Andrew Garman has narrated 24 audiobooks on Listento.it by 24 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 112 ratings. The most-rated is How Music Works.
How Music Works
Summary
Best known as a founding member and principal songwriter of the iconic band Talking Heads, David Byrne has received Grammy, Oscar, and Golden Globe awards and has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In the insightful How Music Works, Byrne offers his unique perspective on music - including how music is shaped by time, how recording technologies transform the listening experience, the evolution of the industry, and much more.
©2012 David Byrne (P)2012 Recorded Books
A Billion Wicked Thoughts
Summary
Informed by 18,000 interviews and bold insight from neuroscientists Sai Gaddam and Ogi Ogas, this groundbreaking study will likely rock many people’s perceptions of what stimulates males and females. The surprising results not only demonstrate people’s needs, but the needs of people’s mates as well.
©2011 Sai Goddam and Ogi Ogas (P)2011 Recorded Books, LLC
Turn Right at Machu Picchu
Summary
Writer for the New York Times and GQ, Mark Adams is also the acclaimed author of Mr. America. In this fascinating travelogue, Adams follows in the controversial footsteps of Hiram Bingham III, who’s been both lionized and vilified for his discovery of the famed Lost City in 1911 - but which reputation is justified?
©2011 Mark Adams (P)2012 Recorded Books
Civil War of 1812
Summary
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor tells the riveting story of a war that redefined North America. In a world of double identities, slippery allegiances, and porous borders, the leaders of the American Republic and the British Empire struggled to control their own diverse peoples. Taylor’s vivid narrative of an often brutal—sometimes farcical—war reveals much about the tangled origins of the United States and Canada.
©2010 Alan Taylor (P)2010 Recorded Books, LLC
The Fate of Rome
Summary
A sweeping new history of how climate change and disease helped bring down the Roman Empire Here is the monumental retelling of one of the most consequential chapters of human history: the fall of the Roman Empire. The Fate of Rome is the first book to examine the catastrophic role that climate change and infectious diseases played in the collapse of Rome's power - a story of nature's triumph over human ambition. Interweaving a grand historical narrative with cutting-edge climate science and genetic discoveries, Kyle Harper traces how the fate of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria. He takes listeners from Rome's pinnacle in the second century, when the empire seemed an invincible superpower, to its unraveling by the seventh century, when Rome was politically fragmented and materially depleted. Harper describes how the Romans were resilient in the face of enormous environmental stress, until the besieged empire could no longer withstand the combined challenges of a "little ice age" and recurrent outbreaks of bubonic plague. A poignant reflection on humanity's intimate relationship with the environment, The Fate of Rome provides a sweeping account of how one of history's greatest civilizations encountered, endured, yet ultimately succumbed to the cumulative burden of nature's violence. The example of Rome is a timely reminder that climate change and germ evolution have shaped the world we inhabit - in ways that are surprising and profound. Author bio: Kyle Harper is professor of classics and letters and senior vice president and provost at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425 and From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity. He lives in Norman, Oklahoma.
©2017 Princeton University Press (P)2017 Recorded Books
Junky
Summary
Burroughs' first novel, a largely autobiographical account of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures, and relapses, remains the most unflinching, unsentimental account of addiction ever written. Through time spent kicking and time spent dealing, through junk sickness and a sanatorium, Junky is a field report from the American post-war drug underground. It has influenced generations of writers with its raw, sparse and unapologetic tone.
©2012 William S. Burroughs (P)2012 W.F. Howes
Average is Over
Summary
The widening gap between rich and poor means dealing with one big, uncomfortable truth: If you're not at the top, you're at the bottom. The global labor market is changing radically thanks to growth at the high end and the low. About three quarters of the jobs created in the United States since the great recession pay only a bit more than minimum wage. Still, the United States has more millionaires and billionaires than any country ever, and we continue to mint them. In this eye-opening audiobook, renowned economist and best-selling author Tyler Cowen explains that phenomenon: High earners are taking ever more advantage of machine intelligence in data analysis and achieving ever-better results. Meanwhile, low earners, who haven't committed to learning or to making the most of new technologies, have poorer prospects. Nearly every business sector relies less and less on manual labor, and this fact is forever changing the world of work and wages. A steady, secure life somewhere in the middle is over. With The Great Stagnation, Cowen explained why median wages stagnated over the last four decades; in Average is Over he reveals the essential nature of the new economy, identifies the best path forward for workers and entrepreneurs, and provides listeners with actionable advice to make the most of the new economic landscape. It is a challenging and sober must-listen - but ultimately exciting and good news. In debates about our nation's economic future, it will be impossible to ignore.
