Robertson Dean has narrated 197 audiobooks on Listento.it by 213 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 3,310 ratings. The most-rated is Dark Places.
Masters of the Air
Summary
This is the dramatic story of the American bomber boys in World War II who brought the war to Hitler’s doorstep. With the narrative power of fiction, this is a harrowing ride through the fire-filled skies over Berlin, Hanover, and Dresden. Fighting at 25,000 feet in thin, freezing air no warriors had encountered before, bomber crews battled new kinds of assaults on body and mind. Air combat was deadly but intermittent: periods of inactivity and anxiety were followed by short bursts of fire and fear. Unlike infantrymen, bomber boys slept on clean sheets, drank beer in local pubs, and danced to the music of Glenn Miller’s Air Force Band. But they had a much greater chance of dying than ground soldiers. In 1943 an American bomber crewman stood only a one-in-five chance of surviving his tour of duty. The Eighth Air Force lost more men in the war than the US Marine Corps. The bomber crews were an elite group of warriors. Actor Jimmy Stewart was a bomber boy, as was “King of Hollywood” Clark Gable. The air war was filmed by Oscar-winning director William Wyler and covered by reporters like Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite, all of whom flew combat missions with the men. The Anglo-American bombing campaign against Nazi Germany was the longest military campaign of World War II, a war within a war. Until Allied soldiers crossed into Germany in the final months of the war, it was the only battle fought inside the German homeland. Strategic bombing did not win the war, but the war could not have been won without it. American airpower destroyed the rail facilities and oil refineries that supplied the German war machine. The bombing campaign was a shared enterprise: The British bombed at night while American bombers attacked by day - a technique that British commanders thought was suicidal. Drawn from interviews, oral histories, and American, British, German, and other archives, this is an authoritative, deeply moving account of the world’s first and only bomber war.
©2006 Donald L. Miller (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Fighter Pilot
Summary
A larger-than-life hero with a towering personality, Robin Olds was a graduate of West Point and an inductee in the National College Football Hall of Fame for his All-American performance for Army. In World War II, Olds quickly became a top fighter pilot and squadron commander by the age of 22—a double ace with 12 aerial victories. But it was in Vietnam where the man became a legend. He motivated a dejected group of pilots by placing himself under junior officers and challenging them to train him properly. He led the wing with aggressiveness, scoring another four confirmed kills and becoming a rare triple ace. With his marriage to Hollywood actress and pin-up girl Ella Raines, his nonregulation mustache and penchant for drink, Olds was a unique individual whose story is one of the most eagerly anticipated military books of the year. Christina Olds, the daughter of Robin Olds, holds a B.A. in English and creative writing from Vassar, is a member of the Air Force Association, and is the first honorary lifetime member of the Red River Valley Association. Ed Rasimus is a retired USAF fighter pilot who holds a B.S. in political science and an M.S. in both political science and international relations. He has previously written two books on the Vietnam air war, When Thunder Rolled and Palace Cobra.
©2010 Robin Olds with Christina Olds and Ed Rasimus (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Faithful Spy
Summary
“A well-crafted page-turner that addresses the most important issue of our time. It will keep you reading well into the night.” (Vince Flynn) A New York Times reporter has drawn upon his experience covering the occupation in Iraq to write the most gripping and chillingly plausible thriller of the post-9/11 era. Alex Berenson’s debut novel of suspense, The Faithful Spy, is a sharp, explosive story that takes listeners inside the war on terror as fiction has never done before. John Wells is the only American CIA agent ever to penetrate al Qaeda. Since before the attacks in 2001, Wells has been hiding in the mountains of Pakistan, biding his time, building his cover. Now, on the orders of Omar Khadri - the malicious mastermind plotting more al Qaeda strikes on America - Wells is coming home. Neither Khadri nor Jennifer Exley, Wells’s superior at Langley, knows quite what to expect. For Wells has changed during his years in the mountains. He has become a Muslim. He finds the United States decadent and shallow. Yet he hates al Qaeda and the way it uses Islam to justify its murderous assaults on innocents. He is a man alone, and the CIA - still reeling from its failure to predict 9/11 or find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - does not know whether to trust him. Among his handlers at Langley, only Exley believes in him, and even she sometimes wonders. And so the agency freezes Wells out, preferring to rely on high-tech means for gathering intelligence. But as that strategy fails and Khadri moves closer to unleashing the most devastating terrorist attack in history, Wells and Exley must somehow find a way to stop him, with or without the government’s consent. From secret American military bases where suspects are held and “interrogated” to basement laboratories where al Qaeda’s scientists grow the deadliest of biological weapons, The Faithful Spy is a riveting and cautionary tale, as affecting in its personal stories as it is sophisticated in its political details. The first spy thriller to grapple squarely with the complexities and terrors of today’s world, this is a uniquely exciting and unnerving novel by an author who truly knows his territory.
