David Drummond has narrated 98 audiobooks on Listento.it by 94 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 648 ratings. The most-rated is Empire of the Summer Moon.
Kiss Your BUT Good-Bye
Summary
A simple, engaging, and eminently practical guide to overcoming your weaknesses - your Buts - to achieve the career and personal relationships you want. Imagine a workplace where all the employees are aware of the things they do - or fail to do - that prevent them from being more productive and valuable. Imagine a company where everyone speaks openly and honestly about his or her weaknesses and is committed to strengthening and overcoming them. Imagine an environment where colleagues help one another become more efficient and less disruptive by speaking the truth about what detracts from the team's efforts and objectives. Imagine a place where the firm's most talented employees know exactly what they need to do to attain a leadership position. This is no fantasy workplace: It can be your business if you listen to Joe Azelby and Bob Azelby, brothers and successful executives in their own right. Kiss Your BUT Good-Bye will help all professionals find their individual BUT - whether it's a lack of skills, a distracting behavior, or a personality quirk that interferes with achieving success. Using road-tested techniques, Kiss Your BUT Good-Bye helps you examine your BUT, understand it, manage it, cover it, and most important, shrink it. It also enables managers to help their employees discover personal weaknesses and to learn how to deliver the direct, honest feedback every worker needs and deserves. Finding your BUT can be tough medicine, but the Azelbys deliver it with a tasty spoonful of sugar. Get ready for success...get ready to Kiss Your BUT Good-Bye.
©2013 Joseph Azelby and Robert Azelby (P)2013 HarperCollinsPublishers
Lions of the West
Summary
Thomas Jefferson, a naturalist and visionary, dreamed that the United States would stretch across the continent from ocean to ocean. The account of how that dream became reality unfolds in the stories of Jefferson and nine other Americans whose adventurous spirits and lust for land pushed the westward boundaries: Andrew Jackson, John “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman, David Crockett, Sam Houston, James K. Polk, Winfield Scott, Kit Carson, Nicholas Trist, and John Quincy Adams. Their tenacity was matched only by that of their enemies: the Mexican army under Santa Anna at the Alamo, the Comanche and Apache Indians, and the forbidding geography itself. Known also for his powerful fiction (Gap Creek, The Truest Pleasure, Brave Enemies), Morgan uses his skill at characterization to give life to the personalities of these ten Americans without whom the United States might well have ended at the Arkansas border. Their stories - and those of the nameless thousands who risked their lives to settle on the frontier, displacing thousands of Native Americans - form an extraordinary chapter in American history that led directly to the cataclysm of the Civil War. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2011 Original material Robert Morgan. Recorded by arrangement with Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a division of Workman Publishing Company, Inc. (P)2011 HighBridge Company
Molterpocalypse
Summary
The unstoppable horde won't stop Jonah Browne from protecting his family. The survivors call it the Molting. It spread across the planet faster than anyone could anticipate, turning people into bloodthirsty creatures, abominations of nature. Now, Molters swarm every landscape, hunting the few remaining humans. Former army grunt Jonah Browne helps his family survive the only way they know how: hunting down what hunts them from their secluded cabin in the remote German Mountains. It’s only a matter of time before the cabin is overrun. After a shootout with a rival survivor community, Jonah and his family have to find a safer base. He sets out on his most dangerous mission yet, leaving his family vulnerable. Jonah must rely on his survival skills to escape the unstoppable horde while dealing with the desperation of his fellow men. In a world filled with monsters - both unnatural and human - will Jonah survive long enough to return to his family?
©2020 C.A. Gleason (P)2020 C.A. Gleason
One Man Great Enough
Summary
Abraham Lincoln is the central axis of this story about America's seemingly unstoppable march toward war, the shattering of its political landscape, and its grappling with the moral underpinnings of a republic of the people, by the people, and for the people. Here are such key events as the Mexican-American War, the Dred Scott Case, westward expansion, the rise of the industrial north, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and the birth of the Republican Party. And here we meet Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Zachary Taylor, Stephen Douglas, and abolitionists Wendell Phillips, John Brown, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. We see it all through the breathtaking writings of Lincoln himself, detailing his emergence onto the political scene and the evolution of his beliefs about the Union, democracy, slavery, and civil war.
©2007 John C. Waugh (P)2007 Blackstone Audio Inc.
