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.
23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism
Summary
Thing 1: There is no such thing as the free market.Thing 4: The washing machine has changed the world more than the Internet.Thing 5: Assume the worst about people, and you get the worst.Thing 13: Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer. If you've wondered how we did not see the economic collapse coming, Ha-Joon Chang knows the answer: We didn't ask what they didn't tell us about capitalism. This is a lighthearted book with a serious purpose: to question the assumptions behind the dogma and sheer hype that the dominant school of neoliberal economists - the apostles of the freemarket - have spun since the Age of Reagan. Chang, the author of the international best seller Bad Samaritans, is one of the world's most respected economists, a voice of sanity - and wit - in the tradition of John Kenneth Galbraith and Joseph Stiglitz. 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism equips listeners with an understanding of how global capitalism works - and doesn't. In his final chapter, "How to Rebuild the World", Chang offers a vision of how we can shape capitalism to humane ends, instead of becoming slaves of the market. Ha-Joon Chang teaches in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge. His books include the best-selling Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. His Kicking Away the Ladder received the 2003 Myrdal Prize, and, in 2005, Chang was awarded the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.
©2011 Ha-Joon Chang (P)2011 Audible, Inc.
Hope Never Dies
Summary
Advance Praise: A Publishers Weekly Summer Read 2018 "The Obama/Biden buddy-detective-story we never knew we needed." (Advance NetGalley review) This mystery thriller reunites Vice President Joe Biden and President Barack Obama for a political mashup full of suspense, intrigue, and laugh-out-loud bromance. Vice President Joe Biden is fresh out of the Obama White House and feeling adrift when his favorite railroad conductor dies in a suspicious accident, leaving behind an ailing wife and a trail of clues. To unravel the mystery, "Amtrak Joe" re-teams with the only man he's ever fully trusted - the 44th president of the United States. Together they'll plumb the darkest corners of Delaware, traveling from cheap motels to biker bars and beyond, as they uncover the sinister forces advancing America's opioid epidemic. Part noir thriller and part bromance novel, Hope Never Dies is essentially the first published work of Obama/Biden fan fiction - and a cathartic listen for anyone distressed by the current state of affairs. Cover illustration by Jeremy Enecio (2018), Levy Creative Management NYC.
©2018 Andrew Shaffer (P)2018 Audible, Inc.
The Last Don
Summary
The last don is Domenico Clericuzio, a wise and ruthless man who is determined to see his heirs established in legitimate society but whose vision is threatened when secrets from the family's past spark a vicious war between two blood cousins. This is a mesmerizing tale that takes us inside the equally corrupt worlds of the mob, the movie industry, and the casinos - where beautiful actresses and ruthless hit men are ruled by lust and violence, where sleazy producers and greedy studio heads are drunk with power, where crooked cops and desperate gamblers play dangerous games of betrayal, and where one man controls them all.
©1996 Mario Puzo (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Letters to a Young Scientist
Summary
Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward O. Wilson imparts the wisdom of his storied career to the next generation. Edward O. Wilson has distilled sixty years of teaching into a book for students, young and old. Reflecting on his coming-of-age in the South as a Boy Scout and a lover of ants and butterflies, Wilson threads these twenty-one letters, each richly illustrated, with autobiographical anecdotes that illuminate his career - both his successes and his failures - and his motivations for becoming a biologist. At a time in human history when our survival is more than ever linked to our understanding of science, Wilson insists that success in the sciences does not depend on mathematical skill, but rather a passion for finding a problem and solving it. From the collapse of stars to the exploration of rain forests and the oceans’ depths, Wilson instills a love of the innate creativity of science and a respect for the human being’s modest place in the planet’s ecosystem in his readers.
