John McLain has narrated 111 audiobooks on Listento.it by 115 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 367 ratings. The most-rated is The Lions of Al-Rassan.
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism
Summary
The worst idea in history is back! Communism has wrecked national economies, enslaved whole peoples, and killed more than a hundred million men and women. What's not to like? Too many young Americans are supporting communism. Millennials prefer socialism to capitalism, and 25 percent have a positive view of Lenin. One in four Americans believe that George W. Bush killed more people than Joseph Stalin. And 69 percent of millennials would vote for a socialist for president. They ought to know better. Communism is the most dangerous idea in world history, producing dire poverty, repression, and carnage wherever it has been tried. And no wonder - because communism flatly denies morality, human nature, and basic facts. But it's always going to be different this time. Renowned scholar and best-selling author Paul Kengor unmasks communism, exposing its blood-drenched history and the strange sway it has long exercised over much of American media and education. He reveals: Stalin alone killed six times as many people as Hitler The Khmer Rouge slaughtered more than a third of the population of Cambodia Communists in Eastern Europe and worldwide tortured Christians Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was directly controlled by the Soviets Obama's CIA director voted for the CPUSA candidate for president in 1980 Unrepentant 60s-era communists are educating American teachers today The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism debunks the world's worst ideology, sounds the alarm about its disturbing popular resurgence, and arms you with facts you need to refute its appeal.
©2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc. (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Occupational Hazards: The Blue-Collar Omnibus
Summary
Winner of the 2018 ABR Listeners Choice Award for best in humor! A collection of absurdist and thought-provoking stories from the author's Return to the Dirt, Just Speculating, and more, including unreleased, exclusive, audio-only content! Performed by a cast of award-winning and Audie® nominated narrators. Fans of the macabre, dark humor, and cerebral thrillers are guaranteed a good listen. Occupational Hazards is an unflinching ride through the absurdity of it all. Existentialism, absurdism, and outlandish humor merge with ordinary, workaday life for a truly unique perspective of the human experience. Not recommended for the faint of heart or easily offended. But if meaty stories are what you're after.... We hope you're hungry.
©2017 Geoff Sturtevant (P)2017 Geoff Sturtevant
Lasso the Wind
Summary
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Winner of the Mountains and Plains Book Seller's Association Award "They have tried to tame it, shave it, fence it, cut it, dam it, drain it, nuke it, poison it, pave it, and subdivide it," writes Timothy Egan of the West; still, "this region's hold on the American character has never seemed stronger." In this colorful and revealing journey through the eleven states west of the 100th meridian, Egan, a third-generation westerner, evokes a lovely and troubled country where land is religion and the holy war between preservers and possessors never ends. Egan leads us on an unconventional, freewheeling tour: from America's oldest continuously inhabited community, the Ancoma Pueblo in New Mexico, to the high kitsch of Lake Havasu City, Arizona, where London Bridge has been painstakingly rebuilt stone by stone; from the fragile beauty of Idaho's Bitterroot Range to the gross excess of Las Vegas, a city built as though in defiance of its arid environment. In a unique blend of travel writing, historical reflection, and passionate polemic, Egan has produced a moving study of the West: how it became what it is, and where it is going.
©1998 Timothy P. Egan (P)2017 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
The Holy
Summary
They knew us before we began to walk upright. Shamans called them guardians, mythmakers called them tricksters, pagans called them gods, churchmen called them demons, folklorists called them shape-shifters. They've obligingly taken any role we've assigned them, and, while needing nothing from us, have accepted whatever we thought was their due? love, hate, fear, worship, condemnation, neglect, oblivion. Even in modern times, when their existence is doubted or denied, they continue to extend invitations to those who would travel a different road, a road not found on any of our cultural maps. But now, perceiving us as a threat to life itself, they issue their invitations with a dark purpose of their own. In this dazzling metaphysical thriller, four who put themselves in the hands of these all-but-forgotten Others venture across a sinister American landscape hidden from normal view, finding their way to interlocking destinies of death, terror, transcendental rapture, and shattering enlightenment.