Shakespeare's Planet
Summary
A human space traveler trapped on a remote planet must somehow unravel a confounding alien technology - or else surrender himself to a host of incomprehensible horrors. For thousands of years, Carter Horton has been traveling across the galaxy toward a distant world capable of supporting human life. At journey's end, awakened from his millennia-long sleep by a curiously adaptive android, he is informed that his crewmates have all perished due to a system malfunction. But worse is yet to come: Horton's sentient ship is refusing to return him to Earth, and a strangely cordial predator is waiting for him on the planet's surface. The repulsive creature, Carnivore, arrived here via a tunnel across the universe, as did his late companion - a human dubbing himself William Shakespeare - whom Carnivore just recently devoured. But the tunnel moves in only one direction, and if Carter is unable to reverse it, he will find himself marooned forever in this incomprehensible world, at the mercy of monsters and a terrifying, mind-freezing alien anomaly that occurs every evening in the "God-hour". With unparalleled verve, award-winning science fiction grand master Clifford D. Simak performs a truly astonishing feat of world creation in Shakespeare's Planet. Bursting with intelligence, imagination, and breathtaking invention, this is a gem of speculative fiction from one of the genre's most revered and innovative artists.
©1976 Clifford D. Simak; This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc. (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
George Washington: The Founding Father (Eminent Lives)
Summary
By far the most important figure in the history of the United States, George Washington liberated the 13 colonies from the superior forces of the British Empire against all military odds, and presided over the production and ratification of a constitution that (suitably amended) has lasted for more than 200 years. Yet today, Washington remains a distant figure to many Americans, a failing that acclaimed author Paul Johnson sets out to rectify with this brilliantly vivid, sharply etched portrait of the great hero as a young warrior, masterful commander in chief, patient lawmaker, and exceptionally wise president.
©2005 Paul Johnson (P)2011 HarperCollinsPublishers
Reformations
Summary
This fast-paced survey of Western civilization's transition from the Middle Ages to modernity brings that tumultuous period vividly to life. Carlos Eire, popular professor and gifted writer, chronicles the 200-year era of the Renaissance and Reformation with particular attention to issues that persist as concerns in the present day. Eire connects the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in new and profound ways, and he demonstrates convincingly that this crucial turning point in history not only affected people long gone but continues to shape our world and define who we are today. The book focuses on the vast changes that took place in Western civilization between 1450 and 1650, from Gutenberg's printing press and the subsequent revolution in the spread of ideas to the close of the Thirty Years' War. Eire devotes equal attention to the various Protestant traditions and churches as well as to Catholicism, skepticism, and secularism, and he takes into account the expansion of European culture and religion into other lands, particularly the Americas and Asia. He also underscores how changes in religion transformed the Western secular world.
©2016 Yale University (P)2018 Tantor
Microsoft Secrets
Summary
Microsoft commands the high ground of the information superhighway by owning the operating systems and basic applications programs that run on hundreds of millions of computers around the world. Beyond the unquestioned genius and vision of Bill Gates, what accounts for Microsoft's astounding success? Drawing on almost two years of on-site observation at Microsoft headquarters, eminent scientists Michael A. Cusumano and Richard W. Selby reveal many of Microsoft's innermost secrets. This inside report, based on 40 in-depth interviews by authors who had access to confidential documents and project data, outlines the seven complementary strategies that characterize exactly how Microsoft competes and operates, including the "Brain Trust" of talented employees and exceptional management; "bang for the buck" competitive strategies and clear organizational goals that produce self-critiquing, learning, and improving; a flexible, incremental approach to product development; and a relentless pursuit of future markets. Cusumano and Selby's masterful analysis successfully uncovers the distinctive way in which Microsoft has combined all of the elements necessary to get to the top of an enormously important industry - and stay there.
©1995 Michael A. Cusumano and Richard W. Selby (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
On a Farther Shore
Summary
Published on the 50th anniversary of her seminal book Silent Spring, here is an indelible new portrait of Rachel Carson, founder of the modern environmental movement. Carson loved the ocean and wrote three books about its mysteries, including the international best seller The Sea around Us. But it was with her fourth book, Silent Spring, that this unassuming biologist transformed our relationship with the natural world. Rachel Carson began work on Silent Spring in the late 1950s, when a dizzying array of synthetic pesticides had come into use. Leading this chemical onslaught was the insecticide DDT, whose inventor had won a Nobel Prize for its discovery. Effective against crop pests as well as insects that transmitted human diseases, such as typhus and malaria, DDT had at first appeared safe. But as its use expanded, alarming reports surfaced of collateral damage to fish, birds, and other wildlife. Silent Spring was a chilling indictment of DDT and its effects, which were lasting, widespread, and lethal. Published in 1962, Silent Spring shocked the public and forced the government to take action—despite a withering attack on Carson from the chemicals industry. The book awakened the world to the heedless contamination of the environment and eventually led to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and to the banning of DDT and a host of related pesticides. By drawing frightening parallels between dangerous chemicals and the then-pervasive fallout from nuclear testing, Carson opened a fault line between the gentle ideal of conservation and the more urgent new concept of environmentalism. Elegantly written and meticulously researched, On a Farther Shore reveals a shy yet passionate woman more at home in the natural world than in the literary one that embraced her. William Souder also writes sensitively of Carson’s romantic friendship with Dorothy Freeman and of Carson’s death from cancer in 1964. This extraordinary biography captures the essence of one of the great reformers of the 20th century.
