Robert Fass has narrated 125 audiobooks on Listento.it by 125 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 3,753 ratings. The most-rated is Before We Were Yours.
Farewell Summer
Summary
The master of American fiction returns to the territory of his beloved classic, Dandelion Wine - a sequel 50 years in the making Some summers refuse to end... October 1st, the end of summer. The air is still warm, but fall is in the air. Thirteen-year-old Douglas Spaulding, his younger brother Tom, and their friends do their best to take advantage of these last warm days, rampaging through the ravine, tormenting the girls...and declaring war on the old men who run Green Town, IL. For the boys know that Colonel Quartermain and his cohorts want nothing more than to force them to put away their wild ways, to settle down, to grow up. If only, the boys believe, they could stop the clock atop the courthouse building. Then, surely, they could hold onto the last days of summer...and their youth. But the old men were young once, too. And Quartermain, crusty old guardian of the school board and town curfew, is bent on teaching the boys a lesson. What he doesn’t know is that before the last leaf turns, the boys will give him a gift: they will teach him the importance of not being afraid of letting go.
Public Domain (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers
The Roman Hat Mystery
Summary
Despite the dismal Broadway season, Gunplay continues to draw crowds. A gangland spectacle, it's packed to the gills with action, explosions, and gunfire. In fact, Gunplay is so loud that no one notices the killing of Monte Field. In a sold-out theater, Field is found dead partway through the second act, surrounded by empty seats. The police hold the crowd and call for the one man who can untangle this daring murder: Inspector Richard Queen. With the help of his son Ellery, a bibliophile and novelist whose imagination can solve any crime, the Inspector attacks this seemingly impenetrable mystery. Anyone in the theater could have killed the unscrupulous lawyer, and several had the motive. Only Ellery Queen, in his debut novel, can decipher the clue of the dead man's missing top hat.
©2013 Ellery Queen (P)2013 AudioGO
The Fall of the Kings
Summary
Audie Award Finalist, Multi-Voiced Performance, 2014 Audie Award Finalist, Audio Drama, 2014 Award-winning author, narrator, and screenwriter Neil Gaiman personally selected this book, and, using the tools of the Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX), produced this work for his audiobook label, Neil Gaiman Presents. A few words from Neil on The Fall of the Kings: "In the Riverside chronology of events, The Fall of the Kings takes place a generation after Swordspoint. If you are new to the world of Riverside, I hope the richness of this book will surprise and delight you, with multi-voiced scenes set like jewels in the gold of Ellen Kushner's narration…." In this stunning follow-up to Kushner's The Privilege of the Sword and the Audie-award winning Swordspoint, co-author Delia Sherman (The Freedom Maze) joins Ellen to return to that world of labyrinthine intrigue, where sharp swords and even sharper wits rule. This time, they explore the city's University, where a troubled young nobleman and his scholar lover find themselves playing out an ancient drama destined to explode their society's smug view of itself. In a city grown decadent, myth and magic begin to seep through the ancient stones. Generations ago the last king fell. But the blood of kings runs deep in the land - and the key may be Theron Campion of Tremontaine, a louche beauty of questionable morals seeking to escape his family heritage in the University lecture halls. When he and renegade scholar Basil St. Cloud come together, they discover that the price of uncovering ancient history may be to be forced to repeat it.... Sue Zizza of SueMedia Productions creates some truly stunning sound elements, including a full score of original music by composer Nathanael Tronerud commissioned for this series... with a full supporting cast who bring to life the rich tapestry of passionate University scholars, noblemen in brothels and Riverside lowlifes, in the sophisticated urban setting that Kushner's many fans have come to love.
©2003 Ellen Kushner & Delia Sherman (P)2013 SueMedia Productions
The Doll-Master
Summary
From one of our most important contemporary writers, The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror is a bold, haunting collection of six stories. In the title story, a young boy becomes obsessed with his cousin's doll after she tragically passes away from leukemia. As he grows older, he begins to collect "found dolls" from the surrounding neighborhoods and stores his treasures in the abandoned carriage house on his family's estate. But just what kind of dolls are they? In "Gun Accident", a teenage girl is thrilled when her favorite teacher asks her to house-sit, even on short notice. But when an intruder forces his way into the house while the girl is there, the fate of more than one life is changed forever. In "Equatorial", set in the exotic Galápagos, an affluent American wife experiences disorienting assaults on her sense of who her charismatic husband really is, and what his plans may be for her. In The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, Joyce Carol Oates evokes the “fascination of the abomination” that is at the core of the most profound, the most unsettling, and the most memorable of dark mystery fiction.
