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.
Rebel Mother
Summary
Carol Andreas was a traditional 1950s housewife from a small Mennonite town in central Kansas who became a radical feminist and Marxist revolutionary. From the late sixties to the early eighties, she went through multiple husbands and countless lovers while living in three states and five countries. She took her youngest son, Peter, with her wherever she went, even kidnapping him and running off to South America after his straitlaced father won a long and bitter custody fight. They were chasing the revolution together, though the more they chased it the more distant it became. They battled the bad "isms" (sexism, imperialism, capitalism, fascism, consumerism), and fought for the good "isms" (feminism, socialism, communism, egalitarianism). They were constantly running, moving, hiding. Between the ages of five and 11, Peter attended more than a dozen schools and lived in more than a dozen homes, moving from the suburbs of Detroit to a hippie commune in Berkeley to a socialist collective farm in Chile to highland villages and coastal shantytowns in Peru. When they secretly returned to America they settled down clandestinely in Denver, where his mother changed her name to hide from his father.
©2017 Peter Andreas (P)2017 Tantor
Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit
Summary
A brilliant and utterly original new novel from Mark Leyner about a father and his intense and devout relationship with his daughter and with alcohol. An anthropologist and his daughter travel to Kermunkachunk, the capitol of Chalazia, to conduct research for an ethnography on the Chalazian Mafia Faction (a splinter group of the Chalazian Children's Theater). The book takes place over the course of a night at the Bar Pulpo, Kermunkachunk's #1 spoken-word karaoke bar, where conversations are actually being read from multiple karaoke screens arrayed around the barroom. Moreover, it's Thursday, "Father/Daughter Nite", when the bar is frequented by actual fathers and daughters as well as couples cosplaying fathers and daughters. Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit is a book about the deep pleasures of reading and drinking, the tumultuous reign of a cabal of mystic mobsters, and, of course, the transcendent love of a father for his daughter.
©2021 Mark Leyner (P)2021 Hachette Audio
The Winter Father
Summary
While the title novella of Dubus' Finding a Girl in America returns to the somewhat off-the-rails literary life of Hank Allison, the collection's opening story strikes a much darker tone: "Killings" - the basis of the Academy Award-nominated film In the Bedroom - is a swift tale of revenge that leaves listeners wondering what they might do in the name of family love. Dubus' prowess with narrative compression is on full display in the story "Waiting": the hollow ache experienced by a woman widowed by the Korean War took Dubus 14 months to write and was more than 100 pages in early manuscript form but spans a mere seven pages in published form. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Joyce Carol Oates called "The Pretty Girl" - the opening novella of The Times Are Never so Bad - "[T]he most compelling and suspenseful work of fiction [Dubus] has written". Richard Russo's introduction to this volume grapples with his complex feelings on reading Dubus' work over many decades, but when it comes to the much-anthologized masterpiece "A Father's Story", Russo writes: "I won't mince words. It's one of the finest stories ever penned by an American."
©2018 David R Godine (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
To Obama
Summary
President Barack Obama received 10,000 letters a day from his constituents. This is the story of the private and profound relationship with letter writers that shaped his presidency. Their voices combine to reveal a diary of a nation. Every evening for eight years, at his request, President Obama was given 10 handpicked letters written by ordinary American citizens - the unfiltered voice of a nation - from his Office of Presidential Correspondence. He was the first president to interact daily with constituent mail and to archive it in its entirety. The letters affected not only the president and his policies but also the deeply committed people who were tasked with opening and reading the millions of pleas, rants, thank-yous, and apologies that landed in the White House mailroom. In To Obama, Jeanne Marie Laskas interviews President Obama, the letter writers themselves, and the White House staff who sifted through the powerful, moving, and incredibly intimate narrative of America during the Obama years: There is Kelli, who saw her grandfathers finally marry - legally - after thirty-five years together; Bill, a lifelong Republican whose attitude toward immigration reform was transformed when he met a boy escaping MS-13 gang leaders in El Salvador; Heba, a Syrian refugee who wants to forget the day the tanks rolled into her village; Marjorie, who grappled with disturbing feelings of racial bias lurking within her during the George Zimmerman trial; and Vicki, whose family was torn apart by those who voted for Trump and those who did not. They wrote to Obama out of gratitude and desperation, in their darkest times of need, in search of connection. They wrote with anger, fear, and respect. And together, this chorus of voices achieves a kind of beautiful harmony. To Obama is an intimate look at one man’s relationship to the American people, and at a time when empathy intersected with politics in the White House. Full list of narrators includes: Macleod Andrews, Paula Christensen, Michael Crouch, Donna Coltharp, Sheryl Cousineau, Shane Darby, Ramon De Ocampo, Robert Fass, Lauren Fortang, Kyla Garcia, Heba Hallak, Marnie Hazelton, Lacey Higley, Tom Hoefner, Hillary Huber, Bobby Ingram, Marjorie McKinney, Thomas Meehan, Bob Melton, Alex Myteberi, Adenrele Ojo, Bill Oliver, Christine Reisman, Tara Sands, Vicki Shearer, Marc Thompson, and Emily Woo Zeller.
