John Cleland has narrated 4 audiobooks on Listento.it by 7 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 110 ratings. The most-rated is Precious Cargo.
Precious Cargo
Summary
National Best Seller
For listeners of Kristine Barnett's The Spark, Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree, and Ian Brown's The Boy in the Moon, here is a heartfelt, funny, and surprising memoir about one year spent driving a bus full of children with special needs.
With his last novel, Cataract City, Craig Davidson established himself as one of our most talented novelists. But before writing that novel and before his previous work, Rust and Bone, was made into a Golden Globe-nominated film, Davidson experienced a period of poverty, apparent failure, and despair. In this new work of riveting and timely nonfiction, Davidson tells the unvarnished story of one transformative year in his life and of his unlikely relationships with a handful of unique and vibrant children who were, to his initial astonishment and bewilderment and eventual delight, placed in his care for a couple of hours each day - the kids on school bus 3077.
One morning in 2008, desperate and impoverished while trying unsuccessfully to write, Davidson plucked a flyer out of his mailbox that read, "Bus Drivers Wanted". That was the first step toward an unlikely new career: driving a school bus full of special-needs kids for a year. Armed only with a sense of humor akin to that of his charges, a creative approach to the challenge of driving a large, awkward vehicle while corralling a rowdy gang of kids, and unexpected reserves of empathy, Davidson takes us along for the ride. He shows us how his evolving relationship with the kids on that bus, each of them struggling physically as well as emotionally and socially, slowly but surely changed his life along with the lives of the "precious cargo" in his care. This is the extraordinary story of that year and those relationships. It is also a moving, important, and universal story about how we see and treat people with special needs in our society.
©2016 Craig Davidson (P)2018 Knopf Canada
Overdose
Summary
National Best Seller "Overdose is a necessary and searching investigation into a devastating epidemic that should never have happened. Benjamin Perrin painstakingly shows that it need not continue if we, as a society, heed the evidence." (Gabor Maté MD, author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction) An astonishing and powerful look at the ongoing opioid crisis North America is in the middle of a health emergency. Life expectancies are declining. Someone is dying every two hours in Canada from illicit drug overdose. Fentanyl has become a looming presence - an opioid more powerful, pervasive, and deadly than any previous street drug. The victims are many - and often not whom we might expect. They include the poor and forgotten but also our neighbours: professionals, students, and parents. Despite the thousands of deaths, these victims have remained largely invisible. But not anymore. Benjamin Perrin, a law and policy expert, shines a light in this darkest of corners - and his findings challenge many assumptions about the crisis. Why do people use drugs despite the risk of overdosing? Can we crack down on the fentanyl supply? Do supervised consumption sites and providing "safe drugs" enable the problem? Which treatments work? Would decriminalizing all drugs help or do further harm? In this urgent and humane look at a devastating epidemic, Perrin draws on behind-the-scenes interviews with those on the frontlines, including undercover police officers, intelligence analysts, border agents, prosecutors, healthcare professionals, Indigenous organizations, activists, and people who use drugs. Not only does he unveil the many complexities of this situation, but he also offers a new way forward - one that may save thousands of lives.
©2020 Benjamin Perrin (P)2020 Viking
How We Can Win
Summary
Our kids are smart, our banks are sound, our health care system is humane, our democracy is stable - but technological change is about to disrupt our economy and threaten our way of life. Canadians aren't ready for the race to the future. Can we still catch up - or even win? Yes, says Anthony Lacavera, one of Canada's most successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. But we need to change the way we think and talk about our own abilities - dream bigger, aim higher, and go for gold, not bronze. We also need to change the way we do business. Our dominant business culture, Lacavera believes, is fundamentally unCanadian: traditional, backward-looking, insular, timid, greedy, unoriginal - everything that Canadians themselves are not. And that unCanadian business culture, protected by outmoded regulations and government policies, is stifling our economic growth. It dumps roadblocks in the paths of entrepreneurs who want to build the kind of powerhouse businesses that will create jobs and fuel our economy. Anthony Lacavera faced those roadblocks himself when he was building WIND - an epic battle against the big three telecommunications giants in Canada. But he's certain we have the talent and the brains to tear those roadblocks down. He gives us vivid portraits of some of Canada's most important natural resources: our talented, innovative entrepreneurs, who want to change the world for the better (and, yes, make money while they're at it). But we are shipping far too many of them to the United States, gift-wrapped in our tax dollars. They don't want to leave - they're forced out because it's just too difficult to build big, bold businesses in Canada. How We Can Win explains what we need to do to keep them here and what all Canadians must do to ensure our future prosperity. Our biggest problem is not that we are a small country but that we think too small. We can be a nation of big dreamers and bigger doers. Not by aping Silicon Valley but by focusing on uniquely Canadian strengths and then doubling down on them. If we bet aggressively on ourselves and our future rather than clinging to the status quo, we will create a new, more solid economic foundation - one that allows us to win the race to the future without leaving home.
©2017 Anthony Lacavera and Kate Fillion (P)2017 Penguin Random House Canada
A Good War
Summary
“This is the roadmap out of climate crisis that Canadians have been waiting for.” (Naomi Klein, activist and New York Times best-selling author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine) One of Canada’s top policy analysts provides the first full-scale blueprint for meeting our climate change commitments Contains the results of a national poll on Canadians’ attitudes to the climate crisis Shows that radical transformative climate action can be done, while producing jobs and reducing inequality as we retool how we live and work Deeply researched and targeted specifically to Canada and Canadians while providing a model that other countries could follow Canada needs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent to prevent a catastrophic 1.5 degree increase in the earth’s average temperature - assumed by many scientists to be a critical “danger line” for the planet and human life as we know it. It’s 2020, and Canada is not on track to meet our targets. To do so, we’ll need radical systemic change to how we live and work - and fast. How can we ever achieve this? Top policy analyst and author Seth Klein reveals we can do it now because we’ve done it before. During the Second World War, Canadian citizens and government remade the economy by retooling factories, transforming their workforce, and making the war effort a common cause for all Canadians to contribute to. Klein demonstrates how wartime thinking and community efforts can be repurposed today for Canada’s own Green New Deal. He shares how we can create jobs and reduce inequality while tackling our climate obligations for a climate neutral - or even climate zero - future. From enlisting broad public support for new economic models, to job creation through investment in green infrastructure, Klein shows us a bold, practical policy plan for Canada’s sustainable future. More than this: A Good War offers a remarkably hopeful message for how we can meet the defining challenge of our lives. COVID-19 has brought a previously unthinkable pace of change to the world - one that demonstrates our ability to adapt rapidly when we’re at risk. Many recent changes are what Klein proposes here. The world can, actually, turn on a dime if necessary. This is the blueprint for how to do it.
©2020 Seth Klein (P)2020 ECW Press