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.
Prescription for the Future
Summary
How can America's health-care system be transformed to provide consistently higher-quality and lower-cost care? Nothing else in health care matters more. Prescription for the Future identifies some standout medical organizations that have achieved higher-quality, more patient-focused, and lower-cost care, and from their examples distills 12 transformational practices that could transform the entire health-care sector. Ezekiel J. Emanuel looks at individual physician practices and organizations who are already successfully driving change and the specific practices they have instituted. They are not the titans everyone seems to know and assume to be the "best"; instead, Emanuel has chosen a select group - from small physician offices to large multispecialty group practices, accountable care organizations, and even for-profit companies - that are genuinely transforming care. Prescription for the Future shines a bright diagnostic light on the state of American health care and provides invaluable insights for health-care workers, investors, and patients. The book gives all of us the tools to recognize the places that will deliver high-quality, effective care when we need it.
©2017 Ezekiel J. Emanuel (P)2017 Hachette Audio
Death on the River of Doubt
Summary
The action-packed true story of President Theodore Roosevelt's dangerous adventure down one of the most treacherous rivers on Earth. Death on the River of Doubt takes listeners inside the thrilling journey that unfolded as Theodore Roosevelt and his companions navigated the Amazonian River of Doubt through an unforgiving and unpredictable jungle. With new threats at every turn, from bloodthirsty piranhas and raging rapids to starvation, disease, and a traitor in their own ranks, it seemed that not everyone would make it out alive. Through it all, the indomitable Teddy Roosevelt remained determined to complete their mission and rewrite the map of the world. Or die trying. With letters, diary entries, and more, Death on the River of Doubt is a comprehensive narrative nonfiction thriller and the first young adult book to tell this unbelievable tale.
©2017 Samantha Seiple (P)2017 Scholastic Inc.
Sonic Boom
Summary
The most compelling figures in the Warner Bros. story are the sagacious Mo Ostin and the unlikely crew of hippies, eccentrics, and enlightened execs who were the first in the music business to read the generational writing on the wall in the mid-1960s. By recruiting outsider artists and allowing them to make the music they wanted, Ostin and his staff transformed an out-of-touch company into the voice of a generation. Along the way, they revolutionized the music industry and, within just a few years, created the most successful record label in the history of the American music industry. Ostin ushered in a counterintuitive model that matched the counterculture. His offbeat crew reinvented the way business was done, giving their artists free rein while rejecting out-of-date methods of advertising, promotion, and distribution. And even as they set new standards for in-house weirdness, the upstarts' experiments and innovations paid off, to the tune of hundreds of legendary hit albums. It may sound like a fairy tale, but once upon a time, Warner Bros Records conquered the music business by focusing on the music rather than the business. Their story is as raucous as it is inspiring, pure entertainment that also maps a route to that holy grail: love and money.
©2021 Peter Ames Carlin (P)2021 Tantor
Topaz
Summary
A #1 New York Times bestseller, Topaz follows French intelligence chief André Devereaux and NATO intelligence chief Michael Nordstrom. On the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Paris, 1962, Devereaux and Nordstrom uncover Soviet plans to ship nuclear arms. But when nobody acts after sharing his findings, Devereaux becomes the target of an assassination attempt and soon realizes the plot extends far beyond Cuba - and himself. A thrilling and well-paced novel filled with Cold War intrigue, Topaz features two agents on a journey around the world to save NATO and themselves. A subsequent film based on the novel was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and released in 1969. “A master at weaving historical fact and fiction.” (USA Today) “Good Uris beats the best of John Grisham or Tom Clancy any time.” (Fort Worth Star-Telegram)
©1967 Leon M. Uris (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Adventures on the Wine Route (25th Anniversary Edition)
Summary
"Wine is, above all, about pleasure. Those who make it ponderous make it dull.... If you keep an open mind and take each wine on its own terms, there is a world of magic to discover." So wrote the renowned wine expert Kermit Lynch in the introduction to Adventures on the Wine Route, his ultimate tour of France, especially its wine cellars. The "magic" of wine is Lynch's subject as he takes the listener on a singular journey through the Loire, Bordeaux, the Languedoc, Provence, northern and southern Rhone, and Burgundy. In Adventures on the Wine Route, the wine lover will find wisdom without a trace of pretension and hype. As Victor Hazan wrote, "In Kermit Lynch's small, true, delightful book there is more understanding about what wine really is than in everything else I have read." Praise for Lynch and for Adventures on the Wine Route has not ceased since the book's initial publication a quarter century ago. In 2007, The New York Times called it "one of the finest American books on wine." And in June 2012, The Wall Street Journal proclaimed it "the best book on the wine business". Full of vivid portraits of French vintners, memorable evocations of the French countryside, and, of course, vibrant descriptions of French wines, this new edition of Adventures on the Wine Route updates a modern classic for our times.
