JD Jackson has narrated 111 audiobooks on Listento.it by 131 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 415 ratings. The most-rated is The Racketeer.
The Racketeer
Summary
Given the importance of what they do, and the controversies that often surround them, and the violent people they sometimes confront, it is remarkable that in the history of this country only four active federal judges have been murdered. Judge Raymond Fawcett has just become number five. Who is the Racketeer? And what does he have to do with the judge’s untimely demise? His name, for the moment, is Malcolm Bannister. Job status? Former attorney. Current residence? The Federal Prison Camp near Frostburg, Maryland. On paper, Malcolm’s situation isn’t looking too good these days, but he’s got an ace up his sleeve. He knows who killed Judge Fawcett, and he knows why. The judge’s body was found in his remote lakeside cabin. There was no forced entry, no struggle, just two dead bodies: Judge Fawcett and his young secretary. And one large, state-of-the-art, extremely secure safe, opened and emptied. What was in the safe? The FBI would love to know. And Malcolm Bannister would love to tell them. But everything has a price—especially information as explosive as the sequence of events that led to Judge Fawcett’s death. And the Racketeer wasn’t born yesterday.... Nothing is as it seems and everything’s fair game in this wickedly clever new novel from John Grisham, the undisputed master of the legal thriller.
©2012 Belfry Holdings, Inc. (P)2012 Random House Audio
The Dragons of Eden
Summary
The Pulitzer Prize Winner Dr. Carl Sagan takes us on a great adventure, offering his vivid and startling insight into the brain of man and beast, the origin of human intelligence, the function of our most haunting legends - and their amazing links to recent discoveries.
©1977 Carl Sagan (P)2017 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
The Wait
Summary
President/CEO of Franklin Entertainment and former Sony Pictures executive DeVon Franklin and award-winning actress Meagan Good have learned sometimes all we can do is wait for "the one" to come into our lives. They spent years crossing paths, but it wasn't until they were thrown together while working on the film Jumping the Broom that their storybook romance began. Faced with starting a new relationship and wanting to avoid potentially devastating relationship pitfalls, DeVon and Meagan chose to do something almost unheard of in today's society - abstain from sex until they were married. In The Wait, DeVon and Meagan share the life-changing message that waiting - rather than rushing a relationship - can help you find the person you're meant to be with. It's a story filled with candid his-and-hers accounts of the most important moments of their relationship and practical advice on how waiting for everything - from dating to sex - can transform relationships, allowing you to find a deep connection based on patience, trust, and faith.
©2016 DeVon Franklin and Meagan Good (P)2016 Tantor
Mrs. Fletcher
Summary
From one of the most popular and best-selling authors of our time, a penetrating and hilarious new novel about sex, love, and identity on the front lines of America's culture wars. Eve Fletcher is trying to figure out what comes next. A 46-year-old divorcée whose beloved only child has just left for college, Eve is struggling to adjust to her empty nest when one night her phone lights up with a text message. Sent from an anonymous number, the mysterious sender tells Eve, "U R my MILF!" Over the months that follow, that message comes to obsess Eve. While leading her all-too-placid life - serving as executive director of the local senior center by day and taking a community college course on gender and society at night - Eve can't curtail her own interest in a porn website called MILFateria.com, which features the erotic exploits of ordinary middle-aged women like herself. Before long, Eve's online fixations begin to spill over into real life, revealing new romantic possibilities that threaten to upend her quiet suburban existence. Meanwhile, miles away at the state college, Eve's son, Brendan - a jock and aspiring frat boy - discovers that his new campus isn't nearly as welcoming to his hard-partying lifestyle as he had imagined. Only a few weeks into his freshman year, Brendan is floundering in a college environment that challenges his white-dude privilege and shames him for his outmoded, chauvinistic ideas of sex. As the New England autumn turns cold, both mother and son find themselves enmeshed in morally fraught situations that come to a head on one fateful November night. Sharp, witty, and provocative, Mrs. Fletcher is a timeless examination of sexuality, identity, parenthood, and the big clarifying mistakes people can make when they're no longer sure of who they are or where they belong.