©2013 Edward O. Wilson (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
The Blue Zones Solution
Summary
Dan Buettner, the New York Times best-selling author of The Blue Zones, lays out a proven plan to maximize your health based on the practices of the world's healthiest people. For the first time, Buettner reveals how to transform your health using smart eating and lifestyle habits gleaned from new research on the diets, eating habits, and lifestyle practices of the communities he's identified as "Blue Zones" - those places with the world's longest-lived and thus healthiest people. With this audiobook's audacious belief that the lifestyles of the world's Blue Zones could be adapted and replicated in towns across North America, you'll be inspired by the specific stories of the people, foods, and routines of our healthy elders; understand the role community, family, and naturally healthy habits can play to improve our diet and health; and learn the exact foods - including the fifty superfoods of longevity and dozens of recipes adapted for Western tastes and markets - that offer delicious ways to eat your way to optimum health. Filled with moving personal stories, delicious recipes, checklists, and useful tips that will transform any home into a miniature blue zone, The Blue Zones Solution is the ultimate blueprint for a healthy, happy life. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2015 Dan Buettner (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Shibumi
Summary
Nicholai Hel, born in the ravages of World War I China to an aristocratic Russian mother and a mysterious German father, raised in the spiritual gardens of a Japanese Go Master, survives the destruction of Hiroshima to emerge as the world's most artful lover and its most accomplished and highly paid assassin. Genius, mystic, master of language and culture, Hel's secret is his determination to attain a rare kind of personal excellence, a state of effortless perfection: shibumi. Now living in an isolated mountain fortress with his magnificent Eurasian mistress, Hel faces his most sinister enemy, a super-monolith of espionage and monopoly. The battle lines are drawn: ruthless power and corruption on one side and on the other, shibumi.
©1979 Trevanian (P)2005 Blackstone Audiobooks
One of a Kind
Summary
He was a legend before he was of legal age. Stuey Ungar dropped out of high school to become an underground card-table sensation, eventually taking out every top gin-rummy player on the east coast. Bankrolled by the Genovese crime family, Ungar went on to win the World Series of Poker a record three times. Then his luck began to run out. Nolan Dalla was commissioned by Ungar in 1998 to pen his story, resulting in hundreds of hours of taped interviews and conversations. The result is the startling tale of a man who won at his game and lost control of his life. Notorious for gambling every single dollar in his pocket, Ungar won an estimated $30 million in his lifetime, but when he was found dead in a Las Vegas motel at the age of 45, he had only $800 in cash on his person, with no bank account or home address.
©2005 Nolan Dalla (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Tomb
Summary
Much to the chagrin of his girlfriend, Gia, Repairman Jack doesn't deal with electronic appliances. He fixes situations for people, often putting himself in deadly danger. His latest project is recovering a stolen necklace, which carries with it an ancient curse that may unleash a horde of Bengali demons. Jack is used to danger, but this time Gia's daughter Vicky is threatened. Can Jack overcome the curse of the yellow necklace and bring Vicky safely back home?
©1998 F. Paul Wilson (P)2009 Audible, Inc.
The Sea Wolves
Summary
In AD 793 Norse warriors struck the English isle of Lindisfarne and laid waste to it. Wave after wave of Norse "sea wolves" followed in search of plunder, land, or a glorious death in battle. Much of the British Isles fell before their swords, and the continental capitals of Paris and Aachen were sacked in turn. Turning east, they swept down the uncharted rivers of central Europe, captured Kiev, and clashed with mighty Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. But there is more to the Viking story than brute force. They were makers of law - the term itself comes from an Old Norse word - and they introduced a novel form of trial by jury to England. They were also sophisticated merchants and explorers who settled Iceland, founded Dublin, and established a trading network that stretched from Baghdad to the coast of North America. In The Sea Wolves, Lars Brownworth brings to life this extraordinary Norse world of epic poets, heroes, and travelers through the stories of the great Viking figures, including Leif the Lucky, Eric Bloodaxe, and Harald Hardrada. This riveting history illuminates the saga of the Viking age - a time that "has passed away, and grown dark under the cover of night."
