Joe Barrett has narrated 272 audiobooks on Listento.it by 269 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 2,223 ratings. The most-rated is Melania and Me.
An Environmental History of the Civil War
Summary
This sweeping new history recognizes that the Civil War was not just a military conflict but also a moment of profound transformation in Americans' relationship to the natural world. To be sure, environmental factors such as topography and weather powerfully shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns, and the war could not have been fought without the horses, cattle, and other animals that were essential to both armies. But here Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver weave a far richer story, combining military and environmental history to forge a comprehensive new narrative of the war's significance and impact. As they reveal, the conflict created a new disease environment by fostering the spread of microbes among vulnerable soldiers, civilians, and animals; led to large-scale modifications of the landscape across several states; sparked new thinking about the human relationship to the natural world; and demanded a reckoning with disability and death on an ecological scale. And as the guns fell silent, the change continued; Browning and Silver show how the war influenced the future of weather forecasting, veterinary medicine, the birth of the conservation movement, and the establishment of the first national parks.
©2020 The University of North Carolina Press (P)2020 Tantor
Marine One
Summary
After the presidents' helicopter, Marine One, goes down in a brutal thunderstorm, the government blames the European manufacturer of the helicopter, accusing them of killing the president. Senate investigations and Justice Department accusations multiply as Mike Nolan, a Marine Corps reserve helicopter pilot and trial attorney in civilian life, is hired to defend the company from the criminal investigations and a wrongful-death lawsuit brought by the most notorious lawyer in America on behalf of the First Lady. Nolan knows that to win his case, he has to find out what really caused Marine One to crash and why the president threw caution aside to go to a meeting no one seems to know about.
©2009 James W. Huston (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Turn to Stone
Summary
Turn to Stone takes place in the days immediately preceding the events of The Cold Nowhere, the sixth audiobook in Freeman's thrilling Jonathan Stride series. On his way back to Duluth, Stride stops to visit the grave of his mother in a small Wisconsin town. After a shocking occurrence in the cemetery, Stride becomes enmeshed in a gruesome and suspenseful search for a killer who knows things no one else alive should know. This audiobook from master of suspense Brian Freeman, winner of the International Thriller Writers Award, is not to be missed.
©2014 Brian Freeman (P)2014 Blackstone Audiobooks
Frontier Rebels
Summary
In Frontier Rebels, historian Patrick Spero tells the story of the Black Boys, a band of rebels whose protests ignited the American Revolution. In 1765, as the Stamp Act riled eastern seaports, frontiersmen clashed with the British Empire over another issue: Indian relations. When British officials launched a risky diplomatic expedition into the American interior to open trade with the Indian warrior Pontiac, the Black Boys formed to stop it. Distrustful of Native neighbors and suspicious of imperial aims, the Black Boys led an uprising that threatened the future of Britain's empire. Clashing with unscrupulous traders, daring diplomats, Native warriors, and imperious British officials, the Black Boys evolved into an organized political movement that resisted the Crown years before the Declaration of Independence. A fast-paced book examining an overlooked conflict, Frontier Rebels brings to life a forgotten cast of characters and sheds new light on the origins of American Independence.
©2018 Patrick Spero (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Grinnell
Summary
Before Rachel Carson, there was George Bird Grinnell - the man whose prophetic vision did nothing less than launch American conservation. George Bird Grinnell, the son of a New York merchant, saw a different future for a nation in the thrall of the Industrial Age. With railroads scarring virgin lands and the formerly vast buffalo herds decimated, the country faced a crossroads: Could it pursue Manifest Destiny without destroying its natural bounty and beauty? The alarm that Grinnell sounded would spark America's conservation movement. Yet today his name has been forgotten - an omission that John Taliaferro's commanding biography now sets right with historical care and narrative flair. Drawing on 40,000 pages of Grinnell's correspondence and dozens of his diaries, Taliaferro reveals a man whose deeds and high-mindedness earned him a lustrous peerage, from presidents to chiefs, Audubon to Aldo Leopold, John Muir to Gifford Pinchot, Edward S. Curtis to Edward H. Harriman. Throughout his long life, Grinnell was bound by family and sustained by intimate friendships, toggling between the East and the West. As Taliaferro's enthralling portrait demonstrates, it was this tension that wound Grinnell's nearly inexhaustible spring and honed his vision - a vision that still guides the imperiled future of our national treasures.
