Frederick Davidson has narrated 71 audiobooks on Listento.it by 51 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 443 ratings. The most-rated is War and Peace.
War and Peace
Summary
Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once an epic of the Napoleonic wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit. Tolstoy's genius is clearly seen in the multitude of characters in this massive chronicle, all of them fully realized and equally memorable. Out of this complex narrative emerges a profound examination of the individual's place in the historical process, one that makes it clear why Thomas Mann praised Tolstoy for his Homeric powers and placed War and Peace in the same category as The Iliad. War and Peace was translated by Constance Garnett.
Public Domain (P)2009 Blackstone Audio
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Volume I: Visions of Glory 1874-1932
Summary
Winston Churchill is perhaps the most important political figure of the 20th century. His great oratory and leadership during the Second World War were only part of his huge breadth of experience and achievement. Studying his life is a fascinating way to imbibe the history of his era and gain insight into key events that have shaped our time.
In political office at the end of WWI, Churchill foresaw the folly of Versailles and feared what a crippled Germany would do to the balance of power. In his years in the political wilderness, from 1931 to 1939, he alone of all British public men, continually raised his voice against Hitler and his appeasers. For over 50 years, he was constantly involved in, and usually at the center of, the most important events of his age. It was, however, his obduracy on matters of principle, his fortitude in the face of opposition, and his perseverance in standing alone that defined him.
©1983 William Manchester (P)1990 Blackstone Audio Inc.
The Woefield Poultry Collective
Summary
Woefield Farm is a sprawling thirty acres of scrub land, complete with dilapidated buildings and one half-sheared, lonely sheep named Bertie. It’s “run” - in the loosest possible sense of the word - by Prudence Burns, an energetic, well-intentioned twenty-something New Yorker full of back-to- the-land ideals, but without an iota of related skills or experience. Prudence, who inherited the farm from her uncle, soon discovers that the bank is about to foreclose on Woefield Farm, which means that Prudence has to turn things around, fast. But fear not! She’ll be assisted by Earl, a spry seventy-something, banjo-playing foreman with a distrust of newfangled ideas and a substantial family secret; Seth, the alcoholic, celebrity-blogging boy-next-door, who hasn’t left the house since a scandal with his high-school drama teacher; and Sara Spratt, a highly organized eleven-year-old looking for a home for her prizewinning chickens, including one particularly randy fellow soon to be christened Alec Baldwin. Full of offbeat charm and characters you won’t soon forget, The Woefield Poultry Collective is a heartwarming novel about learning how to take on a challenge, facing your fears, and finding friendship in the most unlikely of places. With alternating narratives, Susan Juby shows how a team of misfits can find acceptance and success, even with - and sometimes in spite of - their highly unorthodox approach.
©2011 Susan Juby (P)2011 HarperCollins Canada
Down and Out in Paris and London
Summary
Orwell's own experiences inspire this semi-autobiographical novel about a man living in Paris in the early 1930s without a penny. The narrator's poverty brings him into contact with strange incidents and characters, which he manages to chronicle with great sensitivity and graphic power. The latter half of the book takes the English narrator to his home city, London, where the world of poverty is different in externals only. A socialist who believed that the lower classes were the wellspring of world reform, Orwell actually went to live among them in England and on the continent. His novel draws on his experiences of this world, from the bottom of the echelon in the kitchens of posh French restaurants to the free lodging houses, tramps, and street people of London. In the tales of both cities, we learn some sobering truths about poverty and society.
©1962 S. M. Pitt-Rivers (P)1993 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Peter the Great
Summary
This superbly told story brings to life one of the most remarkable rulers––and men––in all of history and conveys the drama of his life and world. The Russia of Peter's birth was very different from the Russia his energy, genius, and ruthlessness shaped. Crowned co-Tsar as a child of ten, after witnessing bloody uprisings in the streets of Moscow, he would grow up propelled by an unquenchable curiosity, everywhere looking, asking, tinkering, and learning, fired by Western ideas. We see Peter in his 20s traveling "incognito" with his ambassadors to the courts of Europe; as the victorious soldier proclaimed Emperor; as the simple workman at his forge; and as the visionary statesman who single-handedly created a formidable world power. Impetuous and stubborn, bawdy and stern, relentless in his perseverance, he was capable of the greatest generosity and the greatest cruelty.
©1980 Robert K. Massie (P)1991 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
My Early Life
Summary
One of the classic volumes of autobiography, My Early Life is a lively and colourful account of a young man's quest for action, adventure and danger. Churchill's schooldays are undistinguished, but he is admitted to Sandhurst and embarks on a career as a soldier and a war correspondent, seeing action in Cuba, in India, in the Sudan - where he took part in the battle of Omdurman, of which he gives us a stirring account - and finally in South Africa. Taken prisoner by the Boers, Churchill makes a daring escape. Back home he embarks on the political career that is to make him one of Britain's most distinguished parliamentarians. First published in 1930, when Churchill's most testing time still lay ahead of him, My Early Life is memorable both as an adventure-story and as an account of the events and influences that helped to shape the career of a great Englishman.