©2006 Alex Berenson (P)2006 Books on Tape
Intellectuals and Race
Summary
Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense - one that goes to the root of the problem. The role of intellectuals in racial strife is explored in an international context that puts the American experience in a wholly new light. Intellectuals have played a major role in racial issues throughout the centuries. Though their individual views may differ, as a whole their views tend to group, and just over the course of the twentieth century, they have shifted from one end of the spectrum to the other. Surprisingly, these radically different views of race were held by intellectuals whose views on other issues were often very similar. Intellectuals and Race is not, however, a book about history, even though it has much historical evidence, as well as demographic, geographic, and economic evidence - all of it directed toward testing the underlying assumptions about race that have prevailed at times among intellectuals in general, and especially at their highest levels. Nor is this simply a theoretical exercise. Sowell’s ultimate concern is the impact of intellectual movements on the larger society, both past and present. These ideas and crusades have ranged widely from racial theories of intelligence to eugenics to “social justice” and multiculturalism. In addition to in-depth examinations of these and other issues, Intellectuals and Race explores the incentives, the visions, and the rationales that drive intellectuals at the highest levels to conclusions that have often turned out to be counterproductive and even disastrous, not only for particular racial or ethnic groups but for societies as a whole.
©2013 Thomas Sowell (P)2013 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Burnt Offerings
Summary
Ben and Marian Rolfe are desperate to escape a stifling summer in their tiny Brooklyn apartment, so when they get the chance to rent a mansion in upstate New York for the entire summer for only $900, it's an offer that's too good to refuse. There's only one catch: behind a strange and intricately carved door in a distant wing of the house lives elderly Mrs. Allardyce, and the Rolfes will be responsible for preparing her meals. But Mrs. Allardyce never seems to emerge from her room, and it soon becomes clear that something weird and terrifying is happening in the house. As the suspense builds toward a revelation of what really lies behind that locked door, the Rolfes will discover that their cheap vacation rental comes at a terrible cost.... The basis for a classic 1976 film adaptation and an acknowledged influence on Stephen King's The Shining, Burnt Offerings is one of the most original and scariest haunted house novels ever written. This edition, the first in decades, features a new introduction by award-winning author Stephen Graham Jones.
©1973 Robert Marasco (P)2016 Blue Heron Audio
Dismantling America
Summary
These wide-ranging essays - on many individual political, economic, cultural, and legal issues - have as a recurring, underlying theme the decline of the values and institutions that have sustained and advanced American society for more than two centuries. This decline has been more than erosion. It has, in many cases, been a deliberate dismantling of American values and institutions by people convinced that their superior wisdom and virtue must override both the traditions of the country and the will of the people. Whether these essays (originally published as syndicated newspaper columns) are individually about financial bailouts, illegal immigrants, gay marriage, national security, or the Duke University rape case, the underlying concern is about what these very different kinds of things say about the general direction of American society. This larger and longer-lasting question is whether the particular issues discussed reflect a degeneration or dismantling of the America that we once knew and expected to pass on to our children and grandchildren. There are people determined that this country’s values, history, laws, traditions, and role in the world are fundamentally wrong and must be changed. Such people will not stop dismantling America unless they get stopped—and the next election may be the last time to stop them, before they take the country beyond the point of no return.