©1988 Kermit Lynch (P)2021 Tantor
Unlocking Potential, Second Edition
Summary
Revised, updated, and expanded: The definitive guide to transformational leadership from a team of expert executive coaches. Over the past six years, Michael K. Simpson’s Unlocking Potential has helped leaders motivate, inspire, and fully engage their teams. This revised edition, written with Maria Sullivan and Kari Saddler, builds on that powerful foundation for a new generation of leaders. The key is not just managing but coaching - developing the talents of your organization’s most important asset: the employees. In any successful organization, that begins with the basic skills developed by Simpson: building trust, recognizing potential, challenging paradigms, clarifying individual personal goals, executing flawlessly, giving effective feedback, and tapping into talent. Now Simpson expands on his knowledge and experience as a senior consultant with the management assessment firm FranklinCovey. This revised and updated edition also features insights from Sullivan and Saddler and additional real-life lessons learned in the field by managers who have put Simpson’s invaluable coaching skills into play. Transform your business relationships (and your business) with this comprehensive tool for optimizing productivity, profitability, loyalty, and customer focus. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2014, 2020 FranklinCovey. (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Correspondence: 1927-1987
Summary
Selected letters capturing ongoing conversations between famed mythologist Joseph Campbell and a remarkable group of artists, seekers, filmmakers, novelists, and scholars This brand-new collection of letters features illuminating conversations between Joseph Campbell and a fascinating cast of correspondents, ranging from friends and cowriters to renegade scholars and fellow visionaries. Including letters from both Campbell and his correspondents, and spanning the course of his entire adult life (1927-1987), the collection demonstrates the lasting influence of Campbell’s work, which inspired creative endeavors and radical shifts in so many people’s lives. Included are exchanges with artists such as Angela Gregory and Gary Snyder; colleagues including Alan Watts, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, and Maud Oakes; editors of his books, from The Hero with a Thousand Faces to The Mythic Image; and many others who engaged with Campbell in his exploration of humanity’s “one great story.” In selecting the letters, editors Evans Lansing Smith and Dennis Patrick Slattery discovered that the dynamic exchanges formed themselves into what Smith describes as a “narrative, with multiple voices and points of view, dramatic conflict and resolution, character development, and even mystery.” In the end, they found “a portrait not just of Campbell but of a remarkable generation of artists, dancers, filmmakers, musicians, spiritual seekers, poets, and novelists, all engaged in the creative powers unleashed by mythology.” With crucial historical context provided by the editors, this compelling volume provides vital new insight into Campbell’s personal life and mythological vision.
©2019 Joseph Campbell Foundation. (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Instructions for a Funeral
Summary
"Poetic, insightful, and deeply moving. David Means is one of my very favorite writers." (Tara Westover, author of Educated) Following the publication of his widely acclaimed Man Booker-nominated novel Hystopia, David Means here returns to his signature form: the short story. Thanks to his four previous story collections, Means has won himself an international reputation as one of the most innovative short fiction writers working today: an “established master of the form.” (Laura Miller, The Guardian). Instructions for a Funeral - featuring work from The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, and VICE - finds Means branching out beyond the explorations of violence and trauma with which he is often identified, prominently displaying his sly humor and his inimitable way of telling tales that deliciously wind up to punch the reader in the heart. With each story Means pushes into new territory, writing with tenderness and compassion about fatherhood, marriage, a homeless brother, the nature of addiction, and the death of a friend at the hands of a serial-killer nurse. Means transmutes a fistfight in Sacramento into a tender, life-long love story; two FBI agents on a stakeout in the 1920s into a tale of predator and prey, paternal urges and loss; a man’s funeral instructions into a chronicle of organized crime, real estate ventures, and the destructive force of paranoia. Means’ work has earned him comparisons to Flannery O’Connor, Alice Munro, Sherwood Anderson, Denis Johnson, Edgar Allan Poe, Anton Chekhov, and Raymond Carver, but his place in the American literary landscape is fully and originally his own. "David Means is a master of tense, distilled, quintessentially American prose. Like any artist who has finely honed his talent to its strongest expression he is a brilliant craftsman whose achievement is to appear unstudied, even casual... Each story by Means which I have read is unlike the others, unexpected and an unnerving delight." (Joyce Carol Oates)
©2019 David Means (P)2019 Macmillan Audio
Chicago's Great Fire
Summary
