Patrick Frederic has narrated 7 audiobooks on Listento.it by 12 authors, with an average listener rating of 3★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Flatland.
Flatland
Summary
"Your world has not just four dimensions, but five, fifty, a million, or even an infinity of them!" - A. Square For more than 100 years, Edwin Abbott's mathematical adventure has charmed and fascinated. Set in a world on one plane, Flatland takes listeners on a strange and wonderful journey. This timeless fantasy tells the story of A. Square, a character who lives in a completely flat world where all the inhabitants are geometric shapes and think their world of length and width is the only world that exists. When Square is whisked away to the Land of Three Dimensions, he shakes up his fellow two-dimensional beings with his notion of a dimension beyond their own. One of the rare novels about math and philosophy with almost universal appeal, Flatland is simultaneously a brilliant parody of Victorian society and a fictional guide to the concepts of relativity and the multiple dimensions of space.
©1884 Edwin A. Abbott (P)2001 Random House, Inc.
George H. W. Bush
Summary
George Bush was an uncomfortable leader, a distant patrician figure who spoke awkwardly and was long thought to lack "the vision thing". And yet, as Timothy Naftali argues, there was no person of his generation better prepared for the challenges facing the United States as the Cold War ended. Bush brilliantly shepherded Russian reformers through the liberalization of their socialist system and skillfully orchestrated the reunification of Germany. And following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, he united the global community to defeat and punish Saddam Hussein. Domestically, Bush reasserted principles of fiscal discipline and political accountability. Yet it was ultimately his trademark propriety that cost Bush his chance at a second term. Bush's landmark budget deal was characterized as a political defeat rather than a show of fiscal responsibility; his caution in dealing with Saddam Hussein was considered by many Republicans a pathetic compromise. With his party divided, Bush lost his bid for reelection in 1992, but in a final irony, the conservatives who scorned him would return to power eight years later, under his son and namesake.
©2007 Timothy Naftali (P)2007 Macmillan Audio
Jennifer Government
Summary
In Max Barry's twisted, hilarious vision of the near future, the world is run by giant American corporations; taxes are illegal; employees take the last names of the companies they work for; The Police and The NRA are publicly-traded security firms; the U.S. government may only investigate crimes if they can bill a citizen directly.Hack Nike is a lowly merchandising officer who's not very good at negotiating his salary. So when John Nike and John Nike, offer him a contract, he signs without reading it. Unfortunately, Hack's new contract involves shooting teenagers to build up street cred for Nike's new line of $2,500 sneakers. Scared, Hack goes to The Police, who lease the assassinations to The NRA.Soon Hack finds himself pursued by Jennifer Government, a tough-talking agent with a barcode tattoo under her eye and a rabid determination to nail John Nike. In a world where your job title means everything, the most cherished possession is a platinum credit card, Jennifer Government is the consumer watchdog from hell.Jennifer Government is a Catch-22 for the New World Order, a satire both broad and pointed, deeply funny and disturbingly on-target.
©2003 Max Barry (P)2003 Random House, Inc., Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.
Physical
Summary
A wild ride through the dark heart of American health and health care, plus sex, drugs, and stem-cell wars. Physical is the story of a hard-living, happily married, middle-aged American (the author) who gets a three-day "executive checkup" at the Mayo Clinic and is thereby forced to confront his mortality, not to mention glove-wearing doctors and the pair of dominatrix-esque technicians who supervise his stress test quite strictly. James McManus must understand his revised actuarial odds in the light of his not-so-long-lived forebears and the fact that his youngest children are only six- and five-years-old. He has to survive his own cardiovascular system, inherited habits, and genetic handicaps long enough to see Bea and Grace into adulthood. But with so much at stake, and in spite of his terror of death, he may not have the willpower to follow the Mayo clinicians' advice. On a related health front, McManus' 29-year-old daughter, Bridget, has lived with juvenile diabetes since she was four, and the Bush Administration's opposition to the stem-cell research that could save her life makes him feel like he "might have to do something rash". Meanwhile, should he have a vasectomy? Or try for another child, having lost his only son? How much longer will he be able to perform such manly feats without Viagra? Is his grateful wife sleeping with the brilliant ophthalmological surgeon who saved their daughter's vision? Physical negotiates the political and medical forks in the labyrinth of our health care system and calls for sanity and enlightenment in the stem-cell research wars. It's a no-holds-barred, wrenching, often hilarious portrait of the looming mortality of a privileged generation that can't believe the party's winding down, if not over.
