Fred Williams has narrated 8 audiobooks on Listento.it by 7 authors, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Six Armies in Normandy.
Six Armies in Normandy
Summary
In a burnished, driving prose, incorporating a myriad of fresh sources, John Keegan tells the story of the Allies' greatest military achievement as he chronicles the 1944 invasion of Normandy, from D-Day to the liberation of Paris. Includes: The Americans in their gallant and terrifying night drop on the eve of the landings The Canadians in crucial action at the Omaha beachhead The English tanks and infantry savagely fighting their way inland The Germans in their surprisingly strong resistance The Poles in exile blocking the German escape route in a fierce and desperate firefight The French, liberating at last the City of Light
©1982 Sir John Keegan (P)2000 Blackstone Audiobooks
The Shadow-Line
Summary
Written at the start of the Great War, when his son Borys was at the Western Front, The Shadow-Line is Conrad's supreme effort to open man's eyes to the meaning of war through the stimulus of art. In many ways an autobiographical narrative, this masterpiece of his final period relates the story of a young and inexperienced sea captain whose first command finds him with a ship becalmed in tropical seas and a crew smitten with fever. As he wrestles with his conscience and with the sense of isolation that his position imposes, the captain crosses the "shadow-line" between youth and adulthood. It is the qualities, both individual and collective, needed to confront the ship's crisis that symbolize the qualities needed by humanity, not only to face evil and destruction but also to come to terms with life.
©1923 Joseph Conrad (P)2000 Blackstone Audiobooks
The Devil's Oasis
Summary
It is 1942, and civilization as the world knows it teeters on its edge. Nazi Germany stands at the height of its power. Anton Rider is now a desert commando engaged in obliterating Nazi air bases and petrol dumps. His old friend, Ernst von Decken, a German soldier of fortune, has become the enemy. Meanwhile, in North Africa, the brilliant General Rommel's panzers threaten the Suez Canal, the oil fields of the Middle East, and the trade route to Asia. Alliances shift, loyalties deceive, espionage thrives, and danger lies as much in the dark corners of Cairo as it does in the desert night. And at a barge on the Nile, at the Cataract Café, under the watchful eye of its proprietor, Olivio Alaved, Egypt frames its destiny.
©2001 Bartle Bull (P)2007 Blackstone Audiobooks
In Defense of Women
Summary
Originally published in 1922, this book considers topics that remain of vital interest to today’s readers, including monogamy and polygamy, the double standard, sexual harassment, and declining marriage rates. Written in Mencken’s characteristic no-nonsense manner, In Defense of Women crackles with controversy and caustic wit. “The truth is that neither sex, without some fertilization by the complementary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor. Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naïve and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian, or a bank director. And woman, without some trace of that divine innocence which is masculine, is too harshly the realist for those vast projections of the fancy which lie at the heart of what we call genius. Here, as elsewhere in the universe, the best effects are obtained by a mingling of elements” (H. L. Mencken).
Public Domain (P)1999 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles
Summary
Jason is born the son of King Aeson. His destiny is to rule Iolcus, the land that his father's brother, King Pelias, has taken from him. When Jason comes of age, he returns to Iolcus. But the king is not yet willing to give up his throne. So he cunningly persuades Jason to accept a dare to bring back the famous Golden Fleece of Colchis. Jason accepts the challenge, unaware that he is being conned into a dangerous and perhaps fatal journey far, far from the land he loves. Along with Heracles and Theseus, Perseus and Atalanta and, of course, the sorceress Medea, Jason travels on a wondrous journey in the ship Argo to strange lands populated by even stranger inhabitants. While they travel, Orpheus, the famous Greek storyteller, sings songs about the gods and goddesses and the creation of heaven and earth. This is the story of Jason, the Argonauts, and their quest for the Golden Fleece.
Originally published in 1921; (P)2004 Blackstone Audiobooks
The White Rhino Hotel
Summary
The Great War has ended, tragically for many; but for some more fortunate, East Africa holds the prospect of vast estates, fabulous wealth, and limitless opportunity in this powerful, grandly crafted novel of the natural and human perils that await pioneers in a promised land.It is in colonial Kenya, at Lord Penfold's White Rhino Hotel, that the paths of these new settlers cross. Here they meet the cunning dwarf Olivio Alevado, a man whose lustful desires and vengeful schemes make him a formidable adversary to his enemies and a subtle ally to his friends. Here the destinies of the gypsy adventurer Anton Rider and the courageous, war-hardened Gwenn Llewelyn intersect. Here hope is corrupted by greed, love by revenge, and loyalty by betrayal as the future is trampled into history.
©1992 Bartle Bull (P)2006 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Allan Quatermain
Summary
This sequel to King Solomon's Mines is filled with the spirit of adventure. Thrilled by rumors of a lost civilization, three Englishmen decide to travel to the heart of Africa with their Zulu guide where they meet with continual peril: an attack by a cruel warrior tribe, the scorch of underground volcanic fires, and an encounter with a huge species of ferocious black crab. Exhausted and depleted of supplies, the men at last arrive at a mysterious city in the highlands of the interior. More problems arise when one of the Englishmen falls in love with one of the twin queens who rule the land.
(P)1997 Blackstone Audiobooks
The Forsyte Saga
Summary
The three novels that make up The Forsyte Saga chronicle the ebbing social power of the commercial upper-middle class Forsyte family through three generations, beginning in Victorian London during the 1880s and ending in the early 1920s. Galsworthy's masterly narrative examines not only their fortunes but also the wider developments within society, particularly the changing position of women. The Forsyte Saga is a sequence of novels comprising The Man of Property (1906), In Chancery (1920), and To Let (1921) with two interludes, "Indian Summer of a Forsyte" (1918) and "Awakening", published together in 1922. The saga begins with Soames Forsyte, a successful solicitor who buys land at Robin Hill on which to build a house for his wife Irene and future family. Eventually, the Forsyte family begins to disintegrate when Timothy Forsyte, the last of the old generation, dies at the age of 100. In these novels, John Galsworthy documented a departed way of life, that of the affluent middle class that ruled England before the 1914 war. The class is criticized on account of its possessiveness, but there is also nostalgia because Galsworthy, as a man born into the class, could also appreciate its virtues.
(P)2005 Blackstone Audiobooks