©2002 Daniel Quinn (P)2011 steerforth press llc
Mystery Writers of America Presents The Mystery Box
Summary
There’s nothing more mysterious than a locked box. Whether it’s a literal strongbox, an empty coffin, the inner workings of a scientist’s mind, or an underground prison cell, there are those who will use any means necessary to unlock the secrets of The Mystery Box. With this anthology, best-selling author Brad Meltzer introduces 21 original stories from today’s most prominent mystery writers. In Laura Lippman’s "Waco 1982", a young reporter stuck with a seemingly mundane assignment on lost-and-found boxes unwittingly discovers a dark crime. In Joseph Finder’s "Heirloom", a scheming neighbor frightens the new couple on the block with an unnerving tale of buried treasure. In R. L. Stine’s "High Stakes", a man on his honeymoon gets drawn into a bizarre bet involving a coffin, a bet he may pay for with his life. From the foothills of Mount Fuji to Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp, from a physics laboratory in wartime Leipzig to an unusual fitness club in Boca Raton, these sometimes terrifying, sometimes funny, and always suspenseful tales will keep you riveted. (The complete list of narrators includes Joe Barrett and Donald Corren.)
©2013 Mystery Writers of America, Inc. (P)2013 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Hang Them Slowly
Summary
Stovepipe Stewart and Wilbur Coleman look like drifters, but don’t be fooled. In this blazing Western saga, these two undercover cowboys get paid to find trouble - and to risk their lives to stomp it out. By any means necessary. Vance Brewster is a hardworking young cowboy. Stovepipe and Wilbur are two new ranch hands working at his side. And all three are caught up in a brewing, trigger-happy Montana range war between the Rafter M and Three Rivers. Then the fury suddenly explodes - in a hail of gunfire, the three men must show their hands: they’re all hiding their true identities. With Vance falling in love with the daughter of the Three Rivers manager, and Stovepipe and Wilbur paid by a tycoon who needs the violence to stop, all three are in mortal danger. Their real enemies are hiding true identities of their own - and they’re not nice men. The body count is about to go sky high...and Stovepipe and Wilbur would prefer not be be on top of the pile.
©2016 J. A. Johnstone (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing
Desert Death-Song
Summary
A collection of stories from the most famous Western author of all time! Desert Death-Song is a compilation of some of Louis L’Amour’s greatest stories, many of which might otherwise be difficult to find. Whether he was writing under his early pen name, Jim Mayo, or his own, L’Amour’s stories are unforgettable, touching on rough and rugged American ideals, and set in the untamable frontier of the Western United States. Nearly a dozen stories are presented here that represent the best of L’Amour’s yarn-spinning writing, a choice collection handpicked from the variety of pulp Western magazines in which the author first became known. The most popular author of Westerns the world has ever known, L’Amour wrote stories full of mavericks, outlaws, romantics, and heroes. His characters follow the unspoken laws and morals of the Wild West, and the pictures he paints are unrivaled in their authenticity. From gold prospectors to sheriffs, the characters of L’Amour's tales will never be forgotten.
©2013 Louis L'Amour Enterprises, Inc. (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
The Range Detectives
Summary
Johnstone Country: The good die young. The bad die younger. From the best-selling masters of Western fiction comes two tough frontier detectives who solve the bloodiest crimes with bravado, brains, and bullets blazing.... Homicide on the range A killer is on the loose in the Arizona Territory. One by one, Tonto Basin ranchers are being murdered for their livestock - and the Cattle Raisers' Association has hired two range detectives to catch the culprit. From the looks of them, Stovepipe Stewart and Wilbur Coleman are just another pair of high-plains drifters. But with their razor-sharp detective skills and rare talent for trouble, they're the last remaining hope for one young cowboy who's been arrested for the murders. Stovepipe and Wilbur believe the boy is innocent. In short order, the trail of clues leads to a secret canyon hideout, and the duo find themselves in the middle of an all-out range war - with the dirtiest gang of cutthroats, thieves, and outlaws the West has ever known.... There's just one mystery left to solve: How will they get out of this alive?
