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.
The Great Gamble
Summary
The Soviet war in Afghanistan was a grueling debacle that has striking lessons for American foreign policy today. In The Great Gamble, Gregory Feifer examines the war from the perspective of the soldiers on the ground. During the last years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union sent some of its most elite troops to unfamiliar lands in Central Asia to fight a vaguely defined enemy, which eventually defeated their superior number with unconventional tactics. Although the Soviet leadership initially saw the invasion as a victory, many Russian soldiers came to view the war as a demoralizing and devastating defeat, the consequences of which had a substantial impact on the Soviet Union and its collapse. Feifer's extensive research includes fascinating interviews with participants from both sides of the conflict. In gripping detail, he vividly depicts the invasion of a volatile country that no power has ever successfully conquered. Parallels between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are impossible to ignore: Both conflicts were waged amid vague ideological rhetoric about freedom. Both were roundly condemned by the outside world for trying to impose their favored forms of government on countries with very different ways of life. And both seem destined to end on uncertain terms. The Great Gamble tells an unforgettable story full of drama, action, and political intrigue whose relevance in our own time is greater than ever.
©2008 Gregory Feifer (P)2009 Tantor
The Brothers K
Summary
This touching, uplifting novel spans decades of loyalty, anger, regret, and love in the lives of the Chance family. Here is a father whose dreams of glory on the baseball field are shattered by a mill accident, a mother who clings obsessively to a religion as a ward against the darkest hour of her past, and four brothers who come of age during the seismic upheavals of the 60s. They each choose their own way to deal with what the world has become. By turns uproariously funny and deeply moving, and beautifully written throughout, The Brothers K tells a story both striking in its originality and poignant in its universality.
©1992 David James Duncan (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Too Busy Not to Pray
Summary
Most of us have trouble finding time to pray. There's church and school and neighborhood and job and friends and recreation. And then the crises hit! Time for prayer seems an impossible luxury. As a pastor, Bill Hybels knows hundreds of people with schedules like this. Yet in his own life he has made the hard discovery that prayer doesn't happen on the run. He decided he was too busy not to pray. Hybels's accessible introduction to prayer has already helped over 400,000 readers develop a rich and regular prayer life in the midst of life's business. Now, in this revised and expanded 10th anniversary edition, he includes new insights from his years of ministry and his own spiritual journey. He shows how to slow down to pray, listen to God, respond to what we hear, practice the presence of God and overcome prayer barriers. His fun and practical book offers the resources we need for growing, ongoing experiences in prayer.
©2008 Bill Hybels (P)2009 christianaudio.com
The Essential Rumi, New Expanded Edition
Summary
This revised and expanded edition of The Essential Rumi includes a new introduction by Coleman Barks and more than 80 never-before-published poems. Through his lyrical translations, Coleman Barks has been instrumental in bringing this exquisite literature to a remarkably wide range of listeners, making the ecstatic, spiritual poetry of 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi more popular than ever. The Essential Rumi continues to be the best-selling of all Rumi books and the definitive selection of his beautiful, mystical poetry.
©2018 Coleman Barks, John Moyne, A.J. Arberry, Reynold Nicholson (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Lords of Strategy
Summary
Imagine running a business without a strategy. It would be akin to driving blindfolded, to building a house without a blueprint. Yet just 50 years ago, business “plans” were mere extrapolations of the status quo, heedless of the forces that determine the fate of today’s organizations: competitive threats, customer needs, and business costs. The concept of strategy changed all that, paving the way for the creation of the modern corporate world.
The Lords of Strategy recounts the birth and evolution of strategy — arguably the most influential business paradigm of the past half century — and the trials and triumphs of the surprising disruptors who invented it. Principal among them were four men: Bruce Henderson, found of the Boston Consulting Group; Bill Bain, creator of Bain & Company; Fred Gluck, longtime managing director of McKinsey & Company; and Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter. Each was obsessed with pinpointing how companies achieve competitive advantage over others. This insider account reveals these industry’s pioneers as “idea junkies” - a new breed of intellectuals who wielded concepts as weapons for fighting business battles. Their relentless efforts to plumb the depths of competition exploded much of the prevailing wisdom, galvanized executives into action, and forced companies to understand themselves as never before.
