Robert Petkoff has narrated 222 audiobooks on Listento.it by 176 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 10,629 ratings. The most-rated is Fear.
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
Dr. Benjamin Rush
Summary
A gripping, often startling biography of the Founding Father of an America that other Founding Fathers forgot - an America of women, African Americans, Jews, Roman Catholics, Quakers, indentured workers, the poor, the mentally ill, and war veterans Ninety percent of Americans could not vote and did not enjoy rights to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness when our Founding Fathers proclaimed, "all men are created equal." Alone among those who signed the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush heard the cries of those other, deprived Americans and stepped forth as the nation's first great humanitarian and social reformer. Remembered primarily as America's leading, most influential physician, Rush led the Founding Fathers in calling for abolition of slavery, equal rights for women, improved medical care for injured troops, free health care for the poor, slum clearance, citywide sanitation, an end to child labor, free universal public education, humane treatment and therapy for the mentally ill, prison reform, and an end to capital punishment. Using archival material from Edinburgh, London, Paris, and Philadelphia, as well as significant new materials from Rush's descendants and historical societies, Harlow Giles Unger's new biography restores Benjamin Rush to his rightful place in American history as the Founding Father of modern American medical care and psychiatry. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2018 Harlow Giles Unger (P)2018 Hachette Audio
The Making of a Justice
Summary
A masterful and personal account of life on the Supreme Court that offers a unique understanding of American history from one of the most prominent jurists of our time When Justice John Paul Stevens retired from the Supreme Court of the United States in 2010, he left a legacy of service unequaled in the history of the Court. During his 34-year tenure, Justice Stevens was a prolific writer, authoring in total more than 1,000 opinions. In The Making of a Justice, John Paul Stevens recounts the first 94 years of his extraordinary life, offering an intimate and illuminating account of his service on the nation's highest court. Appointed by President Gerald Ford and eventually retiring during President Obama's first term, Justice Stevens has been witness to, and an integral part of, landmark changes in American society. With stories of growing up in Chicago, his work as a naval traffic analyst at Pearl Harbor during World War II, and his early days in private practice, as well as a behind-the-scenes look at some of the most important Supreme Court decisions over the last four decades, The Making of a Justice offers a warm and fascinating account of Justice Stevens' unique and transformative American life. This comprehensive memoir is a must-listen for those trying to better understand our country and the Constitution. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2019 John Paul Stevens (P)2019 Hachette Audio
If You Find This
Summary
Mixing mystery and adventure in the tradition of Louis Sachar, Avi, and E. L. Konigsburg, If You Find This is the story of unlikely friendships, unexpected bravery, and 11-year-old Nicholas Funes' quest to prove his grandfather's treasure is real. Nicholas is a math and music genius with no friends and a huge problem: His father has lost his job, and they'll have to sell their house, which holds the only memory Nicholas has of his younger brother. Just in time, Nicholas' senile grandfather arrives, filled with tales of priceless treasure he has hidden somewhere in town - but where? With the help of misfit classmates, two grandfathers, a ghosthouse, hidden messages, séances, and an uncanny mind for numbers, Nicholas stages a nursing home breakout, tangles with high schoolers in smugglers' tunnels, and gets swept up in a duel with the biggest bullies in the neighborhood. Will it be enough to find the treasure and save his house?
©2015 Matthew Baker (P)2015 Hachette Audio
The Day the World Went Nuclear
Summary
Autumn 1944. World War II is nearly over in Europe, but in the Pacific, American soldiers face an enemy who will not surrender despite a massive and mounting death toll. Meanwhile, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team of scientists are preparing to test the deadliest weapon known to mankind. Newly inaugurated president Harry Truman faces the most important political decision in history: whether to use that weapon. Adapted from Bill O'Reilly's historical thriller Killing the Rising Sun, with characteristically gripping storytelling, this story explores the decision to use the atom bomb and the end of World War II in the Pacific.
