Grover Gardner has narrated 345 audiobooks on Listento.it by 240 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 6,277 ratings. The most-rated is The Stand.
The Story of Philosophy
Summary
The product of 11 years of research, The Story of Philosophy is an endlessly inspiring and instructive chronicle of the world’s greatest thinkers, from Socrates to Santayana. Written with exacting and scrupulous scholarship, it was designed both to command the respect of educators and to capture the interest of the layman. Durant lucidly describes the philosophical systems of such world-famous “monarchs of the mind” as Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Kant, Voltaire, and Nietzsche. Along with their ideas, he offers their flesh-and-blood biographies, placing their thoughts within their own time and place and elucidating their influence on our modern intellectual heritage. This book is packed with wisdom and wit. Will Durant (1885-1981) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He spent over 50 years writing his critically acclaimed 11-volume series The Story of Civilization. A champion of human-rights issues such as social reform and the brotherhood of man long before they were popular, he continues to educate and entertain readers and listeners worldwide through his writings.
©1926 Will Durant (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Black Order
Summary
High in Nepal, a monastery erupts with savagery and madness. Deep in a German mine, abomination wears the innocent face of a child. Hidden in the jungles of Africa, experiments rooted in a dark past have found fertile ground again. Across the frozen peaks of the Himalayas to the diamond fields of the Congo, from the subterranean labs of a lost era to the bright halls of the Smithsonian, Sigma Force will face its most cunning adversaries, its most daunting challenges, and its most dire threat. The very future of mankind will belong to the victor. For any hope of success, Painter Crowe must make a pact like no other: to align Sigma Force with an old enemy, one beyond redemption. And it will be up to Commander Gray Pierce to find the balance between salvation and damnation, even if it means sacrificing those closest to him. Still, victory is far from certain, for there are riddles that even the greatest minds were never meant to solve.
©2006 Jim Czajkowski (P)2006 HarperCollinsPublishers
The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume I, Fort Sumter to Perryville
Summary
The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol. 1 begins one of the most remarkable works of history ever fashioned. All the great battles are here, of course, from Bull Run through Shiloh, the Seven Days Battles, and Antietam, but so are the smaller ones: Ball's Bluff, Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, Island Ten, New Orleans, and Monitor versus Merrimac. The word “narrative” is the key to this extraordinary book’s incandescence and its truth. The story is told entirely from the point of view of the people involved in it. One learns not only what was happening on all fronts but also how the author discovered it during his years of exhaustive research. This first volume in Shelby Foote’s comprehensive history is a must-listen for anyone interested in one of the bloodiest wars in America’s history.
©1986 Shelby Foote (P)2011 Blackstone Audio
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Summary
Dee Brown's eloquent, meticulously documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the 19th century uses council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions. Brown allows great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them demoralized and defeated. A unique and disturbing narrative told with force and clarity, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee changed forever our vision of how the West was really won - and lost.
©1970 Dee Brown; Preface 2000 by Dee Brown (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Elon Musk and the Quest for a Fantastic Future: Young Readers' Edition
Summary
“Highly recommended for high school and ambitious middle school readers.” (School Library Journal) "A valuable addition to STEM-themed collections." (VOYA) An in-depth look into the extraordinary life of the world’s most important entrepreneur, Elon Musk A fascinating and easily accessible young listeners’ adaptation of Ashlee Vance’s New York Times best-selling Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. The version for adults has been praised as “riveting” (The Financial Times), “spirited” (The Wall Street Journal), and “masterful” (Vice). Now younger listeners can hear about this innovative leader who is revolutionizing three industries at once: space, automotive, and energy. There are few people in history who could match Elon Musk’s relentless drive and vision. A modern combination of famous inventors and industrialists like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs, Elon is the man behind companies such as SpaceX, Tesla Motors, SolarCity, and PayPal that are transforming the way we live. With exclusive access to Elon, his family, and his friends, this book traces Elon’s journey from a kid in South Africa to a young man in the United States, his dramatic technical inventions, and his world-changing companies. Elon has sparked new levels of innovation in the world, and this book gives young listeners a detailed but fast-paced look at his story. A Junior Library Guild Selection!
©2017 Ashlee Vance (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers
The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness
Summary
'What are the marks of a supernaturally changed heart?' This is one of the questions the Apostle Paul addresses as he writes to the church in Corinth. He's not after some superficial outward tinkering, but instead a deep-rooted, life-altering change that takes place on the inside. In an age where pleasing people, puffing up your ego and building your résumé are seen as the methods to "make it", the Apostle Paul calls us to find true rest in blessed self-forgetfulness. In this short and punchy audiobook, best-selling author Timothy Keller, shows that gospel-humility means we can stop connecting every experience, every conversation with ourselves and can thus be free from self-condemnation. A truly gospel-humble person is not a self-hating person or a self-loving person, but a self-forgetful person. This freedom can be yours.
