Jeff Woodman has narrated 103 audiobooks on Listento.it by 75 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 1,177 ratings. The most-rated is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
Anyone Who Had a Heart
Summary
One of the greatest songwriters of all time offers a frank and riveting account of his life and the stories behind the hits. Over the past six decades, Burt Bacharach's legendary songwriting has touched millions of devoted listeners all over the world. In Anyone Who Had a Heart, Bacharach steps out from behind the music to give an honest, engaging look at his life - from his work with Hal David, Dionne Warwick, Elvis Costello, and many others to his tumultuous marriages and the devastating fate of his beloved daughter. Growing up in Forest Hills, New York, during the 1930s and '40s, Burt Bacharach fell in love with music after sneaking into a Manhattan jazz club to see the legendary Dizzy Gillespie. After a stint in the Army during the Korean War, he toured the world with Marlene Dietrich, wrote an endless string of hits, scored numerous Hollywood films, married the glamorous movie star Angie Dickinson, and composed the music for the huge Broadway hit Promises, Promises. While he soared professionally, Bacharach's private life was dominated by the never-ending search for love - and the heartbreak that comes when it is lost - which is reflected in his greatest songs. His first three marriages ended in divorce. His long-running partnership with the late Hal David suffered a bitter split that lasted seventeen years. Throughout the highs and lows, Bacharach steadfastly pursued his muse - a quest that continues to this day. Anyone Who Had a Heart is the story of a man who has always expressed his deepest feelings through his music. Filled with the emotional power that defines Burt Bacharach's most unforgettable songs, his memoir offers a candid backstage look at show business as well as the personal struggles of an artist whose incredible body of work has earned him a unique position in the American cultural landscape.
©2013 Burt Bacharach (P)2013 HarperCollins Publishers
The Dragonling
Summary
Darek is envious when his older brother Clep returns from a quest wearing dragon claws for a necklace. His brother has killed a Great Blue, the largest and most feared of all dragons. The next day the village will hold a great celebration, and Clep will be the guest of honor. Unable to sleep that night, Darek sneaks outside. He hears something whimpering and realizes that the slain dragon has left behind a newborn dragonling that nobody noticed. Calling on all his courage, Darek decides to return the dragonling to its home - a terrifying valley filled with dozens of deadly beasts. Jackie French Koller is an award-winning author of more than 20 books for young readers. With this story, she creates a wondrous fantasy world where magical creatures fill the skies. Narrator Jeff Woodman expertly voices the courageous, yet frightened, Darek.
©1990 Jackie French Koller (P)2002 Recorded Books
Joyful Noise
Summary
Grasshoppers, waterstriders, and fireflies light up the pages of this rib-tickling book of poetry for two voices. Written as spirited duets, the poems ring with the love songs of book lice, the serenades of moths, and a choir of cicadas. Each one is a treat, filled with busy insect life. In addition to the voices of these frisky critters, there are also fascinating tidbits about their lives and habits. The digger wasp lays eggs underground, musing that it will never see their generation. Joyful Noise is a marvelous concoction of music and imagery, sound and sense, brilliantly narrated by four of Recorded Books, Inc.’s most gifted readers. Paul Fleischman, an award-winning author of children’s books, has received critical acclaim for this collection of poems. Joyful Noise is an ALA Notable Children’s Book, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and a Newbery Medal Winner. It won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Fiction/Poetry, it was selected for The Horn Book Fanfare Honor List, and was designated a Notable Children’s Trade Book in the Language Arts by the NCTE.
©1988 Paul Fleischman (P)1997 Recorded Books. LLC
House of the Red Fish
Summary
Winner of the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction and the California Young Reader Medal, Graham Salisbury injects his books with the exotic color of his native Hawaii. Continuing the story begun in Under the Blood-Red Sun, House of the Red Fish returns to Honolulu one year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Thirteen-year-old Japanese American Tomi Nakaji must struggle to support his family after the arrest of his father and grandfather.
©2006 Graham Salisbury (P)2006 Recorded Books, LLC
Fig Pudding
Summary
Cliff Abernathy is 11 years old, but he's not an ordinary elementary school kid. As the oldest in a family of six children, he has a lot of responsibilities - and patience. When Cliff looks back over the last year, he has plenty of stories to tell about his parents, his four brothers, and his sister, especially since the Abernathys like to do everything together.Fig Pudding brings you into the busy world of a big, close family. As you follow Cliff from one Christmas to the next, you'll learn what a yadda-yadda is, how the headless chicks got to be that way, how the family weathers a tragedy, and other wonderful bits of family lore. Ralph Fletcher is the oldest in a family of nine children, so he has vivid firsthand experience with life in a large household. Through Jeff Woodman's spirited narration, Fig Pudding dishes up generous helpings of the energy and good humor that fill the Abernathys' days.