©2012 William Souder (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
American Subversive
Summary
As the 21st century enters its second decade, foreign wars, the lingering recession, and a caustic political environment are taking their toll on Americans. But the party hasn't ended for Aidan Cole and his friends, a band of savvy, if cynical, New York journalists and bloggers who thrive at the intersection of media and celebrity. At wine-sodden dinner parties or in dimly lit downtown bars, their frenetic talk - of scoops and page views, sexual adventures, and trendy restaurants - continues unabated. Then, without warning, the specter of terrorism reenters their lives. A bomb rips through the deserted floor of a midtown office tower. Middle Eastern terrorists are immediately suspected. But four days later, with no arrests and a city on edge, an anonymous email arrives in Aidan's in-box. Attached is the photograph of an attractive young white woman, along with a chilling message: "This is Paige Roderick. She's the one responsible." So begins an extraordinary journey into the dark soul of modern America - from a back-to-the-land community in the Smoky Mountains to a Weather Underground-like bomb factory in Vermont; from Fishers Island, isolated getaway of the wealthy elite, to the hip lofts of Manhattan's Meatpacking District. American Subversive is David Goodwillie's sharp and penetrating take on the paranoia of our times - and its real, untold dangers. In examining the connection between our collective apathy and the roots of insurrection, Goodwillie has crafted an intoxicating story of two young Americans grasping for a foothold in a culture - and a country - that's crumbling around them. With this debut novel, Goodwillie announces himself as a major new voice in American fiction. Expertly written, relentlessly suspenseful, and bitingly funny, American Subversive is both an unnervingly realistic tale of domestic terrorism and a perfectly observed portrait of Manhattan in the digital age.
©2010 David Goodwillie (P)2010 Tantor
Tomlinson Hill
Summary
Journalist Chris Tomlinson grew up hearing stories about his family's abandoned cotton plantation in Falls County, Texas. Most of the tales lionized his white ancestors for pioneering along the Brazos River. His grandfather often said the family's slaves loved them so much that they also took Tomlinson as their last name. LaDainian Tomlinson, football great and former running back for the San Diego Chargers, spent part of his childhood playing on the same land that his black ancestors had worked as slaves. As a child, LaDainian believed that the Hill was named after his family. Not until he was old enough to read a historical plaque did he realize that the Hill was named for his ancestor's slaveholders. A masterpiece of authentic American history, Tomlinson Hill traces the true and very revealing story of these two families. From the beginning in 1854 - when the first Tomlinson, a white woman, arrived - to 2007, when the last Tomlinson, LaDainian's father, left, the book unflinchingly explores the history of race and bigotry in Texas. Along the way, it also manages to disclose a great many untruths that are latent in the unsettling and complex story of America.
©2014 Chris Tomlinson (P)2014 Tantor
Forty Chances
Summary
If you had the resources to accomplish something great in the world, what would you do? Legendary investor Warren Buffett posed this challenge to his son in 2006, when he announced he was leaving the bulk of his fortune to philanthropy. So, Howard G. Buffett set out to help the most vulnerable people on Earth - nearly a billion individuals who lack basic food security. And Howard has given himself a deadline: 40 years to put more than $3 billion to work on this challenge. Each of us has about 40 chances to accomplish our goals in life. Howard learned this lesson through his passion for farming: All farmers can expect to have about 40 growing seasons, giving them just 40 chances to improve on every harvest. This lesson applies to all of us, however, because we all have about 40 productive years to do the best job we can, whatever our passions may be. Forty Chances: Finding Hope in a Hungry World is a book that captures Howard's journey. We join him around the world as he seeks out new approaches to ease the suffering of so many. It is told in a unique format: 40 stories that will provide listeners a compelling look at Howard's lessons learned, ranging from his own backyard to some of the most difficult and dangerous places on Earth.