©2018 Jeanne Marie Laskas (P)2018 Random House Audio
50 Children
Summary
Two ordinary Americans. Fifty innocent lives. One unforgettable journey. In early 1939, few Americans were thinking about the darkening storm clouds over Europe. Nor did they have much sympathy for the growing number of Jewish families that were increasingly threatened and brutalized by Adolf Hitler's policies in Germany and Austria. But one ordinary American couple decided that something had to be done. Despite overwhelming obstacles - both in Europe and in the United States - Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus made a bold and unprecedented decision to travel into Nazi Germany in an effort to save a group of Jewish children. Fewer than 1,200 unaccompanied children were allowed into the United States throughout the entire Holocaust, in which 1.5 million children perished. The 50 children saved by the Krauses turned out to be the single largest group of unaccompanied children brought to America. Drawing from Eleanor Kraus's unpublished memoir, rare historical documents, and interviews with more than a dozen of the surviving children, and illustrated with period photographs, archival materials, and memorabilia, 50 Children is a remarkable tale of personal courage and triumphant heroism that offers a fresh, unique insight into a critical period of history.
©2014 Steven Pressman (P)2014 HarperCollins Publishers
12 Stories of Christmas
Summary
Experience the wonderment of Christmas with this endearing collection of original stories. Even though he's got 3.5 million copies of books in print, Pastor Robert Morgan writes only one short fiction story each year - an original work he shares with his church on Christmas Eve. Now with a fresh new cover and six new stories, the entire collection of 12 is available in this beautiful volume. Beginning is a foreword by David Jeremiah, followed by adventures that evoke the splendor and love found at the manger over 2000 years ago. You'll meet a shy, bookish boy who finds himself center stage in a Christmas pageant, a family whose car full of presents and groceries disappears, and a mountain man trapped in a blizzard with his 12-year-old grandson. You'll meet characters you feel you've known your whole life who'll make you laugh one minute and cry the next. So this year, and the years to follow, gather your family and experience the true spirit of adoration and worship at Christmas through this timeless gift of story.
©2014 Robert Morgan (P)2020 Thomas Nelson
Buying In
Summary
Marketing executives and consumer advocates alike predict a future of brand-proof consumers, armed with technology and a sophisticated understanding of marketing techniques, who can effectively tune out ad campaigns. But as Rob Walker demonstrates, this widely accepted misconception has eclipsed the real changes in the way modern consumers relate to their brands of choice. Combine this with marketers' new ability to blur the line between advertising, entertainment, and public space, and you have dramatically altered the relationship between consumer and consumed.
©2008 Rob Walker (P)2008 BBC Audiobooks America
Jump-Starting America
Summary
The untold story of how America once created the most successful economy the world has ever seen and how we can do it again. The American economy glitters on the outside, but the reality is quite different. Job opportunities and economic growth are increasingly concentrated in a few crowded coastal enclaves. Corporations and investors are disproportionately developing technologies that benefit the wealthiest Americans in the most prosperous areas - and destroying middle-class jobs elsewhere. To turn this tide, we must look to a brilliant and all-but-forgotten American success story and embark on a plan that will create the industries of the future - and the jobs that go with them. Beginning in 1940, massive public investment generated breakthroughs in science and technology that first helped win WWII and then created the most successful economy the world has ever seen. Private enterprise then built on these breakthroughs to create new industries - such as radar, jet engines, digital computers, mobile telecommunications, life-saving medicines, and the internet - that became the catalyst for broader economic growth that generated millions of good jobs. We lifted almost all boats, not just the yachts. Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson tell the story of this first American growth engine and provide the blueprint for a second. It's a visionary, pragmatic, sure-to-be controversial plan that will lead to job growth and a new American economy in places now left behind.