©2016 by J. A. Johnstone (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing
Colter's Journey
Summary
In this thrilling epic of the American West, New York Times best-selling authors William W. Johnstone and J. A. Johnstone capture the human side of the frontier experience in all its glory, grit, and grandeur - through the eyes of one remarkable teenage boy. Leaving their Pennsylvania home to forge a new life in the untamed Oregon Territory of 1845, the Colter family is ambushed by a kill-crazy gang of cutthroats on the Oregon Trail. Fifteen-year-old Tim Colter manages to escape and hide - only to return and find his parents butchered, his sisters Nancy and Margaret missing, and one last killer waiting for his return. Forced to fight for his life, the young Colter embarks on a perilous journey across a lawless frontier, hoping to save his sisters and salvage the dream they lived for. But first Tim has to figure out how to survive. Luckily he finds a new friend in Jed Reno, a grizzled one-eyed trapper who has lived in the Rocky Mountains since the 1820s - and who was attacked by the same gang that ambushed Tim's family. Together the mountain man and the greenhorn set out after the marauders, blazing a trail of vengeance that leads them to one of the deadliest men in the territory. With danger at every turn and death just a heartbeat away, Colter has no choice but to grow up fast - one bullet at a time.
©2017 William W. Johnstone and J. A. Johnstone (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Cutthroats
Summary
Not every Western hero wears a white hat or a tin star. Most of them are just fighting to survive. Some of them can be liars, cheaters, and thieves. And then there's a couple of old-time robbers named Slash and Pecos... After a lifetime of robbing banks and holding up trains, Jimmy "Slash" Braddock and Melvin "Pecos Kid" Baker are ready to call it quits - though not completely by choice. Sold out by their old gang, Slash and Pecos have to bust out of jail and pull one last job to finance their early retirement... The target is a rancher's payroll train. Catch is: the train is carrying a Gatling gun and 20 deputy US marshals who know they're coming. Caught and quickly sentenced to hang, their old enemy - the wheelchair-bound, bucket of mean, Marshal L. C. Bledsoe - shows up at the last minute to spare their lives. For a price. He'll let them live if they hunt down their old gang, the Snake River Marauders. And kill those prairie rats - with extreme prejudice...
©2019 J. A. Johnstone (P)2019 Tantor
The Problem with Lincoln
Summary
So many thousands of books deifying Abraham Lincoln have been published that it is nearly impossible for the average citizen to learn much of anything that is truthful about Lincoln’s presidency. This book should create doubt in anyone’s mind over the designation of Abraham Lincoln as America’s greatest president. Some may even decide that he was the worst. You’ll learn that Lincoln promised to protect slavery forever in his first inaugural address by endorsing the “Corwin Amendment” to the Constitution, which would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with Southern slavery. It should rightly be known as Lincoln’s “slavery forever” speech. You’ll learn that the real reason why Lincoln launched an invasion of his own country (he never admitted that secession was legal or legitimate) was to destroy the voluntary union of the founders and replace it with a coerced union held together by violence and threats of violence, much more like the old Soviet Union than the original American union. You were probably not taught in school that by waging total war on Southern civilians and bombing Southern cities into a smoldering ruin, Lincoln violated all moral codes and international law regarding waging war on civilians and opened the door to the horrific atrocities of 20th-century warfare. Finally, Professor DiLorenzo introduces listeners to the real Abraham Lincoln.
©2020 by Thomas J. DiLorenzo (P)2020 by Blackstone Publishing
Lone Star
Summary
Here is a must-listen history of the Lone Star State, together with an insider's look at the people, politics, and events that have shaped Texas from the beginning right up to our days. Never before has the story been told with more vitality and immediacy. Fehrenbach re-creates the Texas saga from prehistory to the Spanish and French invasions to the heyday of the cotton and cattle empires. He dramatically describes the emergence of Texas as a republic, the vote for secession before the Civil War, and the state's readmission to the Union after the War. In the 20th century oil would emerge as an important economic resource and social change would come. But Texas would remain unmistakably Texas, because Texans "have been made different by the crucible of history; they think and act in different ways, according to the history that shaped their hearts and minds."
