Allyson Johnson has narrated 138 audiobooks on Listento.it by 116 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 8,305 ratings. The most-rated is All These Worlds.
The Meaning of Life
Summary
From the author of the classic Race to Incarcerate, a forceful and necessary argument for eliminating life sentences, including profiles of six people directly impacted by life sentences by formerly incarcerated author Kerry Myers Most Western democracies have few or no people serving life sentences, yet here in the United States more than 200,000 people are sentenced to such prison terms. Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis of The Sentencing Project argue that there is no practical or moral justification for a sentence longer than 20 years. Harsher sentences have been shown to have little effect on crime rates, since people “age out” of crime - meaning that we’re spending a fortune on geriatric care for older prisoners who pose little threat to public safety. Extreme punishment for serious crime also has an inflationary effect on sentences across the spectrum, helping to account for severe mandatory minimums and other harsh punishments. A thoughtful and stirring call to action, The Meaning of Life also features moving profiles of a half dozen people affected by life sentences, written by former “lifer” and award-winning writer Kerry Myers. The book will tie in to a campaign spearheaded by The Sentencing Project and offers a much-needed road map to a more humane criminal justice system. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2018 Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis (P)2018 Audible, Inc.
Angel's Pain
Summary
Briar needs just two things: blood and vengeance. The first sustains her immortal life; the second gives it meaning. First on her hit list is Gregor, the renegade vampire who schooled her in brutality, then betrayed and tortured her. To achieve her deadly ends, Briar joins the inscrutable Reaper and his misfit gang of vampires who are also hunting her old mentor. But once she's destroyed Gregor, she'll be gone. The group means nothing to her. Not even Crisa - damaged, defenseless, a liability in every way -the childlike vamp with whom Briar shares a blood bond. Or Reaper. Though they shared one moment of pure passion, it's not as though Briar has feelings for him. Because Briar needs no one. She needs only to satisfy her twin hungers--ones that may ultimately consume her.
©2008 Maggie Shayne (P)2008 Audible, Inc.
Detroit: I Do Mind Dying
Summary
This new South End Press edition makes available the full text of this out-of-print classic - along with a new foreword by Manning Marable, interviews with participants in DRUM, and reflections on political developments over the past three decades by Georgakas and Surkin.
©1998 Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin (P)2020 Audible, Inc.
The New York Times Book of the Dead
Summary
The obituary page of The New York Times is a celebration of extraordinary lives. This groundbreaking package includes 300+ obits of the most important and fascinating obituaries the Times has ever published. The obituary page is the section many readers first turn to not only see who died, but to read some of the most inspiring, insightful, often funny, and elegantly written stories celebrating the lives of the men and women who have influenced on our world. William McDonald, The Times' obituary editor who was recently featured in the award-winning documentary Obit, selected 320 of the most important and influential obits from the newspaper's archives. In chapters like "Stage and Screen," "Titans of Business," "The Notorious," "Scientists and Healers," "Athletes," and "American Leaders," the entries include a wide variety of newsmakers from the last century and a half, including Annie Oakley, Theodore Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Marilyn Monroe, Coco Chanel, Malcolm X, Jackie Robinson and Prince.
©2016 William McDonald (P)2016 Hachette Audio
Temptation
Summary
Millionaire security expert and rancher Zeke Travers always separates emotion from work - until a case leads him to Sheila Hopkins and the immediate, scorching heat between them. Suddenly, Zeke is tempted to break the rules. And it’s only a matter of time before he gives in.
©2011 Brenda Jackson (P)2011 Audible, Inc.
A Restricted Country
Summary
A proud working-class woman, an "out" lesbian long before the Rainbow revolution, Joan Nestle has stood at the forefront of American freedom struggles from the McCarthy era to the present day. Featuring photographs and a new introduction by the author, this classic collection which intimately accounts the lesbian, feminist and civil rights movements through personal essays is available again for the first time in years.