©2019 John Taliaferro (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
The Last Wild Men of Borneo
Summary
Two modern adventurers sought a treasure possessed by the legendary "Wild Men of Borneo". One found riches. The other vanished forever into an endless jungle. Had he shed civilization - or lost his mind? Global headlines suspected murder. Lured by these mysteries, New York Times best-selling author Carl Hoffman journeyed to find the truth, discovering that nothing is as it seems in the world's last Eden, where the lines between sinner, saint, and myth converge. In 1984, Swiss traveler Bruno Manser joined an expedition to the Mulu caves on Borneo, the planet's third largest island. There he slipped into the forest interior to make contact with the Penan, an indigenous tribe of peace-loving nomads living among the Dayak people, the fabled "Headhunters of Borneo." Bruno lived for years with the Penan, gaining acceptance as a member of the tribe. However, when commercial logging began devouring the Penan's homeland, Bruno led the tribe against these outside forces, earning him status as an enemy of the state, but also worldwide fame as an environmental hero. He escaped captivity under gunfire twice, but the strain took a psychological toll. Then, in 2000, Bruno disappeared without a trace. Had he become a madman, a hermit, or a martyr? American Michael Palmieri is, in many ways, Bruno's opposite. Evading the Vietnam War, the Californian wandered the world, finally settling in Bali in the 1970s. From there, he staged expeditions into the Bornean jungle to acquire astonishing art and artifacts from the Dayaks. He would become one of the world's most successful tribal-art field collectors, supplying sacred works to prestigious museums and wealthy private collectors. And yet suspicion shadowed this self-styled buccaneer who made his living extracting the treasure of the Dayak: Was he preserving or exploiting native culture? As Carl Hoffman unravels the deepening riddle of Bruno's disappearance and seeks answers to the questions surrounding both men, it becomes clear saint and sinner are not so easily defined, and Michael and Bruno are, in a sense, two parts of one whole: each spent his life in pursuit of the sacred fire of indigenous people. The Last Wild Men of Borneo is the product of Hoffman's extensive travels to the region, guided by Penan through jungle paths traveled by Bruno and by Palmieri himself up rivers to remote villages. Hoffman also draws on exclusive interviews with Manser's family and colleagues, and rare access to his letters and journals. Here is a peerless adventure propelled by the entwined lives of two singular, enigmatic men whose stories reveal both the grandeur and the precarious fate of the wildest place on earth.
©2018 Carl Hoffman (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers
House Justice
Summary
When an American defense contractor goes to Iran to sell missile technology, the CIA knows all about it, thanks to a spy in Tehran. But when the story is leaked to an ambitious journalist, the spy is burned, brutally tortured, and executed. The director of the CIA isn’t about to let the callous sacrifice of his valuable spy go unpunished. Joe DeMarco’s boss, Speaker of the House John Fitzpatrick Mahoney, has his own reasons to get to the bottom of the leak. He once had a fling with the journalist, and now that she’s in jail for refusing to reveal her source, she is threatening to tell all unless he helps get her out. DeMarco and the CIA aren’t the only ones looking for the source of the leak, either. Someone else wants to avenge the spy’s death, and is tailing DeMarco, hoping he’ll lead him to his prey. This latest Joe DeMarco thriller is classic Mike Lawson, featuring fascinating characters, inside-the-beltway intrigue, and a gripping plot packed with surprises.
©2010 Mike Lawson (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Big Fish
Summary
Powerfully plotted and funny, Big Fish follows dangerous and mysterious Los Angeles entrepreneur Altmeyer, and his wife Rachel, whose quiet lives in the Hollywood hills are disrupted when a multi-million-dollar gunrunning deal goes bad. Under most circumstances, Altmeyer might be mildly amused by the audacity of the double-cross. But whoever cheated Altmeyer may also be planning to destroy the world. With so much at stake, Altmeyer and Rachel and their friend, super-agent to the stars Bucky Carmichael, set off on a perilous adventure in search of the identity of the Big Fish. What they find is shocking and horrifying and all too credible.
