Ben Arogundade has narrated 4 audiobooks on Listento.it by 5 authors, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 5 ratings. The most-rated is Black Spartacus.
Black Spartacus
Summary
A new interpretation of the life of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture. Among the defining figures of the Age of Revolution, Toussaint Louverture is the most enigmatic. Though the Haitian revolutionary’s image has multiplied across the globe - appearing on banknotes and in bronze, on T-shirts and in film - the only definitive portrait executed in his lifetime has been lost. Well versed in the work of everyone from Rousseau to Machiavelli, he was nonetheless dismissed by Thomas Jefferson as a “cannibal”. A Caribbean acolyte of the European Enlightenment, Toussaint also nurtured a class of Black Catholic clergymen who became one of the pillars of his rule, while his supporters also believed he communicated with voodoo spirits. And for a leader who once summed up his modus operandi with the phrase “Say little but do as much as possible”, he was a prolific and indefatigable correspondent, famous for exhausting the five secretaries he maintained, simultaneously, at the height of his power in the 1790s. Employing groundbreaking archival research and a keen interpretive lens, Sudhir Hazareesingh restores Toussaint to his full complexity in Black Spartacus. At a time when his subject has, variously, been reduced to little more than a one-dimensional icon of liberation or criticized for his personal failings - his White mistresses, his early ownership of slaves, his authoritarianism - Hazareesingh proposes a new conception of Toussaint’s understanding of himself and his role in the Atlantic world of the late 18th century. Black Spartacus is a work of both biography and intellectual history, rich with insights into Toussaint’s fundamental hybridity - his ability to unite European, African, and Caribbean traditions in the service of his revolutionary aims. Hazareesingh offers a new and resonant interpretation of Toussaint’s racial politics, showing how he used Enlightenment ideas to argue for the equal dignity of all human beings while simultaneously insisting on his own world-historical importance and the universal pertinence of Blackness - a message that chimed particularly powerfully among African Americans. Ultimately, Black Spartacus offers a vigorous argument in favor of “getting back to Toussaint” - a call to take Haiti’s founding father seriously on his own terms and to honor his role in shaping the postcolonial world to come. The Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year - 2020 A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
©2020 Sudhir Hazareesingh (P)2020 Macmillan Audio
The Search Party
Summary
Brought to you by Penguin. Sixteen-year-old Sadie Saunders is missing. Five friends set out into the woods to find her. But they're not just friends.... They're suspects. You see, this was never a search party. It's a witch hunt. And not everyone will make it home alive.... The Chalk Man meets The Hunting Party in this gripping story. Witness four suspects as, alongside DI Fleet, you attempt to discover the truth about what happened to Sadie....
©2020 Simon Lelic (P)2020 Penguin Audio
Essays
Summary
Brought to you by Penguin. The articles collected in George Orwell's Essays illuminate the life and work of one of the most individual writers of this century - a man who elevated political writing to an art. This outstanding collection brings together Orwell's longer, major essays and a fine selection of shorter pieces that includes 'My Country Right or Left', 'Decline of the English Murder', 'Shooting an Elephant' and 'A Hanging'. With great originality and wit Orwell unfolds his views on subjects ranging from a revaluation of Charles Dickens to the nature of socialism, from a comic yet profound discussion of naughty seaside postcards to a spirited defence of English cooking. Displaying an almost unrivalled mastery of English plain prose, Orwell's essays created a unique literary manner from the process of thinking aloud and continue to challenge, move and entertain. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Bernard Crick.
Public Domain (P)2021 Penguin Audio
Muscle
Summary
In a hard-boiled city of crooks, grifts and rackets lurk a pair of toughs: Box and _____. They're the kind of men capable of extracting apologies and reparations, of teaching you a chilling lesson. They seldom think twice and ask very few questions. Until one night over the poker table, they encounter a pulp writer with wild ideas and an unscrupulous private detective, leading them into what is either a classic mystery, a senseless maze of corpses or an inextricable fever dream.... Drunk on cinematic and literary influence, Muscle is a slice of noir fiction in collapse, a ceaselessly imaginative story of violence, boredom and madness. In this novel the name of one of the main characters is given only as ‘_____’: this typographic eccentricity cannot be adequately replicated in an audiobook. As a result, for this production the necessary but contentious step has been taken to rechristen him 'Blank'.
©2019 Alan Trotter (P)2019 Faber Audio