Christopher Hurt has narrated 15 audiobooks on Listento.it by 14 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 507 ratings. The most-rated is The Fountainhead.
The Fountainhead
Summary
One of the 20th century's most challenging novels of ideas, The Fountainhead champions the cause of individualism through the story of a gifted young architect who defies the tyranny of conventional public opinion. The struggle for personal integrity in a world that values conformity above creativity is powerfully illustrated through three characters: Howard Roarke, the genius who is resented because he creates purely for the delight of his own work and on no other terms; Gail Wynand, the newspaper mogul and self-made millionaire whose power was bought by sacrificing his ideals to the lowest common denominator of public taste; and Dominique Francon, the devastating beauty whose desperate search for meaning has been twisted, through despair, into a quest to destroy the single object of her desire: Howard Roarke. Dramatic, poetic, and demanding, The Fountainhead remains one of the towering books on the contemporary intellectual scene.
©1943 The Bobbs-Merrill Company; 1968 Ayn Rand; 1993 Leonard Peikoff (P)1994 Blackstone Audio Inc.
Atlas Shrugged
Summary
Atlas Shrugged is the "second most influential book for Americans today" after the Bible, according to a joint survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club. This is the story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world - and did. Is he a destroyer or a liberator? Why does he fight his hardest battle not against his enemies, but against the woman he loves? Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand's magnum opus and launched an ideology and a movement. With the publication of this work in 1957, Rand gained an instant following and became a phenomenon. Atlas Shrugged emerged as a premier moral apologia for capitalism, a defense that had an electrifying effect on millions of readers (and now listeners) who had never heard capitalism defended in other than technical terms.
©1957 Ayn Rand, 1985 renewed Eugene Winick, Paul Gitlin, and Leonard Peikoff, Introduction 1992 Leonard Peikoff (P)1991 Blackstone Audio Inc.
Stranger in a Strange Land
Summary
Valentine Michael Smith, an earthling born and educated on Mars, arrives on Earth with superhuman powers and a total ignorance of the mores of man. On his new planet, Smith is destined to become a freak, a media commodity, a scam artist, a searcher, a sexual pioneer, a neon evangelist, a martyr, and, finally, a messiah. Stranger in a Strange Land is the most famous science fiction novel ever written. It became the bible of the "love generation" and transcended the genre to achieve the status of a modern classic.
©1961 by Robert A. Heinlein (P)1996 by Blackstone Audiobooks
The Closing of the American Mind
Summary
In one of the most important books of our time, Allan Bloom, a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago and a noted translator of Plato and Rousseau, argues that the social and political crisis of 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis. Bloom cites everything from the universities' lack of purpose to the students' lack of learning, from the jargon of liberation to the supplanting of reason by so-called creativity. Furthermore, he shows how American democracy has unwittingly played host to vulgarized Continental ideas of nihilism and despair, of relativism disguised as tolerance, while demonstrating that the collective mind of the American university is closed to the very principles of spiritual heritage that gave rise to the university in the first place.
(P)1992 by Blackstone Audiobooks; ©1987 by Alan Bloom
Death by China
Summary
Best-selling author Peter Navarro (The Coming China Wars) and Greg Autry challenge the dominant paradigm of a "Chinese Miracle" - the one featuring a modernizing, progressive Chinese state heading toward political reform and driving global economic growth with its new found embrace of capitalism and freedom. Tearing this delusion away, Death by China documents the myriad ways that a powerful, wealthy, and corrupt Chinese Communist Party emboldened by a growing nationalistic frenzy is becoming the biggest threat to global peace, prosperity, and health since Nazi Germany. From currency manipulation and abusive trade policies, to slave labor and deadly consumer products, China's ruthless rulers threaten the livelihood of the citizens of every developed nation. These thugs have created a frightening, amoral society ruled by a constant fear hidden to outsiders and bought off with the ill-gotten profits of a myopic quest for economic advantage at any cost - social, environmental, or civil rights concerns be damned. Worse, as with everything else, China is scaling and exporting this model around this world, threatening its neighbors and exploiting developing nations across the globe with a new imperialism. While America worries that Al Qaeda or Iran might get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction, China is using our Wal-Mart dollars to build them by the score, filling brand new nuclear submarines with missiles aimed at our heartland and building stealth planes designed to obliterate our friends in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. America's policy of appeasement and perpetual bending to Beijing's tacit threat to stop funding our unsustainable consumption-based economy and deficit-addicted government has left the Chinese people and the world in a frightening position while achieving absolutely nothing. With each new attempt at further "engagement", China simply rounds up more artists, writers, and political dissidents into its gulags and continues its policies of virtual genocide against the peoples of Tibet and the Uighars of East Turkestan. It tightens control over media and the Internet and expands its regional, territorial, and resource claims. Laughing at our timidity, it becomes ever bolder in executing its plan to shutter every last manufacturing plant in the West. Meanwhile, Western turncoat CEO's are content with pumping up one more quarterly report by driving every last high-value manufacturing jobs to Guangzhou or Chengdu. Congress is happy to be re-elected with contributions from those same corporations. Together they are happy to leave the rest of us with a future of low-paying service and retail "careers" based on selling junk made in China to each other while accumulating a pile of Chinese debt and building a geopolitical time bomb of epic proportions. For every American, European, Japanese, or Korean listener who wonders where his job has gone and worries about the world his children will inherit, Death by China is a must listen. The book features an inspiring forward by Chinese Dissident Baiqiao Tang and a brilliant epilogue by Congressman Dana Rohrabacher.