©2006 James McManus (P)2006 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC
Indecision
Summary
Benjamin Kunkel's brilliantly comic debut novel concerns one of the central maladies of our time: a pathological indecision that turns abundance into an affliction and opportunity into a curse. Dwight B. Wilmerding is only 28, but he's having a midlife crisis. Of course, living a dissolute, dormlike existence in a tiny apartment and working in tech support at the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer are not especially conducive to wisdom. And a few sessions of psychoanalysis conducted by his sister have distinctly failed to help with his biggest problem: a chronic inability to make up his mind. Encouraged by one of his roommates to try an experimental pharmaceutical meant to banish indecision, Dwight jumps at the chance (not without some meditation on the hazards of jumping) and swallows the first fateful pill. And when all at once he is "pfired" from Pfizer and invited to a rendezvous in exotic Ecuador with the girl of his long-ago prep-school dreams, he finds himself on the brink of a new life. The trouble, well, one of the troubles, is that Dwight can't decide if the pills are working. Deep in the jungles of the Amazon, in the foreign country of a changed outlook, his would-be romantic escape becomes a hilarious journey into unbidden responsibility and unwelcome knowledge. How to affirm happiness without living in constant denial of the ways of the world? How to commit, and to what? At once funny and poignant, gentle and outrageous, finely intelligent and proudly silly, Indecision rings with a voice of great energy and originality, while its deeper inquiries reflect the concerns and style of a generation.
©2005 Benjamin Kunkel (P)2005 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.
Legally Correct Fairy Tales
Summary
Why did the Three Little-Pigs call 911? Will the Three Bears sue Goldilocks for trespassing? Who cracked the Humpty Dumpty case? Find out the answers to these fascinating legal inquiries and many others in these hilarious reenactments of bedtime classics transferred into the courtroom and translated into legalese. Eleven different voices, including the author's, bring life to such characters as Little-Pigg, Diana Freewoman, the Jolly Green Giant, and of course various attorneys. The perfect tales for our litigious age.
©1996 David Fisher, All Rights Reserved, Adaptation Approved by the Author (P)1996 Time Warner AudioBooks, © 1996 Time Warner AudioBooks (Packaging Rights Only), A Division of Time Warner Trade Publishing
The Necessary Revolution
Summary
Imagine a world in which the excess energy from one business would be used to heat another. Where buildings need less and less energy around the world, and where "regenerative" commercial buildings - ones that create more energy than they use - are being designed. A world in which environmentally sound products and processes would be more cost-effective than wasteful ones. A world in which corporations such as Costco, Nike, BP, and countless others are forming partnerships with environmental and social justice organizations to ensure better stewardship of the Earth and better livelihoods in the developing world. Now, stop imagining - that world is already emerging. A revolution is underway in today's organizations. As Peter Senge and his coauthors reveal in The Necessary Revolution, companies around the world are boldly leading the change from dead-end "business as usual" tactics to transformative strategies that are essential for creating a flourishing, sustainable world. There is a long way to go, but the era of denial has ended. Today's most innovative leaders are recognizing that for the sake of our companies and our world, we must implement revolutionary - not just incremental - changes in the way we live and work. Brimming with inspiring stories from individuals and organizations tackling social and environmental problems around the globe, The Necessary Revolution reveals how ordinary people at every level are transforming their businesses and communities. By working collaboratively across boundaries, they are exploring and putting into place unprecedented solutions that move beyond just being "less bad" to creating pathways that will enable us to flourish in an increasingly interdependent world.
©2008 Peter Senge, Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Laur, Sara Schley, and Bryan Smith (P)2008 Random House, Inc.