Lloyd James has narrated 137 audiobooks on Listento.it by 119 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 2,410 ratings. The most-rated is Sword of Destiny.
Captivology
Summary
The former editor of Mashable and cofounder of DominateFund examines the psychological phenomena that captivate our attention--and how we can leverage them to draw and retain attention for our ideas, work, companies, and more. Whether you're an artist or a salesperson, a teacher or an engineer, a marketer or a parent, putting the spotlight on your ideas, insights, projects, and products requires a deep understanding of the science of attention. In Captivology, award-winning journalist and entrepreneur Ben Parr explains how and why the mind pays attention to some events or people and not others and presents seven captivation triggers--techniques guaranteed to help you capture and retain the attention of friends, colleagues, customers, fans, and even strangers. Parr combines the latest research on attention with interviews with more than 50 scientists and visionaries--Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, film director Steven Soderbergh, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, magician Jon Armstrong, New York Times best-selling author Susan Cain, Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, founder of Reddit Alexis Ohanian, and more--who have successfully brought their ideas, projects, companies, and products to the forefront of cultural consciousness. The result is an insightful and practical audiobook that will change how you assign jobs to your kids or staff, craft a multimillion-dollar ad campaign, deliver your next presentation, attract users to your product, or convince the world to support your cause.
©2015 Ben Parr (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers
A Death in the Family
Summary
Audie Award Nominee, Classic, 2013 Decades after its original publication, James Agee’s last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man’s death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed. On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxville, Tennessee, to tend to his father, whom he believes is dying. The summons turns out to be a false alarm, but on his way back to his family, Jay has a car accident and is killed instantly. Dancing back and forth in time and braiding the viewpoints of Jay’s wife, brother, and young son, Rufus, Agee creates an overwhelmingly powerful novel of innocence, tenderness, and loss that should be read aloud for the sheer music of its prose.
©1938 1956, 1957 by the James Agee Trust. 1957 by the New Yorker Magazine, Inc. 1985 by Mia Agee (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
unChristian
Summary
Christianity has an image problem. Christians are supposed to represent Christ to the world. But according to the latest report card, something has gone terribly wrong. Using descriptions like "hypocritical," "insensitive," and "judgmental," young Americans share an impression of Christians that's nothing short of . . . unChristian. Find out why these negative perceptions exist, learn how to reverse them in a Christlike manner, and discover practical examples of how Christians can positively contribute to culture.
©2007 David Kinnaman (P)2007 christianaudio.com
Pistol
Summary
Pistol is more than the biography of a ballplayer. It's the stuff of classic novels: the story of a boy transformed by his father's dream and the cost of that dream. Even as Pete Maravich became Pistol Pete, a basketball icon for baby boomers, all the Maraviches paid a price. Now acclaimed author Mark Kriegel has brilliantly captured the saga of an American family: its rise, its apparent ruin, and, finally, its redemption. Almost four decades have passed since Maravich entered the national consciousness as basketball's boy wizard. No one had ever played the game like the kid with the floppy socks and shaggy hair. And all these years later, no one else ever has. The idea of Pistol Pete continues to resonate with young people today just as powerfully as it did with their fathers. In averaging 44.2 points a game at Louisiana State University, he established records that will never be broken. But even more enduring than the numbers was the sense of ecstasy and artistry with which he played. With the ball in his hands, Maravich had a singular power to inspire awe, inflict embarrassment, or even tell a joke. But he wasn't merely a mesmerizing showman. He was basketball's answer to Elvis, a white Southerner who sold Middle America on a black man's game. Like Elvis, he paid a terrible price, becoming a prisoner of his own fame. Set largely in the South, Kriegel's Pistol - a tale of obsession and basketball, fathers and sons - merges several archetypal characters. Maravich was a child prodigy, a prodigal son, his father's ransom in a Faustian bargain, and a Great White Hope. But he was also a creature of contradictions: always the outsider but a virtuoso in a team sport, an exuberant showman who wouldn't look you in the eye, a vegetarian boozer, an athlete who lived like a rock star, a suicidal genius saved by Jesus Christ.
©2007 Mark Kriegel (P)2007 Tantor Media Inc.
The First Family
Summary
Before the Five Families who so notoriously dominated U.S. organized crime for a bloody half-century, there was the one-fingered, surpassingly cunning Giuseppe Morello and his murderous coterie of brothers. Born into a life of poverty in rural Sicily, Morello became an American nightmare, pioneering the bizarre initiation rituals, imaginative protection rackets, influential underworld reigns, and Mafia wars later popularized by countless books, television shows, and movies. In The First Family, Mike Dash tells the little known story of the Morello family. He follows the birth of the Mafia in America from the 1890s to the 1920s, from the wharves of New Orleans - where Morello himself disembarked in the United States - to the streets of Little Italy. Using previously untapped secret service archives, prison records, and interviews with surviving family members, Dash brings to life the remarkable villains and unusual heroes of the Mafia's early years, from the colorful members of the Morello family to Joseph Petrosino, an Italian cop with a thick Naples accent, and William Flynn, a dogged U.S. Secret Service agent, who banded together to bring down Morello. More than just a pulse-quickening Mafia narrative, The First Family is the first authoritative account of a particularly crucial period in American history, in which the modern American underworld was born.
