Christian Baskous has narrated 42 audiobooks on Listento.it by 19 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 2,000 ratings. The most-rated is American Buffalo.
American Buffalo
Summary
From the host of the Travel Channel’s The Wild Within. A hunt for the American buffalo - an adventurous, fascinating examination of an animal that has haunted the American imagination. In 2005, Steven Rinella won a lottery permit to hunt for a wild buffalo, or American bison, in the Alaskan wilderness. Despite the odds - there’s only a two percent chance of drawing the permit, and fewer than 20 percent of those hunters are successful - Rinella managed to kill a buffalo on a snow-covered mountainside and then raft the meat back to civilization while being trailed by grizzly bears and suffering from hypothermia. Throughout these adventures, Rinella found himself contemplating his own place among the 14,000 years’ worth of buffalo hunters in North America, as well as the buffalo’s place in the American experience. At the time of the Revolutionary War, North America was home to approximately 40 million buffalo, the largest herd of big mammals on the planet, but by the mid-1890s only a few hundred remained. Now that the buffalo is on the verge of a dramatic ecological recovery across the West, Americans are faced with the challenge of how, and if, we can dare to share our land with a beast that is the embodiment of the American wilderness. American Buffalo is a narrative tale of Rinella’s hunt. But beyond that, it is the story of the many ways in which the buffalo has shaped our national identity. Rinella takes us across the continent in search of the buffalo’s past, present, and future: to the Bering Land Bridge, where scientists search for buffalo bones amid artifacts of the New World’s earliest human inhabitants; to buffalo jumps where Native Americans once ran buffalo over cliffs by the thousands; to the Detroit Carbon works, a “bone charcoal” plant that made fortunes in the late 1800s by turning millions of tons of buffalo bones into bone meal, black dye, and fine china; and even to an abattoir turned fashion mecca in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, where a depressed buffalo named Black Diamond met his fate after serving as the model for the American nickel. Rinella’s erudition and exuberance, combined with his gift for storytelling, make him the perfect guide for a book that combines outdoor adventure with a quirky blend of facts and observations about history, biology, and the natural world. Both a captivating narrative and a book of environmental and historical significance, American Buffalo tells us as much about ourselves as Americans as it does about the creature who perhaps best of all embodies the American ethos.
©2008, 2009 Steven Rinella (P)2019 Random House Audio
East of Eden
Summary
This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
©1952 John Steinbeck; Renewed 1980 Elaine Steinbeck, Thom Steinbeck, and John Steinbeck IV (P)2011 Penguin Audio
Embers
Summary
"Life sometimes is hard. There are challenges. There are difficulties. There is pain. As a younger man I sought to avoid them and only ever caused myself more of the same. These days I choose to face life head on - and I have become a comet. I arc across the sky of my life and the harder times are the friction that lets the worn and tired bits drop away. It's a good way to travel; eventually I will wear away all resistance until all there is left of me is light. I can live towards that end." (Richard Wagamese, Embers) In this carefully curated selection of everyday reflections, Richard Wagamese finds lessons in both the mundane and sublime as he muses on the universe, drawing inspiration from working in the bush-sawing and cutting and stacking wood for winter as well as the smudge ceremony to bring him closer to the Creator. Embers is perhaps Richard Wagamese's most personal volume to date. Honest, evocative, and articulate, he explores the various manifestations of grief, joy, recovery, beauty, gratitude, physicality, and spirituality-concepts many find hard to express. But for Wagamese, spirituality is multifaceted. From this audiobook, listeners will find hard-won and concrete wisdom on how to feel the joy in the everyday things. Wagamese does not seek to be a teacher or guru, but these observations made along his own journey to become, as he says, "a spiritual bad-ass," make inspiring listening.