©2016 The Ontario Review, Inc. (P)2019 Tantor
Grand Expectations
Summary
Grand Expectations weaves the major political, cultural, and economic events of the period into a superb portrait of America from 1945 through Watergate. Read with warmth by Robert Fass, who previously narrated Oxford’s Empire of Liberty by Gordon S. Wood, this history portrays the amazing growth after World War II rallied an upbeat mood and grander and grander expectations as the era progressed. As one of four new volumes offered by Audible, Grand Expectations brings to audio one part of an elegant American history that was conceived of and originally edited by C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter more than 50 years ago. Please note: The individual volumes of the series have not been published in historical order. Grand Expectations is number X in The Oxford History of the United States.
©1996 James T. Patterson (P)2010 Audible, Inc.
The Man Who Touched His Own Heart
Summary
The secret history of our most vital organ - the human heart The Man Who Touched His Own Heart tells the raucous, gory, mesmerizing story of the heart, from the first "explorers" who dug up cadavers and plumbed their hearts' chambers, through the first heart surgeries - which had to be completed in three minutes before death arrived - to heart transplants and the latest medical efforts to prolong our hearts' lives, almost defying nature in the process. Thought of as the seat of our soul, then as a mysteriously animated object, the heart is still more a mystery than it is understood. Why do most animals only get one billion beats? (And how did modern humans get to over two billion - effectively letting us live out two lives?) Why are sufferers of gingivitis more likely to have heart attacks? Why do we often undergo expensive procedures when cheaper ones are just as effective? What do Da Vinci, Mary Shelley, and contemporary Egyptian archaeologists have in common? And what does it really feel like to touch your own heart, or to have someone else's beating inside your chest? Rob Dunn's fascinating history of our hearts brings us deep inside the science, history, and stories of the four chambers we depend on most.
©2015 Rob Dunn (P)2015 Hachette Audio
John Marshall
Summary
A soul-stirring biography of John Marshall, the young Republic's great chief justice who led the Supreme Court to power and brought law and order to the nation. In the political turmoil that convulsed America after George Washington's death, the surviving Founding Fathers went mad - literally pummeling each other in Congress and challenging one another to deadly duels in their quest for power. Out of the political intrigue, one man emerged to restore calm and dignity to the government: John Marshall. The longest-serving chief justice in American history, Marshall transformed the Supreme Court from an irrelevant appeals court into the powerful and controversial branch of government that Americans today either revere or despise. Drawing on rare documents, Harlow Giles Unger shows how, with nine key decisions, Marshall rewrote the Constitution, reshaped government, and prevented Thomas Jefferson from turning tyrant. John Adamscalled his appointment of Marshall to chief justice his greatest gift to the nation and "the pride of my life".
©2014 Harlow Giles Unger (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Voices of a People's History of the United States, 10th Anniversary Edition
Summary
Selected testimonies to living history-speeches, letters, poems, songs-offered by the people who make history happen, but are often left out of history books: women, workers, nonwhites. Featuring introductions to the original texts by Howard Zinn. New voices featured in this 10th Anniversary Edition include Chelsea Manning, speaking after her 35-year prison sentence; Naomi Klein, speaking from the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Liberty Square; a member of Dream Defenders, a youth organization that confronts systemic racial inequality; members of the Undocumented Youth movement, who occupied, marched, and demonstrated in support of the DREAM Act; a member of the Day Laborers movement; Chicago Teachers Union strikers; and several critics of the Obama administration, including Glenn Greenwald, on governmental secrecy.
