Tom Shachtman has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 121 ratings. The most-rated is Whoever Fights Monsters.
Whoever Fights Monsters
Summary
Face-to-face with some of America's most terrifying killers, FBI veteran and ex-Army CID colonel Robert Ressler learned from them how to identify the unknown monsters who walk among us - and put them behind bars. Now the man who coined the phrase "serial killer" and advised Thomas Harris on The Silence of the Lambs shows how he has tracked down some of the nation's most brutal murderers. Just as it happened in The Silence of the Lambs, Ressler uses the evidence at a crime scene to put together a psychological profile of the killers. From the victims they choose, to the way they kill, to the often grotesque souvenirs they take with them, Ressler unlocks the identities of these vicious killers for the police to capture. Join Ressler as he takes you on the hunt for America's most dangerous psychopaths. It is a terrifying journey you will not forget.
©1992 Robert K. Ressler and Tom Shachtman (P)2016 Tantor
The Founding Fortunes
Summary
In The Founding Fortunes, historian Tom Shachtman reveals the ways in which a dozen notable revolutionaries deeply affected the finances and birth of the new country while making and losing their fortunes. While history teaches that successful revolutions depend on participation by the common man, the establishment of a stable and independent United States first required wealthy colonials uniting to disrupt the very system that had enriched them, and then funding a very long war. While some fortunes were made during the war at the expense of the poor, many of the wealthy embraced the goal of obtaining for their poorer countrymen an unprecedented equality of opportunity, along with independence. In addition to nuanced views of the well-known wealthy such as Robert Morris and John Hancock, and of the less wealthy but influential Alexander Hamilton, The Founding Fortunes offers insight into the contributions of those often overlooked by popular history: Henry Laurens, the plantation owner who replaced Hancock as President of Congress; pioneering businessmen William Bingham, Jeremiah Wadsworth, and Stephen Girard; privateer magnate Elias Hasket Derby; and Hamilton’s successors at Treasury, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., and Albert Gallatin. The Founders dealt with tariffs, taxes on the wealthy, the national debt, regional disparities, the census as it affected finances, and how much of what America needs should be manufactured at home in ways that remain startlingly relevant. Revelatory and insightful, The Founding Fortunes provides a riveting history of economic patriotism that still resonates today.
©2020 Tom Shachtman (P)2020 Macmillan Audio
The Memoir of the Minotaur
Summary
The Memoir of the Minotaur is the posthumous confessions of the half-man, half-bull of Crete, as offered to an audience of recently deceased 21st-century fellow souls in Hades’ domain. This book is a satire for listeners unafraid of a rollicking good tale involving anatomically complex beings, unforgivable puns, the champion serial killer of all time, scantily clad Greek maidens and youths, articulate tyrants, and feminist proto-history leavened with theological impertinence. The Memoir of the Minotaur shares its form with other popular retellings of the monster narrative such as John Gardner’s Grendel, and the narrative voice has likenesses to the exuberance, bawdiness, and blasphemy of Salman Rushdie and John Barth. Packed with actions both big and small, while containing a breadth of complexity as it deals with themes of power, violence, sexuality, and the role of storytelling, its most endearing quality is the hilarity and absurdity of our classical values interacting with our animalistic cores. Ultimately, the book is riotous.
©2020 Tom Shachtman (P)2020 Tom Shachtman