©2019 Richard Wagamese (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing
Crucible
Summary
In the race to save one of their own, Sigma Force must wrestle with the deepest spiritual mysteries of mankind in this mind-expanding adventure from the number-one New York Times best-selling author, told with his trademark blend of cutting-edge science, historical mystery, and pulse-pounding action. Arriving home on Christmas Eve, Commander Gray Pierce discovers his house ransacked, his pregnant lover missing, and his best friend’s wife, Kat, unconscious on the kitchen floor. With no shred of evidence to follow, his one hope to find the woman he loves and his unborn child is Kat, the only witness to what happened. But the injured woman is in a semicomatose state and cannot speak - until a brilliant neurologist offers a radical approach to “unlock” her mind long enough to ask a few questions. What Pierce learns from Kat sets Sigma Force on a frantic quest for answers that are connected to mysteries reaching back to the Spanish Inquisition and to one of the most reviled and blood-soaked books in human history - a Medieval text known as the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches. What they uncover hidden deep in the past will reveal a frightening truth in the present and a future on the brink of annihilation and force them to confront the ultimate question: What does it mean to have a soul?
©2019 James Czajkowski (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers
The Last Odyssey: A Thriller
Summary
To save the world and our future, Sigma Force must embark on a dangerous odyssey into an ancient past whose horrors are all too present in this pause-resisting thriller from number one New York Times best-selling author James Rollins that combines cutting-edge science, historical mystery, mythology, and pulse-pounding action. For eons, the city of Troy - whose legendary fall was detailed in Homer’s Iliad - was believed to be myth, until archaeologists in the 19th century uncovered its ancient walls buried beneath the sands. If Troy was real, how much of Homer’s twin tales of gods and monsters, curses and miracles - The Iliad and The Odyssey - could also be true and awaiting discovery? In the frozen tundra of Greenland, a group of modern-day researchers stumble on a shocking find: a medieval ship buried a half-mile below the ice. The ship’s hold contains a collection of even older artifacts - tools of war - dating back to the Bronze Age. Inside the captain’s cabin is a magnificent treasure that is as priceless as it is miraculous: a clockwork gold map imbedded with an intricate silver astrolabe. The mechanism was crafted by a group of Muslim inventors - the Banu Musa brothers - considered by many to be the Da Vincis of the Arab world - brilliant scientists who inspired Leonardo’s own work. Once activated, the moving map traces the path of Odysseus’s famous ship as it sailed away from Troy. But the route detours as the map opens to reveal a fiery river leading to a hidden realm underneath the Mediterranean Sea. It is the subterranean world of Tartarus, the Greek name for Hell. In mythology, Tartarus was where the wicked were punished and the monstrous Titans of old, imprisoned. When word of Tartarus spreads - and of the cache of miraculous weapons said to be hidden there - tensions explode in this volatile region where Turks battle Kurds, terrorists wage war, and civilians suffer untold horrors. The phantasmagoric horrors found in Homer’s tales are all too real - and could be unleashed upon the world. Whoever possesses them can use their awesome power to control the future of humanity. Now, Sigma Force must go where humans fear to tread. To prevent a tyrant from igniting a global war, they must cross the very gates of Hell.
©2020 James Rollins (P)2020 HarperAudio
One Drum
Summary
Fans of Richard Wagamese’s writing will be heartened by the news that the best-selling author left behind a manuscript he’d been working on until shortly before his death in 2017.
In One Drum, Wagamese wrote, “I am not a shaman. Nor am I an elder, a pipe carrier, or a celebrated traditionalist. I am merely one who has trudged the same path many of this human family has - the path of the seeker, called forward by a yearning I have not always understood.”
One Drum draws from the foundational teachings of Ojibway tradition, the Grandfather Teachings. Focusing specifically on the lessons of humility, respect, and courage, the volume contains simple ceremonies that anyone anywhere can do, alone or in a group, to foster harmony and connection. Wagamese believed that there is a shaman in each of us, that we are all teachers, and in the world of the spirit, there is no right way or wrong way.