©1995 Ralph Fletcher (P)1999 Recorded Books, LLC
The Moment of 'Psycho'
Summary
It was made like a television movie, and completed in less than three months. It killed off its star in 40 minutes. There was no happy ending. And it offered the most violent scene to that date in American film, punctuated by shrieking strings that seared the national consciousness. Nothing like Psycho had existed before, and the movie industry, even America itself, would never be the same.In The Moment of Psycho, film critic David Thomson situates Psycho in Alfred Hitchcock's career, recreating the mood and time when the seminal film erupted onto film screens worldwide. Thomson shows that Psycho was not just a sensation in film - it altered the very nature of our desires. Sex, violence, and horror took on new life. Psycho, all of a sudden, represented all America wanted from a film and, as Thomson brilliantly demonstrates, still does.
©2009 David Thomson (P)2009 Audible, Inc.
Thy Kingdom Come
Summary
For much of American history, evangelicalism was aligned with progressive political causes: nineteenth-century evangelicals fought for the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, and public education. But contemporary conservative activists have defaulted on this majestic legacy, embracing instead an agenda virtually indistinguishable from the Republican Party platform. Abortion, gay marriage, public education: the Religious Right is fighting, and winning, some of the most important political battles of the twenty-first century. How has evangelical Christianity become so entrenched in partisan politics? Randall Balmer is both an evangelical Christian and a historian of American religion. Struggling to reconcile the contemporary state of evangelical faith in America with its proud tradition of progressivism, Balmer has headed to the frontlines of some of the most powerful and controversial organizations tied to the Religious Right. Deftly combining ethnographic research, theological reflections, and historical context, Balmer laments the trivialization of Christianity, and offers a rallying cry for liberal Christians to reclaim the noblest traditions of their faith.
©2006 Randall Balmer (P)2006 HighBridge Company
Zeitgeist
Summary
It's 1999, and on the Turkish half of Cyprus, the ever-enterprising Leggy Starlitz has alighted - pausing on his mission to storm the Third World with the G-7 girls, the cheapest, phoniest all-girl band ever to wear Wonderbras and spandex. His market is staring him in the face: millions of teenagers trapped in a world of mullahs and mosques, all ready to blow their pocket change on G-7's massive merchandising campaign - and to wildly anticipate music the band will never release. Leggy's brilliant plan means doing business with some of the world's most dangerous people. Among these thieves, schemers, and killers, he must act quickly and decisively. Y2K is just around the corner - and the only rule to live by is that the whole scheme stops before the year 2000. But Leggy's G-7 Zeitgeist is in serious jeopardy, for in Istanbul, his former partners are getting restless - and the G-7 girls are beginning to die...
©2000 Bruce Sterling (P)2000 Random House, Inc.
Every Precious Thing
Summary
From award winning author Brett Battles comes the second Logan Harper thriller. It was supposed to be a fun weekend, a celebration of a marriage and growing family. Alan Lindley couldn't have been happier... until his wife, Sara, disappeared. Asked by a mutual friend to help look for her, Logan Harper is sure he'd discover a wife who simply wants out of the marriage. What he finds instead is a woman who didn't exist, a diabolical plan, and people who would do anything to keep it a secret, including taking the life of the person most important to him. What would you do for those precious to you?
©2011 Brett Battles (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Tel Aviv Noir
Summary
Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched with the summer '04 award-winning best seller Brooklyn Noir. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. For Tel Aviv Noir, Etgar Keret and Assaf Gavron have masterfully assembled some of Israel's top contemporary writers into a compulsively readable collection. From the introduction by Etgar Keret: "In spite of its outwardly warm and polite exterior, Tel Aviv has quite a bit to hide. At any club, most of the people dancing around you to the sounds of a deep-house hit dedicated to peace and love have undergone extensive automatic-weapons training and a hand-grenade tutorial... The workers washing the dishes in the fluorescent-lit kitchen of that same club are Eritrean refugees who have crossed the Egyptian border illegally, along with a group of bedouins smuggling some high-quality hash, which the deejay will soon be smoking on his little podium, right by the busy dance floor filled with drunks, coked-up lawyers, and Ukrainian call girls whose pimp keeps their passports in a safe two streets away. Don't get me wrong - Tel Aviv is a lovely, safe city. Most of the time, for most of its inhabitants. But the stories in this collection describe what happens the rest of the time, to the rest of its inhabitants. From one last cup of coffee at a caf targeted by a suicide bomber, through repeat visits from a Yiddish-speaking ghost, to an organized tour of mythological crime scenes that goes terribly wrong, the stories of Tel Aviv Noir reveal the concealed, scarred face of this city that we love so much." Featuring brand-new stories by: Etgar Keret, Gadi Taub, Lavie Tidhar, Deakla Keydar, Matan Hermoni, Julia Fermentto, Gon Ben Ari, Shimon Adaf, Alex Epstein, Antonio Ungar, Gai Ad, Assaf Gavron, Silje Bekeng, and Yoav Katz.
©2014 Akashic Books (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Don't Know Much About Anything
Summary
In his wildly entertaining, winningly irreverent, New York Times best-selling Don't Know Much About series, author Kenneth C. Davis has amused and edified us with fascinating facts about history, mythology, the Bible, the universe, geography, and the Civil War. Now, the sky's the limit in his latest irresistible installment. Brimming with busted myths, gripping true stories, and peculiar particulars about a plethora of people, places, and events, this captivating compendium is guaranteed to delight information lovers everywhere as it feeds our insatiable appetites to know everything!
©2007 Kenneth C. Davis (P)2007 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.
The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios
Summary
Here are four unforgettable stories by Yann Martel, the New York Times best-selling author of Life of Pi. In the exquisite title novella, a very young man dying of AIDS joins his friend in fashioning a story of the Roccamatio family of Helsinki, set against the yearly march of the 20th century. In "The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American composer John Morton", a Canadian university student visits Washington, D.C., and experiences the Vietnam War and its aftermath through an intense musical encounter. In "Manners of Dying", variations of a warden's letter to the mother of an executed man reveal how each life is contained in its end. The final story, "The Vita Eterna Mirror Company: Mirrors to Last till Kingdom Come", is about a young man who discovers an antique mirror-making machine that runs on memories.Written earlier in Martel's career, these tales are as moving as they are thought-provoking, as inventive in form as they are timeless in content. They display the startling mix of dazzle and depth that have made Yann Martel an international phenomenon.
©1993, 2004 Yann Martel (P)2004 HighBridge Company
The Intellectual Devotional: American History
Summary
Modeled after those bedside books of prayer and contemplation that millions turn to for daily spiritual guidance and growth, the national best-seller The Intellectual Devotional, offering secular wisdom and cerebral nourishment, drew a year's worth of readings from seven different fields of knowledge. In this follow-up volume, authors David S. Kidder and Noah D. Oppenheim have turned to the rich legacy of American history for their selections. From Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to Martin Luther King Jr., from the Federalist Papers to Watergate, the giant figures, cultural touchstones, and pivotal events in our national heritage provide a bountiful source of reflection and education that will refresh knowledge, revitalize the mind, and open new horizons of intellectual discovery.
©2007 TID Volumes, LLC (P)2007 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers LLC
Daniel's Duck
Summary
Young Daniel and his family live in a log cabin high on a Tennessee mountain. Whenever Daniel has time, he carves things out of wood. First he makes a beautiful dish for his mother. Then he tries a cup and a spoon. But Daniel wants to create realistic animals just like the famous woodcarver who lives in the valley. All winter long after supper, Daniel sits in front of the warm fireplace with his knife and a large piece of wood. He is working on a duck to sell at the spring fair in the valley. But when he finishes his sculpture, everyone laughs! In Clyde Robert Bulla’s heartwarming tale, a young boy learns there are different reasons for laughter. Narrator Jeff Woodman's delightful performance will captivate beginning readers and inspire them to read for themselves.
©1979 Clyde Robert Bulla (P)1988 Recorded Books
Shadow on the Mountain
Summary
Shadow on the Mountain recounts the adventures of a 14-year-old Norwegian boy named Espen during World War II. After Nazi Germany invades and occupies Norway, Espen and his friends are swept up in the Norwegian resistance movement. Espen gets his start by delivering illegal newspapers, then graduates to the role of courier, and finally becomes a spy, dodging the Gestapo along the way. During five years under the Nazi regime, he gains - and loses - friends, falls in love, and makes one small mistake that threatens to catch up with him as he sets out to escape on skis over the mountains to Sweden. Preus incorporates archival photographs, maps, and other images to tell this story based on the real-life adventures of Norwegian Erling Storrusten, whom Preus interviewed in Norway.
©2012 Margi Preus (P)2012 Recorded Books
Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving
Summary
Benjamin Benjamin has lost virtually everything - his wife, his family, his home, and his livelihood. With few options, Ben enrolls in a night class called The Fundamentals of Caregiving, taught in the basement of a local church. There Ben is instructed in the art of inserting catheters and avoiding liability, about professionalism, and how to keep physical and emotional distance between client and provider. But when Ben is assigned to 19-year-old Trev, who is in the advanced stages of Duchenne muscular dystrophy, he discovers that the endless mnemonics and service plan checklists have done little to prepare him for the reality of caring for a fiercely stubborn, sexually frustrated adolescent. As they embark on a wild road trip across the American West to visit Trev's ailing father, a new camaraderie replaces the traditional boundary between patient and caregiver. Bursting with energy, this big-hearted, soulful, and inspired novel ponders life's terrible surprises and the heart's uncanny capacity to mend and become whole again.
©2012 Jonathan Evison (P)2012 HighBridge Company
What the Nose Knows
Summary
Everything about the sense of smell fascinates us, from its power to evoke memories to its ability to change our moods and influence our behavior. Yet because it is the least understood of the senses, myths abound.For example, contrary to popular belief, the human nose is almost as sensitive as the noses of many animals, including dogs; blind people do not have enhanced powers of smell; and perfumers excel at their jobs not because they have superior noses, but because they have perfected the art of thinking about scents.In this entertaining and enlightening journey through the world of aroma, olfaction expert Avery Gilbert illuminates the latest scientific discoveries and offers keen observations on modern culture: how a museum is preserving the smells of John Steinbeck's Cannery Row; why John Waters revived the "smellie" in Polyester; and what innovations are coming from artists like the Dutch "aroma jockey" known as Odo7.From brain-imaging laboratories to the high-stakes world of scent marketing, What the Nose Knows takes us on a tour of the strange and surprising realm of smell.
©2008 Avery Gilbert (P)2009 Audible, Inc.
The Winter Room
Summary
This story of two Norwegian-American farm boys who discover the remarkable magic of storytelling is vintage Gary Paulsen - earthy, gritty, and ultimately poignant. Be aware that Paulsen vividly describes the reality of farm life, including slaughtering pigs and shoveling manure, as the story unfolds.
©1989 Gary Paulsen (P)1994 Recorded Books
The End of Nature
Summary
Audie Award Finalist, Non-Fiction, 2014 Reissued on the 10th anniversary of its publication, this classic work on our environmental crisis features a new introduction by the author, reviewing both the progress and ground lost in the fight to save the Earth. This impassioned plea for radical and life-renewing change is today still considered a groundbreaking work in environmental studies. McKibben's argument that the survival of the globe is dependent on a fundamental, philosophical shift in the way we relate to nature is more relevant than ever. McKibben writes of our Earth's environmental cataclysm, addressing such core issues as the greenhouse effect, acid rain, and the depletion of the ozone layer. His new introduction addresses some of the latest environmental issues that have risen during the 1990s. More than simply a handbook for survival or a doomsday catalog of scientific prediction, this classic, soulful lament on nature is required reading for nature enthusiasts, activists, and concerned citizens alike.
©1989, 2006 William McKibben (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Night Journeys
Summary
In this colonial adventure tale, set on the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border in 1768, Everett Shinn is enlisted in a search for two runaway indentured servants. Eager for adventure and to become a hero by capturing the runaways himself, 12-year-old Peter York, Shinn’s adopted son, volunteers to join the search. Peter assumes that the runaways are swarthy ruffians. When he discovers, however, that they are mistreated children seeking freedom in Pennsylvania, Peter’s purpose turns from capturing them to helping them escape. Will Shinn, a devout Quaker of few words, foil Peter’s plans, or will the young man receive help from an unexpected source? Avi is an award-winning author. He has written two Newbery Honor books, won the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and an ALA Booklist Best Book of the 1980s. Narrator Jeff Woodman captures all the danger and excitement of this tightly-plotted suspense, and keeps the book moving as rapidly as the flooded Delaware River. Be sure to look for these other exciting audiobook titles by Avi: The Man Who Was Poe, Smuggler’s Island, Romeo and Juliet Together (and alive!) at Last, and S.O.R. Losers.
©1979 Avi Wortis (P)1997 Recorded Books