©2009 Michael Dash (P)2009 Tantor
President Lincoln
Summary
The American president has come to be the most powerful figure in the world. And back in the 19th century, a great man held that office. William Lee Miller's new book closely examines that great man in that hugely important office: Abraham Lincoln as president. Wars waged by American presidents have come to be pivotal historical events. Here Miller analyzes the commander in chief who coped with the profound moral dilemmas of America's bloodiest war. In his acclaimed book Lincoln's Virtues, Miller explored Abraham Lincoln's intellectual and moral development. Now he completes his "ethical biography", showing the amiable and inexperienced backcountry politician transformed by constitutional alchemy into an oath-bound head of state, slapped in the face from the first minute of his presidency by decisions of the utmost gravity and confronted by the radical moral contradiction left by the nation's Founders: universal ideals of Equality and Liberty and the monstrous injustice of human slavery. With wit and penetrating sensitivity, Miller shows us a Lincoln with unusual intellectual power, as he brings together the great themes that will be his legend: preserving the United States of America while ending the odious institution that corrupted the nation's meaning. Miller finds in this superb politician a remarkable presidential amalgamation: an indomitable resolve, combined with the judgment that keeps it from being mindless stubbornness; and a supreme magnanimity, combined with the discriminating judgment that keeps it from being sentimentality. Here is the realistic war leader persisting after multiple defeats, pressing his generals to take the battle to the enemy, insisting that the objective was the destruction of Lee's army and not the capture of territory, saying that breath alone kills no rebels, remarking that he regretted war does not admit of holy days, asking whether one could believe that he would strike lighter blows rather than heavier ones...
©2008 William Lee Miller (P)2008 Tantor
Everything Must Change
Summary
What do the life and teaching of Jesus have to say about the most critical global problems in our world today? Acclaimed author and Emergent church leader Brian McLaren states, "More and more Christian leaders are beginning to realize that for the millions of young adults who have recently dropped out of church, Christianity is a failed religion. Why? Because it has specialized in dealing with 'spiritual needs' to the exclusion of physical and social needs. It has focused on 'me' and 'my eternal destiny,' but it has failed to address the dominant societal and global realities of their lifetime: systemic injustice, poverty, and dysfunction." McLaren asks, "Shouldn't a message purporting to be the best news in the world be doing better than this?" What he sets forth in this provocative, unsettling work is a "form of Christian faith that is holistic, integral, balanced, that offers good news for both the living and the dying, that speaks of God's grace at work both in this life and the life to come, both to individuals and to societies and the planet as a whole."
©2007 Brian D. McLaren (P)2008 christianaudio.com
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Summary
A landmark work of American photojournalism "renowned for its fusion of social conscience and artistic radicality" (New York Times). In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was first published in 1941 to enormous critical acclaim. This unsparing record of place, the people who shaped the land, and the rhythm of their lives is intensely moving and unrelentingly honest, and today - recognized by the New York Public Library as one of the most influential books of the 20th century - it stands as a poetic tract of its time. With a 64-page photographic prologue featuring archival reproductions of Evans' classic images, this book offers listeners a window into a remarkable slice of American history.
©1939,1940 © 1941 by James Agee and Walker Evans. © renewed 1969 by Mia Fritsch Agee and Walker Evans. © 1960 by Walker Evans. © renewed 1988 by John T. Hill, executor of the estate of Walker Evans (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Telex from Cuba
Summary
Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. The debut novel by New York Times best-selling author Rachel Kushner, called “shimmering” (The New Yorker), “multilayered and absorbing” (The New York Times Book Review), and “gorgeously written” (Kirkus Reviews). Young Everly Lederer and K.C. Stites come of age in Oriente Province, where the Americans tend their own fiefdom - 300,000 acres of United Fruit Company sugarcane that surround their gated enclave. If the rural tropics are a child's dreamworld, Everly and K.C. nevertheless have keen eyes for the indulgences and betrayals of the grown-ups around them - the mordant drinking and illicit loves, the race hierarchies and violence. In Havana, 1,000 kilometers and a world away from the American colony, a cabaret dancer meets a French agitator named Christian de La Mazière, whose seductive demeanor can't mask his shameful past. Together, they become enmeshed in the brewing political underground. When Fidel and Raúl Castro lead a revolt from the mountains above the cane plantation, torching the sugar and kidnapping a boat full of "yanqui" revelers, K.C. and Everly begin to discover the brutality that keeps the colony humming. Though their parents remain blissfully untouched by the forces of history, the children hear the whispers of what is to come. Kushner's first novel is a tour de force, haunting and compelling, with the urgency of a telex from a forgotten time and place.