©2013 Tyler Cowen (P)2013 Recorded Books
Paper
Summary
From the New York Times best-selling author of Cod and Salt, a definitive history of paper and the astonishing ways it has shaped today's world. Paper is one of the simplest and most essential pieces of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce, and art; it has formed the foundation of civilizations, promoting revolutions and restoring stability. One has only to look at history's greatest press run, which produced 6.5 billion copies of Mao zhuxi yulu, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Zedong), which doesn't include editions in 37 foreign languages and in brailleto appreciate the range and influence of a single publication, in paper. Or take the fact that one of history's most revered artists, Leonardo da Vinci, left behind only 15 paintings but 4,000 works on paper. And though the colonies were at the time calling for a boycott of all British goods, the one exception they made speaks to the essentiality of the material; they penned the Declaration of Independence on British paper. Now, amid discussion of "going paperless" and as speculation about the effects of a digitally dependent society grows rampant, we've come to a world-historic juncture. Thousands of years ago, Socrates and Plato warned that written language would be the end of "true knowledge", replacing the need to excise memory and think through complex questions. Similar arguments were made about the switch from handwritten to printed books, and today about the role of computer technology. By tracing paper's evolution from antiquity to the present, with an emphasis on the contributions made in Asia and the Middle East, Mark Kurlansky challenges common assumptions about technology's influence, affirming that paper is here to stay. Paper will be the commodity history that guides us forward in the 21st century and illuminates our times.
©2016 Mark Kurlansky (P)2016 Recorded Books
Meet Me in Atlantis
Summary
The New York Times best-selling author of Turn Right at Machu Picchu sets out to uncover the truth behind the legendary lost city of Atlantis. A few years ago, Mark Adams made a strange discovery: Everything we know about the lost city of Atlantis comes from the work of one man, the Greek philosopher Plato. Then he made a second, stranger discovery: Amateur explorers are still actively searching for this sunken city all around the world, based entirely on the clues Plato left behind. Exposed to the Atlantis obsession, Adams decides to track down these people and determine why they believe it's possible to find the world's most famous lost city and whether any of their theories could prove or disprove its existence. He visits scientists who use cutting-edge technology to find legendary civilizations once thought to be fictional. He examines the numerical and musical codes hidden in Plato's writings, and with the help of some charismatic sleuths traces their roots back to Pythagoras, the sixth-century BC mathematician. He learns how ancient societies transmitted accounts of cataclysmic events - and how one might dig out the "kernel of truth" in Plato's original tale. Meet Me in Atlantis is Adams's enthralling account of his quest to solve one of history's greatest mysteries; a travelogue that takes listeners to fascinating locations to meet irresistible characters; and a deep, often humorous look at the human longing to rediscover a lost world.
©2015 Mark Adams (P)2015 Recorded Books
Queer
Summary
For more than three decades, while its writer's world fame increased, Queer remained unpublished because of its forthright depiction of homosexual longings. Set in the corrupt and spectral Mexico City of the '40s, Queer is the story of William Lee, a man afflicted with both acute heroin withdrawal and romantic and sexual yearnings for an indifferent user named Eugene Allerton. The narrative is punctuated by Lee's outrageous "routines" - brilliant comic monologues that foreshadow Naked Lunch - yet the atmosphere is heavy with foreboding.
©2010 The William S. Burroughs Trust, 2010 Oliver Harris (introduction) (P)2013 Recorded Books
Fierce Patriot
Summary
With a unique, witty, and conversational voice historian Robert O'Connell breaks down the often paradoxical, easily caricatured character of General William T. Sherman for the most well-rounded portrait of the man yet written. There were many Shermans, according to O'Connell. Most prominently was Sherman the military strategist (indeed, one of the greatest strategists of all time), who gained an appreciation of geography from early campaigns out west and applied it to his famed Civil War march. Then there was "Uncle Billy", Sherman's popular persona, the charismatic and beloved leader of the Army of the West, and instrumental in the achievement of the transcontinental railroad in his post-war years. This Sherman, as O'Connell writes, was "the human embodiment of manifest destiny". From north to south and east to west, Sherman dedicated his life to keeping the United States united. Finally, there was Sherman the family man, whose tempestuous relationship with his wife (and stepsister!) Ellen is out of a Dickens novel. Throughout, O'Connell breaks down the misperceptions about Sherman, bolstered both by contemporary journalists and by the work of modern historians. O'Connell makes a compelling case that Sherman's march through the south was not a campaign of unmitigated destruction, but a necessary piece of strategy and the perceived chaos has been overblown. O'Connell's Sherman is ultimately a complicated and quintessential 19th-century American. Robert O' Connell worked as Senior Analyst at the U.S. Army Intelligence Agency's Foreign Science and Technology Center and was a contributing editor to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History.
©2014 Robert L. O'Connell (P)2014 Recorded Books
American Emperor
Summary
A spellbinding storyteller, historian David O. Stewart traces the canny and charismatic Aaron Burr from the threshold of the presidency in 1800 to his duel with Alexander Hamilton. Stewart recounts Burr’s efforts to carve out an empire, taking listeners across the American West as the renegade vice president schemes with foreign ambassadors, the U.S. general-in-chief, and future presidents.
©2011 David O. Stewart (P)2011 Recorded Books, LLC
The Yage Letters Redux
Summary
William Burroughs closed his classic novel, Junky, by saying he had determined to search out a drug he called 'Yage', a drug that could be 'the final fix'. In The Yage Letters, a mix of travel writing, satire, psychedelia and epistolary novel, he journeys through South America, writing to his friend Allen Ginsberg about his experiments with the strange drug, using it to travel through time and space and derange his senses. Burroughs' letters reveal his desire to escape the norms of American society which hemmed him in, and the extraordinary steps he took to break free.
