Paul Bellantoni has narrated 8 audiobooks on Listento.it by 9 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 68 ratings. The most-rated is Turbo Twenty-Three.
Turbo Twenty-Three
Summary
In the heart of Trenton, N. J., a killer is out to make sure someone gets his just desserts. Larry Virgil skipped out on his latest court date after he was arrested for hijacking an eighteen-wheeler full of premium bourbon. Fortunately for bounty hunter Stephanie Plum, Larry is just stupid enough to attempt almost the exact same crime again. Only this time he flees the scene, leaving behind a freezer truck loaded with Bogart ice cream and a dead body—frozen solid and covered in chocolate and chopped pecans. As fate would have it, Stephanie's mentor and occasional employer, Ranger, needs her to go undercover at the Bogart factory to find out who's putting their employees on ice and sabotaging the business. It's going to be hard for Stephanie to keep her hands off all that ice cream, and even harder for her to keep her hands off Ranger. It's also going to be hard to explain to Trenton's hottest cop, Joe Morelli, why she is spending late nights with Ranger, late nights with Lula and Randy Briggs—who are naked and afraid—and late nights keeping tabs on Grandma Mazur and her new fella. Stephanie Plum has a lot on her plate, but for a girl who claims to have "virtually no marketable skills," these are the kinds of sweet assignments she does best.
©2016 Janet Evanovich (P)2016 Random House Audio
The Power of Bad
Summary
"The most important book at the borderland of psychology and politics that I have ever read." (Martin E. P. Seligman, Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Learned Optimism) Why are we devastated by a word of criticism even when it’s mixed with lavish praise? Because our brains are wired to focus on the bad. This negativity effect explains things great and small: why countries blunder into disastrous wars, why couples divorce, why people flub job interviews, how schools fail students, why football coaches stupidly punt on fourth down. All day long, the power of bad governs people’s moods, drives marketing campaigns, and dominates news and politics. Eminent social scientist Roy F. Baumeister stumbled unexpectedly upon this fundamental aspect of human nature. To find out why financial losses mattered more to people than financial gains, Baumeister looked for situations in which good events made a bigger impact than bad ones. But his team couldn’t find any. Their research showed that bad is relentlessly stronger than good, and their paper has become one of the most cited in the scientific literature. Our brain’s negativity bias makes evolutionary sense because it kept our ancestors alert to fatal dangers, but it distorts our perspective in today’s media environment. The steady barrage of bad news and crisismongering makes us feel helpless and leaves us needlessly fearful and angry. We ignore our many blessings, preferring to heed - and vote for - the voices telling us the world is going to hell. But once we recognize our negativity bias, the rational brain can overcome the power of bad when it’s harmful and employ that power when it’s beneficial. In fact, bad breaks and bad feelings create the most powerful incentives to become smarter and stronger. Properly understood, bad can be put to perfectly good use. As noted science journalist John Tierney and Baumeister show in this wide-ranging book, we can adopt proven strategies to avoid the pitfalls that doom relationships, careers, businesses, and nations. Instead of despairing at what’s wrong in your life and in the world, you can see how much is going right - and how to make it still better.
©2019 John Tierney, Roy F. Baumeister (P)2019 Penguin Audio
Batman and Psychology
Summary
Batman is one of the most compelling and enduring characters to come from the Golden Age of Comics, and interest in his story has only increased through countless incarnations since his first appearance in Detective Comics #27 in 1939. Why does this superhero without superpowers fascinate us? What does that fascination say about us? Batman and Psychology explores these and other intriguing questions about the masked vigilante, including the following: Does Batman have PTSD? Why does he fight crime? Why as a vigilante? Why the mask, the bat, and the underage partner? Why are his most intimate relationships with bad girls he ought to lock up? And why won't he kill that homicidal green-haired clown? This book, which is written by a psychology professor and Superherologist (a scholar of superheroes), gives fresh insight into the complex inner world of Batman and Bruce Wayne (and the other characters of Gotham City), using this popular comic-book character as a lens to help explain psychological theory and concepts.
