Kevin Kenerly has narrated 65 audiobooks on Listento.it by 70 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 761 ratings. The most-rated is The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
Meditations from the Mat
Summary
As more and more people in the West pursue yoga in its various forms, whether at traditional centers, in the high-powered atmosphere of sports clubs, or on their own, they begin to realize that far from being just another exercise routine, yoga is a discipline of the body and the mind. The 365 meditations included in this book offer a way to integrate the mindfulness that yoga teaches into everyday life. Whether used in the morning to set the tone for the day, during yoga exercise itself, or at the end of the day, during evening reflection, Meditations from the Mat will support and enhance anyone's yoga journey.
©2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc. (P)2015 Blackstone Audiobooks
No Name in the Street
Summary
This stunningly personal document and extraordinary history of the turbulent '60s and early '70s displays James Baldwin's fury and despair more deeply than any of his other works. In vivid detail he remembers the Harlem childhood that shaped his early consciousness, the later events that scored his heart with pain - the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his return to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.
©1972 James Baldwin (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
A Kind of Freedom
Summary
Evelyn is a Creole woman who comes of age in New Orleans at the height of World War II. Her family inhabits the upper echelon of black society, and when she falls for no-name Renard, she is forced to choose between her life of privilege and the man she loves. In 1982, Evelyn's daughter Jackie is a frazzled single mother grappling with her absent husband's drug addiction. Just as she comes to terms with his abandoning the family, he returns, ready to resume their old life. Jackie must decide if the promise of her husband is worth the near certainty that he will leave again. Jackie's son T. C. loves the creative process of growing marijuana more than the weed itself. He finds something hypnotic about training the seedlings, testing the levels, trimming the leaves, and drying the buds. He was a square before Hurricane Katrina, but the New Orleans he knew didn't survive the storm, and in its wake he was changed too. Now, fresh out of a four-month stint for possession with the intent to distribute, he decides to start over - until an old friend convinces him to stake his new beginning on one last deal. For Evelyn, Jim Crow is an ongoing reality, and in its wake, new threats spring up to haunt her descendants. A Kind of Freedom is an urgent novel that explores the legacy of racial disparity in the South through a poignant and redemptive family history.
©2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc. (P)2017 Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
The CIA UFO Papers
Summary
Here are the secret CIA papers that prove that the government has been tracking UFOs and extraterrestrials for over 50 years. In autumn 2016, the CIA sent to its website a cache of electronic files previously released under the Freedom of Information Act but housed at the National Archives. Among a variety of subjects were "unidentified flying objects." Finally, a stockpile of reports and correspondences were available for serious UFO researchers to examine at home. This book consists of selections from those secret files. Dan Wright spent 18 months selecting, editing, and organizing the 550 files that are relevant to UFO research and has produced a chronological collection of CIA documents spanning 1949 to 2000. Each chapter focuses on a particular year. The summary of documents for each year is followed by a section called "While You Were Away from Your Desk", which provides historical and cultural context for the document summaries and examines other sightings and contacts that are not mentioned in the CIA files. Among the fascinating tidbits are: A memo to J. Edgar Hoover about flying saucer reports and The 1949 conference at Los Alamos that included Edward Teller, upper atmosphere physicist Dr. Joseph Kaplan, and other renowned scientists in which the participants debated whether recent incidents were natural phenomena or UFO sightings. This is a must-listen for those fascinated by the history of UFO sightings and those interested in government secrets and cover-ups.
©2019 Dan Wright. Foreword © by Jan Harzan (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing
The Truth About Grace
Summary
In this sequel to The Pecan Man, Eldred Mims has died in prison after serving time for a crime he did not commit. When Ora Lee Beckworth decides to set the record straight, her confession leaves Blanche Lowery's daughters, Patrice and Grace, to grapple with the aftermath of a lifetime of lies. Now the sisters must reframe everything they thought they knew about their mother, their brother, and the man they knew as Eddie.
©2018 Cassie Dandridge Selleck (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Black Mamba Boy
Summary
Yemen, 1935. Jama is a half-feral child scavenging with his friends in the dusty streets of a great seaport. For Jama, life is a carnival, at least when he can fill his belly. When his mother dies young, she leaves him only an amulet stuffed with one hundred rupees. Jama decides to spend her life's meager savings to search for his missing father, rumored to be a driver for the British in the north. So begins Jama's extraordinary journey of more than a thousand miles to Egypt. He slings himself from one perilous city to another, fiercely enjoying life on the road and relying on his vast clan network to shelter him and point the way to his father, who always seems just out of reach. In his travels, Jama will witness scenes of great humanity and brutality; he will be caught up in the indifferent, grinding machine of war; he will crisscross the Red Sea in search of working papers and a ship.