©2017 Bill O'Reilly (P)2017 Macmillan Audio
Our Better Angels
Summary
Inspiring and insightful, Our Better Angels: Seven Simple Virtues That Will Change Your Life and the World celebrates the shared principles that unite and enable us to overcome life’s challenges together. "When the waters rise, so do our better angels." (President Jimmy Carter) Jonathan Reckford, the CEO of Habitat for Humanity, has seen time and again the powerful benefits that arise when people from all walks of life work together to help one another. In this uplifting audiobook, he shares true stories of people involved with Habitat as volunteers and future homeowners who embody seven timeless virtues - kindness, community, empowerment, joy, respect, generosity, and service - and shows how we can all practice these to improve the quality of our own lives as well as those around us. A Vietnam veteran finds peace where he was once engaged in war. An impoverished single mother offers her family’s time and energy to enrich their neighbors’ lives. A Zambian family of nine living in a makeshift tent makes room to shelter even more. A teenager grieving for his mother honors her love and memory by ensuring other people have a place to call home. A former president of the United States leads by example with a determined work ethic that motivates everyone around him to be the best version of themselves. These stories, and many others, illustrate how virtues become values, how cooperation becomes connection, and how even the smallest act of compassion can encourage actions that transform the world around us. Here are tales that will make listeners laugh and cry and embrace with passion the calling of our better angels to change the way we take care of ourselves, our families, our communities, and the world. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2019, 2019 Jonathan Reckford, Foreword copyright Jimmy Carter (P)2019 Macmillan Audio
Victory City
Summary
From John Strausbaugh, author of City of Sedition and The Village, comes the definitive history of Gotham during the World War II era. New York City during World War II wasn't just a place of servicemen, politicians, heroes, GI Joes, and Rosie the Riveters, but also of quislings and saboteurs; of Nazi, fascist, and communist sympathizers; of war protesters and conscientious objectors; of gangsters and hookers and profiteers; of latchkey kids and bobby-soxers, poets and painters, atomic scientists and atomic spies. While the war launched and leveled nations, spurred economic growth, and saw the rise and fall of global fascism, New York City would eventually emerge as the new capital of the world. From the Gilded Age to VJ-Day, an array of fascinating New Yorkers rose to fame, from Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Langston Hughes to Joe Louis, to Robert Moses and Joe DiMaggio. In Victory City, John Strausbaugh returns to tell the story of New York City's war years with the same richness, depth, and nuance he brought to his previous books, City of Sedition and The Village, providing listeners with a groundbreaking new look into the greatest city on earth during the most transformative - and costliest - war in human history. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2018 John Strausbaugh (P)2018 Hachette Audio
Processed Cheese
Summary
From an "astonishing" writer (Toni Morrison), the savagely funny story of a couple who unexpectedly come into some money in a wealth-obsessed America deranged by Mammon. A bag of money drops out of the sky, literally, into the path of a cash-starved citizen named Graveyard. He carries it home to his wife, Ambience, and they embark on the adventure of their lives, finally able to have everything they've always thought they deserved: cars, guns, games, jewels, clothes - and of course sex, travel, and time with friends and family. There is no limit except their imagination and the hours in the day, and even those seem to be subject to their control. Of course, the owner of the bag is searching for it, and will do whatever is necessary to get it back. And, of course, these new riches change everything - and nothing at all. Darkly hilarious, Processed Cheese is both satire and serious as death. It's a road novel, a family story, and a last-girl-standing thriller of once-in-a-generation vitality and inventiveness. With the clarity of a Swift or a Melville, Wright has created a funhouse-mirror drama that puts all the chips on the table and every bullet in the clip, down to the last breathtaking moment.
©2020 Stephen Wright (P)2020 Hachette Audio
Chasing History
Summary
The Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of All the President’s Men - the chronicle of the investigative report about the Watergate break-in and resultant political scandal that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation - recalls his formative years as a teenage newspaper reporter in JFK’s Washington - a tale of adventures, scrapes, clever escapes, and the opportunity of a lifetime. “Carl Bernstein, Washington Star.” With these words, the 16-year-old senior at Montgomery Blair High School set himself apart from the high school crowd and set himself on a track that would define his life. Carl Bernstein was far from the best student in his class - in fact, he was in danger of not graduating at all - but he had a talent for writing, a burning desire to know things that other people didn’t, and a flair for being in the right place at the right time. Those qualities got him inside the newsroom at the Washington Star, the afternoon paper in the nation’s capital, in the summer of 1960, a pivotal time for America, for Washington, DC, and for a young man in a hurry on the cusp of adulthood. Chasing History opens up the world of the early 1960s as Bernstein experienced it, chasing after grisly crimes with the paper’s police reporter, gathering colorful details at a John F. Kennedy campaign rally, running afoul of union rules, and confronting racial tensions as the civil rights movement gained strength. We learn alongside him as he comes to understand the life of a newspaperman, and we share his pride as he hunts down information, gets his first byline, and discovers that he has a talent for the job after all. By turns exhilarating, funny, tense, and poignant, Chasing History shows us a country coming into its own maturity along with young Carl Bernstein, and when he strikes out on his own after five years at the Star, his hard-won knowledge and experience feels like ours as well. A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company
©2021 Carl Bernstein (P)2021 Macmillan Audio
The Dreadful Lemon Sky
Summary
Hero of The Dreadful Lemon Sky is Travis McGee, a man of universal interest and independent means who lives on an old houseboat he won in a poker game. One evening a young woman shows up with a suitcase full of cash. McGee agrees to be bagman. She tells him what to do if she doesn't return. When she doesn't, McGee is left alone to deal with an intrigue that involves drugs, fear, passion, and death.