©2019 Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson (P)2019 Hachette Audio
No Fear of Failure
Summary
Candid conversations with top leaders around the world on how they approached pivotal moments in their careers. No Fear of Failure offers insightful, candid conversations with some of the world's top leaders in business, politics, education, and philanthropy - each giving a first-person account of how they approached crucial, career-defining moments. Gary Burnison, CEO of Korn/Ferry International, the world's largest executive recruiting firm, sits down one-on-one with a highly select and elite corps, and together they openly discuss how they handled (often very publicly) war, economic downturn, corporate turnover, and even retirement. Together these world-class leaders show the risks one must be willing to take, as well as the vision, resilience, and compassion necessary to lead. Includes original interviews with Michael Bloomberg, Carlos Slim, Eli Broad, Indra Nooyi, Drew Gilpin Faust, Anne Mulcahy, Vincente Fox, Lt. General Franklin L. "Buster" Hagenbeck, Coach John McKissick, Liu Chuanzhi, Daniel Vasella, and Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. Explores the common traits great leaders exhibit: vision, compassion, resilience, competitiveness, purpose, humility, team-building skills, entrepreneurial spirit, perseverance, self-awareness, empowerment, and being a catalyst. Taking listeners into executive suites, government offices, battlefields, and football fields, No Fear of Failure shows how great leaders make lasting impact.
©2011 Korn/Ferry International (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Shatter the Nations
Summary
Unflinching dispatches of an embedded war reporter covering ISIS and the unlikely alliance of forces who came together to defeat it. The battle to defeat ISIS was an unremittingly brutal and dystopian struggle, a multi-sided war of gritty local commandos and militias. Mike Giglio takes listeners to the heart of this shifting, uncertain conflict, capturing the essence of a modern war. At its peak, ISIS controlled a self-styled "caliphate" the size of Great Britain, with a population cast into servitude that numbered in the millions. Its territory spread across Iraq and Syria as its influence stretched throughout the wider world. Giglio tells the story of the rise of the caliphate and the ramshackle coalition - aided by secretive Western troops and American airstrikes - that was assembled to break it down village by village, district by district. The story moves from the smugglers, traffickers, and jihadis working on the ISIS side to the victims of its zealous persecution and the local soldiers who died by the thousands to defeat it. Amid the battlefield drama, culminating in a climactic showdown in Mosul, is a dazzlingly human portrait of the destructive power of extremism, and of the tenacity and astonishing courage required to defeat it. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2019 Mike Giglio (P)2019 PublicAffairs
The Glass Village
Summary
When mere accusation takes the place of evidence, freedom is in peril. What happens after the murder is the story of what Johnny Shinn—late of Army Intelligence and veteran of two wars—in spite of himself, does about it. The tense lynch trial that is the focus of the action is really the trial of Johnny Shinn as an American.
©1954 Ellery Queen (P)2014 AudioGO
The Last Sultan
Summary
The definitive biography of the king of the rock 'n' roll business, Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic Records.
©2011 Schoolyard Productions, Inc. (P)2011 Tantor
In the Distance with You
Summary
This Chilean literary thriller tells the story of three lives intertwined with that of an enigmatic author, whose character is inspired by the groundbreaking Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. Vera Sigall, now 80 years old, has lived a mysterious, ascetic life far from the limelight of literary circles. This powerful character has a profound effect on those around her - Daniel, an architect and her neighbor and friend, unhappy in his marriage and career; Emilia, a Franco-Chilean student who travels to Santiago to write a thesis on the elusive Vera; and Horacio, an acclaimed poet with whom Vera had a tumultuous, passionate affair in her youth. As Daniel, Emilia, and Horacio tell their stories, they reconstruct Vera's past, and search for their own identities. Spanning from modern-day Chile to the 1950s, 60s, and through the years of the Pinochet dictatorship, In the Distance with You reveals successive mysteries and discoveries like a set of Russian nesting dolls.
©2015 Carla Guelfenbein; English translation copyright 2018 by Other Press (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
A Speck in the Sea
Summary
In the dead of night on July 24, 2013, John Aldridge was thrown off the back of the Anna Mary while his fishing partner, Anthony Sosinski, slept below. As desperate hours ticked by, Sosinski, the families, the local fishing community, and the US Coast Guard in three states mobilized in an unprecedented search effort that culminated in a rare and exhilarating success. A tale of survival, perseverance, and community, A Speck in the Sea tells of one man's struggle to survive as friends and strangers work separately and together to bring him home. Aldridge's wrenching first-person account intertwines with the narrative of the massive, constantly evolving rescue operation designed to save him. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2017 John Aldridge and Anthony Sosinski (P)2017 Hachette Audio
Out of My League
Summary
The baseball classic that Ernest Hemingway called "beautifully observed and incredibly conceived", now recorded and including a foreword from Jane Leavy. The first of Plimpton's remarkable forays into participatory journalism, Out of My League chronicles with wit, charm, and grace what happens when a self-professed amateur has the chance to answer every fan's question: could he strike out a major league star? Plimpton's inspired idea - to get on the mound and pitch a few innings to the All-Stars of the American and National Leagues - begins as a fun-filled stunt and comes to a deeply hellish, nearly humiliating end. This honest and hilarious tale features Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Whitey Ford, Ralph Houk, and other baseball greats and is "a baseball book such as no one else ever wrote, and one of the best ever". (New York Herald Tribune)
©2003 George Plimpton (P)2016 Hachette Audio
A Study in Terror
Summary
Ellery Queen and Sherlock Holmes match wits to reveal the identity of history's most infamous killer. Ellery Queen and Sherlock Holmes are the undisputed masters of analytical deduction - their talents and methods strikingly, almost uncannily, alike. Through the strange interlocking of events past and present, the two celebrated detectives meet to focus their razor-sharp intellects - and their brilliant powers of observation - on the mystery of…Jack the Ripper. History's most depraved murderer, Jack the Ripper found victims who were the whores of Whitechapel. Lurking in narrow, fog-shrouded alleys, he crept forth night after night to murder - and mutilate. Eluding Scotland Yard'smost heroic efforts to track him down, the Ripper continued to satisfy his unnatural appetites, unrestrained - and unidentified! Can Queen and Holmes unmask the notorious killer? Uniquely imaginative, A Study in Terror is a masterpiece of mystery and suspense.
