Richard Poe has narrated 105 audiobooks on Listento.it by 103 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 2,719 ratings. The most-rated is 48 Laws of Power.
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track
Summary
Few scientists have enthralled more people than Richard P. Feynman, the Nobel Prize winner and best-selling author of Six Easy Pieces and Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Beloved for his engaging character and zest for life, he is an American icon. In this selection of letters, Feynman's towering genius and singular personality shine like dazzling stars. A brilliant physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, Feynman believed the excitement of discovery was matched by the bliss of sharing. That joy is evident here, whether Feynman's subject is quantum physics or the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. The letters also show a personal side to this extraordinary man, a man who dearly loved his wife and enthusiastically shared his thoughts with those who sought them. Most of Feynman's personal correspondence has remained private for years. Now, at long last, the most personal reflections of this fascinating man can be relished by all.
©2005 Michelle Feynman and Carl Feynman (P)2005 Recorded Books, LLC
Angels and Demons
Summary
An ancient secret brotherhood. A devastating new weapon of destruction. An unthinkable target... World-renowned Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to a Swiss research facility to analyze a cryptic symbol seared into the chest of a murdered physicist. What he discovers is unimaginable: a deadly vendetta against the Catholic Church by a centuries-old underground organization - the Illuminati. Desperate to save the Vatican from a powerful time bomb, Langdon joins forces in Rome with the beautiful and mysterious scientist Vittoria Vetra. Together they embark on a frantic hunt through sealed crypts, dangerous catacombs, deserted cathedrals, and the most secretive vault on earth...the long-forgotten Illuminati lair.
©2003 Dan Brown (P)2003 Simon & Schuster Inc. All Rights Reserved. AUDIOWORKS is an imprint of Simon & Schuster Audio Division, Simon & Schuster Inc.
Primeval
Summary
Thousands of years after giant beasts crossed the land bridge into North America and mysteriously disappeared, a rare journal documenting the truth about the Romanovs' execution emerges, triggering an international competition and leading the Event Group to make a baffling discovery.
©2010 David L. Golemon (P)2014 Recorded Books
The Traveler
Summary
The Event Group is faced with an impossible mission in the latest heart-pounding hit from the New York Times best-selling author of Carpathian. In 267,000 BCE the continent was its own world, untouched by the planetwide catastrophe that ended the reign of the dinosaurs over 65 million years before. A traveler arrives in the jungles of this ancient world who will fight to survive carnivorous creatures in a land never meant for humankind. In another time and in a land far distant, men and women struggle to recover from the loss of so many of their own in a battle. Inside of this group, Colonel Jack Collins has summoned the best of the best from the most secretive organization in the United States government, the Event Group, to help him in his quest. The new mission is to recover one of their own: to bring home a lost soldier from a world that existed in the distant past. To accomplish the impossible, Department 5656, the Event Group, will have to travel to a place and time far removed from their own world - almost 300,000 years in the past. The trail to find the technology to accomplish time travel will be ripe with treachery and murder as the group fights to bring home their friend, Captain Carl Everett, a man who was lost in a battle to save the world. This will be a fight that, if lost, will change the very history of the planet and thus our present.
©2016 David L. Golemon (P)2016 Recorded Books
Independence Day
Summary
Pulitzer Prize Winner, Fiction 1996 Hailed as a major American novel, Independence Day is a relentlessly thoughtful, heart-wrenching, yet hilarious portrait of an ordinary American man. Wickedly realistic details and dialog entice you to see modern life filtered through the first-person narrator's complex and evolving consciousness. Apparently directionless since his divorce, Frank Bascombe migrates from one non-committal relationship to another. He freely indulges his tendencies to self absorption, over-intellectualization, and neurotic ambivalence. But all of that changes one fateful Fourth of July weekend, when, armed with the Declaration of Independence, he embarks on a mission to save his troubled teenaged son.
©1995 Richard Ford (P)1998 RECORDED BOOKS
The Brief History of the Dead
Summary
Award-winning author Kevin Brockmeier delivers a spellbinding, supernatural tale of love, memories, and human connection. All residents of the City have recently died, and they will remain in the City only as long as someone still living on Earth remembers them. On Earth, however, the population has been devastated by a terrible pandemic. Laura Byrd, isolated at an Antarctic research station, may be the only person to have survived the pandemic. But she's running out of time and supplies, and her memories are fading. Brilliant in concept and execution, The Brief History of the Dead is a spectacular achievement that lingers in the mind long after the final word.
