J.D. Nicholsen has narrated 3 audiobooks on Listento.it by 4 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 639 ratings. The most-rated is The Making of Us.
The Making of Us
Summary
Lydia, Dean, and Robyn don't know one another...yet. Each is facing difficult challenges: Lydia is still wearing the scars from her traumatic childhood. Wealthy and successful, she leads a lonely and disjointed existence. Dean is a young, unemployed, single dad whose life is going nowhere. Robyn is 18. Gorgeous, popular, and intelligent, she entered her first year of college confident about her dream to become a pediatrician. Now she's failing her classes. Now she's falling in love for the first time. Lydia, Dean, and Robyn live very different lives, but each of them, independently, has always felt that something was missing. What they don't know is that a letter is about to arrive that will turn their lives upside down. It's a letter containing a secret - one that will bind them together and show them what love and family and friendship really mean. A literary gem, The Making of Us will remind listeners of the miracles that happen when we bring life into the world and share our lives with those we love.
©2012 Lisa Jewell (P)2018 Dreamscape Media, LLC
The Secret History of Soldiers
Summary
There have been thousands of books on the Great War, but most have focused on commanders, battles, strategy, and tactics. Less attention has been paid to the daily lives of the combatants, how they endured the unimaginable conditions of industrial warfare: the rain of shells, bullets, and chemical agents. In The Secret History of Soldiers, Tim Cook, Canada's foremost military historian, examines how those who survived trench warfare on the Western Front found entertainment, solace, relief, and distraction from the relentless slaughter. These tales come from the soldiers themselves, mined from the letters, diaries, memoirs, and oral accounts of more than 500 combatants. Rare examples of trench art, postcards, and even song sheets offer insight into a hidden society that was often irreverent, raunchy, and anti-authoritarian. Believing in supernatural stories was another way soldiers shielded themselves from the horror. While novels and poetry often depict the soldiers of the Great War as mere victims, this new history tells how the soldiers pushed back against the grim war, refusing to be broken in the mincing machine of the Western Front. The violence of war is always present, but Cook reveals the gallows humor the soldiers employed to get through it. Over the years, both writers and historians have overlooked this aspect of the men's lives. The fighting at the front was devastating, but behind the battle lines, another layer of life existed, one that included songs, skits, art, and soldier-produced newspapers. With his trademark narrative abilities and an unerring eye for the telling human detail, Cook has created another landmark history of Canadian military life as he reveals the secrets of how soldiers survived the carnage of the Western Front.
©2018 Tim Cook (P)2018 Allen Lane
Commanding Hope
Summary
From the number one best-selling thought leader: Calling on history, cutting-edge research, complexity science, and even Lord of the Rings, Thomas Homer-Dixon lays out the tools we can command to rescue a world on the brink. For three decades, the renowned author of The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization and The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future? has examined the threats to our future security - predicting a deteriorating global environment, extreme economic stresses, mass migrations, social instability, and wide political violence if humankind continued on its current course. He was called the Doom Meister, but we now see how prescient he was. Today just about everything we've known and relied on (our natural environment, economy, societies, cultures, and institutions) is changing dramatically - too often for the worse. Without radical new approaches, our planet will become unrecognizable as well as poorer, more violent, more authoritarian. In his fascinating long-awaited new book (dedicated to his young children), he calls on his extraordinary knowledge of complexity science, of how societies work and can evolve, and of our capacity to handle threats, to show that we can shift human civilization onto a decisively new path if we mobilize our minds, spirits, imaginations, and collective values. Commanding Hope marshals a fascinating, accessible argument for reinvigorating our cognitive strengths and belief systems to affect urgent systemic change, strengthen our economies and cultures, and renew our hope in a positive future for everyone on Earth.
©2020 Thomas Homer-Dixon (P)2020 Penguin Random House Canada