David de Vries has narrated 97 audiobooks on Listento.it by 98 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 476 ratings. The most-rated is Vortena: Everybody Loves Large Chests, Volume 3.
How to Read Novels Like a Professor
Summary
Of all the literary forms, the novel is arguably the most discussed...and fretted over. From Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote to the works of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and today's masters, the novel has grown with and adapted to changing societies and technologies, mixing tradition and innovation in every age throughout history. Thomas C. Foster - the sage and scholar who ingeniously led audiences through the fascinating symbolic codes of great literature in his first book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor - now examines the grammar of the popular novel. Exploring how authors' choices about structure - point of view, narrative voice, first page, chapter construction, character emblems, and narrative (dis)continuity - create meaning and a special literary language, How to Read Novels Like a Professor shares the keys to this language with audiences who want to get more insight, more understanding, and more pleasure from their reading.
©2008 Thomas C. Foster (P)2019 Tantor
How the Old World Ended
Summary
A magisterial account of how the cultural and maritime relationships between the British, Dutch, and American territories changed the existing world order-and made the Industrial Revolution possible Between 1500 and 1800, the North Sea region overtook the Mediterranean as the most dynamic part of the world. At its core, the Anglo-Dutch relationship intertwined close alliance and fierce antagonism to intense creative effect. But a precondition for the Industrial Revolution was also the establishment in British North America of a unique type of colony - for the settlement of people and culture, rather than the extraction of things. England's republican revolution of 1649-53 was a spectacular attempt to change social, political, and moral life in the direction pioneered by the Dutch. In this book, Jonathan Scott argues that it was also a turning point in world history. In the revolution's wake, competition with the Dutch transformed the military-fiscal and naval resources of the state. One result was a navally protected Anglo-American trading monopoly. Within this context, more than a century later, the Industrial Revolution would be triggered by the alchemical power of American shopping.
©2019 Jonathan Scott (P)2020 Tantor
Zombies Don't Cry
Summary
In the world of the not-so-distant future, dying is easy - it's the afterliving that's hard! Nicky Rosewell hadn't expected to be a candidate for biotechnological resurrection at age 27, but he's unfortunately killed by a suicide bomber while taking a shortcut through the local mall after his lunch break. Having idled away his real life, Nicky's immediate prospects of making better use of his afterlife seem rather slim. The beleagued community of albino, pink-eyed zombies is dominated by the very old, and subject to all manner of social prejudice and discrimination. What's worse, Nicky finds it difficult to raise a laugh, as no one seems willing any longer to understand his jokes. When the Rehabilitation Center in which he's living is besieged by an angry mob of the living, however, it seems that the situation might be getting too serious by far.
©2011 Brian Stableford (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Kent State
Summary
Winner of the American Library Association’s 2021 Odyssey Award for Excellence in Audiobook Production! From two-time National Book Award finalist Deborah Wiles, a masterpiece exploration of one of the darkest moments in our history, when American troops killed four American students protesting the Vietnam War. May 4, 1970. Kent State University. As protestors roil the campus, National Guardsmen are called in. In the chaos of what happens next, shots are fired and four students are killed. To this day, there is still argument of what happened and why. Told in multiple voices from a number of vantage points - protestor, Guardsman, townie, student - Deborah Wiles's Kent State gives a moving, terrifying, galvanizing picture of what happened that weekend in Ohio...an event that, even 50 years later, still resonates deeply.
©2020 Scholastic Inc (P)2020 Scholastic Inc
The Magician's Hat
Summary
Super Bowl champion and literacy crusader Malcolm Mitchell presents the story of a magician who reveals an awe-inspiring treasure from his bag of tricks - books that make every kid's dream come true! This is not your typical afternoon at the library. It's Family Fun Day, and a magical man with a big hat has suddenly appeared. A crowd gathers to see what kinds of tricks this surprise visitor will perform. That's when the Magician pulls off his favorite trick of all. He invites kids to reach into his hat to pull out whatever they find when they dig down deep. Soon - poof! - each child comes away with something better than they could've imagined - a book that helps them become whatever they want to be, and makes their dreams come true through words and the adventures that follow. But as each child is swept into reading's powerful adventures, they can't help but wonder, What's really making the magic happen?
©2018 Malcolm Mitchell (P)2018 Scholastic Inc.
The Free Speech Century
Summary
The Supreme Court's 1919 decision in Schenck vs. the United States is one of the most important free speech cases in American history. Written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, it is most famous for first invoking the phrase "clear and present danger". Although the decision upheld the conviction of an individual for criticizing the draft during World War I, it also laid the foundation for our nation's robust protection of free speech. Over time, the standard Holmes devised made freedom of speech in America a reality rather than merely an ideal. In The Free Speech Century, two of America's leading First Amendment scholars, Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone, have gathered a group of the nation's leading constitutional scholars to evaluate the evolution of free speech doctrine since Schenk and to assess where it might be headed in the future. Publishing on the 100th anniversary of the decision that laid the foundation for America's free speech tradition, The Free Speech Century will serve as an essential resource for anyone interested in how our understanding of the First Amendment transformed over time and why it is so critical both for the United States and for the world today.
