George Newbern has narrated 187 audiobooks on Listento.it by 183 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 2,798 ratings. The most-rated is Influence.
Testimony of Two Men
Summary
A small-town doctor acquitted of murdering his pregnant wife faces new charges in this New York Times bestseller set in the early days of modern medicine. Hambledon, Pennsylvania, is still reeling from the sensational murder trial that shattered the peace of the bucolic hamlet less than a year ago. Dr. Jonathan Ferrier was accused of killing his beautiful young wife after she died following a botched abortion. The scion of a powerful old eastern family, Jonathan hired the best attorneys money could buy. When he was acquitted, many believed he had bought his freedom. Now, he has returned home to sell his practice and move on. But haunted by his wife's death, Jonathan still strives to heal the judgmental people of his divided town. Robert Morgan, a young, idealistic doctor, is determined to make up his own mind about the accused's innocence or guilt. Of one thing he is certain: Jonathan is a good doctor, perhaps even a great one. He is also a man who feels abandoned by God, his church, his family, and his friends. As Jonathan continues to be pilloried by the town, a new series of accusations are leveled at him. Is he a cold-blooded killer who murdered his wife and their unborn child? Or a man unjustly accused and wrongly maligned? Testimony of Two Men explores the evolution of modern medicine and the tireless physicians who are its unsung heroes. Author Taylor Caldwell's bestselling novel touches on faith, religion, and the then-new field of mental health as it tells a mesmerizing tale of desire, betrayal, and love that can destroy or redeem.
©1968 Reback & Reback (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Batman and the Joker
Summary
This cultural analysis of visual and narrative elements within Batman comics provides an important exploration of the ways readers and creators negotiate gender, identity, and sexuality in popular culture. Thematic chapters investigate how artists, writers, and fans engage with, challenge, and interpret gendered and sexual representations by focusing on one of the most popular and heated fictional rivalries ever inked: that of Batman and the Joker. The monograph provides critical insights into ways queer reading practices can open new forms of understanding that have generally remained implicit and unexplored in mainstream comics studies. This accessible and interdisciplinary approach to the Caped Crusader and the Clown Prince of Crime engages diverse fields of scholarship such as comics studies, critical theory, cultural studies, gender studies, literature, psychoanalysis, media studies, and queer theory.
©2021 Chris Richardson (P)2021 Tantor
How Baseball Happened
Summary
The fascinating, true origin story of baseball - how America’s first great sport developed and how it conquered a nation. Baseball’s true founders don’t have plaques in Cooperstown. The founders were the hundreds of uncredited amateurs - ordinary people - who played without gloves, facemasks, or performance incentives in the middle decades of the 19th century. Unlike today’s pro athletes, they lived full lives outside of sports. They worked, built businesses, and fought against the South in the Civil War. But that’s not the way the story has been told. The wrongness of baseball history can be staggering. You may have heard that Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright invented baseball. Neither did. You may have been told that a club called the Knickerbockers played the first baseball game in 1846. They didn’t. You have read that baseball’s color line was uncrossed and unchallenged until Jackie Robinson in 1947. Nope. You may have heard Cooperstown, Hoboken, or New York City called the birthplace of baseball, but not Brooklyn. Yet Brooklyn was the home of baseball’s first fans, the first ballpark, the first statistics - and modern pitching. Baseball was originally supposed to be played, not watched. This changed when crowds began to show up at games in Brooklyn in the late 1850s. We fans weren’t invited to the party; we crashed it. Professionalism wasn’t part of the plan either, but when an 1858 Brooklyn versus New York City series accidentally proved that people would pay to see a game, the writing was on the outfield wall. When the first professional league was formed in 1871, baseball was already a fully formed modern sport with championships, media coverage, and famous stars. Professional baseball invented an organization, but not the sport itself. Baseball’s amazing amateurs had already done that. Thomas W. Gilbert’s history is for baseball fans and anyone fascinating by origin stories and American culture.