©2010 Nadifa Mohamed (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Postman
Summary
He was a survivor - a wanderer who traded tales for food and shelter in the dark and savage aftermath of a devastating war. Fate touches him one chill winter’s day when he borrows the jacket of a long-dead postal worker to protect himself from the cold. The old, worn uniform still has power as a symbol of hope, and with it he begins to weave his greatest tale, of a nation on the road to recovery. This is the story of a lie that became the most powerful kind of truth. A timeless novel as urgently compelling as War Day or Alas, Babylon, David Brin’s The Postman is the dramatically moving saga of a man who rekindled the spirit of America through the power of a dream, from a modern master of science fiction.
©2020 David Brin (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
Nobody Knows My Name
Summary
James Baldwin's Nobody Knows My Name records the last months of this famed American writer's 10-year self-exile in Europe, his return to America and to Harlem, and his first trip south at the time of the school integration battles. It contains Baldwin's controversial and intimate profiles of Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, and Ingmar Bergman. And it explores such varied themes as the relations between blacks and whites, the role of blacks in America and in Europe, and the question of sexual identity.
©2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc. (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Race Manners
Summary
Talking about race relations is never easy. Bruce A. Jacobs has written a book that shows us how we can begin - not with lofty abstractions or policy arguments, but with practicality and directness. Completely revised and updated, this is a candid assessment of, and guide to, improving race relations, a book Kirkus Reviews called "shocking" and Publishers Weekly termed "a frank, intelligent guide".
©1999, 2006, 2011 Bruce A. Jacobs (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
The Rift
Summary
Fast-paced and terrifyingly real, The Rift is a blockbuster novel of destruction, heroism, and survival that is sure to grab fans of recent disaster movies.
It starts with the dogs. They won’t stop barking. And then the earth shrugs - 8.9 on the Richter scale. It’s the world’s biggest earthquake since Lisbon in 1755, and it doesn’t hit California or Japan or Mexico, but New Madrid, Missouri, a sleepy town on the Mississippi River. Seismologists had predicted the scope of the disaster - but no one listened.
For hundreds of miles around, dams burst, engulfing entire counties in tidal waves of mud and debris. Cities collapse into piles of brick and shards of glass. Hospitals and schools crumble. Bridges twist and snap, spilling rush-hour traffic into rivers already swollen with bodies. Within minutes, there is nothing but chaos and ruin from St. Louis to Vicksburg, from Kansas City to Louisville. Every bridge down, every highway torn, every house gone.
America’s heartland has fallen into the nightmare known as the Rift, a fault line in the earth that wrenchingly exposes the fractures in American society itself. As a strange white mist smelling of sulfur rises from the crevassed ground, the real terror begins for the survivors, who will soon envy the dead, including:
Jason Adams, a teenager separated from his mother;
Nick Ruford, an African-American engineer searching for his estranged daughter;
Noble Frankland, the television preacher whose visions of hell have become all too real;
Larry Hallock, a technician working frantically to prevent a nuclear meltdown at his power station;
And Omar Paxton, a sheriff and Ku Klux Klansman who seeks racial vengeance in the turmoil of disaster.
Walter J. Williams has created a modern American disaster saga, a story based on terrifying fact, filled with non-stop action, peopled with characters who are heartbreakingly real. Witnessing authentic heroes surfacing in the unlikeliest places, you will share their horror, feel their despair, and triumph with them in their struggle to survive. One thing you will know for sure: It can happen here. And sooner or later, it will.
©2013 Walter Jon Williams (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Metamorphica
Summary
A brilliant and daring novel that reimagines Ovid's Metamorphoses In the tradition of his best-selling debut novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey, Zachary Mason's Metamorphica transforms Ovid's epic poem of endless transformation. It reimagines the stories of Narcissus, Pygmalion and Galatea, Midas, and Atalanta and strings them together like the stars in constellations - even Ovid becomes a story. It's as though the ancient mythologies had been rewritten by Borges or Calvino. Metamorphica is an archipelago in which to linger for a while; it reflects a little light from the morning of the world.