©2014 Lars Brownworth (P)2015 Tantor
Big Game
Summary
The New York Times best seller! From the number one New York Times best-selling author of This Town, an equally merciless probing of America's biggest cultural force, pro football, at a moment of peak success and high anxiety Like millions of Americans, Mark Leibovich has spent more of his life tuned in to pro football than he'd care to admit. Being a lifelong New England Patriots fan meant growing up on a steady diet of lovable loserdom. That is until the Tom Brady/Bill Belichick era made the Pats the most ruthlessly efficient and polarizing sports dynasty of the modern NFL, and its fans the most irritating in all of Pigskin America. Leibovich kept his obsession quiet, making a nice career for himself covering that other playground for rich and overgrown children, American politics. Still, every now and then Leibovich would reach out to Tom Brady to gauge his willingness to subject himself to a profile. He figured that the chances of Brady agreeing were a Hail Mary at best, but Brady returned Mark's call in summer 2014 and kept on returning his calls through epic Patriots Super Bowl victory and defeat, and a scandal involving Brady - Deflategate - whose grip on sports media was as profound as its true significance was ridiculous. So began a four-year odyssey that took Mark Leibovich deeper inside the NFL than anyone has gone before. From the owners' meeting to the draft to the sidelines of crucial games, he takes in the show at the elbow of everyone from Brady to big-name owners to the cordially despised NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell. Ultimately, Big Game is a chronicle of "peak football" - the high point of the sport's economic success and cultural dominance but also the time when the dark side began to show. It is an era of explosive revenue growth but also one of creeping existential fear. Players have long joked that NFL stands for "not for long", but as the true impact of concussions becomes inescapable background noise, it's increasingly difficult to enjoy the simple glory of football without the buzzkill of its obvious consequences. And that was before Donald Trump. In 2016, Mark's day job caught up with him, and the NFL slammed headlong into America's culture wars. Big Game is a journey through an epic storm. Through it all, Leibovich always keeps one eye on Tom Brady and his beloved Patriots, through to the 2018 Super Bowl. Pro football, this hilarious and enthralling book proves, may not be the sport America needs, but it is most definitely the sport we deserve. One of Mother Jones’ Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2018
©2018 Mark Leibovich (P)2018 Penguin Audio
Double Cross
Summary
One of the most feared Chicago mobsters, Sam Giancana, clawed his way to the top of the Mafia hierarchy by starting as a hit man for Al Capone. He was known as one of the best vehicle escape artists, a tenacious business man, and a ruthless killer. He partied with major stars such as Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe and did business with agents ranging from the CIA to the Vatican to the shah of Iran. When politician Joe Kennedy gave Giancana the chance to use mob muscle to get his son John elected, Giancana jumped at the task. But the Kennedy brothers double-crossed him, waging full-out war on organized crime throughout the United States. And Giancana went after them. Written with suspense and conviction, we learn about how the CIA asked Giancana to assassinate Fidel Castro. The book includes Giancana's testimony about the truth of his involvement in the deaths of Monroe and others. Chuck Giancana, Sam's brother, contributes a unique perspective of the mob's relationship with the Bay of Pigs and many other pivotal events of the '60s and beyond. Double Cross is an eye-opening account of the interworking of the government and the mob and how this relationship has impacted American history.
©1992 Sam Giancana, Chuck Giancana, and Bettina Giancana; Foreword copyright 2014 by Bettina Giancana and Sam Giancana (P)2019 Tantor
Strangers to Ourselves
Summary
In an eye-opening tour of the unconscious, as contemporary psychological science has redefined it, Timothy D. Wilson introduces us to a hidden mental world of judgments, feelings, and motives that introspection may never show us. This is not your psychoanalyst's unconscious. The adaptive unconscious that empirical psychology has revealed, and that Wilson describes, is much more than a repository of primative drives and conflict-ridden memories. It is a set of pervasive, sophisticated mental processes that size up our worlds, set goals, and initiate action, all while we are consciously thinking about something else. If we don't know ourselves -- our potentials, feelings, or motives -- it is most often, Wilson tells us, because we have developed a plausible story about ourselves that is out of touch with our adaptive unconscious. Citing evidence that too much introspection can actually do damage, Wilson makes the case for better ways of discovering our unconscious selves. If you want to know who you are or what you feel or what you're like, Wilson advises, pay attention to what you actually do and what other people think about you. Showing us an unconscious more powerful that Freud's, and even more pervasive in our daily life, Strangers to Ourselves marks a revolution in how we know ourselves. The book is published by Harvard University Press.