An important book by one of management’s keenest observers, The Lords of Strategy provides listeners with a deeper understanding of the world they compete in and a sharper eye for what works — and what doesn’t — when forging strategy.
©2010 Walter Kiechel III (P)2010 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Spook Country
Summary
Tito is in his early 20s. Born in Cuba, he speaks fluent Russian, lives in one room in a NoLita warehouse, and does delicate jobs involving information transfer. Hollis Henry is an investigative journalist, on assignment from a magazine called Node. Node doesn't exist yet, which is fine; she's used to that. But it seems to be actively blocking the kind of buzz that magazines normally cultivate before they start up. Really actively blocking it. It's odd, even a little scary, if Hollis lets herself think about it much - which she doesn't. She can't afford to. Milgrim is a junkie. A high-end junkie, hooked on prescription antianxiety drugs. Milgrim figures he wouldn't survive 24 hours if Brown, the mystery man who saved him from a misunderstanding with his dealer, ever stopped supplying those little bubble packs. What exactly Brown is up to Milgrim can't say, but it seems to be military in nature. At least, Milgrim's very nuanced Russian would seem to be a big part of it, as would breaking into locked rooms. Bobby Chombo is a "producer" and an enigma. In his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for manufacturers of military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. Hollis Henry has been told to find him.
©2007 William Gibson (P)2007 Penguin Audio, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. and Books on Tape. All rights reserved.
Tin Can Titans
Summary
When Admiral William Halsey selected Destroyer Squadron 21 to lead his victorious ships into Tokyo Bay to accept the Japanese surrender, it was the most battle-hardened US naval squadron of the war. But it was not the squadron of ships that had accumulated such an inspiring résumé; it was the people serving aboard them. Sailors, not metallic superstructures and hulls, had won the battles and become the stuff of legend. Men like Commander Donald MacDonald, skipper of the USS O'Bannon, who became the most decorated naval officer of the Pacific war; Lieutenant Hugh Barr Miller, who survived his ship's sinking and waged a one-man battle against the enemy while stranded on a Japanese-occupied island; and Doctor Dow "Doc" Ransom, the beloved physician of the USS La Vallette, who combined a mixture of humor and medical expertise to treat his patients at sea epitomize the sacrifices made by all the men and women of World War II. Through diaries, personal interviews with survivors, and letters written to and by the crews during the war, preeminent historian of the Pacific theater John Wukovits brings to life the human story of the squadron and its men, who bested the Japanese in the Pacific and helped take the war to Tokyo.
©2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc. (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Forever War
Summary
From the front lines of the battle against Islamic fundamentalism, a searing, unforgettable audiobook that captures the human essence of the greatest conflict of our time. Through the eyes of Dexter Filkins, the prize-winning New York Times correspondent, we witness the remarkable chain of events that began with the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, continued with the attacks of 9/11, and moved on to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Filkins's narrative moves across a vast and various landscape of amazing characters and astonishing scenes: a public amputation performed by the Taliban, children frolicking in minefields, skies streaked white by the contrails of B-52's, a night's sleep in the rubble of Ground Zero. We venture into a torture chamber run by Saddam Hussein. We go into the homes of suicide bombers, meet Iraqi insurgents, and an American captain who loses a quarter of his men in eight days. The Forever War allows us a visceral understanding of today's battlefields and of the experiences of the people on the ground, warriors and innocents alike. It is a brilliant, fearless work, not just about America's wars after 9/11, but ultimately about the nature of war itself.