©2018 Zachary Mason (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Meditations on Intention and Being
Summary
Yoga has never been more popular. Throughout the United States, people are turning to this ancient practice as a response to the pressures of today's hectic world. In Meditations on Intention and Being, acclaimed yoga teacher Rolf Gates draws on 20 years of teaching experience to explore and explain how to take the mindfulness of yoga off the mat and integrate it into every aspect of life. Presented in the form of 365 inspirational daily reflections, Gates helps listeners - from experienced yogis to novices seeking a little tranquility - to fundamentally reconsider their relationships with their minds, their bodies, and the universe around them through self-reflection. Over the course of seven chapters, he explores effortlessness, nonviolence, the spirit of practice, mindfulness, compassion and loving-kindness, equanimity and joy, and intention and being, giving listeners the tools they need to effect positive changes in their lives.
©2015 Rolf Gates (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
What Matters in Mayhew
Summary
Every town has at least one beloved if misunderstood eccentric, and Beanie Bradsher belongs to Mayhew Junction. Some - LouWanda Crump, for example - would call Beanie a spectacle, but Beanie just marches - and dresses - to the beat of a different drum. Not much has changed over the years in this town. On any given morning, you'll find the same people at the same table at the same cafe, and none of them have changed one iota in the past 20 years. But now Beanie Bradsher has won the lottery and might be dating Sweet Lee Atwater's husband. And the hometown basketball star Vesuvius Jones just got a face full of red velvet cake at the trunk-or-treat. The gossip has never been juicier, which might just be a good thing. Lord knows this town could use a good shaking up.
©2016 Cassie Dandridge Selleck (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Hiding Places
Summary
Family means safety. Family means protection. Until it doesn't. Eleven-year-old Kate Whitby, the youngest member of her odd family, leads an invisible life. They live in their historic small-town hotel, where she is an expert at keeping everyone's secrets: Her sister's a thief, her great-grandmother isn't as crazy as people think, her mother lives in the past, and her beloved grandfather might have killed his best friend. Devoted to the people she loves - more than they have ever been to her - Kate vows to protect each one. Charlie Fuse has lived on the streets since his alcoholic father threw him out. When Charlie's powerful street family tests his loyalty by demanding that he kill the son of a rival gang leader, he refuses. They frame him for the murder, forcing Charlie to run. When Kate finds Charlie injured and penniless, she hides him from his enemies and her uncharitable relatives, unaware that he has a connection to her family as old as the hotel itself. The murderous gang tracks Charlie down. To flush him out, they take the clueless family hostage and threaten young Kate. Even then, Kate keeps Charlie hidden, putting all her childlike faith in one terrible hope: that the family who has never been able to protect her before might learn how to do it now. The full voice cast includes Kevin Kenerly.
©2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc. (P)2015 Blackstone Audiobooks
Grand Central Winter, Expanded Second Edition
Summary
In the underground tunnels below Grand Central Terminal, Lee Stringer - homeless and drug-addicted for 11 years - found a pencil to run through his crack pipe. One day he used it to write. Soon writing became a habit that won out over drugs, and before long Stringer had created one of the most powerful urban memoirs of our time. With humane wisdom and a biting wit, Stringer chronicles the unraveling of his seemingly secure existence as a marketing executive and his odyssey of survival on the streets of New York. Whether he is portraying "God's corner", as he calls 42nd Street, or his friend Suzi, a hooker and "past-due tourist" whose infant he sometimes babysits, whether he recounts taking shelter underneath Grand Central by night and collecting cans by day or making a living hawking Street News on the subway, Lee Stringer conveys the vitality and complexity of a down-and-out life. Rich with small acts of kindness, humor, and even heroism amid violence and desperation, Grand Central Winter offers a touching portrait of our shared humanity.