©2011 Pearson Education, Inc. (P)2011 Audible, Inc.
The Manchurian Candidate
Summary
Buried deep within the consciousness of Sergeant Raymond Shaw is the mechanism of an assassin, a time bomb ticking toward explosion, controlled by the delicate skill of its Communist masters. Shaw returns from the Korean War to an idolizing and unsuspecting country. In a farcical, uproarious scene, he is greeted amid flashbulbs and frock coats by his power-hungry, domineering mother and her politician husband, who have decided to use Shaw's fame to further their own unscrupulous ambitions. What follows is at once a spy story, a love story, and a sobering, yet outrageously funny satire on demagoguery in American politics. Two tender love stories provide an undercurrent theme: the powers of light against the powers of dark. Shaw, the pawn, the brainwashed, is caught between the forces struggling for his soul.
©1959 by Richard Condon (P)1995 by Blackstone Audiobooks
Humboldt's Gift
Summary
For years, they were the best of friends: the grand, erratic Humboldt and the ambitious young Charlie. But now Humboldt has died a failure, and Charlie's success-ridden life has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life: he has left Charlie something in his will.
©1973 Saul Bellow (P)1992 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Gray Fox
Summary
Robert E. Lee, a Christian and a gentleman, was the most remarkable man to emerge from the Civil War and is one of the greatest tragic figures of American history. Reserved and unflappable, savvy and fearless, shrewd and tenacious, fatherly and kind; these are but a few of the adjectives commonly used to describe this noble hero. By using a dramatic form of narrative and relying on numerous eyewitness accounts, Burke Davis brings Lee to life. Listening to this powerful work gives you the feeling you are there, with Lee, Jackson, and the rest. It is a rare blend of history and emotion, a book that speaks to both the mind and the heart.
©1956 by Burke Davis (P)1990 by Blackstone Audiobooks
Outlaw Marriages
Summary
For more than a century before gay marriage became a hot-button political issue, same-sex unions flourished in America. Pairs of men and pairs of women joined together in committed unions, standing by each other "for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health" for periods of 30 or 40 - sometimes as many as 50 - years. In short, they loved and supported each other every bit as much as any husband and wife. In Outlaw Marriages, cultural historian Rodger Streitmatter reveals how some of these unions didn’t merely improve the quality of life for the two people involved but also enriched the American culture. Among the high-profile couples whose lives and loves are illuminated in the following pages are Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith, literary icon Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, author James Baldwin and Lucien Happersberger, and artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
©2012 Rodger Streitmatter (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Earth in Mind
Summary
In Earth in Mind, noted environmental educator David W. Orr focuses not on problems in education, but on the problem of education. Much of what has gone wrong with the world, he argues, is the result of inadequate and misdirected education that: Alienates us from life in the name of human domination; causes students to worry about how to make a living before they know who they are; overemphasizes success and careers; separates feeling from intellect and the practical from the theoretical; deadens the sense of wonder for the created world. The crisis we face, Orr explains, is one of mind, perception, and values. It is, first and foremost, an educational challenge. The author begins by establishing the grounds for a debate about education and knowledge. He describes the problems of education from an ecological perspective, and challenges the "terrible simplifiers" who wish to substitute numbers for values. He follows with a presentation of principles for re-creating education in the broadest way possible, discussing topics such as biophilia, the disciplinary structure of knowledge, the architecture of educational buildings, and the idea of ecological intelligence. Orr concludes by presenting concrete proposals for reorganizing the curriculum to draw out our affinity for life.