©2003 Cleis Press (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Shadow Fall
Summary
Truth is the most dangerous weapon of all.... Kira Solomon's life has never been simple. Battling against the Fallen, serving the Egyptian goddess Maat, becoming romantically involved with a 4,000-year-old Nubian warrior - these are now everyday realities. But something is changing. Kira's magic is becoming dangerously unpredictable, tainted by the Shadow she has been trained to destroy. Matters grow worse when an Atlanta museum exhibit based on the Egyptian Book of the Dead turns out to have truly sinister properties. As the body count rises, even long-trusted allies start to turn against Kira. She can hardly blame them - not when the God of Chaos is stalking her dreams and the shocking truth about her origins is finally coming to light. As one of the good guys, Kira was a force to be reckoned with. But if the only way to stop a terrifying adversary is to fight Shadow with Shadow, then she's ready to find out just how very bad she can be.
©2011 Seressia Glass (P)2011 Audible, Inc.
Homefront
Summary
Set against the backdrop of a far-future Earth struggling to reinvent itself after a technological disaster, Homefront is an uncompromising adventure story about what it truly means to be human. Jantine is a Beta, a genetically modified super soldier charged with establishing a hidden colony on Earth. When her expedition arrives in the middle of a civil war, she must choose her allies wisely or be exterminated. Featuring complex characters and edge-of-your-seat action sequences, Homefront will have listeners guessing until the last tick.
©2014 Scott James Magner (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Riders of the Storm
Summary
The next chapter in the Stratification saga that "delivers all the right elements". (Sci Fi Weekly) On the distant world of Cersi, Om'ray Aryl Sarc and her supporters have been exiled from the rest of their people. Finding refuge in the mountains, they work to rebuild the ruined village of Sona, even as they try to discover what happened to the original Sona Clan. But Sona has a history among all three of Cersi's races - a history that may soon threaten the future of Aryl's newly founded clan....
©2008 Julie E. Czerneda (P)2020 Audible, Inc.
Noir Fatale
Summary
NEW SCIENCE FICTION, URBAN FANTASY, AND MYSTERY STORIES WITH A NOIR THEME FROM BEST-SELLING AUTHORS LAURELL K. HAMILTON delivering an Anita Blake series story, LARRY CORREIA, penning a Grimnoir series adventure, an original Honor Harrington series tale from DAVID WEBER, AND MORE. The silky note of a saxophone. The echoes of a woman’s high heels down a deserted asphalt street. Steam rising from city vents to cloud the street-lit air. A man with a gun. A dame with a problem.... NOIR. From the pulpy pages of Black Mask Magazine in the 1920s and '30s, through the film noir era of the 1940s, to today, noir fiction has lured many a reader and movie-goer away from the light and into the dark underbelly of society. Names such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain; titles like The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, The Postman Always Rings Twice...these have inhabited our collective consciousness for decades. Humanity, it seems, loves the dark. And within the dark, one figure stands out: that of the femme fatale. Here then, Noir Fatale an anthology containing the full spectrum of noir fiction, each incorporating the compelling femme fatale character archetype. From straightforward hardboiled detective story to dark urban fantasy to the dirty secrets of futuristic science fiction - all with a hard, gritty feel. As Raymond Chandler said, “Down these mean streets, a man must walk who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” Because, as these stories prove, doing the right thing doesn’t necessarily mean you get the big bucks or the girl. But you do the right thing anyway. All new stories by Larry Correia Kacey Ezell Laurell K. Hamilton David Weber Sarah A. Hoyt Robert Buettner Alistair Kimble Griffin Barber Michael Massa Christopher L. Smith and Michael Ferguson Hinkley Correia Patrick Tracy Steve Diamond Larry Correia is the creator of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times best-selling Monster Hunter series, with first entry Monster Hunter International, as well as urban fantasy hardboiled adventure saga the Grimnoir Chronicles, with first entry Hard Magic, and epic fantasy series The Saga of the Forgotten Warrior, with first entry Son of the Black Sword and latest entry, House of Assassins. He is an avid gun user and advocate and shot on a competitive level for many years. Kacey Ezell is an active duty USAF helicopter pilot who also writes sci-fi/fantasy/alt history/horror fiction. Her first novel was a Dragon Award finalist in 2018, and her stories have been featured in Baen’s Year’s Best Military and Adventure Science Fiction compilation in 2017 and 2018.
©2019 Larry Correia and Kacey Ezell (P)2019 Audible, Inc.
Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Gray
Summary
A general's wife and a slave girl forge a friendship that transcends race, culture, and the crucible of Civil War. Mary Anna Custis Lee is a great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, wife of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and heiress to Virginia's storied Arlington house and General Washington's personal belongings. Born in bondage at Arlington, Selina Norris Gray learns to read and write in the schoolroom Mary and her mother keep for the slave children and eventually becomes Mary's housekeeper and confidante. As Mary's health declines, Selina becomes her personal maid, strengthening a bond that lasts until death parts them. Forced to flee Arlington at the start of the Civil War, Mary entrusts the keys to her beloved home to no one but Selina. When Union troops begin looting the house, it is Selina who confronts their commander and saves many of its historic treasures. In a story spanning crude slave quarters, sunny schoolrooms, stately wedding parlors, and cramped birthing rooms, novelist Dorothy Love amplifies the astonishing true-life account of an extraordinary alliance and casts fresh light on the tumultuous years leading up to and through the wrenching battle for a nation's soul.
©2016 Dorothy Love (P)2020 Tantor
Say I'm Dead
Summary
Fearful of prison time - or lynching - for violating Indiana’s anti-miscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson's black father and white mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo. Her mother simply vanished, evading an FBI and police search that ended with the declaration to her family that she was the victim of foul play, either dead or sold into white slavery. When Johnson was born, social norms and her government-issued birth certificate said she was Negro, nullifying her mother’s white blood in her identity. As an African American, she withstood the advice of a high school counselor who said that blacks don’t go to college by graduating from Harvard. Then, as a code-switching business executive feeling too far from her black roots, she searched for her father’s black genealogy. Johnson was amazed to suddenly realize that her mother's whole white side was - and always had been - missing. When confronted, her mother's decades-old secret spilled out. Despite her parents’ crippling and well-founded fears of rejection and reprisals, and her black militant brother’s accusation that she was a race traitor, Johnson went searching for the white family who did not know she existed. When she found them, it’s not just their shock and her mama’s shame that have to be overcome, but her own fraught experiences with whites.
©2020 E. Dolores Johnson (P)2020 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Young Mandela
Summary
Nelson Mandela is well known throughout the world as a heroic leader who symbolizes freedom and moral authority. He is fixed in the public mind as the world’s elder statesman—the gray-haired man with a kindly smile who spent 27 years in prison before becoming the first black president of South Africa. But Nelson Mandela was not always elderly or benign. In Young Mandela, David James Smith takes us deep into the heart of racist South Africa to paint a portrait of the Mandela that many have forgotten: the committed revolutionary who left his family behind to live on the run, adopting false names, and organizing the first strikes to overthrow the apartheid state. Young Mandela lifts the curtain on an icon’s first steps to greatness.
©2010 David James Smith (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc., and Buck 50 Productions, LLC
Flossie and the Fox
Summary
A wily fox, notorious for stealing eggs, meets his match when he encounters a bold little girl in the woods who insists upon proof that he is a fox before she will be frightened.
©1986 Patricia McKissack (P)2018 Listening Library
Spain or Shine
Summary
Elena is lost in the shuffle between her three overachieving siblings. But now that she’s on her own for a whole semester, she intends to keep the spotlight on herself - and Spain is just the place to do it. Once she starts living it up in tapas bars, lying out on the beach (even though it’s November), and having a nice, long siesta smack-dab in the middle of every day, Elena finds Spain is everything she hoped it would be. She’s even met a to-fawn-over Spaniard, Miguel. But Elena has always been more comfortable writing plays than starring in them, and she’s beginning to realize that keeping out of the spotlight has its perks, too....
©2005 Michelle Jellen (P)2018 Listening Library
Inquisitor
Summary
From the Aurealis Award-winning author of A Crucible of Souls. To Inquisitor Angel Xia, it was just another corporate killing on a backwater planet. But as the bodies begin to pile up and she finds herself a target, she realizes she's stepped on one toe too many. Barely escaping attempts on her life by powerful agents with seemingly limitless reach and influence, Angel senses even her co-Inquisitors can't be trusted. But as the web tightens, she receives a cryptic message from a computer program claiming to be a little girl in desperate need of her help. She insists she's being held prisoner by a major corporation, but is this just a trap to silence Angel...permanently? Now a fugitive with her life inextricably linked to the girl in the program, Angel is taken to extremes she never knew she was capable of and to forgotten places at the edges of known space that hold the darkest secrets of humanity and the greatest threat to its future.
