Ian Frazier has narrated 4 audiobooks on Listento.it by 3 authors, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Travels in Siberia.
Travels in Siberia
Summary
A Dazzling Russian travelogue from the best-selling author of Great Plains. In Travels in Siberia, Ian Frazier trains his eye for unforgettable detail on Siberia, that vast expanse of Asiatic Russia. He explores many aspects of this storied, often grim region, which takes up one-seventh of the land on earth. He writes about the geography, the resources, the native peoples, the history, the 40-below midwinter afternoons, the bugs. The book brims with Mongols, half-crazed Orthodox archpriests, fur seekers, ambassadors of the czar bound for Peking, tea caravans, German scientists, American prospectors, intrepid English nurses, and prisoners and exiles of every kind - from Natalie Lopukhin, banished by the czarina for copying her dresses; to the noble Decembrist revolutionaries of the 1820s; to the young men and women of the People’s Will movement whose fondest hope was to blow up the czar; to those who met still-ungraspable suffering and death in the Siberian camps during Soviet times. More than just a historical travelogue, Travels in Siberia is also an account of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union and a personal reflection on the all-around amazingness of Russia, a country that still somehow manages to be funny. Siberian travel books have been popular since the 13th century, when monks sent by the pope went east to find the Great Khan and wrote about their journeys. Travels in Siberia will take its place as the 21st century’s indispensable contribution to the genre.
©2010 Ian Frazier (P)2010 Macmillan Audio
Thalia Book Club: Jamaica Kincaid, 'See Now Then'
Summary
The author of Annie John, Lucy, and The Autobiography of My Mother delves into her long-awaited new novel about a complicated modern family, featuring Mr. and Mrs. Sweet and their two children, Heracles and Persephone, who live in the Shirley Jackson house in Vermont. Kincaid discusses her novel with her old friend Ian Frazier (The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days).
©2013 Symphony Space (P)2013 Symphony Space
I Learn from Children
Summary
"A lucid presentation of what progressive education can accomplish.” (The New York Times) How should schools prepare students for the Information Age? The successful worker of the future - a creative, independent thinker who works well in teams - would seem to be too self-contradictory to be the deliberate product of a school. A century ago, the American educator Caroline Pratt created an innovative school that she hoped would produce such independent thinkers, but she asked herself a different question: "Was it unreasonable to try to fit the school to the child, rather than...the child to the school?” A strong-willed small-town schoolteacher who ran a one-room schoolhouse by the time she was 17, Pratt came to viscerally reject the teaching methods of her day, which often featured a long-winded teacher at the front of the room and rows of miserable children, on benches nailed to the floor, stretching to the back. In this classic 1948 memoir, now in its fourth edition, Pratt recounts, in a wry authorial voice much closer to Will Rogers than John Dewey, how she founded what is now the dynamic City and Country School in New York City; invented the maple "unit blocks” that have become a staple in classrooms and children’s homes around the globe; and came to play an important role in reimagining preschool and primary-school education in ways that resound in the tumultuously creative age before us. The 2014 edition features a new introduction by Ian Frazier, as well as a new chapter, "C&C at 100", by former principal Kate Turley, and an afterword by Susan F. Semel. Read by Becky Ann Baker, Ian Frazier, and Kate Turley. Featured music: "School Song" by Larry Goldings. City and Country School wishes to thank Kiran Paranjpe, for initiating this production and for assisting in its development.
©2014 City and Country School, Ian Frazier, Kate Turley, and Susan F. Semel (P)2018 City and Country School and Ian Frazier
Hogs Wild
Summary
"A master of both distilled insight and utter nonsense" (The Believer), Ian Frazier is one of the most gifted chroniclers of contemporary America. Hogs Wild assembles a decade's worth of his finest essays and reportage and demonstrates the irrepressible passions and artful digressions that distinguish his enduring body of work. Part muckraker, part adventurer, and part raconteur, Frazier beholds, captures, and occasionally reimagines the spirit of the American experience. He travels down South to examine feral hogs and learns that their presence in any county is a strong indicator that it votes Republican. He introduces us to a man who, when his house is hit by a supposed meteorite, hopes to "leverage" the space object into opportunity for his family, and a New York City police detective who is fascinated with rap-music-related crimes. Alongside Frazier's delight in the absurdities of contemporary life is his sense of social responsibility: There's an echo of the great reform-minded writers in his pieces on a soup kitchen, opioid overdose deaths on Staten Island, and the rise in homelessness in New York City under Mayor Bloomberg. In each dizzying discovery, Hogs Wild unearths the joys of inquiry without agenda, curiosity without calculation. To listen to Frazier is to become a kind of social and political anthropologist - astute and deeply engaged.
©2016 Ian Frazier (P)2016 Macmillan Audio