©1930 Charles Scribner’s Sons (P)2014 Audible Studios
The Odessa File
Summary
Frederick Forsyth's spellbinding novels are the natural outgrowth of an adventuresome career in international investigative journalism. Written in Austria and Germany during the fall of 1971, The Odessa File is based on its author's life experiences as a Reuters man reporting from London, Paris, and East Berlin in the early 1960s. The "Odessa" of this title is an acronym for the secret organization that has protected the identities and advanced the destinies of former members of Hitler's dreaded SS since shortly before the end of World War II. One of its rare major defeats came in the spring of 1964, when a packet of dossiers arrived anonymously at the Ministry of Justice in Bonn. How and why a once carefree young German freelance journalist came to send the packet is told in this brilliant new extrapolation from reality into terror.
©1972 Dane's Book Production Limited (P)1992 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Hitler
Summary
This masterful biography by one of Germany’s best known journalists was the leading nonfiction best seller in Germany. Fest shows Hitler as the receptacle of the dreads and resentments of a shaken social order, gifted with an uncanny instinct for all that was hollow behind the appearance of power, at home and abroad. Though a warped human being, he was neither clown nor puppet, as many liked to think; Hitler appears here as an enormously astute politician, impressing and hypnotizing Germans and foreigners alike with the scope of his projects and the theatricality of their presentation. In the last analysis, however, Fest uncovers in Hitler a constantly destructive personality, which aimed at and achieved destruction on an unprecedented scale, not least because an insecure world gave him his opportunities.
©1991 Classics on Tape (P)1991 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Homage to Catalonia
Summary
In 1936, George Orwell went to Spain to report on the civil war and instead joined the P.O.U.M. militia to fight against the Fascists. In this now justly famous account of his experience, he describes both the bleak and the comic aspects of trench warfare on the Aragon front, the Barcelona uprising in May 1937, his nearly fatal wounding just two weeks later, and his escape from Barcelona into France after the P.O.U.M. was suppressed. As important as the story of the war itself is Orwell's analysis of why the Communist Party sabotaged the workers' revolution and branded the P.O.U.M. as Trotskyist, which provides an essential key to understanding the outcome of the war and an ironic sidelight on international Communism. It was during this period in Spain that Orwell learned for himself the nature of totalitarianism in practice, an education that laid the groundwork for his great books Animal Farm and 1984.
©1980 The Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell (P)1992 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Dogs of War
Summary
"Knocking off a bank or an armored truck is merely crude. Knocking off an entire republic has, I feel, a certain style." So says mining magnate Sir James Manson, a shadowy titan of London's financial district, who is scheming a coup d'état in the small West African dictatorship of Zangaro, where a secret source of platinum lies waiting to be exploited. The man selected to plan and carry out the sack of Zangaro is Cat Shannon, a 33-year-old Anglo-Irishman from Nigeria. If the goal is clear, the means are not, for there are no up-to-date manuals on overthrowing governments by force. By the time he has set forth this sinister venture in all its ramifications, Frederick Forsyth has fashioned that manual and given us a classic of terror and enthrallment.
©1974 Danesbrook Productions Limited (P)1993 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Cunning Man
Summary
"Should I have taken the false teeth?" This is what Dr. Jonathan Hullah, a former police surgeon, thinks after he watches Father Hobbes die in front of the High Altar at Toronto's St. Aidan's on the morning of Good Friday. How did the good father die? We do not learn the answer until the very end of this "Case Book" of a man's rich and highly observant life. But we learn much more about many things, and especially about Dr. Hullah, as the Cunning Man takes us through his own long and ardent life of theatre, art, and music; varied adventures in the Canadian Army during World War II; and the secrets of a doctor's consulting room, his preoccupation is not with sorrow but with the comedic canvas of life.
©1996 Robertson Davies (P)2012 Blackstone Audiobooks
History of the World, Updated
Summary
In the
History of the World, Updated, J. M. Roberts has revised his monumental previous work,
History of the World, taking into account the great range of discoveries that have altered our views on everything from early civilizations to post-Cold War globalism. Large portions of text have been rewritten, addressing events as recent as the relationship between the Arab and Western worlds in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
As in his previous work, this is also a book of extraordinary ambition, clarity, and style that follows the central notion that human history is the story of change, a deliberate shaping of experience and environment. Among the elements that have made the book uniquely appealing are its powerful vision and voice.
Roberts's book is exceptional in its genuinely global and comprehensive nature, showing the development of different civilizations through the ages, from our origins on the African savannah to A.D. 2002. Like no other book, it succeeds in conveying the staggering diversity of the human experience across a vast range of circumstances and habitats.
If there is one book anyone truly interested in history should hear, this is it.
©2002 J.M. Roberts (P)2003 Blackstone Audiobooks
Twenty Years After
Summary
Originally published in 1845 as a sequel to The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After is a supreme creation of suspense and heroic adventure. Two decades have passed since the three musketeers triumphed over Cardinal Richelieu and Milady. Time has weakened their resolve and dispersed their loyalties. But treasons and stratagems still cry out for justice: civil war endangers the throne of France, while in England, Cromwell threatens to send Charles I to the scaffold. Dumas brings his immortal quartet out of retirement to cross swords with time, the malevolence of men, and the forces of history. But their greatest test is a titanic struggle with the son of Milady, who wears the face of Evil.
Public Domain (P)1997 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Belly of Paris
Summary
Although it is little known in this country, The Belly of Paris is considered one of Émile Zola’s best novels. Set in the newly built food markets of Paris, it is a story of wealth and poverty set against a sumptuous banquet of food and commerce. Having just escaped from prison after being wrongfully accused, young Florent arrives at Paris’ food market, Les Halles, half starved, surrounded by all he can’t have, and indignant at his world, which he now knows to be unjust. He finds that the city’s working classes have been displaced to make way for bigger streets and bourgeois living quarters, so he settles in with his brother’s family. Gradually, he takes up with the local socialists, who are more at home in bars than on the revolutionary streets. Slowly, the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor drags the city to the breaking point.
©1996 Translation by Sun & Moon Press (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
History of the World (Updated)
Summary
In his monumental History of the World, J.M. Roberts delivered a powerful vision of human history as a story of change, a deliberate shaping of experience and environment. This revised and updated edition takes into account the great range of events and discoveries that have altered our views on everything from early civilizations to post-Cold War globalism. Large portions of the text have been rewritten. Roberts' view of history is exceptional in its global and comprehensive nature as it shows the development of different civilizations through the ages, from our origins on the African savannah to the modern world in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Like no other book, this History of the World succeeds in conveying the staggering diversity of the human experience.
©1976 J. M. Roberts (P)2003 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Hudson Taylor
Summary
Hudson Taylor is one of the most remarkable of Christianity's heroes. A gawky, determined Yorkshire boy of commonplace origins, mediocre education, and uncertain health, Hudson Taylor lived in the assurance that under God's direction he would someday evangelize China's 400 million souls. Today he is remembered both as the founder of the world-famous China Inland Mission and one of history's great men of faith. Hudson Taylor left England on September 19, 1853, and did not reach China until the spring of 1894. The long and arduous voyage, persecution, poverty, and the barriers of language and culture did not deter him from his mission. Throughout a life filled with trials of all sorts, Taylor remained confident in his knowledge of God's will and of his care, even in the shadow of death.
Public Domain (P)2000 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
A History of Europe
Summary
How is it that the small continent of Europe, with its rich multiplicity of cultures and traditions, has managed to exert so profound an influence on the rest of the world? Roberts's sweeping and entertaining history notes the paradoxical effect, for good and ill, on everything touched by those Western values that originated in Europe. Beginning with its Paleolithic origins and the early civilizations of the Aegean, Roberts traces the development of the European identity over the course of thousands of years, ranging across empires and religions, economics, science, and the arts. Antiquity, the age of Christendom, the Middle Ages, early modern history, and the old European order are all surveyed in turn, with particular emphasis given to the turbulent 20th century.
©1996 J. M. Roberts (P)2003 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Kingdom
Summary
The Kingdom is the story of a country - a country of astonishing contrasts, where routine computer printouts open with the words “In the name of God,” where men who grew up in goat-hair tents now dominate the money markets of the world, and where murderers and adulterers are publicly executed in the street. By its own reckoning, this country is just entering the 15th century. The Kingdom is also the story of a family - a family that has fought its way from poverty and obscurity into wealth and power the likes of which the world has never known, a family characterized by fierce loyalty among its members, ruthlessness toward its enemies, and dedication to one of the world’s most severe and demanding creeds. The Kingdom is Saudi Arabia - the only country in the world to bear the name of the family that rules it.
©1981 Robert Lacey (P)2000 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Merlin
Summary
He was born to greatness, the son of a Druid bard and a princess of lost Atlantis. A trained warrior, blessed with the gifts of prophecy and song, he grew to manhood in a Britain abandoned by its Roman conquerors - a land ravaged by the brutal greed of petty chieftains and barbarian invaders. Respected, feared and hated by many, he was to have a higher destiny: to prepare the way for the momentous event that would unite the Island of the Mighty - the coming of Arthur Pendragon, Lord of the Kingdom of Summer. This is the second book of The Pendragon Cycle.
©1988 by Stephen R. Lawhead (P)1995 by Blackstone Audiobooks
The Great Explorers
Summary
The great voyages of discovery to the New World are here brought to life by one of the 20th century's most eminent historians, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Samuel Morison. A master seaman himself, Morison personally retraced the voyages of the early explorers, charting his travels in maps and photographs and comparing these to the maps and travelogues of the early sailors. The resulting two-volume The European Discovery of America was widely acclaimed both for its author's incomparable knowledge of history, cartography, and sea navigation and for the fresh immediacy of its writing. The Great Explorers abridges this great work, following the voyages of Columbus, Magellan, Drake, and many more. Here is the fascinating story of these explorers' ventures into uncharted waters, their encounters with natives, and their joy - and surprise - at discovering new land.
©1978 Oxford University Press (P)1995 Blackstone Audio, Inc.