©1974 John D. MacDonald Publishing, Inc. (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
A Cruel and Shocking Act
Summary
A groundbreaking, explosive account of the Kennedy assassination that will rewrite the history of the 20th century's most controversial murder investigation. The questions have haunted our nation for half a century: Was the President killed by a single gunman? Was Lee Harvey Oswald part of a conspiracy? Did the Warren Commission discover the whole truth of what happened on November 22, 1963? Philip Shenon, a veteran investigative journalist who spent most of his career at The New York Times, finally provides many of the answers. Though A Cruel and Shocking Act began as Shenon's attempt to write the first insider's history of the Warren Commission, it quickly became something much larger and more important when he discovered startling information that was withheld from the Warren Commission by the CIA, FBI, and others in power in Washington. Shenon shows how the commission's 10-month investigation was doomed to fail because the man leading it - Chief Justice Earl Warren - was more committed to protecting the Kennedy family than getting to the full truth about what happened on that tragic day. A taut, narrative, Shenon's audiobook features some of the most compelling figures of the 20th century: Bobby Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, Chief Justice Warren, CIA spymasters Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, as well as the CIA's treacherous "molehunter", James Jesus Angleton. Based on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to the surviving commission staffers and many other key players, Philip Shenon's authoritative, scrupulously researched book will forever change the way we think about the Kennedy assassination and about the deeply flawed investigation that followed. Includes a prologue read by the author.
©2013 Philip Shenon (P)2013 Macmillan Audio
The Latecomers
Summary
From the best-selling author of What Was Mine - a deeply moving family drama about a young Irish immigrant, an ancestral home in New England, and a dark secret that lay hidden in its walls for five generations. In 1908, 16-year-old Bridey runs away from her small town in Ireland with her same-age sweetheart, Thom. But when Thom dies suddenly of ship fever on their ocean crossing, Bridey finds herself alone and pregnant in a strange new world. Forced by circumstance to give up the baby for adoption, Bridey finds work as a maid for the Hollingworth family at a lavish, sprawling estate. It's the dawn of a new century: Innovative technologies are emerging, women's roles are changing, and Bridey is emboldened by the promise of a fresh start. She cares for the Hollingworth children as if they were her own, until a mysterious death changes Bridey and the household forever. For decades, the terrible secrets of Bridey's past continue to haunt the family. In the present day, the youngest Hollingworth makes a connection that finally brings these dark ghost stories into the light. Told in interweaving timelines and rich with detailed history, romance, and dark secrets, Helen Klein Ross' The Latecomers spans a century of America life and reminds us all we can never truly leave the past behind. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2018 Helen Klein Ross (P)2018 Hachette Audio
The Green Ripper
Summary
Beautiful girls always grace the Florida beaches; strolling, sailing, relaxing at the many parties on Travis McGee's houseboat, The Busted Flush. McGee was too smart - and had been around too long - for many of them to touch his heart. Now, however, there was Gretel. She had discovered the key to McGee - to all of him - and now he had something to hope for. Then, terribly, unexpectedly, she was dead. From a mysterious illness, or so they said. But McGee knew the truth; that Gretel had been murdered. And now he was out for blood.
©1979 John D. MacDonald (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Lincoln
Summary
This work is perhaps the most complete and enjoyable children's book ever written about one of the nation's most fascinating and important figures, Abraham Lincoln.
©1989 Russell Freedman (P)2008 Listening Library
The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper
Summary
Helena Pearson. Undeniably beautiful... indisputably rich... incredibly wanton... the perfect client for Travis McGee. He did a big favor for her husband and then for the lady herself. Now Helena is dead, and McGee finds out that she had one last request to make of him: find out why her beautiful daughter, Maurie, keeps trying to kill herself. So, half-convinced that Maurie needs a good doctor and not a devil-may-care beach bum, McGee makes his way to the prosperous town of Fort Courtney, Florida, a respectable, booming, deadly little place.
©1968 John D. MacDonald Publishing, Inc. (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Dress Her in Indigo
Summary
A wealthy old man laid up in the hospital is desperate to understand the last months of his daughter's life before she was killed in a car crash in Mexico. It was puzzling. She'd cleaned out her considerable bank account, left Miami and hadn't been heard from again. Travis McGee ventures into the steep hills and strange backwoods of Oaxaca through a bizarre world of dropouts, drug freaks, and kinky rich people - and begins to suspect the beautiful girl's death was no accident.