©2017 Tom Perrotta (P)2017 Simon & Schuster Audio
Race Matters, 25th Anniversary
Summary
The 25th-anniversary edition of the groundbreaking classic, with a new introduction First published in 1993, on the one-year anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, Race Matters became a national best seller that has gone on to sell more than half a million copies. This classic treatise on race contains Dr. West's most incisive essays on the issues relevant to black Americans, including the crisis in leadership in the Black community, Black conservatism, Black-Jewish relations, myths about Black sexuality, and the legacy of Malcolm X. The insights Dr. West brings to these complex problems remain relevant, provocative, creative, and compassionate. In a new introduction for the 25th-anniversary edition, Dr. West argues that we are in the midst of a spiritual blackout characterized by imperial decline, racial animosity, and unchecked brutality and terror as seen in Baltimore, Ferguson, and Charlottesville. Calling for a moral and spiritual awakening, Dr. West finds hope in the collective and visionary resistance exemplified by the Movement for Black Lives, Standing Rock, and the Black freedom tradition. Now more than ever, Race Matters is an essential book for all Americans, helping us to build a genuine multiracial democracy in the new millennium.
©1993, 2017 Cornel West (P)2017 Random House Audio
The Color of Water
Summary
The New York Times best-selling story from the author of The Good Lord Bird, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction. Who is Ruth McBride Jordan? A self-declared "light-skinned" woman evasive about her ethnicity, yet steadfast in her love for her 12 black children. James McBride, journalist, musician, and son, explores his mother's past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful debut, The Color Of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother. The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James McBride grew up in "orchestrated chaos" with his 11 siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. In The Color of Water, McBride retraces his mother's footsteps and, through her searing and spirited voice, recreates her remarkable story. The daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox rabbi, she was born Rachel Shilsky (actually Ruchel Dwara Zylska) in Poland on April 1, 1921. Fleeing pogroms, her family emigrated to America and ultimately settled in Suffolk, Virginia, a small town where anti-Semitism and racial tensions ran high. At 17, after fleeing Virginia and settling in New York City, Ruth married a black minister and founded the all- black New Brown Memorial Baptist Church in her Red Hook living room. "God is the color of water," Ruth McBride taught her children, firmly convinced that life's blessings and life's values transcend race. Interspersed throughout his mother's compelling narrative, McBride shares candid recollections of his own experiences as a mixed-race child of poverty, his flirtations with drugs and violence, and his eventual self-realization and professional success. The Color of Water touches listeners of all colors as a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son.
©2014 James McBride (P)2014 Penguin Audio
Who Do You Love
Summary
From the "hilarious, heartbreaking, and insightful" (The Miami Herald) best-selling author Jennifer Weiner comes a sweeping, modern-day fairy tale about first romance and lasting love. Rachel Blum and Andy Landis are eight years old when they meet late one night in an ER waiting room. Born with a congenital heart defect, Rachel is a veteran of hospitals, and she's intrigued by the boy who shows up all alone with a broken arm. He tells her his name. She tells him a story. After Andy's taken back to the emergency room and Rachel's sent back to her bed, they think they'll never see each other again. Rachel, the beloved, popular, and protected daughter of two doting parents, grows up wanting for nothing in a fancy Florida suburb. Andy grows up poor in Philadelphia with a single mom and a rare talent that will let him become one of the best runners of his generation. Over the course of three decades, through high school and college, marriages and divorces, from the pinnacles of victory and the heartbreak of defeat, Andy and Rachel will find each other again and again until they are finally given a chance to decide whether love can surmount difference and distance and if they've been running toward each other all along. With honesty, wit, and clear-eyed observations about men and women, love and fate, and the truth about happy endings, Jennifer Weiner delivers two of her most memorable characters and a love story you'll never forget.
