Richard Allen has narrated 34 audiobooks on Listento.it by 36 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 103 ratings. The most-rated is The Beginning of Everything.
Soul Circus
Summary
Soul Circus starts with a rented gun and moves into the vacuum created by the imprisonment of a D.C. crime lord. Two young dealers are fighting for the now unclaimed territory, prestige, and millions of dollars in future profits. Now the kid brother of one of those dealers is going to escalate the friction into wholesale slaughter.
Private investigators Derek Strange and Terry Quinn have found a woman whose testimony could make the difference between a death sentence and a return to the streets for the crime lord. First they have to get her to talk. Then they have to keep her alive.
©2004 George Pelecanos (P)2004 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Tread Lightly
Summary
Humans evolved over the millennia to become one of the most exceptional distance-running species on Earth. So why are injuries so common? Are our shoes to blame, or is it a question of running form, training, or poor diet? In this groundbreaking book, Peter Larson and Bill Katovsky explore the reasons why runners experience injuries and offer potential solutions to the current epidemic of running-related injuries. Their findings, gleaned from research studies and conversations with leading footwear scientists, biomechanical experts, coaches, podiatrists, physical therapists, and competitive runners, are informative and enlightening. Topics include: How modern runners differ from their ancestors Why repetitive stress causes most injuries, and how runners can safely reduce their occurrence The pros and cons of barefoot running Why it’s time to move beyond the pronation-control paradigm with running shoes How certain running-form flaws might increase injury risk How footwear has evolved over the past 10,000 years The recreational runner Why running shoes are not inherently evil Tread Lightly is a highly listenable, multifaceted investigation of running - past and present, with a hopeful look to the future.
©2012 Peter Larson and Bill Katovsky (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Futureland
Summary
Life in America a generation from now isn't much different from today: The drugs are better, the daily grind is worse. The gap between the rich and the poor has widened to a chasm. You can store the world's legal knowledge on a chip in your little finger, while the Supreme Court has decreed that constitutional rights don't apply to any individual who challenges the system. Justice is swiftly delivered by automated courts, so the prison industry is booming. And while the media declare racism is dead, word on the street is that even in a colorless society, it's a crime to be black.But the world still turns, and folks still have to get by with the hands they're dealt, folks such as:Ptolemy "Popo" Bent: This gentle backwoods child has a genius I.Q.- and a soul so pure that officials want him locked up forever.Folio Johnson: A hardboiled, cyber-augmented private eye who can see beneath the dark poetry of the metropolis, he will need an even greater edge than that to find out who's systematically murdering rich, young Nazis.Fera Jones: She's the boxing Queen of the Ring who must still fight all comers to save her dad, preserve her identity, and protect the fans who believe in her.Dr. Ivan Kismet: The world's richest man, Macrocode's CEO is a tycoon, tyrant, and messiah who is evidently more powerful than God. So it's too bad for everyone that Dr. Kismet is utterly insane.Walter Mosley brings to life the celebs, working stiffs, leaders, victims, technocrats, crooks, oppressors, and revolutionaries who inhabit a glorious all-American nightmare that's just around the corner. Welcome to Futureland.
©2004 Walter Mosley (P)2004 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Plan B 4.0
Summary
“[Brown’s] ability to make a complicated subject accessible to the general reader is remarkable.” (Katherine Salant, Washington Post)As fossil fuel prices rise, oil insecurity deepens, and concerns about climate change cast a shadow over the future of coal, a new energy economy is emerging. Wind, solar, and geothermal energy are replacing oil, coal, and natural gas, at a pace and on a scale we could not have imagined even a year ago. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, we have begun investing in energy sources that can last forever. Plan B 4.0 explores both the nature of this transition to a new energy economy and how it will affect our daily lives.
