C. S. Treadway has narrated 2 audiobooks on Listento.it by 2 authors. The most-rated is Soul Serenade.
The World in Flames
Summary
A memoir of growing up with blind African American parents in a segregated cult preaching the imminent end of the world When The World in Flames begins in 1970, Jerry Walker is six years old. His consciousness revolves around being a member of a church whose beliefs he finds not only confusing but terrifying. Composed of a hodgepodge of requirements and restrictions (including a prohibition against doctors and hospitals), the underpinning tenet of Herbert W. Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God is that its members are divinely chosen, and all others will soon perish in rivers of flames. The substantial membership is ruled by fear, intimidation, and threats. Anyone who dares leave the church will endure hardship for the remainder of this life and eternal suffering in the next. The next life, according to Armstrong, will arrive in 1975, three years after the start of the "Great Tribulation". Jerry will be 11 years old. Jerry's parents were particularly vulnerable to the promise of relief from the world's hardships. When they joined the church in 1960, they were living in a two-room apartment in a dangerous Chicago housing project with the first four of their seven children. Most significantly, they both were blind, having lost their sight to childhood accidents. They took comfort in the belief that they had been chosen for a special afterlife, even if it meant following a religion with a white supremacist ideology. They dutifully sent tithes to Armstrong, whose church boasted more than 100,000 members and more than $80 million in annual revenues at its height. When the prophecy of the 1972 Great Tribulation does not materialize, Jerry is considerably less disappointed than relieved. When the 1975 end-time prophecy also fails, he finally begins to question his faith and imagines the possibility of choosing a destiny of his own.
©2016 Jerald Walker (P)2016 Random House Audio
Soul Serenade
Summary
A coming-of-age memoir about a young boy in rural Arkansas who searches for himself and his distant father through soul music. Growing up in rural Arkansas, young Rashod Ollison turned to music to make sense of his life. The dysfunction, sadness, and steely resilience of his family and neighbors was reflected in the R&B songs that played on 45s in smoky rooms. Steeped in the sounds, the smells, and the salty language of rural Arkansas in the 1980s, Soul Serenade is the memoir of a pop music critic whose love for soul music was fostered by his father, Raymond. Drafted into the Vietnam War as a teenager, Raymond returned a changed man, "dead on the inside". After his parents' volatile marriage ended in divorce, Rashod was haunted by the memory of his itinerant father and his mama's long forgotten "sunshine smile". For six-year-old Rashod, his father's record collection - the music of Aretha Franklin, Bobby Womack, Al Green, and others - provided solace, coherence, and escape. Moving nine times during his childhood, Rashod constantly adjusted to new schools and homes with his two sisters, Dusa and Reagan, and his mother, Dianne. Resilient and tough while also being distant and punitive, she worked multiple jobs, striving "to make ends wave at each other if they couldn't meet". He spent time with his acerbic mother's mother, Mama Teacake, and her family's living-out-loud ways, which clashed with his father's family - religious, discreet, and appropriate - where Rashod gravitated to Big Mama and Paw Paw, his father's parents. Becoming aware of his same-sex attraction, Rashod felt further isolated and alone but was encouraged by mentors in the community who fostered his intelligence and talent. He became transformed through discovering the writing of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Nikki Giovanni, and other literary greats, and these books, along with the soulful sounds of the 1970s and '80s, enabled him to thrive in spite of the instability and harshness of his childhood. In textured and evocative language, and peppered with unexpected humor, Soul Serenade is an original and captivating coming-of-age story set to an original beat.
©2016 Rashod Ollison (P)2016 Random House Audio