©2010 Thomas Sowell (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Conspiracy of Fools
Summary
From an award-winning New York Times reporter comes the full, mind-boggling true story of the lies, crimes, and ineptitude behind the Enron scandal that imperiled a presidency, destroyed a marketplace, and changed Washington and Wall Street forever. It was the corporate collapse that appeared to come out of nowhere. In late 2001, the Enron Corporation - a darling of the financial world, a company whose executives were friends of presidents and the powerful - imploded virtually overnight, leaving vast wreckage in its wake and sparking a criminal investigation that would last for years. Kurt Eichenwald transforms the unbelievable story of the Enron scandal into a rip-roaring narrative of epic proportions, taking readers behind every closed door - from the Oval Office to the executive suites, from the highest reaches of the Justice Department to the homes and bedrooms of the top officers. It is a tale of global reach - from Houston to Washington, from Bombay to London, from Munich to Sao Paolo - laying out the unbelievable scenes that twisted together to create this shocking true story. Eichenwald reveals never-disclosed details of a story that features a cast including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul O’Neill, Harvey Pitt, Colin Powell, Gray Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Alan Greenspan, Ken Lay, Andy Fastow, Jeff Skilling, Bill Clinton, Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone. With its you-are-there glimpse into the secretive worlds of corporate power, Conspiracy of Fools is an all-true financial and political thriller of cinematic proportions.
©2005 Kurt Eichenwald (P)2005 Books on Tape
Armor and Blood
Summary
While the Battle of Kursk has long captivated World War II aficionados, it has been unjustly overlooked by historians. Drawing on the masses of new information made available by the opening of the Russian military archives, Dennis E. Showalter at last corrects that error. This battle was the critical turning point on World War II's Eastern Front. In the aftermath of the Red Army's brutal repulse of the Germans at Stalingrad, the stakes could not have been higher. More than 3,000,000 men and 8,000 tanks met in the heart of the Soviet Union, some 400 miles south of Moscow, in an encounter that both sides knew would reshape the war. The adversaries were at the peak of their respective powers. On both sides, the generals and the dictators they served were in agreement on where, why, and how to fight. The result was a furious death grapple between two of history's most formidable fighting forces - a battle that might possibly have been the greatest of all time. In Armor and Blood, Showalter recreates every aspect of this dramatic struggle. He offers expert perspective on strategy and tactics at the highest levels, from the halls of power in Moscow and Berlin to the battlefield command posts on both sides. But it is the author's exploration of the human dimension of armored combat that truly distinguishes this book. In the classic tradition of John Keegan's The Face of Battle, Showalter's narrative crackles with insight into the unique dynamics of tank warfare - its effect on men's minds as well as their bodies. Scrupulously researched, exhaustively documented, and vividly illustrated, this book is a chilling testament to man's ability to build and to destroy. When the dust settled, the field at Kursk was nothing more than a wasteland of steel carcasses, dead soldiers, and smoking debris. The Soviet victory ended German hopes of restoring their position on the Eastern Front, and put the Red Army on the road to Berlin. Armor and Blood presents listeners with what will likely be the authoritative study of Kursk for decades to come.
©2013 Dennis Showalter (P)2013 Tantor
Learned Optimism
Summary
You can acquire optimism and significantly improve your life! Are you an optimist or a pessimist? How often do you take on exciting new projects or celebrate your successes? Now psychologist Martin E.P. Seligman, one of the world's experts on motivation, shows you how to chart a new approach to living with "flexible optimism." Dr. Seligman's principles of reasoned, flexible optimism will help you rise above pessimism and the depression that accompanies negative thoughts. Learned Optimism shows you how to: Attain maximum personal achievement Boost your mood - and your immune system - with healthful thoughts Help your children by practicing the patterns of thought that encourage optimism at an early age Change your interior dialogue and experience the astonishing positive results
©1991 Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved (P)1991 Simon & Schuster Audio, All Rights Reserved
The Thomas Sowell Reader
Summary
These selections from the many writings of Thomas Sowell over a period of half a century cover social, economic, cultural, legal, educational, and political issues. The sources range from Dr. Sowell’s letters, books, newspaper columns, and articles in both scholarly journals and popular magazines. The topics range from latetalking children to tax cuts for the rich, baseball, race, war, the role of judges, medical care, and the rhetoric of politicians. These topics are dealt with by drawing sometimes on history, sometimes on economics, and sometimes on a sense of humor.
©2011 Thomas Sowell (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
As I Lay Dying
Summary
At the heart of this 1930 novel is the Bundren family's bizarre journey to Jefferson to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Faulkner lets each family member, including Addie, and others along the way tell their private responses to Addie's life.