©2002 the President and Fellows of Harvard College (P)2011 Redwood Audiobooks
The Bone House
Summary
Hilary and Mark Bradley are trapped in a web of suspicion. Last year, accusations of a torrid affair with a student cost Mark his teaching job and made the young couple into outcasts in their remote island town off the Lake Michigan coast. Now another teenage girl is found dead on a deserted beach... and once again, Mark faces a hostile town convinced of his guilt. Hilary Bradley is determined to prove that Mark is innocent, but she’s on a lonely, dangerous quest. Even when she discovers that the murdered girl was witness to a horrific crime years earlier, the police are certain she’s throwing up a smoke screen to protect her husband. Only a quirky detective named Cab Bolton seems willing to believe Hilary’s story. Hilary and Cab soon find that people in this community are willing to kill to keep their secrets hidden - and to make sure Mark doesn’t get away with murder. And with each shocking revelation, even Hilary begins to wonder whether her husband is truly innocent. Freeman’s first stand-alone thriller since his Stride novels is a knockout.
©2011 Brian Freeman (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
A Cool Breeze on the Underground
Summary
Neal Carey is not your usual private eye. A graduate student at Columbia University, he grew up on the streets of New York, usually on the wrong side of the law. Then he met a P.I. who introduced him to the Bank, an exclusive institution with a sideline in keeping its wealthy clients happy and out of trouble. They pay Neal's college tuition, and Neal gets an education that can't be found in any textbook, from learning how to trail a suspect to mastering the proper way to search a room.Now it's payback time. The Bank wants Neal to put his skills to work in finding Allie Chase, the rebellious teenage daughter of a prominent senator. The problem is that she's gone underground in the London punk scene. To get her back, Neal has to follow her into a violent netherworld where drugs run rampant and rage is the name of the game.
©1991 Don Winslow (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Night Bird
Summary
Homicide detective Frost Easton doesn't like coincidences. When a series of bizarre deaths rock San Francisco - as seemingly random women suffer violent psychotic breaks - Frost looks for a connection that leads him to psychiatrist Francesca Stein. Frankie's controversial therapy helps people erase their most terrifying memories...and all the victims were her patients. As Frost and Frankie carry out their own investigations, the case becomes increasingly personal - and dangerous. Long-submerged secrets surface as someone called the Night Bird taunts the pair with cryptic messages pertaining to the deaths. Soon Frankie is forced to confront strange gaps in her own memory, and Frost faces a killer who knows the detective's worst fears. As the body count rises and the Night Bird circles ever closer, a dedicated cop and a brilliant doctor race to solve the puzzle before a cunning killer claims another victim.
©2017 Brian Freeman (P)2016 Brilliance Audio
Gotti's Rules
Summary
The notorious Gotti family is the stuff of mob legend. The "Dapper Don", John Gotti Sr., and his son John A. "Junior" Gotti ran New York's powerful Gambino crime family and were well known for their flamboyant style and brutal ways, an image perpetuated in popular Mafia mythology. John Alite, a mob hit man, associate, and close friend of the Gottis, has a very different story to tell. An Albanian-American from Queens, Alite was an unlikely ally to the Gottis and the Italian mob, but with his street smarts he was eventually recruited to be Junior Gotti's protector and muscle. For decades Alite worked as a thug, drug dealer, and murderer for Junior Gotti and his infamous father. Although he reaped the benefits of working under the powerful mob figure, Alite discovered firsthand that the legendary American Mafia - an organization that claimed to be built on honor and loyalty - was nothing more than a facade for the hypocritical, manipulative, and greedy criminals like the Gottis who ran it. Following a harrowing sentence in a Brazilian prison (a system considered among the worst in the world), Alite was extradited to the United States in 2006 and agreed to help the feds put Gotti Jr. and his fearsome crime family behind bars. No one was better placed as an informant than Alite - the man who knew the real truth about the Gotti family. In Gotti's Rules, veteran true-crime writer and prize-winning reporter George Anastasia gains unprecedented access to the Gotti crime family's stories and secrets, including its fascinating "Gotti Rules" of leadership. Based on extensive FBI files and exclusive interviews with insiders and experts, particularly former insider John Alite, Anastasia's unparalleled access demystifies the infamous Gotti family and its larger-than-life legend and provides irrefutable proof of shocking allegations against Gotti Jr. that have never before been confirmed.