©1969 John D. MacDonald (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Hamlet (No Fear Shakespeare)
Summary
Don’t be intimidated by Shakespeare! These popular guides make the Bard’s plays accessible and enjoyable. Each No Fear guide contains: The complete text of the original play A line-by-line translation that puts Shakespeare into everyday language A complete list of characters with descriptions Plenty of helpful commentary When Shakespeare’s words make your head spin, our audio translations will help you sort out what’s happening, who’s saying what, and why!
©2018 SparkNotes (P)2021 SparkNotes Audio/No Fear Shakespeare
Goodnight Trump
Summary
Turn out the lights on another endless day in Trump's America with this parody of Goodnight Moon by the best-selling duo behind Goodnight Bush - putting to bed America's most yugely bad president ever. In the very classy room There was a golden mirror And a silver spoon And a broadcast of - A half-baked story from a fake newsroom... Parodying the soothing incantations of Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown with illustrations by Clement Hurd, Goodnight Trump opens in the very classy golden bedroom of the White House, where it is bedtime for the 45th President of the United States. In this wickedly funny update to the bedtime classic, listeners can encourage this very stable genius to bid a gentle goodnight to some of his favorite things, including his stuffed animal (what else but a Playboy bunny), his best friends from Russia, his Twitter feed, and his 12-pack of Diet Coke. Goodnight Trump is a perfect gift for those who lean to the left - offering listeners the chance to put America's man-child-in-chief to bed early, so children everywhere can have sweet dreams without fear of being torn from their homes and families. The full list of narrators for this audiobook includes: Wes Studi, DeLana Studi, Ellen Archer, Sam Archer Esner, Robert Petkoff, Susan Wands, James Langton, Sophie Langton, Olivia Langton, Liam Langton, Ade M’Cormack, Paula Andrea, Feodor Chin, ViViAnn Yes, Jeanette Illidg, Nicholas Tecosky, Robin Miles, Asher Du Ford, Erich Origen, Aimee Ollman, Yaser Bantan, Kyle Chapple, and Paul-Mikel Williams. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2018 Erich Origen and Gan Golan (P)2018 Hachette Audio
Rise the Dark
Summary
Mark Novak's greatest mystery may be his own.... Rise the dark. These were the last words written in Lauren Novak's notebook before she was murdered in a strange Florida village. They've never meant anything to the police or to her husband, investigator Markus Novak. Now the man he believes killed her is out of prison and draws Markus to the place he's avoided for so long: the lonely road where his wife was shot to death beneath the cypress trees and Spanish moss in a town called Cassadaga. In Red Lodge, Montana, a senseless act of vandalism shuts the lights off in the town where Sabrina Baldwin is still trying to adjust to a new home and mourning the loss of her brother, who was a high-voltage linesman just like her husband, Jay. As the spring's final snowstorm calls Jay deeper into the mountains, chasing the destruction on the electrical grid, Sabrina is abducted by Garland Webb, the man Markus Novak believes killed his wife. Drawing them all together is a messianic villain who understands that you can never outpace your past. You can only rise against the future.
©2016 Michael Koryta (P)2016 Hachette Audio
The Problem of Democracy
Summary
"Told with authority and style.... Crisply summarizing the Adamses' legacy, the authors stress principle over partisanship." (The Wall Street Journal) How the father and son presidents foresaw the rise of the cult of personality and fought those who sought to abuse the weaknesses inherent in our democracy, from the New York Times best-selling author of White Trash. John and John Quincy Adams: rogue intellectuals, unsparing truth-tellers, too uncensored for their own political good. They held that political participation demanded moral courage. They did not seek popularity (it showed). They lamented the fact that hero worship in America substituted idolatry for results; and they made it clear that they were talking about Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. When John Adams succeeded George Washington as President, his son had already followed him into public service and was stationed in Europe as a diplomat. Though they spent many years apart - and as their careers spanned Europe, Washington DC, and their family home south of Boston - they maintained a close bond through extensive letter writing, debating history, political philosophy, and partisan maneuvering. The problem of democracy is an urgent problem; the father-and-son presidents grasped the perilous psychology of politics and forecast what future generations would have to contend with: citizens wanting heroes to worship and covetous elites more than willing to mislead. Rejection at the polls, each after one term, does not prove that the presidents Adams had erroneous ideas. Intellectually, they were what we today call "independents", reluctant to commit blindly to an organized political party. No historian has attempted to dissect their intertwined lives as Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein do in this audio, and there is no better time than the present to learn from the American nation's most insightful malcontents.
©2019 Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein (P)2019 Penguin Audio