(P)2005 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.
A Bright Shining Lie
Summary
Sheehan's tragic biography of John Paul Vann is also a sweeping history of America's seduction, entrapment and disillusionment in Vietnam.
©1989 Neil Sheehan (P)2009 Random House
And the Birds Rained Down
Summary
Tom and Charlie are living out what's left of their lives on their own terms in a remote forest, two pot growers their only connection to the outside world. But then two women arrive - a photographer on the trail of survivors of a decades-ago forest fire and an elderly escapee from a psychiatric institution - and everything changes. And the Birds Rained Down, the recipient of several prizes, is a haunting meditation on aging and self-determination. Please note: The French version came before the English translation.
©2011 Jocelyne Saucier, © 2012 Rhonda Mullins, English Translation. (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Future Crimes
Summary
One of the world's leading authorities on global security, Marc Goodman takes listeners deep into the digital underground to expose the alarming ways criminals, corporations, and even countries are using new and emerging technologies against you - and how this makes everyone more vulnerable than ever imagined. Technological advances have benefited our world in immeasurable ways, but there is an ominous flip side: Our technology can be turned against us. Hackers can activate baby monitors to spy on families, thieves are analyzing social media posts to plot home invasions, and stalkers are exploiting the GPS on smart phones to track their victims' every move. We all know today's criminals can steal identities, drain online bank accounts, and wipe out computer servers, but that's just the beginning. To date, no computer has been created that could not be hacked - a sobering fact given our radical dependence on these machines for everything from our nation's power grid to air traffic control to financial services. Yet, as ubiquitous as technology seems today, just over the horizon is a tidal wave of scientific progress that will leave our heads spinning. If today's Internet is the size of a golf ball, tomorrow's will be the size of the sun. Welcome to the Internet of Things, a living, breathing, global information grid where every physical object will be online. But with greater connections come greater risks. Implantable medical devices such as pacemakers can be hacked to deliver a lethal jolt of electricity and a car's brakes can be disabled at high speed from miles away. Meanwhile, 3-D printers can produce AK-47s, bioterrorists can download the recipe for Spanish flu, and cartels are using fleets of drones to ferry drugs across borders. With explosive insights based upon a career in law enforcement and counterterrorism, Marc Goodman takes listeners on a vivid journey through the darkest recesses of the Internet.
©2015 Marc Goodman (P)2015 Randon House Audio
Hell in a Very Small Place
Summary
Like Gettysburg, Stalingrad, Midway, and Tet, the battle at Dien Bien Phu - a strategic attack launched by France against the Vietnamese in 1954 after eight long years of war - marked a historic turning point. By the end of the 56-day siege, a determined Viet Minh guerrilla force had destroyed a large tactical French colonial army in the heart of Southeast Asia. The Vietnamese victory would not only end French occupation of Indochina and offer a sobering premonition of the US' future military defeat in the region but would also provide a new model of modern warfare in which size and sophistication didn't always dictate victory. Before his death in Vietnam in 1967, Bernard Fall, a critically acclaimed scholar and reporter, drew upon declassified documents from the French Defense Ministry and interviews with thousands of surviving French and Vietnamese soldiers to weave a compelling account of the key battle of Dien Bien Phu. With Fall's thorough and insightful analysis, Hell in a Very Small Place has become one of the benchmarks in war reportage.