©2000 T. R. Fehrenbach (P)2018 Tantor
Close Enemies
Summary
Tigers don’t belong in Yellowstone National Park. Yet, here they are...big, mean, and thirsty for blood. It started as a routine check for park ranger Michael Biörn. A vehicle illegally parked on a service road. An instant later, a child is fighting for her life while the man responsible vanishes into thin air. Stranger still, the encounter leaves Michael wounded and unable to heal for the first time in his eon-long existence. Before the shape-shifter has a chance to reflect on his puzzling disability, the slaying begins. Yellowstone's bears are the first victims, hunted for sport by very large cats. But soon the beasts start targeting humans, and it falls to Michael to stop them. In his weakened state, Michael will need some help to unravel the mystery behind the attacks. But who can he trust when every single one of his friends is a potential suspect? In an investigation spanning three continents, Michael will need to come face to face with the demons of his past to protect those close to him and finally find peace. Books in the Michael Biörn series are mysteries with an urban fantasy backdrop in the tradition of Patricia Briggs, Jim Butcher, and Faith Hunter. Michael Biörn series 0. Michael Biörn (a short story) 1. Shadow Pack 2. Unholy Trinity 3. Close Enemies
©2019 David Fouchard (P)2020 David Marc Daniel Fouchard
Operation Devil Horns
Summary
In a bid to take down MS-13's criminal network in the Mission District of San Francisco, Michael Santini, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, recruits a pair of hardened gang members and convinces them to risk their lives as criminal informants. Set in a city with one of the strictest sanctuary policies protecting illegal immigrants in America, Operation Devil Horns illustrates how politically correct ideology impacts life-or-death crime fighting on the streets. Through the informants' eyes, Operation Devil Horns offers a rare glimpse into the pervasive criminal subculture of MS-13, a gang of Spanish-speaking immigrants that still terrorizes pockets of American society today - including their own compatriots. The case begins with a focus on the gang in San Francisco, eventually widening to include a network that reaches across borders. Santini tracks down the gang's leadership from the Bay Area to the prison cells of corrupt Central American regimes. Eventually, it takes the cold-blooded murder of three family members in San Francisco to shake the American public out of complacency and focus sober attention on a growing and violent threat.
©2018 Bad Hombre, LLC (P)2018 Tantor
Hang Him Twice
Summary
There are a lot of ways a man can end up on a wanted poster. There's the easy way (murder), there's the hard way (robbery), and then there's Dooley Monahan's way (by accident). On the trail west with his trusty horse and dog, the hapless gunslinger stops a mean, hungry bear from making lunch out of the legendary Buffalo Bill Cody. In turn, Cody grubstakes Dooley for the purchase of a silver mine in the lawless, violent boomtown of Leadville, Colorado. Dooley can't believe his good luck. But when he guns down three deadly outlaws, the grateful townsfolk pin a sheriff's badge on Dooley. And that's when his luck runs out... Turns out there's a war going on between two rival gangs. Stagecoaches are being robbed every other day, and fingers are being pointed at Dooley himself. There's a tradition here in these parts, he discovers. If a sheriff's no good, they hang him. And if the next one's no better, they hang him twice...
©2018 J. A. Johnstone (P)2020 Tantor
The Searchers
Summary
In 1836 in East Texas, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by Comanches. She was raised by the tribe and eventually became the wife of a warrior. Twenty-four years after her capture, she was reclaimed by the U.S. cavalry and Texas Rangers and restored to her white family, to die in misery and obscurity. Cynthia Ann's story has been told and re-told over generations to become a foundational American tale. The myth gave rise to operas and one-act plays, and in the 1950s to a novel by Alan LeMay, which would be adapted into one of Hollywood's most legendary films, The Searchers, "The Biggest, Roughest, Toughest... and Most Beautiful Picture Ever Made!" directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne. Glenn Frankel, beginning in Hollywood and then returning to the origins of the story, creates a rich and nuanced anatomy of a timeless film and a quintessentially American myth. The dominant story that has emerged departs dramatically from documented history: it is of the inevitable triumph of white civilization, underpinned by anxiety about the sullying of white women by "savages." What makes John Ford's film so powerful, and so important, Frankel argues, is that it both upholds that myth and undermines it, baring the ambiguities surrounding race, sexuality, and violence in the settling of the West and the making of America.
©2013 Glenn Frankel (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Cattle Kingdom
Summary
A revolutionary new appraisal of the Old West and the America it made The Open Range cattle era lasted barely a quarter-century, but it left America irrevocably changed. These few decades following the Civil War brought America its greatest boom-and-bust cycle until the Depression, the invention of the assembly line, and the dawn of the conservation movement. It inspired legends, such as that icon of rugged individualism, the cowboy. Yet this extraordinary time and its import have remained unexamined for decades. Cattle Kingdom reveals the truth of how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today. The tale takes us from dust-choked cattle drives to the unlikely splendors of boomtowns like Abilene, Kansas, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. We venture from the Texas Panhandle, to the Dakota Badlands, to the Chicago stockyards. We meet a diverse array of players - from the expert cowboy Teddy Blue to the failed rancher and future president Teddy Roosevelt. Knowlton tells us how they and others like them could achieve so many outsized feats: killing millions of bison in a decade, building the first opera house on the open range, driving cattle by the thousand, and much more. Cattle Kingdom is a revelatory new view of the Old West.
©2017 Christopher Knowlton (P)2021 Tantor
After Dachau
Summary
Daniel Quinn, well known for Ishmael - a life-changing book for readers the world over - once again turns the tables and creates an otherworld that is very like our own, yet fascinating beyond words. Imagine that Nazi Germany was the first to develop an atomic bomb and the Allies surrendered. America was never bombed, occupied, or even invaded, but was nonetheless forced to recognize Nazi world dominance. The Nazis continued to press their campaign to rid the planet of "mongrel races" until eventually the world - from Capetown to Tokyo - was populated by only white faces. Two thousand years in the future, people don't remember, or much care, about this distant past. The reality is that to be human is to be caucasian, and what came before was literally ancient history and has nothing to do with the living. Now imagine that reincarnation is real, that souls migrate over time from one living creature to another, and that a soul that once animated an American black woman living at the time of World War II now animates an Aryan in Quinn's new world, and that due to a traumatic accident, memories of this earlier incarnation assert themselves. Compared by readers and critics alike to 1984 and Brave New World, After Dachau is a new dystopian classic with much to say about our own time, and the dynamics of human history.
©2001 Daniel Quinn (P)2011 Steerforth Press LLC
Blood Aces
Summary
The astonishing story of Benny Binion - a rip-roaring saga of murder, money, and the making of Las Vegas. Benny Binion was many things: a cowboy, a pioneering casino owner, a gangster, a killer, and founder of the hugely successful World Series of Poker. Blood Aces tells the story of Binion's crucial role in shaping modern Las Vegas. From a Texas backwater, Binion rose to prominence on a combination of vision, determination, and brutal expediency.
©2014 Doug J. Swanson (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Idoru
Summary
21st century Tokyo, after the millennial quake. Neon rain. Light everywhere blowing under any door you might try to close. Where the New Buildings, the largest in the world, erect themselves unaided, their slow rippling movements like the contractions of a sea-creature... Colin Laney is here looking for work. He is an intuitive fisher for patterns of information, the "signature" an individual creates simply by going about the business of living. But Laney knows how to sift for the dangerous bits. Which makes him useful - to certain people. Chia McKenzie is here on a rescue mission. She's 14. Her idol is the singer Rez, of the band Lo,Rez. When the Seattle chapter of the Lo,Rez fan club decided that he might be in trouble in Tokyo, they sent Chia to check it out. Rei Toei is the idoru - the beautiful, entirely virtual media star adored by all Japan. Rez has declared that he will marry her. This is the rumor that has brought Chia to Tokyo. True or not, the idoru and the powerful interests surrounding her are enough to put all their lives in danger...
©1996 William Gibson (P)2018 Tantor