©2013 Howard G. Buffett (P)2014 Blackstone Audio
1919
Summary
With 1919, the second volume of his U.S.A. trilogy, John Dos Passos continues his "vigorous and sweeping panorama of 20th-century America" (Forum), lauded on publication of the first volume not only for its scope but also for its groundbreaking style. Again employing a host of experimental devices that would inspire a whole new generation of writers to follow, Dos Passos captures the many textures, flavors, and background noises of modern life with a cinematic touch and unparalleled nerve. The novel opens to find America and the world at war, and Dos Passos's characters, many of whom we met in the first volume, are thrown into the snarl. We follow the daughter of a Chicago minister, a wide-eyed Texas girl, a young poet, and a radical Jew, and we glimpse Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Unknown Soldier.
©1932, 1959 John Dos Passos (P)2010 Tantor
Admiral Bill Halsey
Summary
William Halsey was the most famous naval officer of World War II. His fearlessness in carrier raids against Japan, his steely resolve at Guadalcanal, and his impulsive blunder at the Battle of Leyte Gulf made him the "Patton of the Pacific" and solidified his reputation as a decisive, aggressive fighter prone to impetuous errors of judgment in the heat of battle. In this definitive biography, Thomas Hughes punctures the popular caricature of the "fighting admiral" to reveal the truth of Halsey's personal and professional life as it was lived in times of war and peace. Halsey, the son of a Navy officer whose alcoholism scuttled a promising career, committed himself wholeheartedly to naval life at an early age. An audacious and inspiring commander to his men, he met the operational challenges of the battle at sea against Japan with dramatically effective carrier strikes early in the war. Yet his greatest contribution to the Allied victory was as commander of the combined sea, air, and land forces in the South Pacific. Skillfully mediating the constant strategy disputes between the Army and the Navy, Halsey was the linchpin of America's Pacific war effort when its outcome was far from certain.
©2016 the President and Fellows of Harvard College (P)2016 Tantor
The Big Money
Summary
The Big Money completes John Dos Passos's three-volume "fable of America's materialistic success and moral decline" (American Heritage) and marks the end of "one of the most ambitious projects that an American novelist has ever undertaken" (Time). Here, we come back to America after the war and find a nation on the upswing. Industrialism booms. The stock market surges. Lindbergh takes his solo flight. Henry Ford makes automobiles. From New York to Hollywood, love affairs to business deals, it is a country taking the turns too fast, speeding toward the crash of 1929. Ultimately, the novels of the U.S.A. trilogy - both individually and as a whole - paint a sweeping portrait of collective America and showcase the brilliance and bravery of one of its most enduring and admired writers.
©1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, renewed 1963, 1964 John Dos Passos (P)2010 Tantor
The Best of American Heritage: Lincoln
Summary
Some of America's foremost historians - including James M. McPherson, Allan Nevins, and Stephen B. Oates - recount the extraordinary life of Abraham Lincoln in this collection of the best essays from 60 years of American Heritage. Lincoln, the book argues, "...evolved into nothing less than an apostle for the sanctity of the Union, the ethic of majority rule, and the dreams of freedom and equality of opportunity. Who could have so predicted when Lincoln had seemed the least qualified candidate for the presidency?"
©2015 American Heritage (P)2017 Tantor
Vice Capades
Summary
From the illegality of bowling in colonial America to violent video games and synthetic drugs, Vice Capades by best-selling author Mark Stein examines the nation's relationship with the actions, attitudes, and antics that have defined morality. This comprehensive yet humorous history reveals that our views of vice are not formed merely by morals but by power. By viewing a variety of vices across the span of American history, Vice Capades brings into focus the nation's inconsistent moral compass and helps us understand shifts in laws to combat vice by revealing who and what wields power (often invisibly) in the United States. While laws against such things as nude dancing have become less restrictive, restrictive laws have been enacted against sexual harassment. While marijuana is no longer illegal in numerous jurisdictions, restrictive laws have been enacted against cigarettes. Stein examines how this nation's inconsistent moral compass has consistently pointed to every era's powers-that-be and enables us to view shifts in the power structure taking place before the public became aware of particular laws against vice and who determines what is or is not deemed vice.