©2008 Rachel Kushner (P)2019 Simon & Schuster
Finding Organic Church
Summary
From the author of Reimagining Church comes an essential guide that provides practical, effective tools for finding vibrant Christian communities. Driven by a passion for the body of Christ, Frank Viola has written some of today's most authoritative and celebrated works on the growing home, organic, and missional church movements. Now Viola shares practical keys to a healthy and successful church plant. Viola contends that many congregations today are struggling to survive, not because of bad planning, but poor planting. He presents an essential guide for starting and nourishing organic churches in any culture. Drawing from both Scripture and a wealth of experience, Viola offers real-world tools, insights, and practical suggestions so churches won't just grow, but thrive.
©2009 Frank Viola (P)2009 christianaudio.com
The Orphan of Ellis Island
Summary
Dominic Cantori is an orphan. Ashamed of his situation, Dominic avoids making friends for fear of exposing his terrible secret. One day on a class trip to Ellis Island, a tour guide asks everyone about their families. Immediately, Dominic flees from the class and hides in a closet, where he falls asleep for hours. When he wakes up, the museum is deserted. Lonely and afraid, he picks up one display telephone after another, listening to the recorded voices of immigrants who describe their lives in faraway countries and their journeys to Ellis Island. To Dominic's surprise, the voice of an old Italian immigrant speaks directly to him! And before he knows it, he's transported back in time: to Italy in 1908. There, he unlocks the door to his past, and discovers just what it feels like to be loved by his own family.
©1997 Elvira Woodruff (P)2007 Blackstone Audio Inc.
Give Me Tomorrow
Summary
“If I were God, what would you want for Christmas?” With a thousand-yard stare, a haggard and bloodied marine looked incredulously at the war correspondent who asked him this question. In an answer that took “almost forever,” the marine responded, “Give me tomorrow.” After nearly four months of continuous and bloody combat in Korea, such a wish seemed impossible. For many of the men of George Company, or “Bloody George” - one of the Forgotten War’s most decorated yet unrecognized companies - this would be their last day. This is the epic story of George Company, Spartans for the modern age. After storming ashore at Inchon and fighting house-to-house in Seoul, America’s last reserve unit found itself on the frozen tundra of the Chosin Reservoir facing an entire division of Chinese troops. Little did this small band of men - green troops who had been rushed through training to bring fresh forces to the war - know they would soon be saviors. This is their story, and it will never again be forgotten.
©2010 Patrick K. O’Donnell (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Change the Culture, Change the Game
Summary
Two-time New York Times best-selling authors Roger Connors and Tom Smith show how leaders can achieve record-breaking results by quickly and effectively shaping their organizational culture to capitalize on their greatest asset - their people. Change the Culture, Change the Game joins their classic book The Oz Principle and their recent best seller How Did That Happen? to complete the most comprehensive series ever written on workplace accountability. Based on their earlier book Journey to the Emerald City, this fully revised installment captures what the authors have learned while working with hundreds of thousands of people on using organizational culture as a strategic advantage. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2011 Partners in Leadership, LLC (P)2011 Tantor
Arkansas Mischief
Summary
As Bill Clinton's political and business mentor, Jim McDougal, with his knowledge of embarrassing real-estate and banking deals, bribes, and obstructions of justice, long haunted the White House. McDougal's vivid self-portrait, completed only days before his death and coauthored by veteran journalist Curtis Wilkie, reveals the hidden intersections of politics and special interests in Arkansas and the betrayals that followed. It is the story of how ambitious men and women climbed out of rural obscurity and "how friendships break down and lives are ruined". Anecdotes fall like bright coins from a raconteur's rich purse. "Whitewater" is shown for what it was, a venture in land speculation that fell victim to mismanagement and high interest rates. Lies and cover-ups were the inevitable result. Vintage political history, Arkansas Mischief is a southern tragedy with lessons for us all.