©2015 George Anastasia (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers
Lesser Beasts
Summary
Unlike other barnyard animals, which pull plows, give eggs or milk, or grow wool, a pig produces only one thing: meat. Incredibly efficient at converting almost any organic matter into nourishing, delectable protein, swine are nothing short of a gastronomic godsend - yet their flesh is banned in many cultures, and the animals themselves are maligned as filthy, lazy brutes. As historian Mark Essig reveals in Lesser Beasts, swine have such a bad reputation for precisely the same reasons they are so valuable as a source of food: they are intelligent, self-sufficient, and omnivorous. What's more, he argues, we ignore our historic partnership with these astonishing animals at our peril. Tracing the interplay of pig biology and human culture from Neolithic villages 10,000 years ago to modern industrial farms, Essig blends culinary and natural history to demonstrate the vast importance of the pig and the tragedy of its modern treatment at the hands of humans. Pork, Essig explains, has long been a staple of the human diet, prized in societies from Ancient Rome to dynastic China to the contemporary American South. Yet pigs' ability to track down and eat a wide range of substances (some of them distinctly unpalatable to humans) and convert them into edible meat has also led people throughout history to demonize the entire species as craven and unclean. Today's unconscionable system of factory farming, Essig explains, is only the latest instance of humans taking pigs for granted, and the most recent evidence of how both pigs and people suffer when our symbiotic relationship falls out of balance. An expansive, illuminating history of one of our most vital yet unsung food animals, Lesser Beasts turns a spotlight on the humble creature that, perhaps more than any other, has been a mainstay of civilization since its very beginnings - whether we like it or not.
©2015 Mark Essig (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
The Hustler
Summary
To Fast Eddie Felsen, a young pool hustler, there was only one thing that mattered: to make the big time and the big money in the world of pool by beating the best in the country. Hustling suckers in small towns for good stake money was practice for his goal, and when he felt ready he went to Bennington's pool hall in Chicago to find Minnesota Fats. Eddie and Fats pit nerve against skill in a fantastic match over an unbroken 36 hours. Eddie's final painful loss teaches him that nerve alone isn't enough - guts, stamina, and character make the difference between winners and losers. It takes an interlude with Sarah, an alcoholic and a born loser, to bring the lesson home, and the shrewd advice and backing of Bert, a professional gambler, to put it into practice. Bert knows talent without character is nothing and stakes Eddie to a climactic all-or-nothing rematch. When it is over, Eddie knows a great deal more about big-time pool, about money, and about himself. In beating Fats he became the best in the country.
©2014 Walter Tevis (P)2016 Tantor
Hunting the Jackal
Summary
For more than half a century, Special Forces and CIA legend Billy Waugh dedicated his life to tracking down and eliminating America's most virulent enemies. Operating from the darkest shadows and most desolate corners of the world, he made his mark in many of the most important operations in the annals of US Spec Ops. He spent seven and a half years behind enemy lines in Vietnam as a member of a covert group of elite commandos. He trailed Osama Bin Laden in Khartoum in the early '90s and would have killed the terrorist kingpin if his superiors had allowed it. And at the age of 72, he marched through the frozen high plains of Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. Hunting the Jackal is the astonishing true account of the singular career of a courageous soldier in his nation's shadow wars - including his pivotal role in the previously untold story of the capture of the most infamous and elusive assassin in history, Carlos the Jackal.
©2004 Billy Waugh (P)2017 Tantor
Globalists
Summary
Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level. Slobodian begins in Austria in the 1920s. Empires were dissolving and nationalism, socialism, and democratic self-determination threatened the stability of the global capitalist system. In response, Austrian intellectuals called for a new way of organizing the world. But they and their successors in academia and government, from such famous economists as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises to influential but lesser-known figures such as Wilhelm Röpke and Michael Heilperin, did not propose a regime of laissez-faire. Rather they used states and global institutions - the League of Nations, the European Court of Justice, the World Trade Organization, and international investment law - to insulate the markets against sovereign states, political change, and turbulent democratic demands for greater equality and social justice. Far from discarding the regulatory state, neoliberals wanted to harness it to their grand project of protecting capitalism on a global scale. It was a project, Slobodian shows, that changed the world, but that was also undermined time and again by the inequality, relentless change, and social injustice that accompanied it.
©2018 the President and Fellows of Harvard College (P)2018 Tantor