©1966 Ellery Queen (P)2014 Blackstone Audiobooks
The Devil to Pay
Summary
When Hollywood bigwig Solly Spaeth is murdered, thousands cheer. He is a most popular corpse, for Solly's stock manipulations have ruined many, including his partner. A cut-and-dried case - or so it appears. Enter master detective Ellery Queen, whose embarrassing questions uncover a maze of conflicting alibis and motives, and ultimately reveal a deadly face lurking beneath the glittering mask of Tinseltown.
©2013 Ellery Queen (P)2013 Blackstone Audiobooks
This Terrible Beauty
Summary
From the bestselling author of The Forgotten Hours comes an unforgettable story of one woman’s journey to reclaim what she lost in a country torn apart by the devastating legacy of WWII. On the windswept shores of an East German island, Bettina Heilstrom struggles to build a life from the ashes. World War II has ended, and her country is torn apart. Longing for a family, she marries Werner, an older bureaucrat who adores her. But after joining the fledgling secret police, he is drawn deep into its dark mission and becomes a dangerous man. When Bettina falls in love with an idealistic young renegade, Werner discovers her infidelity and forces her to make a terrible choice: spend her life in prison or leave her home forever. Either way she loses both her lover and child. Ten years later, Bettina has reinvented herself as a celebrated photographer in Chicago, but she’s never stopped yearning for the baby she left behind. Surprised by an unexpected visitor from her past, she resolves to return to her ravaged homeland to reclaim her daughter and uncover her beloved’s fate, whatever the cost.
©2020 Katrin Schumann (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Learning to Die in Miami
Summary
Carlos Eire's story of a boyhood uprooted by the Cuban Revolution quickly lures us in, as 11-year-old Carlos and his older brother, Tony, touch down in the sun-dappled Miami of 1962 - a place of daunting abundance where his old Cuban self must die to make way for a new, American self waiting to be born. In this enchanting new work, narrated in Eire's inimitable and lyrical voice, young Carlos adjusts to life in his new country. He lives for a time in a Dickensian foster home, struggles to learn English, attends American schools, and confronts the age-old immigrant's plight: surrounded by the bounty of this rich land yet unable to partake. Carlos must learn to balance the divide between his past and present lives and find his way in this strange new world of gas stations, vending machines, and sprinkler systems. Every bit as poignant, bittersweet, and humorous as his first memoir, Learning to Die in Miami is a moving personal saga, an elegy for a lost childhood and a vanished country, and a celebration of the spirit of renewal that America represents.
©2010 Carlos Eire (P)2010 Tantor
High Crimes
Summary
Two award-winning journalists offer the most comprehensive inside story behind our most significant modern political drama: the House impeachment of Donald Trump. Having spent a year essentially embedded inside several House committees, Michael D'Antonio and Peter Eisner draw on many sources, including key House leaders, to expose the politicking, play-calling, and strategies debated backstage and to explain the Democrats' successes and apparent public failures during the show itself. High Crimes opens with Nancy Pelosi deciding the House should take up impeachment, then, in part one, leaps back to explain what Ukraine was really all about: not just Joe Biden and election interference, but a money grab and oil. In the second part, the authors recount key meetings throughout the run up to the impeachment hearings, including many of the heated confrontations between the Trump administration and House Democrats. And the third part takes listeners behind the scenes of those hearings, showing why certain things happened the way they did for reasons that never came up in public. In the end, having illuminated every step of impeachment, from the schemes that led Giuliani to the Ukraine in 2016 to Fiona Hill's rebuking the Republicans' conspiracy theories, High Crimes promises to be Trump's Final Days. A Macmillan Audio production from Thomas Dunne Books
©2020 Michael D'Antonio (P)2020 Macmillan Audio