©2013 eChristian (P)2013 eChristian
Barrayar
Summary
Political intrigue, culture clash and romance make a stirring mix in this award-winning follow-up novel to the acclaimed Shards of Honor. In the wake of interplanetary war, former commander Cordelia Naismith has deserted her own planet to marry the leader of the defeated enemy, Aral Vorkosigan. On his home planet of Barrayar, two rival factions are eyeing the recently vacated throne, and Aral, recently appointed Regent of Barrayar by the Emperor on his deathbed, must stand between them. Lord and Lady Vorkosigan, Aral and Cordelia struggle to establish stability in a fragile government thrown into confusion by the transition of power and the threat of civil war. When a palace coup endangers the government, their lives, and her unborn son, Cordelia takes action to secure the safety of her new family and new home.
©1991 Lois McMaster Bujold (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942
Summary
Audie Award Nominee, History, 2013 The planning, the strategy, the sacrifices and heroics - on both sides - illuminating the greatest naval war in history. On the first Sunday in December 1941, an armada of Japanese warplanes appeared suddenly over Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Six months later, in a sea fight north of the tiny atoll of Midway, four Japanese aircraft carriers were sent into the abyss. Pacific Crucible tells the epic tale of these first searing months of the Pacific war, when the U.S. Navy shook off the worst defeat in American military history and seized the strategic initiative. Ian W. Toll's dramatic narrative encompasses both the high command and the "sailor's-eye" view from the lower deck. Relying predominantly on eyewitness accounts and primary sources, Pacific Crucible also spotlights recent scholarship that has revised our understanding of the conflict, including the Japanese decision to provoke a war that few in the country's highest circles thought they could win. The result is a pause-resistant history that does justice to the breadth and depth of a tremendous subject.
©2011 Ian W. Toll (P)2011 Audible, Inc.
Means of Ascent
Summary
Robert A. Caro's life of Lyndon Johnson, which began with the greatly acclaimed The Path to Power, also winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, continues - one of the richest, most intensive, and most revealing examinations ever undertaken of an American President. In Means of Ascent, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer/historian, chronicler also of Robert Moses in The Power Broker, carries Johnson through his service in World War II and the foundation of his long-concealed fortune and the facts behind the myths he created about it. But the explosive heart of the book is Caro's revelation of the true story of the fiercely contested 1948 senatorial election, for 40 years shrouded in rumor, which Johnson had to win or face certain political death, and which he did win -- by "the 87 votes that changed history." Caro makes us witness to a momentous turning point in American politics: the tragic last stand of the old politics versus the new - the politics of issue versus the politics of image, mass manipulation, money and electronic dazzle.
©1990 Robert A. Caro, Inc. (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
North and South
Summary
Two strangers, young men from Pennsylvania and South Carolina, meet on the way to West Point.... Thus begins this brilliant novel of antebellum America, spanning three generations and chronicling the lives and loves of two great family dynasties. The Hazards and the Mains are brought together in bonds of friendship and affection that neither jealousy nor violence can shatter - until a storm of events sunders the nation and brings the cataclysm of war!
©1982 John Jakes (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
The Vor Game
Summary
Miles Vorkosigan graduates from the Barrayaran Military Academy with high expectations of ship command, but is disappointed with an assignment as meteorologist to Lazkowski Base, an arctic training camp. His tenure in the windy, snow-covered north is cut short when Miles narrowly averts a massacre between the trigger-happy base commander and mutinous recruits. After a brief stay under 'house arrest', Miles is re-assigned to investigate a suspicious military build-up near a wormhole nexus. Reviving his undercover persona as mercenary Admiral Miles Naismith, his routine information-gathering duty expands to a rescue mission when the Emperor of Barrayar disappears during a political conference on a nearby space station. Miles must use his considerable negotiating skills to avoid a showdown between competing powers for control of the wormhole, find the Emperor, and watch his back for the arctic base commander seeking bloody vengeance.
©1990 Lois McMaster Bujold (P)2005 Blackstone Audiobooks
Propaganda
Summary
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country." (Edward Bernays) A seminal and controversial figure in the history of political thought and public relations, Edward Bernays pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he famously dubbed the "engineering of consent". During World War I, he was an integral part of the US Committee on Public Information, or CPI, a powerful propaganda apparatus that was mobilized to package, advertise, and sell the war to the American people as one that would "Make the World Safe for Democracy". The CPI became the blueprint for the marketing strategies of future wars. Bernays applied the techniques he had learned in the CPI and, incorporating some of the ideas of Walter Lipmann, became an outspoken proponent of propaganda as a tool for democratic and corporate manipulation of the population. His 1928 bombshell, Propaganda, lays out his eerily prescient vision for using propaganda to regiment the collective mind in a variety of areas, including government, politics, art, science, and education. To listen to this book today is to frightfully comprehend what our contemporary institutions of government and business have become in regard to the organized manipulation of the masses.