©2017 Mark Stein (P)2017 Tantor
Savage Kingdom
Summary
Published to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the first American colony, Savage Kingdom presents a bold, even reckless, political adventure driven by a sense of imperial destiny and dogged by official hostility. Four centuries ago, and 14 years before the Mayflower, a group of men - led by a one-armed ex-pirate, an epileptic aristocrat, a reprobate cleric, and a government spy - left London aboard a fleet of three ships to start a new life in America. They arrived in Virginia in the spring of 1607 and set about trying to create a settlement on a tiny island in the James River. Despite their shortcomings, and against the odds, they built Jamestown, a ramshackle outpost that laid the foundations of the British Empire and the United States of America. Drawing on new discoveries, neglected sources, and manuscript collections scattered across the world, Savage Kingdom challenges the textbook image of Jamestown as a mere money-making venture. It reveals a reckless, daring enterprise led by outcasts of the Old World who found themselves interlopers in a new one. It charts their journey into a beautiful landscape and a sophisticated culture that they found both ravishing and alien, which they yearned to possess but threatened to destroy. They called their new home a "savage kingdom", but it was the savagery they had experienced in Europe that had driven them across the ocean and which they hoped to escape by building in America "one of the most glorious nations under the sun". An intimate story in an epic setting, Woolley shows how the land of Pocahontas came to be drawn into a new global order, reaching from London to the Orinoco Delta, from the warring kingdoms of Angola to the slave markets of Mexico, from the gates of the Ottoman Empire to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
©2007 Benjamin Woolley (P)2007 Tantor Media Inc.
An Audio Bundle: How to Win Any Argument & How to Win Any Negotiation
Summary
A bundle of two compelling audiobooks from author Robert Mayer. The art of argument. It's mysterious and powerful. It's the art of having things go your way. But also it's the art of getting out of your own way. It's having The Moves. But it's also about having The Touch. Arguing. There's the rough and tumble of the norm, the amateur's game. Then there's the pro's game - always knowing what to say, how to say it, and when to say it. Winning arguments without quarreling, squabbling, tussling, wrangling, bickering, raising your voice, losing your cool, or coming to blows. Today's super negotiator has to be a versatile problem solver, seeking hard-bargain results with a soft touch. With punch and panache, Mayer shows you how to make the grade, revealing powerful negotiating tools drawn from a unique blend of sources, including recent advances in psychology, linguistics, trial advocacy, sales, and management communications - the cutting edge of the art of performance; Tips, tricks, and techniques from 200 of the world's masters - the legendary street and bazaar merchants of Bombay, Istanbul, Cairo, and Shanghai; and Mayer's own "been there, done that" years as a lawyer representing thousands of clients (from foreign government agencies and mega-corporations to some of the world's best-known actors, authors, and athletes), negotiating deals on everything from amphitheaters to Zero aircraft.
©2020 Listen & Live Audio (P)2020 Listen & Live Audio
The Third Coast
Summary
A cultural history of Chicago at midcentury, with its incredible mix of architects, politicians, musicians, writers, entrepreneurs, and actors who helped shape modern America Though today it can seem as if all American culture comes out of New York and Los Angeles, much of what defined the nation as it grew into a superpower was produced in Chicago. Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop there, and this flow of people and commodities made it America’s central clearinghouse, laboratory, and factory. Between the end of World War II and 1960, Mies van der Rohe’s glass-and-steel architecture became the face of corporate America, Ray Kroc’s McDonald’s changed how people eat, Hugh Hefner unveiled Playboy, and the Chess brothers supercharged rock and roll with Chuck Berry. At the University of Chicago, the atom was split and Western civilization was packaged into the Great Books. Yet even as Chicago led the way in creating mass-market culture, its artists pushed back in their own distinct voices. In literature, it was the outlaw novels of Nelson Algren (then carrying on a passionate affair with Simone de Beauvoir), the poems of Gwendolyn Brooks, and Studs Terkel’s oral histories. In music, it was the gospel of Mahalia Jackson, the urban blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and the trippy avant-garde jazz of Sun Ra. In performance, it was the intimacy of Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, the “Chicago School” of television, and the improvisational comedy troupe Second City whose famous alumni are now everywhere in American entertainment. Despite this diversity, racial divisions informed virtually every aspect of life in Chicago. The chaos - both constructive and destructive - of this period was set into motion by the second migration north of African Americans during World War II. As whites either fled to the suburbs or violently opposed integration, urban planners tried to design away "blight" with projects that marred a generation of American cities. The election of Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1955 launched a frenzy of new building that came at a terrible cost - monolithic housing projects for the black community and a new kind of self-satisfied provincialism that sped up the end of Chicago’s role as America’s meeting place. In luminous prose, Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story of the city in its postwar prime and explains its profound impact on modern America.
©2013 Kelmsott Ink, Inc. (P)2013 Blackstone Audio, Inc.