©1985 Thomas Perry (P)2018 Tantor
Defiance of the Patriots
Summary
On the evening of December 16, 1773, a group of disguised Bostonians boarded three merchant ships and dumped more than 46 tons of tea into Boston Harbor. The Boston Tea Party, as it later came to be known, was an audacious and revolutionary act. It set the stage for war and cemented certain values in the American psyche that many still cherish today. But why did the Tea Party happen? Whom did it involve? What did it mean? The answers to these questions are far from straightforward. In this thrilling book, Benjamin L. Carp tells the full story of the Tea Party - exploding myths, exploring the unique city life of Boston, and setting this extraordinary event in a global context. Bringing vividly to life the diverse array of people and places that the Tea Party brought together - from Chinese tea-pickers to English businessmen, Native American tribes, sugar plantation slaves, and Boston's ladies of leisure - Carp illuminates how a determined group shook the foundations of a mighty empire, and what this has meant for Americans since. As he reveals many little-known historical facts and considers the Tea Party's uncertain legacy, he presents a compelling and expansive history of an iconic event in America's tempestuous past.
©2010 Benjamin L. Carp (P)2019 Tantor
Grunts
Summary
From the acclaimed author of The Dead and Those About to Die comes a sweeping narrative of six decades of combat, and an eye-opening account of the evolution of the American infantry. From the beaches of Normandy and the South Pacific Islands to the deserts of the Middle East, the American soldier has been the most indispensable - and most overlooked - factor in wartime victory. In Grunts, renowned historian John C. McManus examines 10 critical battles - from Hitler's massive assault on US soldiers at the Battle of the Bulge to counterinsurgency combat in Iraq - where the skills and courage of American troops proved the crucial difference between victory and defeat. Based on years of research and interviews with veterans, this powerful history reveals the ugly face of war in a way few books have and demonstrates the fundamental, and too often forgotten, importance of the human element in serving and protecting the nation.
©2018 John C. McManus (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Rise of American Democracy
Summary
A grand political history in a fresh new style of how the elitist young American republic became a rough-and-tumble democracy. In this magisterial work, Sean Wilentz traces a historical arc from the earliest days of the republic to the opening shots of the Civil War. One of our finest writers of history, Wilentz brings to life the era after the American Revolution, when the idea of democracy remained contentious, and Jeffersonians and Federalists clashed over the role of ordinary citizens in government of, by, and for the people. The triumph of Andrew Jackson soon defined this role on the national level, while city democrats, Anti-Masons, fugitive slaves, and a host of others hewed their own local definitions. In these definitions, Wilentz recovers the beginnings of a discontent - two starkly opposed democracies, one in the North and another in the South - and the wary balance that lasted until the election of Abraham Lincoln sparked its bloody resolution.
©2005 Sean Wilentz (P)2020 Tantor
From Twilight Till Dawn
Summary
Are vampires a bloodthirsty menace to mankind? Or simply misunderstood creatures struggling to survive? After hearing these six entertaining stories, you'll be able to decide for yourself. From the horrifying to the humorous, some of today's finest authors share stories about one of the oldest imagined evils, the vampire. From Tanith Lee's chilling story to Esther Friesner's comic tale of rival teens trying to best one another, these stories bring vampires to (un)life, in all their majesty and terror.
©2009 Phoenix (P)2009 Phoenix
War at the End of the World
Summary
One American soldier called it "a green hell on Earth". Monsoon-soaked wilderness, debilitating heat, impassable mountains, torrential rivers, and disease-infested swamps - New Guinea was a battleground far more deadly than the most fanatical of enemy troops. Japanese forces numbering some 600,000 men began landing in January 1942, determined to seize the island as a cornerstone of the empire's strategy to knock Australia out of the war. Allied commander-in-chief General Douglas MacArthur committed 340,000 Americans, in addition to tens of thousands of Australian, Dutch, and New Guinean troops, to retake New Guinea at all costs. In this gripping narrative, historian James P. Duffy chronicles the most ruthless combat of the Pacific War, a fight complicated by rampant tropical disease, violent rainstorms, and unforgiving terrain that punished both Axis and Allied forces alike. Drawing on primary sources, War at the End of the World fills in a crucial gap in the history of World War II while offering listeners a narrative of the first rank.