©2015 Jennifer Weiner, Inc. (P)2015 Simon & Schuster
For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood...and the Rest of Y'all Too
Summary
A New York Times Best Seller Featured in: MotherJones.com, Education Week, Weekend All Things Considered with Michel Martin, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, PBS NewsHour.com, Slate, The Washington Post, Scholastic Administrator Magazine, Essence Magazine, Salon, ColorLines, Ebony.com, Huffington Post Education Merging real stories with theory, research, and practice, a prominent scholar offers a new approach to teaching and learning for every stakeholder in urban education. Drawing on his own experience of feeling undervalued and invisible in classrooms as a young man of color, and merging his experiences with more than a decade of teaching and researching in urban America, award-winning educator Christopher Emdin offers a new lens on an approach to teaching and learning in urban schools. He begins by taking to task the perception of urban youth of color as unteachable, and he challenges educators to embrace and respect each student's culture and to reimagine the classroom as a site where roles are reversed and students become the experts in their own learning. Putting forth his theory of reality pedagogy, Emdin provides practical tools to unleash the brilliance and eagerness of youth and educators alike - both of whom have been typecast and stymied by outdated modes of thinking about urban education. With this fresh and engaging new pedagogical vision, Emdin demonstrates the importance of creating a family structure and building communities within the classroom, using culturally relevant strategies like hip-hop music and call-and-response, and connecting the experiences of urban youth to indigenous populations globally. Merging real stories with theory, research, and practice, Emdin demonstrates how by implementing the "Seven C's" of reality pedagogy in their own classrooms, urban youth of color benefit from truly transformative education. Lively, accessible, and revelatory, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood...and the Rest of Y'all Too is the much-needed antidote to traditional top-down pedagogy and promises to radically reframe the landscape of urban education for the better.
©2016 Christopher Emdin (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
The Devil You Know
Summary
From journalist and New York Times best-selling author Charles Blow comes a powerful manifesto and call to action for Black Americans to amass political power and fight white supremacy. Race, as we have come to understand it, is a fiction; but, racism, as we have come to live it, is a fact. The point here is not to impose a new racial hierarchy, but to remove an existing one. After centuries of waiting for White majorities to overturn white supremacy, it seems to me that it has fallen to Black people to do it themselves. Acclaimed columnist and author Charles Blow never wanted to write a “race book.” But as violence against Black people - both physical and psychological - seemed only to increase in recent years, culminating in the historic pandemic and protests of the summer of 2020, he felt compelled to write a new story for Black Americans. He envisioned a succinct, counterintuitive, and impassioned corrective to the myths that have for too long governed our thinking about race and geography in America. Drawing on both political observations and personal experience as a Black son of the South, Charles set out to offer a call to action by which Black people can finally achieve equality, on their own terms. So what will it take to make lasting change when small steps have so frequently failed? It’s going to take an unprecedented shift in power. The Devil You Know is a groundbreaking manifesto, proposing nothing short of the most audacious power play by Black people in the history of this country. This book is a grand exhortation to generations of a people, offering a road map to true and lasting freedom.
©2021 Charles M. Blow (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers
I Feel Like Going On
Summary
Ray Lewis, legendary Baltimore Ravens linebacker and one of the greatest defensive players of his generation, holds nothing back on the state of football as well as his troubled childhood, his rise to athletic greatness, the storm that threatened to ruin his NFL career, and the devastating injury that nearly cost him a final moment of glory. A lot of folks, they know my game, but they don't know my deal. This audiobook right here, it tells the story of my 17-year NFL career. It tells of my two Super Bowls, the mark I was blessed to be able to make on the game, on the city of Baltimore. But it also tells the story of how I grew up - abandoned by my no-account father, raised with my siblings by our God-fearing, hardworking single mother. It tells how I sometimes struggled off the field. It tells of the anguish and controversy that found me away from the game. Mostly it tells how heartbreak can sometimes lift you to greatness and glory - if you find a way to put your focus on faith and faith in your focus. When I left the game, confetti raining down on my teammates and me after winning the Super Bowl, I made a promise to myself to show how the game is really played at the highest level. That's what you'll find in this audio - a raw, honest look at the business of football and a look behind the scenes at some of the most torturous aspects of the game. The grind of the NFL - that's what shines through. My deal? That grind is a given. Every player who wears an NFL uniform has to slog through the same battles just to get to the league. But it's how you prepare for those battles that defines you - and here I hope to show how an unwavering trust in God and an unbreakable sense of purpose can lift you from tragedy to triumph. From strength to strength, man - that's the deal.
©2015 Ray A. Lewis Jr. (P)2015 Simon & Schuster
Pryor Convictions
Summary
Richard Pryor journeys from his childhood in a family that worked in whore-houses and bars, through to his years in Hollywood - the money, the women, the drugs - and the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.