©2004, 2009; 2014 Howard Zinn, Anthony Arnove; Howard Zinn Revocable Trust, Anthony Arnove (P)2018 Blackstone Publishing
The Arrest
Summary
From the award-winning author of The Feral Detective and Motherless Brooklyn comes an utterly original post-collapse yarn about two siblings, the man that came between them, and a nuclear-powered super car. The Arrest isn’t post-apocalypse. It isn’t a dystopia. It isn’t a utopia. It’s just what happens when much of what we take for granted - cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters - quits working.... Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in L.A. An old college friend and writing partner, the charismatic and malicious Peter Todbaum, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didn’t hurt. Now, post-Arrest, nothing is what it was. Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, has landed in rural Maine. There he assists the butcher and delivers the food grown by his sister, Maddy, at her organic farm. But then Todbaum shows up in an extraordinary vehicle: a retrofitted tunnel-digger powered by a nuclear reactor. Todbaum has spent the Arrest smashing his way across a fragmented and phantasmagorical United States, trailing enmities all the way. Plopping back into the siblings’ life with his usual odious panache, his motives are entirely unclear. Can it be that Todbaum wants to produce one more extravaganza? Whatever he’s up to, it may fall to Journeyman to stop him. Written with unrepentant joy and shot through with just the right amount of contemporary dread, The Arrest is speculative fiction at its absolute finest. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2020 Jonathan Lethem (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers
Dialectical Behavior Therapy
Summary
Dialectical behavioral therapy or DBT is based on a dialectical view of the world. The dialectical perspective supports different aspects of the nature of reality and human behavior. The dialectic method supports as first aspect the fundamental interrelation and unity of reality, implying that the analysis of the single parts of a system is limited if they are not inserted in specific contexts, in which the behavior of individuals, and individuals in the group, are expressed. Dialectical behavior therapy has offered much in the realm of therapies. Dr. Linehan has saved thousands of lives with her innovative work. Borderline personality disorder is not being "crazy" or "unhinged". It's simply mental illness. It includes many other mental illnesses as facets of it. Because of that, it only makes sense that an effective therapy would include many types of therapy and self-reflection. Mindfulness is probably the most important aspect of DBT because we have been trained not to be mindful. We're like ants, scurrying around - hurry, hurry, hurry, but going nowhere. Mindfulness forces you to focus on the present. Ask yourself, "Am I treading water? Am I at the bottom of a rung I want to be on or the middle of one I don't?" When you choose mindfulness, you look at your life for a moment. Your questions aren't all going to be answered in one moment of mindfulness. It's something that must be practiced every day. DBT is an excellent medium for learning skills of mindfulness and interpersonal relationships. When therapy is complete, you've acquired an outstanding toolkit of skills to reach for in any situation. This book gives a comprehensive guide on the following: What is DBT? DBT Stages and G
©2019 Brandon Travis (P)2019 Brandon Travis
Bad Wolf
Summary
The thrilling next book in the internationally best-selling series that began with Snow White Must Die On a hot June day the body of a 16-year-old girl washes up on a river bank outside of Frankfurt. She has been brutally murdered, but no one comes forward with any information as to her identity. Even weeks later, the local police have not been able to identify her. Then a new case comes in: a popular television reporter is attacked, raped, and locked in the trunk of her own car. She survives - barely - and is able to supply certain hints to the police having to do with her recent investigations into a child welfare organization and the potential uncovering of a child pornography ring with members from the highest echelon of society. As the two cases collide, Inspectors Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein dig deep into the past and underneath the veneer of bourgeois society to come up against a terrible secret that is about to impact their personal lives as well. In Nele Neuhaus' second US publication of her enormously popular series, tensions run high, and a complex and unpredictable plot propels her characters forward at breakneck speed.
©2014 Nele Neuhaus (P)2014 Blackstone Audio
Harvest of Empire
Summary
The first new edition in 10 years of this important study of Latinos in US history, Harvest of Empire spans five centuries - from the first New World colonies to the first decade of the new millennium. Latinos are now the largest minority group in the United States, and their impact on American popular culture - from food to entertainment to literature - is greater than ever. Featuring family portraits of real-life immigrant Latino pioneers, as well as accounts of the events and conditions that compelled them to leave their homelands, Harvest of Empire is required listening for anyone wishing to understand the history and legacy of this increasingly influential group.