©2016 James P. Duffy (P)2016 Tantor
Boston Mob
Summary
The New England Mafia was a hugely powerful organization that survived by using violence to ruthlessly crush anyone that threatened it, or its lucrative gambling, loansharking, bootlegging, and other enterprises. Psychopathic strongman Joseph "The Animal" Barboza was one of the most feared mob enforcers of all time, killing as many as 30 people for business and pleasure. From information based on newly declassified documents and the use of underworld sources, Boston Mob spans the gutters and alleyways of East Boston, Providence, and Charlestown to the halls of Congress in Washington, D.C., and Boston's Beacon Hill. Its players include governors and mayors, and the Mafia Commission of New York City. From the tragic legacy of the Kennedy family to the Winter Hill-Charlestown feud, the fall of the New England Mafia and the rise of Whitey Bulger, Mark Songini's Boston Mob is a saga of treachery, murder, greed, and the survival of ruthless men pitted against legal systems and police forces.
©2014 Marc Songini (P)2018 Tantor
Death in the A Shau Valley
Summary
Featuring a new introduction by the author about his return to Vietnam, his reflections on the war, and his humanitarian work in Cambodia. "The enemy had a single purpose: kill me and my teammates." Larry Chambers was still new to Vietnam in early 1969 when the LRRPs of the 101st Airborne Division became L Company, 75th (Rangers). But his unit's mission stayed the same: act as the eyes and ears of the 101st deep in the dreaded A Shau Valley - where the NVA ruled. Relentless thick fog frequently made fighter bombers useless in the A Shau, and the enemy had furnished the nearby mountaintops with antiaircraft machine guns to protect the massive trail network that snaked through it. So, outgunned, outmanned, and unsupported, the teams of L Company executed hundreds of courageous missions. Now, in this powerful personal record, Larry Chambers recaptures the experience of the war's most brutal on-the-job training, where the slightest noise or smallest error could bring sudden - and certain-death...
©1998 Larry Chambers (P)2020 Tantor
Darkest Hour: John Alite
Summary
A college baseball scholarship was his way out of the inner city, but his dreams of going pro were crushed by an arm injury. John Alite was forced to return home to the only life he knew, where having to live on the streets of New York meant one thing - earning how to survive. He was driven. He was extreme. He was feared. But most of all, he was loyal. From a young age, he found himself influenced by the wrong crowd. Enticed by the wealth, power, and prestige of the mafia, he immersed himself in a world that was foreign to most. A society where policies were enforced by instilling fear. Honor and loyalty were merely a misnomer. The cold, bitter truth was he was expendable, and his sworn allegiance was rewarded with betrayal. On the run and unable to trust anyone, John was finally forced to confront his own demon - himself. Facing the harsh realities of who he was and what he had done wasn't pretty, and he had some serious, life-altering decisions to make - ones that would come with a price. Through a life of heartache, betrayal, and loss comes a story of grace, healing, and redemption.
©2018 S.C. Pike (P)2018 Tantor
The Statesman and the Storyteller
Summary
John Hay, Lincoln's private secretary and later secretary of state under presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, and Samuel Langhorne Clemens, famous as "Mark Twain", grew up 50 miles apart on the banks of the Mississippi River in the same rural antebellum stew of race, class, and want. This shared history drew them together in the late 1860s, and their mutual admiration never waned in spite of sharp differences. In The Statesman and the Storyteller, the last decade of their lives plays out against the tumultuous events of the day, as the United States government begins to aggressively pursue a policy of imperialism, overthrowing the duly elected queen of Hawaii; violently wresting Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines away from Spain; and finally supporting a revolution to clear a path for the building of the US-controlled Panama Canal. Stunning in its relevance, The Statesman and the Storyteller explores the tactics of America's earliest global policies and their influence on US actions for years to follow. Ultimately, it is the very human rendering of Clemens and Hay that distinguishes Zwonitzer's work, providing profound insights into the lives of two men who helped define their era.