From an acclaimed historian, the full and authoritative story of one of the most iconic disasters in American history, told through the vivid memories of those who experienced it.? Between October 8-10, 1871, much of the city of Chicago was destroyed by one of the most legendary urban fires in history. Incorporated as a city in 1837, Chicago had grown at a breathtaking pace in barely three decades, from just over 4,000 in 1840 to greater than 330,000 at the time of the fire. Built hastily, the city was largely made of wood. Once it began in the barn of Catherine and Patrick O’Leary, the fire quickly grew out of control, twice jumping branches of the Chicago River on its relentless northeastward path through the city’s three divisions. Close to one of every three Chicago residents was left homeless and more were instantly unemployed, though the death toll was miraculously low. Remarkably, no carefully researched popular history of the Great Chicago Fire has been written until now, despite it being one of the most cataclysmic disasters in US history. Building the story around memorable characters, both known to history and unknown, including the likes of General Philip Sheridan and Robert Todd Lincoln, eminent Chicago historian Carl Smith chronicles the city’s rapid growth and place in America’s post-Civil War expansion. The dramatic story of the fire - revealing human nature in all its guises - became one of equally remarkable renewal, as Chicago quickly rose back up from the ashes thanks to local determination and the world’s generosity and faith in Chicago’s future. As we approach the fire’s 150th anniversary, Carl Smith’s compelling narrative at last gives this epic event its full and proper place in our national chronicle. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2020 Carl Smith (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
Three Ordinary Girls
Summary
May 10, 1940. The Netherlands was swarming with Third Reich troops. In seven days it's entirely occupied by Nazi Germany. Joining a small resistance cell in the Dutch city of Haarlem were three teenage girls: Hannie Schaft, and sisters Truus and Freddie Oversteegen, who would soon band together to form a singular female underground squad. Smart, fiercely political, devoted solely to the cause, and "with nothing to lose but their own lives", Hannie, Truus, and Freddie took terrifying direct action against Nazi targets. That included sheltering fleeing Jews, political dissidents, and Dutch resisters. They sabotaged bridges and railways, and donned disguises to lead children from probable internment in concentration camps to safehouses. They covertly transported weapons and set military facilities ablaze. And they carried out the assassinations of German soldiers and traitors - on public streets and in private traps - with the courage of veteran guerilla fighters and the cunning of seasoned spies. Tim Brady offers a never-before-seen perspective of the Dutch resistance during the war. Of lives under threat; of how these courageous young women became involved in the underground; and of how their dedication evolved into dangerous, life-threatening missions on behalf of Dutch patriots - regardless of the consequences.
©2021 Tim Brady (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Just Another Day in Vietnam
Summary
Uniquely adopting a third-person omniscient point of view, Nightingale eschews the "I" of memoir in favor of multiple perspectives and a larger historical vision that afford equal time and weight to ally and enemy alike. Examples of the many perspectives based on real-life characters include: Hu, a VC "informant" whose false information led the Rangers straight into the jaws of a ferocious ambush; General Tanh, the COSVN commander; Major Nguyen Hiep, the 52d Ranger Commander; and Ranger POWs later returned by the North. Nightingale moreover offers the point of view of an American advisor to elite Vietnamese troops, a vital perspective regrettably underrepresented in the literature of Vietnam, including Burns' documentary. Added to this are well-informed conjecture of enemy psychology; insight into the dedication and often misunderstood role of the elite Vietnamese Ranger forces; the intelligence acquired from debriefing captured Rangers, whose captors had told them that the entire battle had been a carefully staged attack planned by COSVN as part of a larger Total War strategy developed by the leadership of the North Vietnamese Army; and an eyewitness account by a gifted author who is a rare survivor of one of the most vicious - and heretofore forgotten - battles of the war.
©2019 Keith M. Nightingale (P)2021 Tantor
The Measure of Man
Summary
It was one of the most concentrated surges of creativity in the history of civilization. Between 1390 and 1537, Florence poured forth an astonishing stream of magnificent artworks. But Florentines did more during this brief period than create masterpieces. As citizens of a fractious republic threatened from below, without, and within, they also were driven to reimagine the political and ethical basis of their world, exploring the meaning and possibilities of liberty, virtue, and beauty. This vibrant era is brought to life in rich detail by noted historian Lawrence Rothfield in The Measure of Man. His account introduces listeners to a city teeming with memorable individuals and audacious risk-takers, capable of producing works of the most serene beauty and acts of the most shocking violence. Rothfield's cast of characters includes book hunters and book burners, devout Christians and assassins, humble pharmacists and arrogant oligarchs, all caught up in a dramatic struggle - a tragic arc running from the cultural heights of republican idealism in the early 15th century, through the aesthetic flowerings and civic vicissitudes of the age of the Medici and Savonarola, to the brooding meditations of Machiavelli and Michelangelo over the fate of the dying republic.
©2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. (P)2021 Tantor
The Ecstasy of Being
Summary
Joseph Campbell’s collected writings on dance and art, edited and introduced by Nancy Allison, CMA, the founder of Jean Erdman Dance, and including Campbell’s unpublished manuscript “Mythology and Form in the Performing and Visual Arts,” the book he was working on when he died. Dance was one of mythologist Joseph Campbell’s wide-ranging passions. His wife, Jean Erdman, was a leading figure in modern dance who worked with Martha Graham and had Merce Cunningham in her first company. When Campbell retired from teaching in 1972, he and Erdman formed the Theater of the Open Eye, where for nearly fifteen years they presented a wide array of dance and theater productions, lectures, and performance pieces. The Ecstasy of Being brings together seven of Campbell’s previously uncollected articles on dance, along with “Mythology and Form in the Performing and Visual Arts,” the treatise that he was working on when he died, published here for the first time. In this new collection Campbell explores the rise of modern art and dance in the twentieth century; delves into the work and philosophy of Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and others; and, as always, probes the idea of art as “the funnel through which spirit is poured into life.” This book offers the listener an accessible, yet profound and provocative, insight into Campbell’s lifelong fascination with the relationship of myth to aesthetic form and human psychology.
©2017 Joseph Campbell Foundation (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
From the Realm of a Dying Sun: Volume 2
Summary
This is the concluding volume of the history of the IV SS-Panzerkorps, a relatively unknown organization that was born in battle during the last year of the war and fought exclusively on the Eastern Front. After their successful defense of Warsaw and the Vistula Front during the fall of 1944, the corps and its two famous Waffen-SS divisions, the Totenkopf and Wiking, as well as several divisions of the German Army, were sent south to reverse the military situation on the Hungarian Front. Follow General Gille and his divisions as they try to relieve Budapest against impossible odds, defend the tactically important town of Stuhlweissenburg, and fight in Germany's last major offensive, Operation Frühlingserwachsen. Learn how this SS tank corps, during the closing days of the war in Europe, fought massive tank battles, conducted grim rear-guard actions, and carried out night assaults against a numerically superior enemy who was determined to crush the Third Reich no matter the cost. After its failure to defend Vienna, the only course remaining for Gille and his men was a long and costly retreat, ending only with capitulation to the US Army and an uncertain future.
©2019 Douglas E. Nash, Sr. (P)2020 Tantor
The Last Jews in Berlin
Summary
When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, approximately 160,000 Jews called Berlin home. By 1943 less than 5,000 remained in the nation's capital, the epicenter of Nazism, and by the end of the war, that number had dwindled to 1,000. All the others had died in air raids, starved to death, committed suicide, or been shipped off to the death camps. In this captivating and harrowing book, Leonard Gross details the real-life stories of a dozen Jewish men and women who spent the final 27 months of World War II underground, hiding in plain sight, defying both the Gestapo and, even worse, Jewish "catchers" ready to report them to the Nazis in order to avoid the gas chambers themselves. A teenage orphan, a black-market jewel trader, a stylish young designer, and a progressive intellectual were among the few who managed to survive. Through their own resourcefulness, bravery, and at times, sheer luck, these Jews managed to evade the tragic fates of so many others. Gross has woven these true stories of perseverance into a heartbreaking, suspenseful, and moving account with the narrative force of a thriller. Compiled from extensive interviews, The Last Jews in Berlin reveals these individuals' astounding determination, against all odds, to live each day knowing it could be their last.
©1992 Leonard Gross (P)2019 Tantor
How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor
Summary
The New York Times best-selling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor uses the same skills to teach how to access accurate information in a rapidly changing 24/7 news cycle and become better readers, thinkers, and consumers of media. We live in an information age, but it is increasingly difficult to know which information to trust. Fake news is rampant in mass media, stoked by foreign powers wishing to disrupt a democratic society. We need to be more perceptive, more critical, and more judicious readers. The future of our republic may depend on it. How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor is more careful, more attentive, more aware reading. On bookstore shelves, one book looks as authoritative as the next. Online, posts and memes don’t announce their relative veracity. It is up to readers to establish how accurate, how thorough, how fair material may be. After laying out general principles of reading nonfiction, How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor offers advice for specific reading strategies in various genres from histories and biographies to science and technology to social media. Throughout, the emphasis will be on understanding writers’ biases, interrogating claims, analyzing arguments, remaining wary of broad assertions and easy answers, and thinking critically about the written and spoken materials readers encounter. We can become better citizens through better reading, and the time for that is now. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2020 Thomas C. Foster (P)2020 HarperAudio
The Hill We Climb
Summary
Amanda Gorman’s powerful and historic poem “The Hill We Climb”, read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration “Stunning.” (CNN) “Dynamic.” (NPR) “Deeply rousing and uplifting.” (Vogue) On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Taking the stage after the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, Gorman captivated the nation and brought hope to viewers around the globe. Her poem “The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country” can now be cherished in this special audiobook. Including an enduring foreword by Oprah Winfrey, this keepsake celebrates the promise of America and affirms the power of poetry.
©2021 Amanda Gorman (P)2021 Penguin Audio