©2004 David W. Orr (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Tucker's Last Stand
Summary
William F. Buckley's best-selling Blackford Oakes novels have set a new standard for stylish espionage entertainment. Now Buckley sends Oakes on his most thrilling adventure yet. The year is 1964. Faced with a hard-hitting presidential campaign and a deteriorating situation in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson dispatches Oakes and a swashbuckling soldier of fortune named Tucker on secret missions to Southeast Asia. Tucker is to figure out how to interdict military traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Oakes is to supervise a secret operation in the Gulf of Tonkin, an operation that will give Johnson the excuse he needs for a greater U.S. military role in Vietnam. Filled with the intrigue, wit, and historical detail that have distinguished the previous novels of the series, Tucker's Last Stand is William F. Buckley, Jr. at his inimitable best.
©1990 William F. Buckley, Jr. (P)1991 Blackstone Audiobooks
The Frugal Superpower
Summary
In this incisive new book, Michael Mandelbaum argues that the era marked by an expansive American foreign policy is coming to an end. During the seven decades from the U.S. entry into World War II in 1941 to the present, economic constraints rarely limited what the United States did in the world. Now that will change. The country's soaring deficits, fueled by the huge costs of the financial crash and of its entitlement programs - Social Security and Medicare - will compel a more modest American international presence. In assessing the consequences of this new, less expensive foreign policy, Mandelbaum, one of America's leading foreign policy experts, describes the policies the United States will have to discontinue; assesses the potential threats from China, Russia, and Iran; and recommends a new policy, centered on a reduction in the nation's dependence on foreign oil, which can do for America and the world in the 21st century what the containment of the Soviet Union did in the 20th.
©2010 Michael Mandelbaum (P)2010 Audible, Inc.
Paris in the Fifties
Summary
In June 1947, fresh out of college and long before he would win the Pulitzer Prize and become known as one of America’s finest historians, Stanley Karnow boarded a freighter bound for France, planning to stay for the summer. He stayed for ten years, first as a student and later as a correspondent for Time magazine. By the time he left, Karnow knew Paris so intimately that his French colleagues dubbed him “le plus Parisien des Américains” - the most Parisian American. Now, Karnow returns to the France of his youth, perceptively and wittily illuminating a time and place like no other. Karnow came to France at a time when the French were striving to return to the life they had enjoyed before the devastation of World War II. Yet even during food shortages, political upheavals, and the struggle to come to terms with a world in which France was no longer the mighty power it had been, Paris remained a city of style, passion, and romance. Paris in the Fifties transports us to Latin Quarter cafés and basement jazz clubs, unheated apartments and glorious ballrooms. We meet such prominent political figures as Charles de Gaulle and Pierre Mendès France, as well as Communist hacks and the demagogic tax rebel Pierre Poujade. We get to know illustrious intellectuals - such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and André Malraux - and visit the glittering salons where aristocrats mingled with novelists, poets, critics, artists, composers, playwrights, and actors. Karnow takes us to marathon murder trials, accompanies a group of tipsy wine connoisseurs on a tour of the Beaujolais vineyards, and recalls the famous automobile race at Le Mans when a catastrophic accident killed 83 spectators. Back in Paris, Karnow hung out with visiting celebrities like Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, and Audrey Hepburn, and we meet them too. A veteran reporter and historian, Karnow has written a vivid, delightful history of a charmed decade in the greatest city in the world.
©1997 Stanley Karnow (P)1998 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Summary
This is the hilarious story of the American Everyboy. Join the society of such unforgettable characters as the miscievous Tom, kindly Aunt Polly, the heart-stoppingly beautiful Becky Thatcher, the malevolent Injun Joe and a free-spirited young lad by the name of Huckleberry Finn.
Public Domain (P)2007 Audio Book Contractors, LLC
They Called Him Stonewall
Summary
Stonewall Jackson was a military genius, at once peculiar and perfect, a fearless soldier in battle but a God-fearing man who hesitated to kill on Sunday. He broke the rules of war to win, and yet his tactics are studied in military academies the world over. From the remarkable Valley Campaign through the Seven Days, Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and the masterful though tragic sweep at Chancellorsville, where Jackson was felled by one of his own soldiers, this is a compelling narrative of men and war. Burke Davis brings the color, vivid characterization, and immediacy of the best fiction to this fascinating biography.
©1954 Burke Davis (P)1990 Blackstone Audio Inc.