©2018 Indigo, Inc. (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
His Truth Is Marching On
Summary
An intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and longtime US congressman John Lewis, linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present - from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of America John Lewis, who at age 25 marched in Selma, Alabama, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was a visionary and a man of faith. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Jon Meacham writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and son of an Alabama tenant farmer was inspired by the Bible and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., to put his life on the line in the service of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." From an early age, Lewis learned that nonviolence was not only a tactic but a philosophy, a biblical imperative, and a transforming reality. At the age of four, Lewis, ambitious to become a minister, practiced by preaching to his family’s chickens. When his mother cooked one of the chickens, the boy refused to eat it - his first act, he wryly recalled, of nonviolent protest. Integral to Lewis' commitment to bettering the nation was his faith in humanity and in God - and an unshakable belief in the power of hope. Meacham calls Lewis "as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first-century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the initial creation of the Republic itself in the eighteenth century." A believer in the injunction that one should love one's neighbor as oneself, Lewis was arguably a saint in our time, risking limb and life to bear witness for the powerless in the face of the powerful. In many ways he brought a still-evolving nation closer to realizing its ideals, and his story offers inspiration and illumination for Americans today who are working for social and political change. This audiobook includes a PDF of the book’s Appendix. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2020 Jon Meacham (P)2020 Random House Audio
Playing for Keeps
Summary
New York Times best seller From a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist comes “the best Jordan book so far” (The Washington Post), the story of Michael Jordan’s legendary years with the Chicago Bulls, capped by the 1998 NBA Finals and the team’s second three-peat. From The Breaks of the Game to Summer of '49, David Halberstam has brought the perspective of a great historian, the insider knowledge of a dogged sportswriter, and the love of a fan to bear on some of the most mythic players and teams in the annals of American sports. With Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, he has given himself the greatest challenge and produced his greatest triumph. In Playing for Keeps, David Halberstam takes the first full measure of Michael Jordan's epic career, one of the great American stories of our time. A narrative of astonishing power and human drama, brimming with revealing anecdotes and penetrating insights, the audiobook chronicles the forces in Jordan's life that have shaped him in to history's greatest basketball player and the larger forces that have converged to make him the most famous living human being in the world.
©2012 David Halberstam (P)2018 Random House Audio
Exile
Summary
A shackled Earth, ruled by an unstoppable tyrant. An exiled son, and a one-way trip across the galaxy. A perfect world, their last hope for survival. Vice admiral Isaac Gallant is the heir apparent to the First Admiral, the dictator of the Confederacy of Humanity. Unwilling to let his mother’s tyranny stand, he joins the rebellion and leads his ships into war against the might of his own nation. Betrayal and failure, however, see Isaac Gallant and his allies captured. Rather than execute her only son, the First Admiral instead decides to exile them, flinging four million dissidents and rebels through a one-shot wormhole to the other end of the galaxy. There, Isaac finds himself forced to keep order and peace as they seek out a new home without becoming the very dictator he fought against - and when that new home turns out to be too perfect to be true, he and his fellow exiles must decide how hard they are prepared to fight for paradise… against the very people who built it.
©2018 Glynn Stewart (P)2018 Podium Publishing
The Power of Knowing God
Summary
When God calls you and me to know him and experience him, he wants more than a fan club. He wants an intimate relationship. You go to church, read your Bible, and participate in Bible study groups, yet you still feel something is missing in your relationship with God. You want more. Dr. Tony Evans believes knowing God fully should be everyone's life ambition. He has developed a strategy for living victoriously as a child of God, and he wants to equip you with the right tools for success in pursuing a personal and authentic relationship with the Savior. Develop the kind of relationship that goes beyond intellectual knowledge, emotions, and actions as you: cultivate a more heartfelt closeness to God experience the power of his presence connect in an abiding relationship with Jesus As you become more intimately bonded in love with God, you will come to know him as he really is.
©2020 Tony Evans (P)2020 One Audiobooks
Not Your Villain
Summary
Bells Broussard thought he had it made when his superpowers manifested early. Being a shape-shifter is awesome. He can change his hair whenever he wants, and if putting on a binder for the day is too much, he's got it covered. But that was before he became the country's most wanted villain. After discovering a massive cover-up by the Heroes' League of Heroes, Bells and his friends Jess, Emma, and Abby set off on a secret mission to find the Resistance. Meanwhile, power-hungry former hero Captain Orion is on the loose with a dangerous serum that renders meta-humans powerless, and a new militarized robotic threat emerges. Everyone is in danger. Between college applications and crushing on his best friend, will Bells have time to take down a corrupt government? Sometimes, to do a hero's job, you need to be a villain.