©2009 Earth Policy Institute (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
The Race Beat
Summary
Pulitzer Prize, History, 2007Here is the story of how the nation's press, after decades of ignoring the problem, came to recognize the importance of the civil-rights struggle and turn it into the most significant domestic news event of the 20th century. Drawing on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews, veteran journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the headlines and datelines to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen - first black reporters, then liberal Southern editors, then reporters and photographers from the national press and the broadcast media - revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings and propelled its citizens to act. We watch the black press move bravely into the front row of the confrontation, only to be attacked and kept away from the action. Following the Supreme Court's 1954 decision striking down school segregation and the South's mobilization against it, we see a growing number of white reporters venture South to cover the Emmett Till murder trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the integration of the University of Alabama. We witness some Southern editors joining the call for massive resistance and working with segregationist organizations to thwart compliance. But we also see a handful of other Southern editors write forcefully and daringly for obedience to federal mandates, signaling to the nation that moderate forces were prepared to push the region into the mainstream. The pace quickens in Little Rock, where reporters test the boundaries of journalistic integrity, then gain momentum as they cover shuttered schools in Virginia, sit-ins in North Carolina, mob-led riots in Mississippi, Freedom Ride buses being set afire, fire hoses and dogs in Birmingham, and long, tense marches through the rural South.
©2007 Gene Roberts (P)2007 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Washington
Summary
Washington, D.C., is home to the most influential power brokers in the world. But how did we come to call D.C. - a place one contemporary observer called a mere swamp "producing nothing except myriads of toads and frogs (of enormous size)", a district that was strategically indefensible, captive to the politics of slavery, and a target of unbridled land speculation - our nation's capital? In Washington, award-winning author Fergus M. Bordewich turns his eye to the backroom deal making and shifting alliances among our Founding Fathers and in so doing pulls back the curtain on the lives of the slaves who actually built the city. The answers revealed in this eye-opening and well-researched book are not only surprising and exciting but also illuminate a story of unexpected triumph over a multitude of political and financial obstacles, including fraudulent real-estate speculation, overextended financiers, and management more apt for a "banana republic" than an emerging world power. In an engrossing work that reveals the hidden and unsavery side of the nation's beginnings, Bordewich once again brings his novelist's sensibility to a little-known chapter in American history.
©2008 Fergus M. Bordewich. (P)2008 Tantor
A Slave No More
Summary
Slave narratives are extremely rare. Of the 100 or so of these testimonies that survive, a mere handful are first-person accounts by slaves who ran away and freed themselves. Now, two newly uncovered narratives, and the biographies of the men who wrote them, join that exclusive group. Wallace Turnage was a teenage field-hand on an Alabama plantation, John Washington an urban slave in Virginia. They never met. But both men saw opportunity in the chaos of the Civil War, both escaped North, and both left us remarkable accounts of their flights to freedom. Handed down through family and friends, these narratives tell gripping stories of escape. Working from an unusual abundance of genealogical material, historian David W. Blight has reconstructed Turnage's and Washington's childhoods as sons of white slaveholders and their climb to black working-class stability in the North, where they reunited their families. In A Slave No More, the untold stories of two ordinary men take their place at the heart of the American experience.
©2007 David W. Blight (P)2007 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.
The Emperor of Ocean Park
Summary
In his triumphant fictional debut, Stephen Carter combines a large-scale, riveting novel of suspense with the saga of a unique family. The Emperor of Ocean Park is set in two privileged worlds: the upper crust African American society of the Eastern seabord - families who summer at Martha’s Vineyard - and the inner circle of an Ivy League law school. Talcott Garland is a successful law professor, devoted father, and husband of a beautiful and ambitious woman, whose future desires may threaten the family he holds so dear. When Talcott’s father, Judge Oliver Garland, a disgraced former Supreme Court nominee, is found dead under suspicious circumstances, Talcott wonders if he may have been murdered. Guided by the elements of a mysterious puzzle that his father left, Talcott must risk his marriage, his career and even his life in his quest for justice. Superbly written and filled with memorable characters, The Emperor of Ocean Park is both a stunning literary achievement and a grand literary entertainment.
©2002 Stephen L. Carter (P)2002 Books on Tape, Inc.
What Becomes of the Brokenhearted
Summary
Now, in his most daring act yet, E. Lynn Harris writes the memoir of his life from his childhood in Arkansas as a closeted gay boy through his struggling days as a self-published author to his rise to New York Times best seller status. In What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, Harris shares with listeners an extraordinary life touched by loneliness and depression, but most importantly he reveals the triumphant story of a small town dreamer who was able, through writing, to make his dreams and more come true. With his signature compassion, raw courage and awe-inspiring honesty, E. Lynn Harris applies the same talents to his memoir that have made him a best selling fiction author.
