 Marines of Fox Company, a courageous but undermanned unit of the First Marines. Barber and his men are ordered to climb seven miles of frozen terrain to a rocky promontory overlooking the pass. The Marines have no way of knowing that the ground they occupy - it is soon dubbed "Fox Hill" - is surrounded by 10,000 Chinese soldiers. As the sun sets on the hill, and the temperature plunges to 30 degrees below zero, Barber's men dig in for the night. At two in the morning they are awakened by the sound - bugles, whistles, cymbals, and drumbeats - of a massive assault by thousands of enemy infantry. The attack is just the first wave of four days and five nights of nearly continuous Chinese attempts to take Fox Hill, during which Barber's beleaguered company clings to the high ground and allows the First Marine Division to battle south. Amid the relentless violence, three-quarters of Fox Company's Marines are killed, wounded, or captured. Just when it looks like the outfit will be overrun, Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Davis, a fearless Marine officer who is fighting south from Chosin, volunteers to lead a force of 500 men on a daring mission that cuts a hole in the Chinese lines and relieves the men of Fox Company. The Last Stand of Fox Company is a fast-paced and gripping account of heroism and self-sacrifice in the face of impossible odds. The authors have conducted dozens of firsthand interviews with the battle's survivors, and they narrate the story with the imm...
©2008 Bob Drury and TO, Clavin (P)2009 Tantor