Writing of neglect, abuse, and loss of identity, Wagamese recalled living on the street, going to jail, drinking too much, feeling rootless and afraid, and then the feeling of hope he gained from connecting with the spiritual ways of his people. He expressed the belief that ceremony has the power to unify and to heal for people of all backgrounds. “When that happens,” he wrote, “we truly become one song and one drum beating together in a common purpose - and we are on the path to being healed.”
One Drum welcomes listeners to unite in ceremony to heal themselves and bring harmony to their lives and communities.
©2019 Estate of Richard Allen Wagamese Gilkinson. Foreword © 2019 Drew Hayden Taylor (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing
One Native Life
Summary
One Native Life is a look back down the road Richard Wagamese has traveled - from childhood abuse to adult alcoholism - in reclaiming his identity. It's about what he has learned as a human being, a man, and an Ojibway in his 52 years on Earth. Whether he's writing about playing baseball, running away with the circus, making bannock, or attending a sacred bundle ceremony, these are stories told in a healing spirit. Through them, Wagamese reveals to listeners how to appreciate life for the journey it is.
©2009 Richard Wagamese (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Ham on Rye
Summary
In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years, and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.
©1982 Charles Bukowski (P)2013 HarperCollinsPublishers
Post Office
Summary
"It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than 12 years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service. In a world where his three true, bitter pleasures are women, booze, and racetrack betting, he somehow drags his hangover out of bed every dawn to lug waterlogged mailbags up mud-soaked mountains, outsmart vicious guard dogs, and pray to survive the day-to-day trials of sadistic bosses and certifiable coworkers. This classic 1971 novel - the one that catapulted its author to national fame - is the perfect introduction to the grimly hysterical world of legendary writer, poet, and Dirty Old Man Charles Bukowski and his fictional alter ego, Chinaski.
©1971 Charles Bukowski (P)2013 HarperCollinsPublishers
The Bone Labyrinth
Summary
A war is coming, a battle that will stretch from the deepest trenches under the sea to the rocky craters of the moon, in New York Times best-selling author James Rollins' groundbreaking masterpiece of ingenuity and intrigue that spans 50,000 years in human history to mankind's next great leap - but will it mark a new chapter in our development or our extinction? A series of strange events throws the world into turmoil. As a manned Chinese rocket explodes upon launch, three American astronauts, each separated by thousands of miles, are murdered. Then an archaeologist in Croatia uncovers a new cavern system that reveals elaborate primitive paintings by a tribe of Neanderthals. The artwork, painted in blood, illustrates an immense battle between the Neanderthals - joined by Homo sapiens - and frightening shadowy figures. Who is the ancient enemy depicted, and what does it mean? The search for answers will take Commander Gray Pierce of Sigma Force 50,000 years back in time. As he and Sigma trace the evolution of human intelligence back to its true source, they will be plunged into a war for the future of humanity that stretches across the globe - and beyond. From ancient tunnels in Ecuador that span the breadth of South America to a millennia-old necropolis holding the bones of our ancestors, from the lost archives tied to the sunken continent of Atlantis to the first moon landing, Sigma embarks on its most harrowing journey ever - and faces off against its greatest threat: an ancient evil resurrected by modern genetic science, strong enough to bring about the end of man's dominance on this planet. Only this time Sigma will falter - and the world we know will change forever.
©2015 James Czajkowski (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers
One Story, One Song
Summary
A collection of warm, wise, and inspiring stories from the author of the best-selling One Native Life Since its publication in 2008, readers and reviewers have embraced Richard Wagamese's One Native Life. "In quiet tones and luminous language," wrote the Winnipeg Free Press, "Wagamese shares his hurts and joys, inviting readers to find the ways in which they are joined to him and to consider how they might be joined to others." In this book, Richard Wagamese again invites listeners to accompany him on his travels. This time his focus is on stories: how they shape us, how they empower us, how they change our lives. Ancient and contemporary, cultural and spiritual, funny and sad, the tales are grouped according to the four essential principles Ojibway traditional teachers sought to impart: humility, trust, introspection, and wisdom. Whether the topic is learning from his fifth grade teacher about Martin Luther King Jr., gleaning understanding from a wolf track, lighting a fire for the first time without matches, or finding the universe in an eagle feather, these stories exhibit the warmth, wisdom, and generosity that made One Native Life so popular. As always, in this book, the land serves as Wagamese's guide. And as always, he finds that true home means not only community but conversation - good, straight-hearted talk about important things. We all need to tell our stories, he says. Every voice matters.