©2003 E. Lynn Harris
The Colonel's Mistake
Summary
In Baku, Azerbaijan, CIA operations officer Daria Buckingham is arrested for a heinous crime. Her former boss, retired CIA station chief Mark Sava, is sure she’s innocent and tries to help her out - landing him in the middle of the new Great Game, an espionage war over oil that has China, Iran, and the United States clawing at each other’s throats. Back in Washington, DC, Colonel Henry Amato, assistant to the US national security advisor, is keeping a close watch on the situation. His stake in the Great Game is high - and personal. The first novel of a globetrotting new thriller series, The Colonel’s Mistake takes listeners on an unforgettable ride into the shadows of the world’s most volatile region, where the good, the bad, and the brutal play a deadly chess game of global espionage.
©2012 Dan Mayland (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Opening Day
Summary
April 15, 1947, marked the most important opening day in baseball history. When Jackie Robinson stepped onto the diamond that afternoon at Ebbets Field, he became the first Black man to break into major-league baseball. World War II had just ended. Democracy had triumphed. Now Americans were beginning to press for justice on the home front, and Robinson had a chance to lead the way. He was an unlikely hero. He had little experience in organized baseball. His swing was far from graceful. And he was assigned to play first base, a position he had never tried before that season. But the biggest concern was his temper. Robinson was an angry man who played an aggressive style of ball. In order to succeed, he would have to control himself in the face of what promised to be a brutal assault by opponents of integration. Drawing on interviews with surviving players, sportswriters, and eyewitnesses, as well as newly discovered material from archives around the country, Jonathan Eig presents a fresh portrait of a ferocious competitor who embodied integration's promise and helped launch the modern civil-rights era. Full of new details and thrilling action, Opening Day brings to life baseball's ultimate story.
©2007 Jonathan Eig (P)2007 Tantor Media Inc.
A Bound Man
Summary
From the New York Times best-selling and controversial author Shelby Steele comes an illuminating examination of the complex racial issues that confront presidential candidate Barack Obama in his race for the White House, a quest that will be one of those galvanizing occasions that forces a national dialogue on the current state of race relations in America. Steele argues that Senator Obama is caught between two classic postures that Blacks have always used to make their way in the White American mainstream: bargaining and challenging. Bargainers strike a "bargain" with White America in which they say, "I will not rub America's ugly history of racism in your face if you will not hold my race against me." Bill Cosby's sitcom in the 1980s was the classic example of bargaining. Obama also sends "bargaining" signals to White America, and Whites respond with considerable gratitude - which explains the special aura of excitement that surrounds him. But in order to garner the Black vote, which is absolutely necessary for victory in the primaries and the general election, Obama must also posture as a challenger. Challengers are the opposite of bargainers. They charge Whites with inherent racism and then demand that they prove themselves innocent by supporting Black-friendly policies, such as affirmative action. If Whites go along with this, thereby proving their innocence, they are granted absolution by the Black challenger. The current Black American identity is grounded in challenging. Obama must therefore posture as a challenger to win the Black vote. However, challenging threatens Obama's White support. But bargaining threatens his Black support. Thus, he is bound. He walks in an impossible political territory where any expression of what he truly feels puts him in jeopardy with one much-needed constituency or another. Only a kind of two-sided political mask, or an "above politics" posture, keeps the wolves at bay.
©2008 Shelby Steele (P)2008 Tantor
Is the Father of Jesus the God of Muhammad?
Summary
An articulate presentation of the distinctive Christian understanding of God in the context of resurgent Islam, aimed at helping Christian believers speak and live the truth in love and learn how to interact with Muslim ideas in an increasingly pluralistic culture.
©2002 Timothy George (P)2009 Zondervan
Silver Tower
Summary
Iran has been invaded. And America responds in a grueling counterattack by air, by sea - and by a brave new technology that will redefine war. The most sophisticated laser defense system ever. It is called Silver Tower. And it will change the balance of world power forever.
Public Domain (P)2006 Brilliance Audio, Inc.