©2006 Kevin Brockmeier (P)2006 Recorded Books, LLC
Ravelstein
Summary
Abe Ravelstein is a brilliant professor at a prominent Midwestern university and a man who glories in training the movers and shakers of the political world. He has lived grandly and ferociously - and much beyond his means. His close friend Chick has suggested that he put forth a book of his convictions about the ideas that sustain humankind, or kill it, and much to Ravelstein’s own surprise, he does and becomes a millionaire. Ravelstein suggests in turn that Chick write a memoir or a life of him, and during the course of a celebratory trip to Paris the two share thoughts on mortality, philosophy and history, loves and friends, old and new, and vaudeville routines from the remote past. The mood turns more somber once they have returned to the Midwest and Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS and Chick himself nearly dies. Deeply insightful and always moving, Saul Bellow’s new novel is a journey through love and memory. It is brave, dark, and bleakly funny: an elegy to friendship and to lives well (or badly) lived.
©2015 Saul Bellow (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Carpathian
Summary
Rumors of the seemingly magical victory that allowed the Exodus of Israelites from Egypt have resonated through the archaeological world for decades. Now evidence has been discovered that explains how the ancient Hebrews destroyed the unstoppable army of Pharaoh - a tribe of warriors who disappeared after the destruction of the City of Jericho, taking with them the most valued treasures of a people without a homeland. Today a treasure of a different kind is unearthed at the lost ruins of Jericho, one that will change the history of God’s Chosen people for all time - the petrified remains of an animal that could not exist. Enter the Event Group. Led by Col. Jack Collins, the Group's brilliant men and women gather to discover the truth behind not only the Exodus, but also the magnificent animals that led the defeat of Pharoah’s army. On a whirlwind race to save the most valuable treasure and artifacts in the history of the world from those who would destroy them, the Event Group will come face to face with every myth, legend, and historical truth that has ever unfolded in the mythic and larger-than-life Carpathians - or as the area was once known - Transylvania, the land of Vlad the Impaler.
©2013 David L. Golemon (P)2013 Recorded Books
Kings of the Earth
Summary
Author of the award-winning novel Finn, Jon Clinch has drawn favorable comparisons to William Faulkner. With Kings of the Earth, he takes listeners to an upstate New York farm where the three Procter brothers live in stasis. When one dies in his sleep, the other two are soon suspected of murder.
©2010 Jon Cinch (P)2010 Recorded Books, LLC
Legend
Summary
The Event Group is comprised of the nation’s most brilliant men and women in the fields of science, philosophy, and the military. Led by Major Jack Collins, their job is to find the truth behind the world's greatest unsolved myths. And this time, Collins and his crew will dare to uncover a terrifying secret - about the long-vanished tribe of the Incas - that's buried deep within the Amazon Basin. The last expedition into the depths and darkness of the Amazon claimed the lives of a female professor and her team. Now the Event Group, using cutting-edge technology exclusively designed by the U.S. military, will travel to the ends of the earth - from Brazil to the Little Bighorn to the Arlington National Cemetery - to bring new meaning to an ancient disaster... or bury the legend forever... or die trying.
©2007 David Lynn Golemon (P)2013 Recorded Books
Love and Other Ways of Dying
Summary
In this moving, lyrical, and ultimately uplifting collection of essays, Michael Paterniti turns a keen eye on the full range of human experience, introducing us to an unforgettable cast of everyday people. Michael Paterniti is one of the most original and empathic storytellers working today. His writing has been described as "humane, devastating, and beautiful" by Elizabeth Gilbert, "spellbinding" by Anthony Doerr, and "expansive and joyful" by George Saunders. In the 17 wide-ranging essays collected for the first time in Love and Other Ways of Dying, he brings his full literary powers to bear, pondering happiness and grief, memory and the redemptive power of human connection. In the remote Ukranian countryside, Paterniti picks apples (and faces mortality) with a real-life giant; in Nanjing, China, he confronts a distraught jumper on a suicide bridge; in Dodge City, Kansas, he takes up residence at a roadside hotel and sees, firsthand, the ways in which the racial divide turns neighbor against neighbor. In each instance Paterniti illuminates the full spectrum of human experience, introducing us to unforgettable everyday people and bygone legends, exploring the big ideas and emotions that move us. Paterniti reenacts François Mitterrand's last meal in a rustic dining room in France and drives across America with Albert Einstein's brain in the trunk of his rental car, floating in a Tupperware container. He delves with heartbreaking detail into the aftermath of a plane crash off the coast of Nova Scotia, an earthquake in Haiti, and a tsunami in Japan - and, in searing swirls of language, unearths the complicated, hidden truths these moments of extremity teach us about our ability to endure and to love. Michael Paterniti has spent the past two decades grappling with some of our most powerful subjects and incomprehensible events, taking an unflinching point of view that seeks to edify as it resists easy answers.