©1998 Jim McDougal and Curtis Wilkie (P)1998 Blackstone Audiobooks
Guernica
Summary
Calling to mind such timeless war-and-love classics as Corelli's Mandolin and The English Patient, Guernica is a transporting novel that thrums with the power of storytelling and is peopled with characters driven by grit and heart. In 1935, Miguel Navarro finds himself in conflict with the Spanish Civil Guard and flees the Basque fishing village of Lekeitio to make a new start in Guernica, the center of Basque culture and tradition. In the midst of this isolated bastion of democratic values, Miguel finds more than a new life - he finds someone to live for. Miren Ansotegui is a charismatic and graceful dancer who has her pick of the bachelors in Guernica, but she focuses only on the charming and mysterious Miguel. The two discover a love that war and tragedy cannot destroy. History and fiction merge seamlessly in this beautiful novel about the resilience of family, love, and tradition in the face of hardship. The bombing of Guernica was a devastating experiment in total warfare by the German Luftwaffe in the run-up to World War II. For the Basques, it was an attack on the soul of their ancient nation; for the world, it was an unprecedented crime against humanity. In his first novel, Boling reintroduces the event and paints his own picture of a people so strong, vibrant, and proud that they are willing to do whatever it takes to protect their values, their country, and their loved ones.
©208 Dave Boling (P)2008 Tantor
The Witch's Daughter
Summary
Though many perished in the dark times past, a precious few survivors escaped, fleeing certain doom to find a dazzling, dangerous land of wonder. Here wizards and witches inhabited forests spun from enchantment and towers of celestial beauty. But in this place of promised safety, the Black Warlock was rising from the ashes of defeat - with an insatiable lust to dominate the world. Square in the path of peril was Rhiannon, the gently reared daughter of the Emerald Witch. As hamlets from the Crystal Mountains to Avalon fell before the fury of the Black Warlock, the young witch sensed a sudden call; strange, terrifying powers tingled within her body. Now Rhiannon had to summon these new, untested abilities to stop the ancient warlock, an enemy who had long since mastered the forces of the universe and bent them to his diabolical will.
©1991 R.A. Salvatore (P)2010 Tantor
Winning the Heart of Your Child
Summary
Many of us enter parenthood with a perfect vision of what our family will be. But along the way, we discover that the children we've been blessed with are real human beings, with their own minds, ideals, and views of the world. Our influence only goes so far, and when those children reach the pre-teen and teenage years, it may seem to have disappeared completely. Yet at no time in a kid's life is their parents' positive, godly influence more critical. For parents who are concerned that their child is pulling away, following poor role models, or making choices that will lead to pain and difficulty, Mike Berry has good news: It's not too late. He offers parents six keys to maximizing and leveraging their influence to help their children through these difficult years and develop a relationship with them that can weather any storm.
©2019 Mission Audio (P)2019 Mission Audio
Appomattox
Summary
With the conclusion of the 10-volume Civil War Battle Series, the multiple strands of the story are woven toward their resolution. Members of the Brannon family are involved in battles spread across the country. In the Shenandoah Valley, Mac and Titus fight alongside Fitzhugh Lee. Nathan Hatcher wears the Union blue in the Dakota Territory, while in the Deep South, Cory fights against William T. Sherman and Henry rides with Nathan Bedford Forrest in Alabama. In the spring of 1865 the war reaches its climax at a crossroads in Virginia known as Appomattox. Soon after, the war is brought home to the Brannon farm when carpetbaggers move into the South and the family must decide whether to fight or flee.
©2003 James Reasoner (P)2006 Blackstone Audiobooks
Vicksburg
Summary
Vicksburg is the fifth book in a series of novels spanning the Civil War and describing its effects on one southern family. In the waning months of 1862, as the Union army advances closer and closer, Cory Brannon must abandon the supply train to undertake a vital mission for Confederate General John Pemberton, the commander in charge of Vicksburg's defenses. The Federal bombardment, illness, injury, and starvation all take their toll on the defenders of Vicksburg, forcing Cory and Lucille to face decisions that threaten not only their love but also their lives.
©2001 James Reasoner (P)2003 Blackstone Audiobooks
The Detonators
Summary
A tale of terrorism, espionage, and an epic struggle for justice in an America on the verge, sparked by a massive and mysterious explosion in New York Harbor in 1916.That year, while the Allied and Central forces waged war in Europe, a group of German saboteurs blew up Black Tom Island, a spit of land in New York Harbor within earshot of downtown Manhattan. The subsequent hail of missiles and gunpowder devastated much of lower New York City. The attack, so massive that as far away as Maryland people could feel the ground shake, had been shockingly easy. America was crisscrossed with networks of German agents, hiding in full daylight, an "enemy within" plotting further, deadlier attacks. All the way up to the president, officials had known something like this could happen, and yet nothing had been done.Twenty years later, the German government had still managed to evade responsibility for the crime, and probably would have continued to, were it not for the determination of three lawyers named McCloy, Peaslee, and Martin. These men, most crucially the young John McCloy, made it their mission to solve a mystery that began during the First World War and barely ended before the second.The Detonators is a fascinating portrait of these men and their time, an era in which the rising American establishment engaged the world. It is also the dramatic love story of John and Ellen McCloy, and the first full accounting of a crime and cover-up that resonates strongly in post-9/11 America.
©2006 Chad Millman (P)2006 Tantor Media Inc