©2020 Dreamscape Media, LLC (P)2020 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Homewreckers
Summary
In the spirit of Evicted, Bait and Switch, and The Big Short, a shocking, heart-wrenching investigation into America’s housing crisis and the modern-day robber barons who are making a fortune off the backs of the disenfranchised working and middle class - among them, Donald Trump and his inner circle. Two years before the housing market collapsed in 2008, Donald Trump looked forward to a crash: “I sort of hope that happens because then people like me would go in and buy”, he said. But our future president wasn’t alone. While millions of Americans suffered financial loss, tycoons pounced to heartlessly seize thousands of homes - their profiteering made even easier because, as prize-winning investigative reporter Aaron Glantz reveals in Homewreckers, they often used taxpayer money - and the Obama administration’s promise to cover their losses. In Homewreckers, Glantz recounts the transformation of straightforward lending into a morass of slivered and combined mortgage “products” that could be bought and sold, accompanied by a shift in priorities and a loosening of regulations and laws that made it good business to lend money to those who wouldn’t be able to repay. Among the men who laughed their way to the bank: Trump cabinet members Steve Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross, Trump pal and confidant Tom Barrack, and billionaire Republican cash cow Steve Schwarzman. Homewreckers also brilliantly weaves together the stories of those most ravaged by the housing crisis. The result is an eye-opening expose of the greed that decimated millions and enriched a gluttonous few.
©2019 Aaron Glantz (P)2019 HarperAudio
A Place Called Hope
Summary
When Quaker Pastor Sam Gardner is asked by the ill Unitarian minister to oversee a wedding in his place, Sam naturally agrees. It's not until the couple stands before him that he realizes they're two women. In the tempest of strong opinions and misunderstandings that follows the incident, Sam faces potential unemployment. Deeply discouraged, he wonders if his pastoral usefulness has come to an end. Perhaps it's time for a change. After all, his wife has found a new job at the library, his elder son is off to college, and the younger has decided to join the military once he graduates high school. Sam is contemplating a future selling used cars when he receives a call from a woman in the suburban town of Hope, Indiana. It seems Hope Friends Meeting is in desperate need of a pastor. Though they only have 12 members, they also have a beautiful meetinghouse and a pie committee (Sam is fond of pie). But can he really leave his beloved hometown of Harmony?
©2014 Philip Gulley (P)2014 Hachette Audio
The 6:41 to Paris
Summary
Cécile, a stylish 47-year-old, has spent the weekend visiting her parents in a provincial town southeast of Paris. By early Monday morning, she's exhausted. These trips back home are always stressful, and she settles into a train compartment with an empty seat beside her. But it's soon occupied by a man she instantly recognizes: Philippe Leduc, with whom she had a passionate affair that ended in her brutal humiliation 30 years ago. In the fraught hour and a half that ensues, their express train hurtles toward the French capital. Cécile and Philippe undertake their own face-to-face journey - in silence? What could they possibly say to one another? - with the listener gaining entrée to the most private of thoughts.
©2015 Jean-Phillippe Blondel (P)2020 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
Summary
From one of the nation's preeminent experts on economic policy, a major reassessment of the foundations of modern economic thinking that explores the profound influence of an until-now unrecognized force - religion. Critics of contemporary economics complain that belief in free markets - among economists as well as many ordinary citizens - is a form of religion. And, it turns out, that in a deeper, more historically grounded sense, there is something to that idea. Contrary to the conventional historical view of economics as an entirely secular product of the Enlightenment, Benjamin M. Friedman demonstrates that religion exerted a powerful influence from the outset. Friedman makes clear how the foundational transition in thinking about what we now call economics, beginning in the 18th century, was decisively shaped by the hotly contended lines of religious thought within the English-speaking Protestant world. Beliefs about God-given human character, about the after-life, and about the purpose of our existence were all under scrutiny in the world in which Adam Smith and his contemporaries lived. Friedman explores how those debates go far in explaining the puzzling behavior of so many of our fellow citizens whose views about economic policies - and whose voting behavior - seems sharply at odds with what would be to their own economic benefit. Illuminating the origins of the relationship between religious thinking and economic thinking, together with its ongoing consequences, Friedman provides invaluable insights into our current economic policy debates and demonstrates ways to shape more functional policies for all citizens.
