James Armstrong has narrated 3 audiobooks on Listento.it by 3 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 3 ratings. The most-rated is The Western Canon.
The Western Canon
Summary
Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism. Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon. Shakespeare has become the touchstone for all writers who come before and after him, whether playwrights, poets, or storytellers. In the creation of character, Bloom maintains, Shakespeare has no true precursor and has left no one after him untouched. Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Ibsen, Joyce, and Beckett were all indebted to him; Tolstoy and Freud rebelled against him; and while Dante, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Whitman, Dickinson, Proust, and the modern Hispanic and Portuguese writers Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa are exquisite examples of how canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. Listen to a conversation with Harold Bloom.
©1994 by Harold Bloom (P)1997 by Blackstone Audiobooks
Son of the Wilderness
Summary
This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of John Muir, the rugged individualist and passionate protector of the wild who saw that the encroachment of civilization into nature would threaten civilization itself.
©2012 Linnie Marsh Wolfe (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc
Playing God
Summary
Throughout time, leaders at the pinnacle of power - popes and kings, presidents and prime ministers, czars and generals - have subscribed to the belief that they can change the course of history, not by the force of arms, but through charm, skillful negotiation, honesty, deceit, and all the other arts of peaceful human exchange. Charles Mee, Jr. reproduces seven singular moments when heads of state have come together to decide the future of the world. He examines the uses of summitry, from the directness of Pope Leo's confrontation with Attila the Hun near Rome to Henry VIII and Francis I's meeting on the Field of the Cloth of Gold; from the surprise encounter between Cortes and Montezuma to the intricacies negotiated by Metternich and Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna; from the ironies of Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George's summit at the Paris Peace Conference to the unintended consequences of Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt's gathering at Yalta; and finally to Gorbachev's desperate appeal to the G7 nations in London to be included in their powerful club. Mee peeks through the curtains of diplomacy to reveal the hidden agendas and the glorious personalities at work. Taken together, these seven fateful moments are bracing and humbling reminders of the enormous complexity and mystery of human affairs.
©1993 by Charles L. Mee, Jr. (P)1997 by Blackstone Audiobooks