©2017 C. B. Lee (P)2018 Tantor
Things That Make White People Uncomfortable
Summary
Super Bowl Champion and two-time Pro Bowler Michael Bennett is an outspoken proponent for social justice and a man without a censor. One of the most scathingly humorous athletes on the planet, he is also a fearless activist, grassroots philanthropist, and organizer. Bennett, a defensive end for the Seattle Seahawks, has gained international recognition for his public support for the Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights. Bennett donates all his endorsement money and half of the proceeds from his jersey sales to fund health and education projects for poor underserved youth and minority communities, and has recently expanded his reach globally to provide STEM programming in Africa. Dave Zirin has been called the "finest, most important writer on sports and politics in America", by Dr. Cornel West, Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at the Harvard Divinity School. He is sports editor for The Nation and author of several titles for Haymarket Books, including his critically acclaimed book The John Carlos Story, written with 1968 Olympian John Carlos.
©2018 Michael Bennett and Dave Zirin (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
The Song of David
Summary
I won my first fight when I was 11 years old, and I've been throwing punches ever since. Fighting is the purest, truest, most elemental thing there is. Some people describe heaven as a sea of unending white, where choirs sing and loved ones await. But for me, heaven was something else. It sounded like the bell at the beginning of a round, and it tasted like adrenaline. For me, heaven was the octagon. Until I met Millie, and heaven became something different. I became something different. I knew I loved her when I watched her stand perfectly still in the middle of a crowded room, people swarming, buzzing, slipping around her. No one seemed to see her at all except for the few who squeezed past her, tossing exasperated looks at her unsmiling face. When they realized she wasn't normal, they hurried away. Why was it that no one saw her, yet she was the first thing I saw? If heaven was the octagon, then she was my angel at the center of it all, the girl with the power to take me down and lift me up again. The girl I wanted to fight for, the girl I wanted to claim. The girl who taught me that sometimes the biggest heroes go unsung, and the most important battles are the ones we don't think we can win.
©2015 Amy Harmon (P)2015 Tantor
Ninth and Nowhere
Summary
Seven strangers. Two hours. One tragic moment of violence that changes everything. In this electrifying short story by New York Times bestselling suspense master Jeffery Deaver, the destinies of seven strangers intersect in ways no one sees coming. It looks like just another gray March morning in the tough urban district nicknamed Nowhere when seven lives converge: a young man intent on buying a gun; the gangbanger who cuts him a deal; a by-the-book police officer on a last patrol; an advertising executive keeping secrets from her husband; a veteran haunted by a combat death; a single dad in a bitter custody battle; and a sharp-looking businessman en route to a new job he desperately needs. Any one of them could have a dark motive. Any one of them could be walking into a trap. When the fog lifts, it will all be much clearer - that a single, shattering act of violence has marked each of them forever.
©2018 Jeffery Deaver (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Beowulf: A New Translation
Summary
"Narrator JD Jackson addresses his listener as 'bro' in this decidedly contemporary retelling of the classic saga...His brilliant performance captures all the artistry, wit, and immediacy of this fresh translation, and breathes new life into what for most has been a literary fossil." (AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award winner) A new, feminist translation of Beowulf by the author of the much-buzzed-about novel The Mere Wife Nearly 20 years after Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf - and 50 years after the translation that continues to torment high-school students around the world - there is a radical new verse translation of the epic poem by Maria Dahvana Headley, which brings to light elements that have never before been translated into English, recontextualizing the binary narrative of monsters and heroes into a tale in which the two categories often entwine, justice is rarely served, and dragons live among us. A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. The familiar elements of the epic poem are seen with a novelist’s eye toward gender, genre, and history - Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment, powerful men seeking to become more powerful, and one woman seeking justice for her child, but this version brings new context to an old story. While crafting her contemporary adaptation of Beowulf, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation. A Macmillan Audio production from MCD x FSG Originals "Brash and belligerent, lunatic and invigorating, with passages of sublime poetry punctuated by obscenities and social-media shorthand." (Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker) "The author of the crazy-cool Beowulf-inspired novel The Mere Wife tackles the Old English epic poem with a fierce new feminist translation that radically recontextualizes the tale." (Barbara VanDenburgh, USA Today)
©2020 Maria Dahvana Headley (P)2020 Macmillan Audio