©2018 Richard Wagamese (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Seventh Plague
Summary
If the biblical plagues of Egypt truly happened—could they happen again—on a global scale? Two years after vanishing into the Sudanese desert, Professor Harold McCabe comes stumbling out of the sands, but he dies before he can tell his story. Then an autopsy uncovers a bizarre corruption: someone had begun to mummify the professor's body—while he was still alive. Subsequently, the medical team who had performed the man's autopsy has fallen ill with an unknown disease. Fearing the worst, a colleague of the professor reaches out to Painter Crowe, the director of Sigma Force. The call is urgent, for Professor McCabe had vanished into the desert while searching for proof of the ten plagues of Moses. As the pandemic grows, a disturbing question arises. Are those plagues starting again? To unravel a secret going back millennia, Director Crowe and Commander Grayson Pierce will be thrust to opposite sides of the globe. As the global crisis grows ever larger, Sigma Force will confront a threat born of the ancient past and made real by the latest science—a danger that will unleash a cascading series of plagues, culminating in a scourge that could kill all of the world's children…decimating humankind forever.
©2016 James Czajkowski (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers
The Eye of God
Summary
In The Eye of God, a Sigma Force novel, New York Times best-selling author James Rollins delivers an apocalyptic vision of a future predicted by the distant past. In the wilds of Mongolia, a research satellite has crashed, triggering an explosive search for its valuable cargo: a code-black physics project connected to the study of dark energy...and a shocking image of the eastern seaboard of the United States in utter ruin. At the Vatican, a package arrives containing two strange artifacts: a skull scrawled with ancient Aramaic and a tome bound in human skin. DNA evidence reveals that both came from the same body: the long-dead Mongol king Genghis Khan. Commander Gray Pierce and Sigma Force set out to discover a truth tied to the fall of the Roman Empire, to a mystery going back to the birth of Christianity, and to a weapon hidden for centuries that holds the fate of humanity.
©2013 James Czajkowski (P)2013 HarperCollinsPublishers
Women
Summary
Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at 50, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running 300 hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that would cripple Casanova. With all of Bukowski's trademark humor and gritty, dark honesty, this 1978 follow-up to Post Office and Factotum is an uncompromising account of life on the edge.
©1978 Charles Bukowski (P)2013 HarperCollinsPublishers
Persuader
Summary
“Gripping and suspenseful...Child ratchets up the suspense to new heights.” (The Denver Post) Jack Reacher lives for the moment. Without a home. Without commitment. And with a burning desire to right wrongs - and rewrite his own agonizing past. DEA Susan Duffy is living for the future, knowing that she has made a terrible mistake by putting one of her own female agents into a death trap within a heavily guarded Maine mansion. Staging a brilliant ruse, Reacher hurtles into the dark heart of a vast criminal enterprise. Trying to rescue an agent whose time is running out, Reacher enters a crime lord’s waterfront fortress. There he will find a world of secrecy and violence - and confront some unfinished business from his own past.