©2010 Lee Stringer (P)2010 Blackstone Audio
To Shape a New World
Summary
Martin Luther King Jr. may be America's most revered political figure, commemorated in statues, celebrations, and street names around the world. On the 50th anniversary of King's assassination, the man and his activism are as close to public consciousness as ever. But despite his stature, the significance of King's writings and political thought remains underappreciated. In To Shape a New World, Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry state that the marginalization of King's ideas reflects a romantic consensus history that renders the civil rights movement inherently conservative - an effort not at radical reform but at "living up to" enduring ideals laid down by the nation's founders. On this view, King marshaled lofty rhetoric to help redeem the ideas of universal (white) heroes, but produced little original thought. This failure to engage deeply and honestly with King's writings allows him to be conscripted into political projects he would not endorse, including the pernicious form of "color blindness" that insists, amid glaring race-based injustice, that racism has been overcome. Cornel West, Danielle Allen, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Gooding-Williams, and other authors join Shelby and Terry in careful, critical engagement with King's understudied writings on labor and welfare rights, voting rights, racism, civil disobedience, nonviolence, economic inequality, poverty, love, just-war theory, virtue ethics, political theology, imperialism, nationalism, reparations, and social justice. In King's exciting and learned work, the authors find an array of compelling challenges to some of the most pressing political dilemmas of our present, and rethink the legacy of this towering figure.
©2018 Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Just Above My Head
Summary
The stark grief of a brother mourning a brother opens this novel with a stunning, unforgettable experience. Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to the church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the homosexual passion of Giovanni's Room, and to the political fire that inflames his nonfiction work. Here, too, the story of gospel singer Arthur Montana and his family becomes both a journey into another country of the soul and senses - and a living contemporary history of black struggle in this land.
©1978, 1979 James Baldwin (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Slavery's Capitalism
Summary
During the 19th century, the United States entered the ranks of the world's most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human bondage. This was no mere coincidence. Slavery's Capitalism argues for slavery's centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. According to editors Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, the issue is not whether slavery itself was or was not capitalist but rather the impossibility of understanding the nation's spectacular pattern of economic development without situating slavery front and center. American capitalism - renowned for its celebration of market competition, private property, and the self-made man - has its origins in an American slavery predicated on the abhorrent notion that human beings could be legally owned and compelled to work under force of violence. Drawing on the expertise of 16 scholars who are at the forefront of rewriting the history of American economic development, Slavery's Capitalism identifies slavery as the primary force driving key innovations in entrepreneurship, finance, accounting, management, and political economy that are too often attributed to the so-called free market. Approaching the study of slavery as the originating catalyst for the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism casts new light on American credit markets, practices of offshore investment, and understandings of human capital. Rather than seeing slavery as outside the institutional structures of capitalism, the essayists recover slavery's importance to the American economic past and prompt enduring questions about the relationship of market freedom to human freedom. Contributors: Edward E. Baptist, Sven Beckert, Daina Ramey Berry, Kathryn Boodry, Alfred L. Brophy, Stephen Chambers, Eric Kimball, John Majewski, Bonnie Martin, Seth Rockman, Daniel B. Rood, Caitlin Rosenthal, Joshua D. Rothman, Calvin Schermerhorn, Andrew Shankman, and Craig Steven Wilder.
©2016 University of Pennsylvania Press (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Paradise Affair
Summary
Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Bill Pronzini’s next historical mystery The Paradise Affair, perfect for fans of Peaky Blinders and The Alienist. Quincannon’s pursuit of two con men who have absconded to Hawaii with a considerable sum of his employer’s assets dovetails nicely with Sabina’s vision of a second honeymoon. But neither is wont to stay out of trouble, and Sabina inadvertently becomes involved in a locked-room/dying-message murder in Honolulu.
©2020 Pronzini-Muller Family Trust (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing
The Lost Eleven
Summary
Their story was almost forgotten by history. Now known as the Wereth Eleven, these brave African-American soldiers left their homes to join the Allied effort on the front lines of WWII. As members of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion, they provided crucial fire support at the Siege of Bastogne. Among the few who managed to escape the Nazis' devastating Ardennes Offensive, they found refuge in the small village of Wereth, Belgium. A farmer and supporter of the Allies took the exhausted and half-starved men into his home. When Nazi authorities learned of their whereabouts, they did not take the soldiers prisoner, but subjected them to torture and execution in a nearby field. Despite their bravery and sacrifice, these 11 soldiers were omitted from the final Congressional War Crimes report of 1949. For 70 years, their files - marked secret - gathered dust in the National Archive. But in 1994, at the site of their execution, a memorial was dedicated to the Wereth Eleven, and all African-American soldiers who fought in Europe. Drawing on firsthand interviews with family members and fellow soldiers, The Lost Eleven tells the complete story of these nearly forgotten soldiers, their valor in battle, and their tragic end.
©2017 Denise George (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.