Cira Larkin has narrated 6 audiobooks on Listento.it by 6 authors, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is The Master of Suspense.
The Master of Suspense
Summary
"I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach." - Alfred Hitchcock, 1956 In the opening pages of his seminal book-length study of Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock's Films (1965), Robin Wood famously asked, "Why Should We Take Hitchcock Seriously?" Wood then proceeded to offer a detailed examination of Hitchcock's career to that point, arguing that the Master of Suspense belonged among the ranks of the preeminent directors in Hollywood, and that his films were among the most important in American culture. When Wood was asking that question, he wasn't asking it rhetorically and was arguing for Hitchcock's relevance, which seems strange today because Hitchcock is now a Hollywood icon. No one would even think of asking that same question today, as just about every American is familiar with Hitchcock's work in some way or another. Hitchcock is regarded as perhaps the most famous and influential director in history, so Wood's question back in 1965 at least demonstrates the evolution of Hitchcock's reputation and the critical reception of his career. Indeed, as revered as Hitchcock is today, it is telling that he was never awarded an Academy Award during his career (though he was given an honorary Oscar after his retirement.) Vertigo (1958), for example, is now considered one of the landmark films of the classical Hollywood cinema, but it was both a box office and a critical flop upon its release. Other Hitchcock films, such as Psycho (1960) and North by Northwest (1959), performed well at the box office but were not viewed as high art.
©2012 Charles River Editors (P)2015 Charles River Editors
As I Stand Here Ironing
Summary
As Tina is ironing, she questions things and then her mind wonders with each item she irons. What ever happened to perma-press? Tina asks herself as she is ironing a linen pair of capris, and is having difficulty getting the wrinkles out. She goes through the history of fabrics, from perma-press, to wrinkle free, to natural fibers, to those that today need ironing, just when life should be simpler. As Tina is ironing her husband's dress shirt, she questions why her husband is steadfast on wearing a business suit with a dress shirt and tie in his stock broker business. She also reflects on what a clean-cut person he is, and how everything has to be in order, and when things get out of order, that it drives him crazy. Speaking of crazy... As Tina irons a dress she wore to a party she attended with her husband, she reflects on the good times they used to have together and wondered what happened between them.
©2014 Reality Today Forum (P)2015 Reality Today Forum
American Legends: The Life of Bette Davis
Summary
"Even the most inconsiderable film...seemed temporarily better than they were because of that precise, nervy voice, the pale ash-blond hair, the popping, neurotic eyes, a kind of corrupt and phosphorescent prettiness.... I would rather watch Miss Davis than any number of competent pictures." (English critic Graham Greene, 1936) A lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history's most influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees? In Charles River Editors' American Legends series, readers can get caught up to speed on the lives of America's most important men and women in the time it takes to finish a commute while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known. Bette Davis presided over Hollywood at a time in which the film industry was at its most influential. Every actress, from Katharine Hepburn to Ingrid Bergman and Ginger Rodgers, themselves now considered among Hollywood's greatest icons, lived in the shadow of Bette Davis. Not only was Davis a box-office sensation and commercial success - she became the highest paid actress in 1938 - but she garnered more critical acclaim than any other actress during the time, as evidenced by the fact that she was the first actress to be nominated for 10 Academy Awards. Even more than two decades after her death, Davis remains popular, and films of hers, most notably All About Eve (1950) and Now, Voyager (1942), are routinely viewed by the public and continue to be taught in college film classes.
©2012- Charles River Editors (P)2015 Charles River Editors
Hollywood Madonna: Loretta Young (Hollywood Legends)
Summary
Loretta Young (1913-2000) was an Academy Award-winning actress known for devout Catholicism and her performances in The Farmer's Daughter, The Bishop's Wife, and Come to the Stable, and for her long-running and tremendously popular television series. But that was not the whole story. Hollywood Madonna explores the full saga of Loretta Young's professional and personal life. She made her film debut at age four, became a star at fifteen, and many awards and accolades later, made her final television movie at age seventy-six. This biography withholds none of the details of her affair with Clark Gable and the daughter that powerful love produced. Bernard F. Dick places Young's affair in the proper context of the time and the choices available to women in 1935, especially a noted Catholic like Young, whose career would have been in ruins if the public knew of her tryst. With the birth of a daughter, who would have been branded a love child, Loretta Young reached the crossroads of disclosure and deception, choosing the latter path. That choice resulted in an illustrious career for her and a tortured childhood for her daughter.
©2011 University Press of Mississippi (P)2012 Redwood Audiobooks
Daddy's Money
Summary
Jo McDougall brings a poet's sensibility to memoir. Recounting five generations of Delta rice farmers, through family archives and oral histories, she traces how the clan made their way into the fabric of America, beginning with her Belgian-immigrant grandfather, a pioneer rice farmer on the Arkansas Delta at the turn of the 20th century. As John Grisham has for a 1950s Arkansas cotton farm, McDougall illuminates an Arkansas rice farm in the 1930s and 1940s. The Garot family's acreage near DeWitt and the town itself provide the stage for McDougall's wry, compelling, and layered account of the day-to-day of rice growing on the farm that her father inherited. In that setting she discovers a rich "universe of words" in the Great Depression, comes of age during World War II, and finds her way alongside "that whole quirky, compelling cast of characters" that comprised her kin. In this conflicted, ironic, southern-but-universal account of betrayal, heartbreak, loss, and joy, "the vagaries and the grace" of the land join forces with the power of money as family bonds are both forged and dissolved. Deeply felt, unsentimental, and often humorous, Daddy's Money presents McDougall's life and the lives of her relatives in the way that all our lives are eventually framed - as stories. "When all else is lost," the author maintains, "the stories remain." The book is published by The University of Arkansas Press.
©2011 The University of Arkansas Press (P)2016 Redwood Audiobooks
The Blackwell Companion to Catholicism
Summary
The Blackwell Companion to Catholicism offers an extensive survey of the history, doctrine, practices, and global circumstances of Roman Catholicism, written by a range of distinguished and experienced Catholic writers. Engages its readers in an informed and informative conversation about Roman Catholic life and thought. Embraces the local and the global, the past and the present, life and the afterlife, and a broad range of institutions and activities. Considers both what is distinctive about Catholic life and thought, and how Catholicism overlaps with and transforms other ways of thinking and living. Topics covered include: peacemaking, violence and wars; money, the vow of poverty and socio-economic life; art by and about Catholics; and men, women and sex.
©2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd (P)2013 Audible Ltd