©2011 Juan Gonzolez (P)2017 Tantor
Ten Days' Wonder
Summary
Ellery Queen is persuaded to accompany an old friend and sculptor to his ancestral home when the latter arrives at Ellery's house covered in blood and unable to remember anything from the past few weeks. Once there, tensions erupt and foul play results in the murder of one of the household's members. Among the many transgressions Ellery will uncover are adultery, blackmail, and deceit.
©2014 Ellery Queen (P)2014 Blackstone Audiobooks
Peter Pan Must Die
Summary
The daunting task that confronts Gurney, once the NYPD's top homicide cop: determining the guilt or innocence of a woman already convicted of shooting her charismatic politician husband - who was felled by a rifle bullet to the brain while delivering the eulogy at his own mother's funeral. Peeling back the layers, Gurney quickly finds himself waging a dangerous battle of wits with a thoroughly corrupt investigator, a disturbingly cordial mob boss, a gorgeous young temptress, and a bizarre assassin whose child-like appearance has earned him the nickname Peter Pan. Startling twists and turns occur in rapid-fire sequence, and soon Gurney is locked inside one of the darkest cases of his career - one in which multiple murders are merely the deceptive surface under which rests a scaffolding of pure evil. Beneath the tangle of poisonous lies, Gurney discovers that the truth is more shocking than anyone had imagined.
©2014 John Verdon (P)2014 Dreamscape Media, LLC
The Midnight Watch
Summary
As the Titanic and her passengers sank slowly into the Atlantic Ocean after striking an iceberg late in the evening of April 14, 1912, a nearby ship looked on. Second Officer Herbert Stone, in charge of the midnight watch on the SS Californian sitting idly a few miles north, saw the distress rockets that the Titanic fired. He alerted the captain, Stanley Lord, who was sleeping in the chartroom below, but Lord did not come to the bridge. Eight rockets were fired during the dark hours of the midnight watch, and eight rockets were ignored. The next morning, the Titanic was at the bottom of the sea, and more than 1,500 people were dead. When they learned of the extent of the tragedy, Lord and Stone did everything they could to hide their role in the disaster, but, pursued by newspapermen, lawyers, and political leaders in America and England, their terrible secret was eventually revealed. The Midnight Watch is a fictional telling of what may have occurred that night on the SS Californian and the resulting desperation of Officer Stone and Captain Lord in the aftermath of their inaction. Told not only from the perspective of the SS Californian crew but also through the eyes of a family of third-class passengers who perished in the disaster, the narrative is drawn together by Steadman, a tenacious Boston journalist who does not rest until the truth is found. David Dyer's The Midnight Watch is a powerful and dramatic debut - the result of many years of research in Liverpool, London, New York, and Boston and informed by the author's own experiences as a ship's officer and a lawyer.
©2016 David Dyer (P)2016 Macmillan Audio
The New Adventures of Ellery Queen
Summary
Trick I - The first thing to vanish is a worthless doorstop. Then, in the twinkling of an eye, goes its rich and elderly owner. And, for the grand finale, both reappear - each as dead as the other. Trick II - From the House of Darkness issues more bafflement. In total darkness and from a distance of 12 feet, four bullets are pumped within an inch of each other into a spectator's back - a feat utterly impossible to perform yet brazenly and undeniably done. Trick III - The piece de resistance. This time it's an entire house, a real house, a solid house, which Ellery Queen had been in only the day before...vanished from the face of the Earth. And in its place emerges one of the most incredible conundrums ever to face the master crime solver. Encores - The New Adventures of Ellery Queen is a classic collection of eight short mysteries and a remarkable short novel. First published in 1940, it has sold more than one million copies and continues to be "as good as they come" (New York Times). Stories include "The Lamp of God", "The Treasure Hunt", "The Hollow Dragon", "The House of Darkness", "The Bleeding Portrait", "Man Bites Dog", "Long Shot", "Mind over Matter", and "The Trojan Horse".
