G. Valmont Thomas has narrated 7 audiobooks on Listento.it by 10 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.2★ across 80 ratings. The most-rated is Malcolm X.
Malcolm X
Summary
Pulitzer Prize, History, 2012 Years in the making, this is the definitive biography of the legendary black activist. Of the great figures in 20th-century American history, perhaps none is more complex and controversial than Malcolm X. Constantly rewriting his own story, he became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and an icon, all before being felled by assassins' bullets at age 39. Through his tireless work and countless speeches, he empowered hundreds of thousands of black Americans to create better lives and stronger communities while establishing the template for the self-actualized, independent African American man. In death, he became a broad symbol of both resistance and reconciliation for millions around the world. Manning Marable's new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement. Filled with new information and shocking revelations that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a sweeping story of race and class in America, from the rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the struggles of the civil-rights movement in the 50s and 60s. Reaching into Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his parents' activism through his own engagement with the Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the never-before-told true story of his assassination. Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of the most singular forces for social change, capturing with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.
©2011 Manning Marable (P)2011 Penguin
Roadwork
Summary
Only Stephen King, writing as Richard Bachman, can imagine the horror of a good and angry man who fights back against bureaucracy when it threatens to destroy his vitality, home, and memories. Barton Dawes' unremarkable but comfortable existence suddenly takes a turn for the worst. A new highway extension is being built right over the laundry plant where he works - and right over his home. Dawes isn't the sort of man who will take an insult of this magnitude lying down. His steadfast determination to fight the inevitable course of progress drives his wife and friends away while he tries to face down the uncaring bureaucracy that has destroyed his life. This number-one national best seller includes an introduction by Stephen King on "The Importance of Being Bachman".
©1981 Richard Bachman (P)2013 Penguin Audio
If I Did It
Summary
In 1994, Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson were brutally murdered at her home in Brentwood, California. O. J. Simpson was tried for the crime in a case that captured the attention of the American people, but he was ultimately found not guilty of criminal charges. The victims' families brought civil cases against Simpson, in which he was found liable for willfully and wrongfully causing the deaths of Ron and Nicole by committing battery with malice and oppression. In 2006, HarperCollins announced the publication of a book in which O. J. Simpson told how he hypothetically would have committed the murders. In response to public outrage that Simpson stood to profit from these crimes, HarperCollins canceled the book. A Florida bankruptcy court awarded the rights to the Goldmans in August 2007 to partially satisfy the unpaid civil judgment, which has risen, with interest, to over $38 million. The Goldman family views this book as Simpson's confession, and has worked hard to ensure that the public will read or listen to this book and learn the truth. This audiobook was produced from the original manuscript approved by O. J. Simpson, with additional insight from the Goldman Family, Pablo F. Fenjves, and Dominick Dunne.
©2007 Pablo F. Fenjves; 2007 Ron Goldman, LLC; 2007 Kim Goldman; 2007 Dominick Dunne (P)2007 Blackstone Audio Inc.
2666
Summary
National Book Critics Circle, Fiction, 2009 Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño’s life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.
©2004 the heirs of Roberto Bolaño (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Long-Legged Fly
Summary
In steamy New Orleans, black private detective Lew Griffin has taken on a seemingly hopeless missing-person case. The trail takes him through the underbelly of the French Quarter with its bar girls, pimps, and tourist attractions. As his search leads to one violent dead end and then another, Griffin is confronted by the realization that his own life has come to resemble those of the people he is attempting to find. Waking in a hospital after an alcoholic binge, Griffin finds another chance in a nurse who comes to love him, but again he reverts to his old life in the mean streets among the predators and their prey. When his son vanishes, Griffin searches back through the tangles and tatters of his life, knowing that he must solve his personal mysteries before he can venture after the whereabouts of others.
©1992 James Sallis (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Moth
Summary
Lew Griffin has quit the detective business and withdrawn to the safety of his old home in New Orleans' Garden District, where he copes with his past by transforming it into fiction. But following the death of a close friend, he returns to the streets - not only the urban ones he has conquered, but also those of the rural South that he escaped long ago - to search for the runaway daughter he didn't know his friend had.Griffin discovers that we rarely know anyone, even those closest to us. And he now finds that he must also face the two things he most fears: memories of his parents and his own relationship with his now-vanished son.
©1993 James Sallis (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Zebra Murders
Summary
This true-crime police procedural is the riveting story of the racially-motivated serial killings that terrorized San Francisco from 1973 to 1974 and how they were solved. Code named the Zebra Murders, the case involved a series of random violent attacks by African-American men against whites, resulting in fifteen deaths. Author Prentice Earl Sanders, the SFPD's first African-American police chief and one of the lead detectives on the case, takes us back through his investigation as he tried to determine whether the murders were to be considered mere serial killings or acts of political terror. At the same time, he describes the racial discrimination within the police force and how that influenced his investigation. The Zebra Murders is a fascinating look at an era of social and political turbulence and how justice was sought amidst its most violent eruptions.
©2006 Prentice Earl Sanders and Bennett Cohen (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.