©2008 Dexter Filkins (P)2008 Books on Tape
The Shadow Factory
Summary
Today's National Security Agency is the largest, most costly, and most technologically advanced spy organization the world has ever known. It is also the most intrusive, secretly filtering millions of phone calls and e-mails an hour in the United States and around the world. Half a million people live on its watch list, and the number grows by the thousands every month. Has America become a surveillance state? In The Shadow Factory, James Bamford, the foremost expert on National Security Agency, charts its transformation since 9/11, as the legendary code breakers turned their ears away from outside enemies, such as the Soviet Union, and inward to enemies whose communications increasingly crisscross America. Fast-paced and riveting, The Shadow Factory is about a world unseen by Americans without the highest security clearances. But it is a world in which even their most intimate whispers may no longer be private.
©2008 James Bamford (P)2008 Books on Tape
The Way of the Heart
Summary
Here is the modern classic that interweaves the solitude, silence, and prayer of the fourth- and fifth-century Egyptian Desert Fathers and Mothers with our contemporary search for an authentic spirituality. Previously recorded by Henri Nouwen as Desert Spirituality and Contemporary Ministry.
©1991 Henri J. M. Nouwen (P)2009 christianaudio.com
The Housing Boom and Bust
Summary
There was no single, dramatic event that set the current financial crisis off. A whole series of very questionable decisions by many people, in many places, over a period of years, built up the pressures that led to a sudden collapse of the housing market and of financial institutions that began to fall like dominoes as a result of investing in securities based on housing prices. This book is designed to unravel the tangled threads of that story. It also attempts to determine whether what is being done to deal with the problem is more likely to make things better or worse.
©2009 Thomas Sowell (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard
Summary
Robert E. Howard, renowned creator of Conan the Barbarian, was also a master at conjuring tales of hair-raising horror. In a career spanning only 12 years, Howard wrote more than 100 stories, with his most celebrated work appearing in Weird Tales, the preeminent pulp magazine of the era. In this collection of Howard's greatest horror tales, some of the author's best-known characters - Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and sailor Steve Costigan among them - roam the forbidding locales of Howard's fevered imagination, from the swamps and bayous of the Deep South to the fiend-haunted woods outside Paris, to remote jungles in Africa. Included in this collection is Howard's masterpiece "Pigeons from Hell", a tale of two travelers who stumble upon the ruins of a Southern plantation - and into the maw of its fatal secret. In "Black Canaan", even the best warrior has little chance of taking down the evil voodoo man with unholy powers - and none at all against his wily mistress, the diabolical High Priestess of Damballah. Also included is the classic revenge nightmare "Worms of the Earth" as well as "The Cairn on the Headland".
©2008 Robert E. Howard Properties, Inc. (P)2010 Tantor
I Am Legend and Other Stories
Summary
In Matheson's vampire classic I Am Legend, a plague has decimated the world and transformed the unfortunate survivors into bloodthirsty creatures of the night. Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth. Every other man, woman, and child has become a vampire hungry for Neville's blood. By day he is the hunter, stalking the sleeping undead through the abandoned ruins of civilization. By night he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn. How long can one man survive in a world of vampires? This recording also includes a sampling of other horror stories by Richard Matheson, some comic, all scary: "Buried Talents", "The Near Departed", "Prey", "Witch War", "Dance of the Dead", "Dress of White Silk", "Mad House", "The Funeral", "From Shadowed Places", and "Person to Person".