©2019 Oxford University Press (P)2019 Tantor
One on One
Summary
After numerous beloved and best-selling sports books, John Feinstein returns to the subjects of his first 10 books, crafting a narrative of the most revealing encounters he's had. Feinstein has interviewed some of the most enduring figures in sports - from hallowed coaches, such as Bob Knight, Jim Valvano, Mike Krzyzewski, and Dean Smith, to beloved athletes, including Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Arnold Palmer, and John McEnroe. And here we have John Feinstein at his very best. He goes behind the scenes of his reporting from The Final Four, Wimbledon, The US Open, the Army/Navy game, the Olympics, and more, opening up sport's most private, closed-door places and sharing exclusive stories from the reporting of books like Season on the Brink, A Good Walk Spoiled, A Season Inside, and A Civil War. These are the coaches and athletes who know their games the best, and the legends and legendary moments that gave inherent shape to our favorite pastimes.
©2011 John Feinstein (P)2011 Hachette
Double Double
Summary
A step-by-step guide to enjoying the roller-coaster ride of growth -- while getting the most out of life as an entrepreneur. A growth-focused approach: The book is divided into three sections, which cover planning for fast growth, building a company for fast growth, and leading for fast growth. Each topic the author covers - from creating a vision for the company's future to learning how to generate free PR for a developing company - is squarely focused on the end goal: doubling the size of the entrepreneur's company in three years or less. A down-to-earth action plan: Herold's experienced-based advice never gets bogged down in generalities or theory. Instead, he offers a wealth of practical tips, including: How to design meetings for maximum efficiency How to hire top-quality talent How to grow in particularly tough markets How to put together a board of advisors -- even for a smaller company How even the busy entrepreneur can achieve a work/life balance
©2019 Cameron Herold (P)2020 Cameron Herold
Damnation
Summary
Dead clients are bad for business, something Tom Winter, head of security for a discrete Swiss private bank, knows all too well. After a helicopter explodes, leaving behind the charred bodies of a client and a colleague, he teams up with Fatima, a mysterious Egyptian businesswoman. Together they follow the money trail around the world and back into the Swiss mountains, the NSA watching their every move. When taciturn Winter, a former special forces commander, closes in on the truth, they turn from being the hunters to the hunted and realize they are in a deadly, high-stakes race against the clock. Originally published in German (2013), now translated by Jamie Bulloch and brought to you by Point Blank (2018), an imprint of Oneworld, twice winner of the Man Booker Prize. Jack Reacher meets George Smiley in a thrilling opener to a breathtaking new series.
©2013 Peter Beck (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
The Korean War
Summary
A bracing account of a war that lingers in our collective memory as both ambiguous and unjustly ignored. For Americans, it was a discrete conflict lasting from 1950 to 1953 that has long been overshadowed by World War II, Vietnam, and the War on Terror. But as Bruce Cumings eloquently explains, for the Asian world the Korean War was a generations-long fight that still haunts contemporary events. And in a very real way, although its true roots and repercussions continue to be either misunderstood, forgotten, or willfully ignored, it is the war that helped form modern America's relationship to the world. With access to new evidence and secret materials from both here and abroad, including an archive of captured North Korean documents, Cumings reveals the war as it was actually fought. He describes its start as a civil war, preordained long before the first shots were fired in June 1950 by lingering fury over Japan's occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Cumings then shares the neglected history of America's post-World War II occupation of Korea, the untold stories of bloody insurgencies and rebellions, and the powerful militaries organized and equipped by America and the Soviet Union in that divided land. He tells of the United States officially entering the action on the side of the South, and exposes as never before the appalling massacres and atrocities committed on all sides and the "oceans of napalm" dropped on the North by US forces in a remarkably violent war that killed as many as four million Koreans, two thirds of whom were civilians. In sobering detail, The Korean War chronicles a US home front agitated by Joseph McCarthy, where absolutist conformity discouraged open inquiry and citizen dissent. Cumings incisively ties our current foreign policy back to Korea: an America with hundreds of permanent military bases abroad, a large standing army, and a permanent national security state at home, the ultimate result of a judicious and limited policy of containment evolving into an ongoing and seemingly endless global crusade. Elegantly written and blisteringly honest, The Korean War is, like the war it illuminates, brief, devastating, and essential.
©2010 Bruce Cumings (P)2019 Tantor
The Getaway
Summary
Doc McCoy is the most skilled criminal alive. But when, for the first time in Doc's long criminal career, his shot doesn't hit the mark, everything begins to fall apart. And Doc begins to realize that the perfect bank robbery isn't complete without the perfect getaway to back it up. The Getaway is the classic story of a bank robbery gone horribly wrong, where the smallest mistakes have catastrophic consequences, and shifting loyalties lead to betrayals and chaos. The basis for the classic Steve McQueen film of the same name, as well as a 1994 remake with Alec Baldwin, Thompson's novel set the bar for every heist story that followed - but as Thompson continues to prove time and again, nobody's ever done it better than the master.
©1958 Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1986 by Alberta H. Thompson (P)2011 Hachette Audio
Mitla Pass
Summary
Gideon Zadok arrives in Israel with every intention to research a new book, mend a broken marriage, and improve his dysfunctional family. But as political tensions escalate and his family is evacuated, Zadok asks to follow Israeli paratroopers to secure Mitla Pass and finds himself in the midst of one of the largest global crises of the twentieth century. A sweeping novel of love, passion, and freedom, Mitla Pass stands as an epic look at modern Middle Eastern history and is quite possibly Uris’s most autobiographical work.
From Library Journal:
Against the backdrop of the 1956 Sinai War, Uris provides a riveting portrait (possibly autobiographical) of a man caught in personal crisis. Gideon Zadok, best-selling novelist and successful Hollywood screenwriter, has come to Israel with his family to research a new novel and to shore up a crumbling marriage. But he jeopardizes that by starting a passionate affair with a beautiful Auschwitz survivor. Zadok is a man wavering on the edge of a breakdown. As the political crisis escalates, and his family is evacuated, Zadok asks to accompany Israeli paratroopers on a desperate mission to seal off the strategic Mitla Pass. The Uris name will make this book much in demand, and if it is not as much of an epic as Exodus or Trinity, it has in Zadok Uris’s most fascinating character.
©2019 by Leon M. Uris. (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
The Unknown American Revolution
Summary
In this audacious recasting of the American Revolution, distinguished historian Gary Nash offers a profound new way of thinking about the struggle to create this country, introducing listeners to a coalition of patriots from all classes and races of American society. From millennialist preachers to enslaved Africans and disgruntled women to aggrieved Indians, the people so vividly portrayed in this book did not all agree or succeed, but during the exhilarating and messy years of this country's birth, they laid down ideas that have become part of our inheritance and ideals toward which we still strive today.
©2005 Gary B. Nash (P)2018 Tantor
The Four Trials of Henry Ford
Summary
The Four Trials of Henry Ford chronicles Henry Ford’s forays into landmark litigation during the early years of the 20th century. Ford was a man of extraordinary genius in the intricacies and workings of mechanical objects and in the identification and hiring of talented engineers and administrative managers. But he was constitutionally unable to permit a light to shine on anyone other than himself and often employed humiliating tactics to terminate any employee who rose to prominence. Lawyer Gregory Piché follows Ford’s lonely defense against alleged infringement of the Selden patent on the automobile brought by a powerful automotive monopoly determined to control prices and competition in the emerging automobile market. He explores a minority shareholder oppression lawsuit brought against Ford by the Dodge brothers who initially manufactured all of the mechanical parts for Ford’s cars. He covers Ford’s libel suit against the Chicago Tribune for calling him an “anarchist” and “ignorant idealist” in the midst of the patriotic fervor during the US/Mexico intervention and the run-up to World War I. And finally, he examines a Jewish lawyer’s persistent libel action against Ford for the defamation of himself and his race in anti-Semitic diatribes widely published and circulated in his personally owned newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. In recounting the Ford litigation, Piché examines Ford’s parallel manipulation of public media to advance his own political and narcissistic agenda. It follows the initial rise of his reputation as a Progressive capitalist to its ultimate erosion as a mean-spirited bigot and contributor to the propaganda that fueled the Holocaust.
©2019 Gregory Piché (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing
Origin of Life
Summary
It seems likely that scientists will someday discover how life can emerge on habitable planets like the early Earth and Mars. In Origin of Life: What Everyone Needs to Know, David W. Deamer has written a comprehensive guide to the origin of life that is organized in three sections. The first section addresses questions such as: Where do the atoms of life come from? How old is Earth? What was the Earth like before life began? Where does water come from? After each question is answered, there is a follow-up: How do we know? This expands the horizon of the book, explaining how scientists reach conclusions and why we can trust these answers. The second section describes how certain organic molecules can spontaneously assemble into populations of protocells that can undergo selection and evolve toward primitive living systems. Here Deamer proposes a truly novel concept that life did not begin in the ocean but instead in fresh water hot springs on volcanic land masses resembling Hawaii today. True knowledge is not just what we know, but equally important is what we don't yet know. In the third section Deamer lists the outstanding questions that must be addressed before we can finally answer a fundamental question of biology: How can life begin?