©2021 Benjamin M. Friedman (P)2021 Random House Audio
Lolita in the Afterlife
Summary
In 1958, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was published in the United States to immediate controversy and best-sellerdom. More than 60 years later, this phenomenal novel generates as much buzz as it did when originally published. Central to countless issues at the forefront of our national discourse - art and politics, race and whiteness, gender and power, sexual trauma - Lolita lives on, in an afterlife as blinding as a supernova. With original contributions from a stellar cast of prominent 21st-century writers and edited by the daughter of Lolita’s original publisher in America, Lolita in the Afterlife is a vibrant collection of sharp and essential modern pieces on this perennially provocative book. With contributions by: Robin Givhan • Aleksandar Hemon • Jim Shepard • Emily Mortimer • Laura Lippman • Erika L. Sánchez • Sarah Weinman • Andre Dubus III • Mary Gaitskill • Zainab Salbi • Christina Baker Kline • Ian Frazier • Cheryl Strayed • Sloane Crosley • Victor LaValle • Jill Kargman • Lila Azam Zanganeh • Roxane Gay • Claire Dederer • Jessica Shattuck • Stacy Schiff • Susan Choi • Kate Elizabeth Russell • Tom Bissell • Kira Von Eichel • Bindu Bansinath • Dani Shapiro • Alexander Chee • Lauren Groff • Morgan Jerkins Audiobook table of contents: "Witness for the Defense: My Father and Lolita" - by Emily Mortimer, read by the author "Véra and Lo" - by Stacy Schiff, read by Marisol Ramirez "On the Road with Humbert and Lolita" - by Ian Frazier, read by Paul Bellantoni "Ugly Beautiful" - by Roxane Gay, read by the author "Badge of Honor" - by Susan Choi, read by Rebecca Lowman "Watching the Detective" - by Laura Lippman, read by the author "Lolita Diary" - by Alexander Chee, read by Vikas Adam "Delectatio Morosa" - by Lauren Groff, read by Rebecca Lowman "Lolita, #MeToo, and Myself"- by Morgan Jerkins, read by Marisol Ramirez "Lolita, Chamonix, France, 2018" - by Andre Dubus III, read by the author "The Showgirl Who Discovered Lolita" - by Sarah Weinman, read by the author "Fashion’s Lolita; Fragile, Subversive, and a Paean to White Femininity" - by Robin Givhan, read by Marisol Ramirez "Lolita and the Empathetic Imagination" - by Jim Shepard, read by the author "How Lolita Freed Me from My Own Humbert" - by Bindu Bansinath, read by the author "Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury" - by Christina Baker Kline, read by Rebecca Lowman "Charmed" - by Victor LaValle, read by Vikas Adam "They Stay the Same Age" - by Sloane Crosley, read by the author "Dear Sugar" - by Cheryl Strayed, read by the author "What We Talk About When We Talk About Lolita" - by Lila Azam Zanganeh, read by Marisol Ramirez "Nabokov’s Rocking Chair: Lolita at the Movies" - by Tom Bissell, read by the author "Lo and Behold" - by Jill Kargman, read by the author "Acquiring Lolita’s Language" - by Aleksandar Hemon, read by Paul Bellantoni "Charlotte’s Complaint" - by Jessica Shattuck, read by the author "Lolita in the Time of Trigger Warnings" - by Erika L. Sánchez, read by Marisol Ramirez "Maison Nymphette" - by Kate Elizabeth Russell, read by the author "A Living Story of Lolita in Iraq" - by Zainab Salbi, read by the author "The Lollipop Room" - by Kira von Eichel, read by Rebecca Lowman "The Anti-Monster" - by Claire Dederer, read by Marisol Ramirez "Lolita in Lockdown" - by Dani Shapiro, read by the author "I Cannot Get Out Said the Starling" - by Mary Gaitskill, read by Rebecca Lowman
©2021 Respective authors of all material within (P)2021 Random House Audio