©2020 Thomas W. Gilbert (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
A Good Marriage
Summary
Coming soon from Amazon and Nicole Kidman’s Blossom Films. A New York Times Summer Reads Selection A People Best Book of the Summer A Library Reads Pick A Book Riot Addictive New Thriller to Add to Your TBR Pile A Book of the Month Selection A Publishers Weekly Summer Reads Pick A Bookish Most-Anticipated Novel A Good Morning America "Binge This!" Pick Big Little Lies meets Presumed Innocent in this “irresistible domestic drama” (Washington Post) from the New York Times best-selling author of Reconstructing Amelia, in which a woman’s brutal murder reveals the perilous compromises some couples make - and the secrets they keep - in order to stay together. Lizzie Kitsakis is working late when she gets the call. Grueling hours are standard at elite law firms like Young & Crane, but they’d be easier to swallow if Lizzie was there voluntarily. Until recently, she’d been a happily underpaid federal prosecutor. That job and her brilliant, devoted husband, Sam - she had everything she’d ever wanted. And then, suddenly, it all fell apart. No. That’s a lie. It wasn’t sudden, was it? Long ago the cracks in Lizzie’s marriage had started to show. She was just good at averting her eyes. The last thing Lizzie needs right now is a call from an inmate at Rikers asking for help - even if Zach Grayson is an old friend. But Zach is desperate: His wife, Amanda, has been found dead at the bottom of the stairs in their Brooklyn brownstone. And Zach’s the primary suspect. As Lizzie is drawn into the dark heart of idyllic Park Slope, she learns that Zach and Amanda weren’t what they seemed - and that their friends, a close-knit group of fellow parents at the exclusive Brooklyn Country Day school, might be protecting troubling secrets of their own. In the end, she’s left wondering not only whether her own marriage can be saved, but what it means to have a good marriage in the first place.
©2020 Kimberly McCreight (P)2020 HarperAudio
We Begin at the End
Summary
With We Begin at the End, Chris Whitaker has crafted an extraordinary novel about people who deserve so much more than life serves them. At times devastating, with flashes of humor and hope throughout, it is ultimately an inspiring tale of how the human spirit prevails and how, in the end, love - in all its different guises - wins. There are two kinds of families: the ones we are born into and the ones we create. Walk has never left the coastal California town where he grew up. He may have become the chief of police, but he’s still trying to heal the old wound of having given the testimony that sent his best friend, Vincent King, to prison decades before. Now, 30 years later, Vincent is being released. Duchess is a 13-year-old self-proclaimed outlaw. Her mother, Star, grew up with Walk and Vincent. Walk is in overdrive trying to protect them, but Vincent and Star seem bent on sliding deeper into self-destruction. Star always burned bright, but recently that light has dimmed, leaving Duchess to parent not only her mother but her five-year-old brother. At school the other kids make fun of Duchess - her clothes are torn, her hair a mess. But let them throw their sticks, because she’ll throw stones. Rules are for other people. She’s just trying to survive and keep her family together. A 40-something-year-old sheriff and a 13-year-old girl may not seem to have a lot in common. But they both have come to expect that people will disappoint you, loved ones will leave you, and if you open your heart it will be broken. So when trouble arrives with Vincent King, Walk and Duchess find they will be unable to do anything but usher it in, arms wide closed. A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company
©2021 Christopher Whitaker (P)2021 Macmillan Audio
The Camera Lies
Summary
Alfred Hitchcock is said to have once remarked, "Actors are cattle", a line that has stuck in the public consciousness ever since. For Hitchcock, acting was a matter of contrast and counterpoint, valuing subtlety and understatement over flashiness. He felt that the camera was duplicitous and directed actors to look and act conversely. In The Camera Lies, author Dan Callahan spotlights the many nuances of Hitchcock's direction throughout his career, from Cary Grant in Notorious to Janet Leigh in Psycho. Delving further, he examines the ways that sex and sexuality are presented through Hitchcock's characters, reflecting the director's own complex relationship with sexuality. Detailing the fluidity of acting, Callahan examines the spectrum of treatment and direction Hitchcock provided well- and lesser-known actors alike, including Ingrid Bergman, Henry Kendall, Joan Barry, Robert Walker, Jessica Tandy, Kim Novak, and Tippi Hedren. As Hitchcock believed, the best actor was one who could "do nothing well" - but behind an outward indifference to his players was a sophisticated acting theorist who often drew out great performances. The Camera Lies unpacks Hitchcock's legacy both as a director who continuously taught audiences to distrust appearance and as a man with an uncanny insight into the human capacity for deceit and misinterpretation.
©2020 Oxford University Press (P)2020 Tantor
Flat Lake in Winter
Summary
Deep in the heart of the Adirondack Mountains sits a mansion, its image reflected perfectly on the still water of Flat Lake. Inside that estate are the savagely murdered bodies of a wealthy elderly couple. All evidence points to Jonathan - their mentally handicapped twenty-eight-year-old grandson - but Matt Fielder, his appointed defense lawyer, isn't convinced. While Fielder is pretty sure Jonathan committed the killings, Jonathan's childlike understanding of the world renders it nearly impossible for him to have done it out of greed or malice. Now Fielder must fight the prosecution's campaign for the death penalty, but as he scours Jonathan's past for anything that will help their case, he uncovers a cache of dark family secrets that turn the case in a shocking and unexpected new direction. When his first novel, Felony Murder, was published, Publishers Weekly called Klempner "a writer to watch." Now, Klempner is better than ever - that rare novelist with both an insider's knowledge of the world he writes about, and a talent for intelligent, compelling storytelling.
©2016 Joseph T. Klempner (P)2017 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.