©1928 Edward Bernays (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Warrior's Apprentice
Summary
Miles Vorkosigan makes his debut in this frenetic coming-of-age tale. At age 17, Miles is allowed to take the entrance exams to the elite military academy; he passes the written but manages, through miscalculation in a moment of anger, to break both his legs on the obstacle course, washing out before he begins. His aged grandfather dies in his sleep shortly after, for which Miles blames himself. Miles is sent to visit his grandmother Naismith on distant Beta Colony, accompanied by his bodyguard, Sergeant Bothari and Bothari's daughter, Elena. Miles passes himself off as a mercenary leader as he picks up a ragtag crew, and soon Miles' father Aral is under political attack back home as garbled rumors of Miles' mercenary operations trickle back. Miles must abandon his new fleet and dash back to Barrayar to stop the plot.
©1986 Lois McMaster Bujold (P)2005 Blackstone Audiobooks
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.
The Passage of Power
Summary
National Book Critics Circle Award, Biography, 2013 The Passage of Power follows Lyndon Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career - 1958 to 1964. It is a time that would see him trade the extraordinary power he had created for himself as Senate Majority Leader for what became the wretched powerlessness of a Vice President in an administration that disdained and distrusted him. Yet it was, as well, the time in which the presidency, the goal he had always pursued, would be thrust upon him in the moment it took an assassin’s bullet to reach its mark. For the first time, we see the Kennedy assassination through Lyndon Johnson’s eyes. We watch Johnson step into the presidency, inheriting a staff fiercely loyal to his slain predecessor; a Congress determined to retain its power over the executive branch; and a nation in shock and mourning. We see how within weeks - grasping the reins of the presidency with supreme mastery - he propels through Congress essential legislation that at the time of Kennedy’s death seemed hopelessly logjammed and seizes on a dormant Kennedy program to create the revolutionary War on Poverty. Caro makes clear how the political genius with which Johnson had ruled the Senate now enabled him to make the presidency wholly his own. This was without doubt Johnson’s finest hour, before his aspirations and accomplishments were overshadowed and eroded by the trap of Vietnam. It is an epic story told with a depth of detail possible only through the peerless research that forms the foundation of Robert Caro’s work, confirming Nicholas von Hoffman’s verdict that “Caro has changed the art of political biography.”
©2012 Robert A. Caro (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
The Renaissance
Summary
An engrossing volume on the Italian Renaissance by Pulitzer Prize - winning historian Will Durant The fifth volume of Durant's acclaimed Story of Civilization,The Renaissance chronicles the history of Italy from1304 to 1576. In this masterful work, listeners will encounter the poets Petrarch and Boccaccio, the fathers ofthe Renaissance; the paintings, sculptures, and architecture ofMilan, Florence, and Venice; the life and accomplishments of Leonardo DaVinci; the Catholic church and the popes of Avignon and Rome; the politicians and philosophers of Italy,including the Borgia family, Julius II, and Machiavelli; the Italian Wars, the conflicts with France, and the country's decline.
©2014 Will Durant (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc
The Flowers of Vashnoi
Summary
Still new to her duties as Lady Vorkosigan, Ekaterin is working together with expatriate scientist Enrique Borgos on a radical scheme to recover the lands of the Vashnoi exclusion zone, lingering radioactive legacy of the Cetagandan invasion of the planet Barrayar. When Enrique's experimental bioengineered creatures go missing, the pair discover that the zone still conceals deadly old secrets.
©2018 Lois McMaster Bujold (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Caesar and Christ
Summary
The third volume of Will Durant's Pulitzer Prize-winning series, Caesar and Christ chronicles the history of Roman civilization and of Christianity from their beginnings to A.D. 325. In this masterful work, listeners will learn about: The Etruscan civilization of ancient Italy The birth of the Roman Republic and the beginnings of Roman law The great reigns of Caesar and Antony The people of Rome - the artisans, tradesmen, and scientists The places of Rome's great empire The beginnings of Christianity and its growth The rise of Constantine and the fall of the empire
©2011 Will Durant (P)2014 Blackstone Audio
Desiring God
Summary
Scripture reveals that the great business of life is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever. In this paradigm-shattering work, John Piper reveals that the debate between duty and delight doesn't truly exist. Delight is our duty. Join him as he unveils stunning, life-impacting truths you saw in the Bible but never dared to believe.
©2003 John Piper (P)2008 christianaudio.com
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Summary
Pulitzer Prize Winner, General Nonfiction, 1998 In this groundbreaking work, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns. It is a story that spans 13,000 years of human history, beginning when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Guns, Germs, and Steel is a world history that really is a history of all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human life.
©1997 Jared Diamond (P)2001 HighBridge Company