©2020 Oxford University Press (P)2020 Tantor
(R)evolution: Phoenix Horizon, Book 1
Summary
Bioengineer Peter Bernhardt has dedicated his life to nanotechnology, the science of manipulating matter on the atomic scale. As the founder of Biogineers, he is on the cusp of revolutionizing brain therapies with microscopic nanorobots that will make certain degenerative diseases a thing of the past. But after his research is stolen by an unknown enemy, seventy thousand people die in Las Vegas in one abominable moment. No one is more horrified than Peter, as this catastrophe sets in motion events that will forever change not only his life but also the course of human evolution. Peter's company is torn from his grasp as the public clamors for his blood. Desperate, he turns to an old friend, who introduces him to the Phoenix Club, a cabal of the most powerful men in the world. To make himself more valuable to his new colleagues, Peter infuses his brain with experimental technology, exponentially upgrading his mental prowess and transforming him irrevocably. As he's exposed to unimaginable wealth and influence, Peter's sense of reality begins to unravel. Do the club members want to help him, or do they just want to claim his technology? What will they do to him once they have their prize? And while he's already evolved beyond mere humanity, is he advanced enough to take on such formidable enemies and win?
©2015 PJ Manney (P)2015 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
Seven Forges
Summary
The Seven Forges are a range of impassable mountains, far to the north of the settled lands of Fellein. From time to time explorers venture up beyond the Blasted Lands in search of a way over them and the promise of legendary riches, but without success. Now Captain Merros Dulver has found a path, and encountered, at last, the half-forgotten people who dwell there. And it would appear they were expecting him.
©2013 James A. Moore (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Fogbound
Summary
Once more, bestselling author Joseph T. Klempner combines thrills, vivid characters, and a plot that leaves the listener breathless. A Lincoln Navigator carries three well-dressed people through the barren New Jersey salt flats. The trip is uncomfortable but necessary. Their target has no phone, certainly no email, and never answers his mail. But August Jorgenson is no country bumpkin. Before retiring, he was one of the most famous judges in the country, and only opinions like his fierce opposition to the death penalty kept him from a seat on the Supreme Court. Now his visitors, from a reality show called Trial TV, have come to enlist his aid. They are excited about an idea they have that promises to strike a serious blow against the death penalty (and boost their ratings past those of Court TV). The judge agrees to help. But as he digs into the facts of the case he becomes their enemy - an enemy who must be removed as a serious threat to their plans. When his first novel, Felony Murder, was published, Publishers Weekly called Klempner "a writer to watch." Now, Klempner is better than ever - that rare novelist with both an insider's knowledge of the world he writes about, and a talent for intelligent, compelling storytelling.
©2016 Joseph T. Klempner (P)2017 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
The Last of His Kind
Summary
“Stunning and stirring.” - Boston Globe In The Last of His Kind, renowned adventure writer David Roberts gives readers a spellbinding history of mountain climbing in the twentieth century as told through the biography of Brad Washburn, legendary mountaineering pioneer and photographer. Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air, has praised David Roberts, saying, “Nobody alive writes better about mountaineering” - and nowhere is that truth more evident than in this breathtaking account of the life and exploits of America’s greatest mountain climber.
©2009 David Roberts. (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
The Spaces Between Us
Summary
Each of us has a protected zone two or three feet wide, swelling around the head and narrowing toward the feet. This zone isn't fixed in size: If you're nervous, it grows; if you're relaxed, it shrinks. It also depends on your cultural upbringing. Personal space is small in Japan and large in Australia. This safety zone, called personal space, provides an invisible spatial scaffold that frames our social interactions. As Michael Graziano argues in The Spaces Between Us, it also organizes our social and emotional spacing, influences our facial expressions, and shapes our interactions with everyday objects including tools, furniture, and clothing. Even ordinary actions like walking are informed by a continuous under-the-surface calculation of threats and obstacles around the body - what Graziano calls a virtual Bubble Wrap of active neurons that fire and move us to action, even before we may be conscious of our course corrections in real time. Humans evolved a complex way of interacting with others and their environment, and The Spaces Between Us looks at how this infrastructure may have led to the first smile and to a host of other human activities, from tool use to courtship to a sense of self. The book concludes with a case study of Graziano's son, who had heartbreaking difficulties developing a functioning personal space. Written with poignant narrative clarity, the book makes the case for the interested scientific public that this system in the brain is more than a fascinating scientific topic: It's deeply personal and shapes our human nature. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2018 Oxford University Press (P)2018 Audible, Inc.