©2015 Mitchell Hogan (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
Dawn of Detroit
Summary
Most Americans believe that slavery was a creature of the South, and that Northern states and territories provided stops on the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. In this paradigm-shifting book, celebrated historian Tiya Miles reveals that slavery was at the heart of the Midwest's iconic city: Detroit. In this richly researched and eye-opening book, Miles has pieced together the experience of the unfree - both native and African American - in the frontier outpost of Detroit, a place wildly remote yet at the center of national and international conflict. Skillfully assembling fragments of a distant historical record, Miles introduces new historical figures and unearths struggles that remained hidden from view until now. The result is fascinating history, little explored and eloquently told, of the limits of freedom in early America, one that adds new layers of complexity to the story of a place that exerts a strong fascination in the media and among public intellectuals, artists, and activists. A book that opens the door on a completely hidden past, The Dawn of Detroit is a powerful and elegantly written history, one that completely changes our understanding of slavery's American legacy.
©2017 Tiya Miles (P)2017 Tantor
Queen of Bebop
Summary
Queen of Bebop brilliantly chronicles the life of jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, one of the most influential and innovative musicians of the 20th century and a pioneer of women's and civil rights. Sarah Vaughan, a pivotal figure in the formation of bebop, influenced a broad array of singers who followed in her wake, yet the breadth and depth of her impact - not just as an artist but also as an African American woman - remain overlooked. Drawing from a wealth of sources as well as on exclusive interviews with Vaughan's friends and former colleagues, Queen of Bebop unravels the many myths and misunderstandings that have surrounded Vaughan while offering insights into this notoriously private woman, her creative process, and, ultimately, her genius. Hayes deftly traces the influence that Vaughan's singing had on the perception and appreciation of vocalists - not to mention women - in jazz. She reveals how, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Vaughan helped desegregate American airwaves, opening doors for future African American artists seeking mainstream success, while also setting the stage for the civil rights activism of the 1960s and 1970s. She follows Vaughan from her hometown of Newark, New Jersey, and her first performances at the Apollo to the Waldorf Astoria and on to the world stage, breathing life into a thrilling time in American music nearly lost to us today. Equal parts biography, criticism, and good old-fashioned American success story, Queen of Bebop is the definitive biography of a hugely influential artist. This absorbing and sensitive treatment of a singular personality updates and corrects the historical record on Vaughan and elevates her status as a jazz great.
©2017 Elaine M. Hayes (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers
Sidewalk Story
Summary
Council on Interracial Books for Children award winner From the award-winning author of The Hundred Penny Box comes a sweet story about how one girl can make a difference. Lilly Etta didn't know the men, but she knew those yellow chairs. They were Tanya's, and they were being taken out of her building. Tanya was being put out - Tanya, her mother, her six brothers and sisters. Their things would be piled on the sidewalk and left there to be had for the taking. It didn't matter if nobody else in the city cared; Lilly Etta did. She knew what friendship was, and she wasn't going to let her friend be thrown out without a fight. “An affecting, sensitive story.” (Booklist)
©1971 Sharon Bell Mathis (P)2018 Listening Library
Stop Me
Summary
Who was the real killer? Romain Fornier lost his reason for living when his daughter was kidnapped and murdered. He used a cop's gun to mete out his own justice and spent the next few years in prison. Once he was freed, he returned to his Cajun roots in small-town Louisiana. But now he learns that he might have killed the wrong man. Jasmine Stratford, a psychological profiler, is convinced his daughter's killer is still alive - and that she and Romain have something in common. She believes the same man kidnapped her sister, Kimberly, 16 years ago. What happens next? Jasmine is determined to track him down when she receives an anonymous package, postmarked New Orleans - the bracelet she gave Kimberly for her eighth birthday. She approaches Romain because she knows he can help her... if he chooses. But searching for the man who irrevocably changed both their lives means they have to rise to a killer's challenge: stop me.
©2008 Brenda Novak; 2008 Audible, Inc.