©2015 Michael Paterniti (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
The Ottoman Endgame
Summary
An astonishing retelling of 20th-century history from the Ottoman perspective, delivering profound new insights into World War I and the contemporary Middle East. Between 1911 and 1922, a series of wars would engulf the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, in which the central conflict, of course, was World War I - a story we think we know well. As Sean McMeekin shows us in this revelatory new history of what he calls the "wars of the Ottoman succession", we know far less than we think. The Ottoman Endgame brings to light the entire strategic narrative that led to an unstable new order in postwar Middle East - much of which is still felt today. The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East draws from McMeekin's years of groundbreaking research in newly opened Ottoman and Russian archives. With great storytelling flair, McMeekin makes new the epic stories we know from the Ottoman front, from Gallipoli to the exploits of Lawrence in Arabia, and introduces a vast range of new stories to Western listeners. His accounts of the lead-up to World War I and the Ottoman Empire's central role in the war itself offers an entirely new and deeper vision of the conflict. Harnessing not only Ottoman and Russian but also British, German, French, American, and Austro-Hungarian sources, the result is a truly pioneering work of scholarship that gives full justice to a multitiered war involving many belligerents. McMeekin also brilliantly reconceives our inherited Anglo-French understanding of the war's outcome and the collapse of the empire that followed. The book chronicles the emergence of modern Turkey and the carve up of the rest of the Ottoman Empire as it has never been told before, offering a new perspective on such issues as the ethno-religious bloodletting and forced population transfers that attended the breakup of empire, the Balfour Declaration, the toppling of the caliphate, and the partition of Iraq and Syria - bringing the contemporary consequences into clear focus. Every so often, a work of history completely reshapes our understanding of a subject of enormous historical and contemporary importance. The Ottoman Endgame is such a book, an instantly definitive and thrilling example of narrative history as high art.
©2015 Sean McMeekin (P)2015 Recorded Books
The Assassins' Gate
Summary
The Assassins' Gate, so dubbed by American soldiers, is the entrance to the American zone in the city of Baghdad. In 2003, the United States blazed into Iraq to depose dictator Saddam Hussein. But after three years and unknown thousands killed, that country faces an escalating civil war and an uncertain fate. How did it get to this point? Rich in history and political insight, this is an important contribution to the ongoing dialogue over the Iraq War. George Packer describes the players and ideas behind the Bush administration's war policy. He also provides first-hand accounts of the men and women, both civilian and military, coalition and Iraqi, who are caught in the middle of the conflict. Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Award, George Packer is a venerated staff writer for The New Yorker with four tours on assignment in Iraq. With The Assassins' Gate, he offers a penetrating work of journalism.
©2005 George Packer (P)2006 Recorded Books LLC
Homesick for Another World
Summary
Ottessa Moshfegh's debut novel, Eileen, was one of the literary events of 2015. Garlanded with critical acclaim, it was named a book of the year by The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, selected as a BEA Buzz pick, and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. But as many critics noted, Moshfegh is particularly held in awe for her short stories. Homesick for Another World is the rare case where an author's short story collection is if anything more anticipated than her novel. And for good reason. There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous, while also being delightful and even laugh-out-loud funny. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet in one way or another; they all yearn for connection and betterment, though each in very different ways, but they are often tripped up by their own baser impulses and existential insecurities. Homesick for Another World is a master class in the varieties of self-deception across the gamut of individuals representing the human condition. But part of the unique quality of her voice, the Moshfeghian experience, is the way the grotesque and the outrageous are infused with tenderness and compassion. Moshfegh is our Flannery O'Connor, and Homesick for Another World is her Everything That Rises Must Converge or A Good Man Is Hard to Find. The flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful. But beauty comes from strange sources. And the dark energy surging through these stories is powerfully invigorating. We're in the hands of an author with a big mind, a big heart, blazing chops, and a political acuity that is needle-sharp. The needle hits the vein before we even feel the prick.