©1940 Frederick A. Stokes Company. © renewed by Ellery Queen (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Bringing Adam Home
Summary
Before Adam Walsh, there were no faces on milk cartons, no Amber Alerts, no National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, no federal databases of crimes against children, no pedophile registry. His 1981 abduction and murder, unsolved for over a quarter of a century, forever changed America. One sunny July morning in 1981, Revé Walsh and her six-year-old son, Adam, stopped by the local Sears to pick up some new lamps. Enchanted by a video game at the store's entrance, Adam begged Revé to let him try it out while she shopped. When she returned a few minutes later, Adam was gone. The shock of Adam's murder, and of the inability of the police and the FBI to find his killer, radically altered American innocence and our ideas about childhood. Gone forever were the days when parents would allow their kids out of the house with the casual instruction "Be home by dark!" Revé and John Walsh, who would go on to create America's Most Wanted, became advocates for the transformation of law enforcement's response to and handling of such cases. Prompted by the Walshes' activism, Congress passed the Missing Children Act in 1982, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was founded in 1984. While our lives have been significantly altered by Adam Walsh's case, few of us know the whole story: how, after more than 27 years of relentless investigation, decorated Miami Beach homicide detective Joe Matthews finally identified Adam's killer. Bringing Adam Home is the definitive account of this horrifying crime.
©2011 Les Standiford and Joe Matthews (P)2011 HarperCollins Publishers
Vlad
Summary
"Vlad" is Vlad the Impaler, of course, whose mythic cruelty was an inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula. In this sly sequel, Vlad really is undead. More than a postmodern riff on "the vampire craze", Vlad is also an anatomy of the Mexican bourgeoisie, as well as our culture's ways of dealing with death. For - as in Dracula - Vlad has need of both a lawyer and a real-estate agent in order to establish his new kingdom, and Yves Navarro and his wife Asuncion fit the bill nicely. Having recently lost a son, might they not welcome the chance to see their remaining child live forever? More importantly, are the pleasures of middle-class life enough to keep one from joining the legions of the damned?
©2004, 2012 Carlos Fuentes (P)2012 Dreamscape Media, LLC
In Her Shadow
Summary
A pregnant young woman becomes obsessed with the disappearance of her lover’s wife, only to discover that she may be headed for the same fate, in this novel from New York Times best-selling author Kristin Miller When secretary Colleen Roper becomes pregnant by her boss, Michael, he whisks her away to Ravenwood, his opulent estate. Abruptly thrust into a life of luxury she’s never known, Colleen finds the immense house suffused with the memory of Michael’s wife, Joanna, who left months ago and haunts her imagination. With rooms she’s prohibited from entering and a staff that greets her with hostility, there is little room for a new mistress of Ravenwood. It’s not long before bones are unearthed in the grove across the street and Michael falls under the suspicion of detectives. The soon-to-be mother of his child finds herself hurled deeper into her lover’s dark past, a past filled with unfaithfulness and deception. Making a claim to her new life is harder than it seems - especially since she’s walking in the shadow of the hauntingly beautiful Joanna. As Colleen untangles truth from lies, she discovers that nothing is what it seems, and that some people will kill to keep their secrets as quiet as the dead. Inspired by Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, In Her Shadow is the chilling story of one woman’s desperate desire to be loved and the ghosts that threaten to get in her way.
©2020 Kristin Miller (P)2020 Random House Audio
Water to the Angels
Summary
The author of Last Train to Paradise tells the story of the largest public water project ever created - William Mulholland's Los Angeles aqueduct - a story of Gilded Age ambition, hubris, greed, and one determined man whose vision shaped the future and continues to impact us today. In 1907 Irish immigrant William Mulholland conceived and built one of the greatest civil engineering feats in history: the aqueduct that carried water 223 miles from the Sierra Nevada mountains to Los Angeles - allowing this small, resource-challenged desert city to grow into a modern global metropolis. Drawing on new research, Les Standiford vividly captures the larger-than-life engineer and the breathtaking scope of his six-year, $23-million project that would transform a region, a state, and a nation at the dawn of its greatest century. With energy and colorful detail, Water to the Angels brings to life the personalities, politics, and power - including bribery, deception, force, and bicoastal financial warfare - behind this dramatic event. At a time when the importance of water is being recognized as never before - considered by many experts to be the essential resource of the twenty-first century - Water to the Angels brings into focus the vigor of a fabled era, the might of a larger-than-life individual, and the scale of a priceless construction project and sheds critical light on a past that offers insights for our future.
©2015 Les Standiford (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers