Kathy Keane has narrated 3 audiobooks on Listento.it by 3 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 19 ratings. The most-rated is The Dearly Beloved.
The Dearly Beloved
Summary
“This gentle, gorgeously written book may be one of my favorites ever.” (Jenna Bush Hager - A Today show “Read with Jenna” Book Club selection!) This “moving portrait of love and friendship set against a backdrop of social change” (The New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice) traces two married couples whose lives become entangled when the husbands become co-pastors at a famed New York city congregation in the 1960s. Charles and Lily, James and Nan. They meet in Greenwich Village in 1963 when Charles and James are jointly hired to steward the historic Third Presbyterian Church through turbulent times. Their personal differences, however, threaten to tear them apart. Charles is destined to succeed his father as an esteemed professor of history at Harvard, until an unorthodox lecture about faith leads him to ministry. How then, can he fall in love with Lily - fiercely intellectual, elegantly stern - after she tells him with certainty that she will never believe in God? And yet, how can he not? James, the youngest son in a hardscrabble Chicago family, spent much of his youth angry at his alcoholic father and avoiding his anxious mother. Nan grew up in Mississippi, the devout and beloved daughter of a minister and a debutante. James' escape from his desperate circumstances leads him to Nan, and, despite his skepticism of hope in all its forms, her gentle, constant faith changes the course of his life. In The Dearly Beloved, Cara Wall reminds us of “the power of the novel in its simplest, richest form: bearing intimate witness to human beings grappling with their faith and falling in love” (Entertainment Weekly, A-) as we follow these two couples through decades of love and friendship, jealousy and understanding, forgiveness and commitment. Against the backdrop of turbulent changes facing the city and the church’s congregation, Wall offers a poignant meditation on faith and reason, marriage and children, and the ways we find meaning in our lives. The Dearly Beloved is a gorgeous, wise, and provocative novel that is destined to become a classic.
©2019 Cara Wall (P)2019 Simon & Schuster Audio
The Myths of Happiness
Summary
Happiness expert Sonja Lyubomirsky’s research-based lessons in how to find opportunity in life’s thorniest moments. In The Myths of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky isolates the major turning points of adult life, looking to both achievements (marriage, children, professional satisfaction, wealth) and failures (singlehood, divorce, financial ruin, illness) to reveal that our misconceptions about the impact of such events is perhaps the greatest threat to our long-term well-being. Lyubomirsky argues that we have been given false promises - myths that assure us that lifelong happiness will be attained once we hit the culturally confirmed markers of adult success. This restricted view of happiness works to discourage us from recognizing the upside of any negative life turn and blocks us from recognizing our own growth potential. Our outsized expectations transform natural rites of passage into emotional land mines and steer us to make toxic decisions, as The Myths of Happiness reveals. Because we expect the best (or the worst) from life's turning points, we shortsightedly place too much weight on our initial emotional responses. The Myths of Happiness empowers listeners to look beyond their first response, sharing scientific evidence that often it is our mindset - not our circumstances - that matters. Central to these findings is the notion of hedonic adaptation, the fact that people are far more adaptable than they think. Even after a major life change - good or bad - we tend to return to our initial happiness level, forgetting what once made us elated or why we felt that life was so unbearable. The Myths of Happiness offers the perspective we need to make wiser choices, sharing how to slow the effects of this adaptation after a positive turn and find the way forward in a time of darkness. In The Myths of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky turns an empirical eye to the biggest, messiest moments, providing listeners with the clear-eyed vision they need to build the healthiest, most satisfying life. A corrective course on happiness and a call to regard life's twists and turns with a more open mind, The Myths of Happiness shares practical lessons with life-changing potential.
©2013 Sonja Lyubomirsky (P)2013 Penguin Audio
The Kingdom of Childhood
Summary
As a child, hers was a dark fairy tale set against a wonderland of sparkling white snow, with the warm glow of candlelit holy day lanterns keeping the shadows at bay. Back then, there was innocence. And now she’ll do anything to return. The Kingdom of Childhood is the story of a boy and a woman: 16-year-old Zach Patterson, uprooted and struggling to reconcile his knowledge of his mother's extramarital affair, and Judy McFarland, a kindergarten teacher watching her family unravel before her eyes. Thrown together to organize a fundraiser for their failing private school and bonded by loneliness, they begin an affair that at first thrills, then corrupts each of them. Judy sees in Zach the elements of a young man she loved as a child, but what Zach does not realize is that their relationship is—for Judy—only the latest in a lifetime of disturbing secrets. As the walls close in, Zach finds himself needing to disentangle from premature adulthood. But the lines between adult and child have blurred, and life and sanity are unraveling faster and further than anyone could ever have imagined.
©2011 Rebecca Coleman (P)2011 Audible, Inc.