©2012 Ottessa Moshfegh (P)2017 Recorded Books
The Future of Nutrition
Summary
Why, despite the many advances in science and technology over the past few decades, does our health only seem to be getting worse? Why, despite so much time and energy spent studying the foods we eat, are we more confused than ever about nutrition - what good nutrition looks like, and what it can do for our health? Colin Campbell’s first book, The China Study - with 3 million copies sold (and growing!) - laid out the exhaustive evidence for the whole foods, plant-based diet as the healthiest way to eat. His New York Times best-selling follow-up, Whole, addressed the widespread scientific emphasis on reductionism that has kept our focus on the discrete behaviors of individual vitamins and nutrients in the foods we eat, rather than diet’s synergistic effects on health. Now, in The Future of Nutrition: An Insider’s Look at the Science, Why We Keep Getting It Wrong, and How to Start Getting It Right, Campbell takes on the institution of nutrition itself: the history of how we got locked in to focusing on “disease care” over health care; the widespread impact of our reverence of animal protein on our interpretation of scientific evidence; the way even well-meaning organizations can limit what science is and is not taken seriously; and what we can do to ensure the future of nutrition is different than its past. The Future of Nutrition offers a fascinating deep-dive behind the curtain of the field of nutrition - with implications both for our health and for the practice of science itself. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2020 T. Colin Campbell, PhD (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
Drop City
Summary
The best-selling, PEN-Faulkner award-winning author of The Tortilla Curtain, T.C. Boyle is hailed as "America's most imaginative contemporary novelist" ( Newsweek). In 1970, a California commune pulls up stakes and moves to the harsh interior of Alaska. The members establish Drop City, a back-to-the-land town, on a foundation of peace and free love. But their idealism cannot prevent tension from rippling through the group. The results are anything but predictable in this honest, surprising evocation of a time period and its enduring beliefs.
©2003 T. Coraghessan Boyle (P)2003 Recorded Books, LLC
Truth Like the Sun
Summary
Internationally best-selling author and Washington State Book Award winner Jim Lynch's Truth Like the Sun was named one of Amazon's Best Books of the Month. In 1962, Roger Morgan became the golden boy behind the Seattle World's Fair. Nearly 40 years later, he's a shoo-in for mayor. But when an ambitious journalist begins digging into his past, sordid details about his career come to light.
©2012 Jim Lynch (P)2012 Recorded Books
Ripper
Summary
New York Times best-selling author David L. Golemon delivers pulse-pounding thrillers that rocket along from start to finish. Ripper gets underway in 1887, when the British Empire unwittingly unleashes Jack the Ripper after contracting an American professor to create a mutant gene for turning ordinary people into vicious fighting machines. Cut to the present, and the professor’s notebooks have surfaced, pitting the Event Group against one of history’s most notorious murderers.
©2012 David L. Golemon (P)2013 Recorded Books
Murder at the Kennedy Center
Summary
Kenneth Ewald has what it takes to win the presidency: the support of his party, a lovely wife, a dynamic campaign. What neither he nor any candidate needs is a corpse. Ewald knows only one man capable of solving a crime, clearing his son, putting his campaign back on track and catching a killer: his best friend Mac Smith. Oddly enough, it was Mac and his dog Rufus who found the body in the first place.
©1999 Margaret Truman (P)2006 Recorded Books LLC
Hit and Run
Summary
Keller's a hit man. For years now, he's had places to go and people to kill. But enough is enough. He's got money in the bank and just one last job standing between him and retirement. So he carries it out with his usual professionalism, and he heads home, but guess what? One more job. Paid in advance, so what's he going to do? Give the money back? In Des Moines, Keller stalks his designated target and waits for the client to give him the go-ahead. And one fine morning, he's picking out stamps for his collection (Sweden 1-5, the official reprints) at a shop in Urbandale when somebody guns down the charismatic governor of Ohio. Back at his motel, Keller's watching TV when they show the killer's face. And there's something all too familiar about that face.... Keller calls his associate, Dot, in White Plains, but there is no answer. He's stranded halfway across the country, every cop in America's just seen his picture, his ID and credit cards are no longer good, and he just spent almost all of his cash on the stamps. Now what?
©2008 Lawrence Block (P)2008 HarperCollins Publishers