©2006 The William Burroughs Trust, The Allen Ginsberg Trust, Introduction Copyright by Oliver Harris (P)2013 Recorded Books
Game Six
Summary
Best-selling author Mark Frost takes listeners back to the 1975 World Series in this thrilling account of the greatest baseball game ever played. The Reds and Red Sox endured three soggy days of inactivity to reach game six. But all that downtime could not prepare them for what happened when the skies finally cleared.
©2009 Good Comma Link, Inc. (P)2009 Recorded Books, LLC
Outside the Gates of Eden
Summary
"Outside the Gates of Eden is a powerful piece of work. Shiner writes about music, and the making of music, better than anyone I know. He gets across the tremendous excitement of the early days of rock and roll, the peace movement, Woodstock and the Summer of Love - but also the heartbreak of failure, betrayal, and loss. The prose is terrific, and the sense of time and place is first rate. A brilliant requiem for our generation and all our dreams." (George R. R. Martin, author of A Game of Thrones) What happened to the idealism of the 1960s? This question has haunted a generation. Outside the Gates of Eden follows two men from their first meeting in high school to their final destination in the 21st century. Alex is torn between his father's business empire and his own artistic yearnings. Cole finds his calling at a Bob Dylan concert in 1965. From the Summer of Love in San Francisco to Woodstock, from campus protests to the SoHo loft scene, from a commune in Virginia to the outlaw country music of Austin, the novel charts the rise and fall of the counterculture - and what came after. Using the music business as a window into half a century, Outside the Gates of Eden is both epic and intimate, starkly realistic and ultimately hopeful, a War and Peace for the Woodstock generation.
©2019 Lewis Shiner (P)2019 Recorded Books
How to Escape from a Leper Colony
Summary
Like Gabriel García Márquez, Edwidge Danticat, and Maryse Condé before her, Tiphanie Yanique has crafted a debut collection that is heartbreaking, hilarious, and mesmerizing. Set mostly in the U.S. Virgin Islands, these lyrical and haunting stories are part oral history, part postcolonial narrative - but ultimately a loving portrait of a wholly unique place.
©2010 Tiphanie Yanique (P)2011 Recorded Books, LLC
Let's All Kill Constance
Summary
On a dismal evening in the previous century, an unnamed writer in Venice, California, answers a furious pounding at his beachfront bungalow door and again admits Constance Rattigan into his life. An aging, once-glamorous Hollywood star, Constance is running in fear from something she dares not acknowledge - and vanishes as suddenly as she appeared, leaving the narrator two macabre books: twin listings of the Tinseltown dead and soon to be dead, with Constance's name included among them. And so begins an odyssey as dark as it is wondrous, as the writer sets off in a broken-down jalopy with his irascible sidekick Crumley to sift through the ashes of a bygone Hollywood - a graveyard of ghosts and secrets where each twisted road leads to grim shrines and shattered dreams...and, all too often, to death.
©2003 Ray Bradbury (P)2018 Recorded Books
The Planet Savers & The Sword of Aldones
Summary
The books that started Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series, this audiobook combines the 1958 novella Planet Savers and the 1962 novella The Sword of Aldones into the only one-volume treatment authorized by the Marion Zimmer Bradley Trust. These two short novels are a welcome addition to any SF fan's library. The Planet Savers, the first Darkover novel, introduces the listener to the now legendary world of Cottman IV.
©1962 Ace Books, Inc.; 1990 Marion Zimmer Bradley (P)2017 Recorded Books
John Jay
Summary
From the award-winning and New York Times best-selling author of Seward and Stanton, here is the critically acclaimed and definitive biography of John Jay: a major Founding Father, a true national hero, and a leading architect of America's future. John Jay was a central figure in the early history of the American Republic. A New York lawyer, born in 1745, Jay served his country with the greatest distinction, and was one of the most influential of its Founding Fathers. In this first full-length biography of John Jay in almost 70 years, Walter Stahr brings Jay vividly to life, setting his astonishing career against the background of the American Revolution. Drawing on substantial new material, Walter Stahr has written a full and highly enjoyable portrait of both the public and private man. It is the story not only of John Jay himself, the most prominent native-born New Yorker of the 18th century, but also of his engaging and intelligent wife, Sarah, who accompanied her husband on his wartime diplomatic missions. This lively and compelling biography presents Jay in the light he deserves.
©2005 Walter Stahr (P)2017 Recorded Books
The Gold Bug Variations
Summary
A national best-seller, voted by Time as the number-one novel of 1991, selected as one of the "Best Books of 1991" by Publishers Weekly, and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award - a magnificent story that probes the meaning of love, science, music, and art, by the brilliant author of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. Stuart Ressler, an up-and-coming molecular biologist, finds his career sidetracked by the turmoil of the '60s, and a young couple of the 1980s tries to discover why the biologist abandoned his scientific pursuits. The Gold Bug Variations is a double love story of two young couples separated by a distance of 25 years.
©1991 Richard Powers (P)2018 Recorded Books