©2003 Lee Child (P)2021 Random House Audio
The 6th Extinction
Summary
A remote military research station sends out a frantic distress call, ending with a chilling final command: Kill us all! Personnel from the neighboring base rush in to discover everyone already dead - and not just the scientists, but every living thing for 50 square miles is annihilated: every animal, plant, and insect, even bacteria. The land is entirely sterile - and the blight is spreading. To halt the inevitable, Commander Gray Pierce and Sigma must unravel a threat that rises out of the distant past, to a time when Antarctica was green and all life on Earth balanced upon the blade of a knife. Following clues from an ancient map rescued from the lost Library of Alexandria, Sigma will discover the truth about an ancient continent, about a new form of death buried under miles of ice. From millennia-old secrets out of the frozen past to mysteries buried deep in the darkest jungles of today, Sigma will face its greatest challenge to date: stopping the coming extinction of mankind. But is it already too late
©2014 James Czajkowski (P)2014 HarperCollinsPublishers
Factotum
Summary
One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic whores, sordid rooms, dreary embraces, and drunken brawls, as he makes his bitter, brilliant way from one drink to the next. Charles Bukowski's posthumous legend continues to grow. Factotum is a masterfully vivid evocation of slow-paced, low-life urbanity and alcoholism, and an excellent introduction to the fictional world of Charles Bukowski.
©1975 Charles Bukowski (P)2013 HarperCollinsPublishers
Blood Infernal
Summary
In a masterpiece of supernatural mystery and apocalyptic prophecy, New York Times best-selling authors James Rollins and Rebecca Cantrell bring to a thunderous conclusion their epic trilogy of novels set between the worlds of shadow and light, between salvation and damnation, where the very gates of hell must be shattered to discover the true fate of humankind.... As an escalating scourge of grisly murders sweeps the globe, archaeologist Erin Granger must decipher the truth behind an immortal prophecy foretold in the Blood Gospel, a tome written by Christ and lost for centuries: The shackles of Lucifer have been loosened, and his Chalice remains lost. It will take the light of all three to forge the Chalice anew and banish him again to his eternal darkness. With the apocalypse looming, Erin must again join forces with army sergeant Jordan Stone and Father Rhun Korza to search for a treasure lost for millennia. But the prize has already fallen into the hands of their enemy--a demon named Legion, before whom even the walls of the Vatican will fall. The search for the key to salvation will take Erin and the others across centuries and around the world, from the dusty shelves of the Vatican's secret archives to lost medieval laboratories where ancient alchemies were employed to horrific ends. All the while,they are hunted, besieged by creatures of uncanny skill and talent. Clues are dug free from ancient underground chapels and found frozen in icy mountain caverns--ones that will destroy not only her but all she loves. To protect the world, Erin must walk through the very gates of hell and face the darkest of enemies: Lucifer himself.
©2015 James Czajkowski and Rebecca Cantrell (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers
Innocent Blood
Summary
A vicious attack at a ranch in California thrusts archaeologist Erin Granger back into the fold of the Sanguines. Following the prophetic words found in the Blood Gospel, Erin must join forces with Army Sergeant Jordan Stone and Father Rhun Korza to discover and protect a boy believed to be an angel given flesh. But an enigmatic enemy of immense power and terrifying ambition seeks the same child, not to save the world, but to hasten its destruction. For any hope of victory, Erin must discover the truth behind Christ's early years and understand His first true miracle, an event wrapped in sin and destruction, an act that yet remains unfulfilled and holds the only hope for the world. The search for the truth will take Erin and the others across centuries and around the world, to the very gates of Hell itself, where their destiny, and the fate of mankind, awaits.
©2014 James Czajkowski and Rebecca Cantrell (P)2014 HarperCollinsPublishers
The Blood Gospel
Summary
An earthquake in Masada, Israel, kills hundreds and reveals a tomb buried in the heart of the mountain. A trio of investigators - Sergeant Jordan Stone, a military forensic expert; Father Rhun Korza, a Vatican priest; and Dr. Erin Granger, a brilliant but disillusioned archaeologist - are sent to explore the macabre discovery, a subterranean temple holding the crucified body of a mummified girl. But a brutal attack at the site sets the three on the run, thrusting them into a race to recover what was once preserved in the tomb's sarcophagus: a book rumored to have been written by Christ's own hand, a tome that is said to hold the secrets to His divinity. The enemy who hounds them is like no other, a force of ancient evil directed by a leader of impossible ambitions and incalculable cunning.
©2013 James Rollins and Rebecca Cantrell (P)2013 HarperCollins Publishers