©2016 Mark Zwonitzer (P)2016 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Catching the Wind
Summary
“One of the truly great biographies of our time.” (Sean Wilentz, New York Times best-selling author of Bob Dylan in America and The Rise of American Democracy) “A landmark study of Washington power politics in the twentieth century in the Robert Caro tradition.” (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times best-selling author of American Moonshot) The epic, definitive biography of Ted Kennedy - an immersive journey through the life of a complicated man and a sweeping history of the fall of liberalism and the collapse of political morality. Catching the Wind is the first volume of Neal Gabler’s magisterial two-volume biography of Edward Kennedy. It is at once a human drama, a history of American politics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and a study of political morality and the role it played in the tortuous course of liberalism. Though he is often portrayed as a reckless hedonist who rode his father’s fortune and his brothers’ coattails to a Senate seat at the age of thirty, the Ted Kennedy in Catching the Wind is one the public seldom saw - a man both racked by and driven by insecurity, a man so doubtful of himself that he sinned in order to be redeemed. The last and by most contemporary accounts the least of the Kennedys, a lightweight. He lived an agonizing childhood, being shuffled from school to school at his mother’s whim, suffering numerous humiliations - including self-inflicted ones - and being pressed to rise to his brothers’ level. He entered the Senate with his colleagues’ lowest expectations, a show horse, not a workhorse, but he used his “ninth-child’s talent” of deference to and comity with his Senate elders to become a promising legislator. And with the deaths of his brothers John and Robert, he was compelled to become something more: the custodian of their political mission. In Catching the Wind, Kennedy, using his late brothers’ moral authority, becomes a moving force in the great “liberal hour”, which sees the passage of the anti-poverty program and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Then, with the election of Richard Nixon, he becomes the leading voice of liberalism itself at a time when its power is waning: a “shadow president”, challenging Nixon to keep the American promise to the marginalized, while Nixon lives in terror of a Kennedy restoration. Catching the Wind also shows how Kennedy’s moral authority is eroded by the fatal auto accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969, dealing a blow not just to Kennedy but to liberalism. In this sweeping biography, Gabler tells a story that is Shakespearean in its dimensions: the story of a star-crossed figure who rises above his seeming limitations and the tragedy that envelopes him to change the face of America.
©2020 Neal Gabler (P)2020 Random House Audio
House Reckoning
Summary
The ninth installment in Mike Lawson's Washington, DC, political thriller series takes listeners back into Joe DeMarco's past - to the murder of his father, which was never investigated, let alone solved. DeMarco always knew that his father, Gino, had a shady job for a local mafioso, but he didn't understand that Gino had been a hit man until he was murdered. Now, nearly 20 years later, one of Gino's former mob associates is dying of lung cancer, and he wants to get something off his chest before retiring to his grave: the truth about Gino's killer. The shocking information, and the powerful position the killer now occupies, sends DeMarco on a mission of revenge with terrible consequences. Now that the secret has been kept for so long, DeMarco has to rush to do something about it because the killer is on the brink of taking a job in Washington, DC, that will leave him untouchable. With his job, his morals, and his very life on the line, DeMarco must ask himself: How far will he go for revenge?
©2014 Mike Lawson (P)2014 Blackstone Audiobooks
The Leper Spy
Summary
The GIs called her Joey. Hundreds owed their lives to the tiny Filipina who stashed explosives in spare tires, tracked Japanese troop movements, and smuggled maps of fortifications across enemy lines. As the Battle of Manila raged, Josefina Guerrero walked through gunfire to bandage wounds and close the eyes of the dead. Her valor earned her the Medal of Freedom, but what made her a good spy was also destroying her: leprosy, which so horrified the Japanese they refused to search her. After the war, army chaplains found her in a nightmarish leper colony and fought for the US government to do something it had never done: welcome a foreigner with leprosy. This brought her celebrity, which she used to publicly speak for other sufferers. However, the notoriety haunted her and she sought a way to disappear. Ben Montgomery now brings Guerrero's heroic accomplishments to light.
©2016 Ben Montgomery (P)2016 Tantor