©1966 Bernard B. Fall (P)2016 Tantor
The Secret History of the Mongol Queens
Summary
The Mongol queens of the 13th century ruled the largest empire the world has ever known. Yet sometime near the end of the century, censors cut a section from The Secret History of the Mongols, leaving a single tantalizing quote from Genghis Khan: “Let us reward our female offspring.” Only this hint of a father??s legacy for his daughters remained of a much larger story. The queens of the Silk Route turned their father’s conquests into the world’s first truly international empire, fostering trade, education, and religion throughout their territories and creating an economic system that stretched from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. Outlandish stories of these powerful queens trickled out of the Empire, shocking the citizens of Europe and and the Islamic world. After Genghis Khan’s death in 1227, conflicts erupted between his daughters and his daughters-in-law; what began as a war between powerful women soon became a war against women in power as brother turned against sister, son against mother. At the end of this epic struggle, the dynasty of the Mongol queens had seemingly been extinguished forever, as even their names were erased from the historical record. One of the most unusual and important warrior queens of history arose to avenge the wrongs, rescue the tattered shreds of the Mongol Empire, and restore order to a shattered world. Putting on her quiver and picking up her bow, Queen Mandhuhai led her soldiers through victory after victory. In her 30s she married a 17-year-old prince, and she bore eight children in the midst of a career spent fighting the Ming Dynasty of China on one side and a series of Muslim warlords on the other. Her unprecedented success on the battlefield provoked the Chinese into the most frantic and expensive phase of wall building in history. Charging into battle even while pregnant, she fought to reassemble the Mongol Nation of Genghis Khan and to preserve it for her own children to rule in peace. At the conclusion of his magnificently researched and ground-breaking narrative, Weatherford notes that, despite their mystery and the efforts to erase them from our collective memory, the deeds of these Mongol queens inspired great artists from Chaucer and Milton to Goethe and Puccini, and so their stories live on today. With The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, Jack Weatherford restores the queens’ missing chapter to the annals of history.
©2010 Jack Weatherford (P)2010 Random House
The Spirit of the Disciplines
Summary
Dallas Willard, one of today's most brilliant Christian thinkers and the author of The Divine Conspiracy ( Christianity Today's 1999 Book of the Year), presents a way of living that enables ordinary men and women to enjoy the fruit of the Christian life. He reveals how the key to self-transformation resides in the practice of the spiritual disciplines, and how their practice affirms human life to the fullest. The Spirit of the Disciplines is for everyone who strives to be a disciple of Jesus in thought and action as well as intention.
©1990 Dallas Willard (P)2007 christianaudio.com
Intercessory Prayer
Summary
With Intercessory Prayer, first-time author and gifted Bible teacher Dutch Sheets brings clear and startling revelation on the power of prayer and the role of intercession. With the rare grace of Lucado and Foster, Dutch unwraps the mystery of intercessory prayer, revealing our role as God's partners in His work. Have you ever wondered if your prayers really count? Or why you never seem to get any answers? If so, then Intercessory Prayer will convince you that your prayers can, indeed, move heaven and earth.
©2008 Dutch Sheets (P)2008 christianaudio.com
Black Dahlia, Red Rose
Summary
The gruesome murder of hopeful starlet Elizabeth Short, in the noir-tinged Los Angeles of 1947, has a permanent place in American lore as one of the most inscrutable of true-crime mysteries. Now, Piu Eatwell - relentless legal sleuth and atmospheric stylist - cracks the case after 70 years. With recently unredacted FBI files, newly released sections of the LAPD files, and explosive new interviews, Eatwell has unprecedented access to primary evidence and a persuasive culprit. She layers her findings into a gritty, cinematic retelling of the case from the corrupt LAPD and the take-no-prisoners press to the seedy underworld of would-be actresses and the men who preyed on them. In mesmerizing prose, Black Dahlia, Red Rose is a panorama of 1940s Hollywood, a definitive account of one of the biggest unsolved murders of American legal history.
©2017 Piu Eatwell (P)2017 HighBridge, a Division of Recorded Books
The Man in the Black Suit
Summary
Acacia Santos excels at her job as concierge at the prestigious Hotel Victoire in Paris. When her superior, Marcel, is attacked in a supposed random mugging, she is tasked with serving one of the hotel's most mysterious and attractive guests. Nicholas Cassirer checks into the hotel under an assumed name every three months. Usually, he stays in the penthouse suite with a beautiful female companion but on this occasion, he arrives alone and is displeased in having to deal with someone new. A match of wits ensues as he tests Acacia's expertise with a series of almost impossible demands. Her intelligence and creativity rise to the challenge, earning his respect. They strike a tenuous accord until Acacia discovers a famous stolen painting in his suite. She contacts a former boyfriend who works for the elite BRB, a unit of French law enforcement that deals with art thefts. Nicholas is questioned by police and released when it is revealed the painting is a reproduction. Irked with her behavior, Acacia's supervisor demotes her threatening dismissal and the cancellation of her work permit. But Acacia has already attracted Nicholas' attention.
©2017 Sylvain Reynard (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books