©1954 renewed 1982 by Richard Matheson. “Buried Talents” © 1987 by Richard Matheson. “The Near Departed” © 1987 by Richard Matheson. “Prey” © 1969 by Richard Matheson. “Witch War” © 1951, renewed 1979 by Richard Matheson. “Dance of the Dead” © 1954, renewed 1982 by Richard Matheson. “Dress of White Silk” © 1951, renewed 1979 by Richard Matheson. “Mad House” © 1952, renewed 1980 by Richard Matheson. “The Funeral” © 1955, renewed 1983 by Richard Matheson. “From Shadowed Places” © 1960, renewed 1988 by Richard Matheson. “Person to Person” © 1989 by Richard Matheson (P)2007 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Fifties
Summary
The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the 10 years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. Halberstam offers portraits of not only the titans of the age: Eisenhower, Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon; but also of Harley Earl, who put fins on cars; Dick and Mac McDonald and Ray Kroc, who mass-produced the American hamburger; Kemmons Wilson, who placed his Holiday Inns along the nation's roadsides; U-2 pilot Gary Francis Powers; Grace Metalious, who wrote Peyton Place; and "Goody" Pincus, who led the team that invented "the pill". A New York Times best seller
©2012 David Halberstam (P)2018 Random House Audio
Ghost Road Blues
Summary
Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel From a master of horror comes an apocalyptic showdown between the residents of a secluded, rural town and the deadly evil that confronts them wherever they turn. Evil doesn’t die. The cozy little town of Pine Deep buried the horrors of its past a long time ago. Thirty years have gone by since the darkness descended and the Black Harvest began, a time when a serial killer sheared a bloody swath through the quiet Pennsylvania village. The evil that once coursed through Pine Deep has been replaced by cheerful tourists getting ready to enjoy the country’s largest Halloween celebration in what is now called “The Spookiest Town in America.” It just grows stronger. But then—a month before Halloween—it begins. Unspeakably desecrated bodies. Inexplicable insanity. An ancient evil walks the streets, drawing in those who would fall to their own demons and seeking to shred the very soul of this rapidly fracturing community. Yes, the residents of Pine Deep have drawn together and faced a killer before. But this time, evil has many faces—and the lust and will to rule the earth. This struggle will be epic.
©2006 Jonathan Maberry (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Arsenals of Folly
Summary
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb: the story of the entire postwar superpower arms race, climaxing during the Reagan-Gorbachev decade when the United States and the Soviet Union came within scant hours of nuclear war - and then nearly agreed to abolish nuclear weapons. In a narrative that moves like a thriller, Rhodes sheds light on the Reagan administration’s unprecedented arms buildup in the early 1980s, as well as the arms-reduction campaign that followed, and Reagan’s famous 1986 summit meeting with Gorbachev. Rhodes’s detailed exploration of events of this time constitutes a prehistory of the neoconservatives, demonstrating that the manipulation of government and public opinion with fake intelligence and threat inflation that the administration of George W. Bush has used to justify the current “war on terror” and the disastrous invasion of Iraq were developed and applied in the Reagan era and even before. Drawing on personal interviews with both Soviet and U.S. participants, and on a wealth of new documentation, memoir literature, and oral history that has become available only in the past 10 years, Rhodes recounts what actually happened in the final years of the Cold War that led to its dramatic end. The story is new, compelling, and continually surprising - a revelatory re-creation of a hugely important era of our recent history.
©2007 Richard Rhodes (P)2007 Books on Tape
Gabriel's Promise
Summary
New York Times best-selling author Sylvain Reynard returns with the fourth installment of the beloved Gabriel's Inferno series. When Gabriel and Julia Emerson first lay eyes on their newborn daughter, Clare, they realize life as they know it will never be the same. Gabriel has vowed to be a good father when he suddenly receives an invitation to give a series of lectures in Edinburgh, Scotland - an opportunity of high prestige - but that would mean leaving his wife and child in Boston. Hesitant to bring it up, he keeps the opportunity from Julia as long as he can, not knowing she has a secret of her own. When a frightening situation arises that threatens their new family, both parents must make sacrifices. With the family in danger, the looming question remains: Will Gabriel pursue his lectureship in Edinburgh, leaving Julia and Clare vulnerable in Boston, or will he abandon the chance of a lifetime in order to ensure his family's safety?
©2020 Sylvain Reynard (P)2020 Penguin Audio
Air Apaches
Summary
The American 345th Bomb Group - the Air Apaches - was legendary in the war against Japan. The first fully trained and fully equipped group sent to the South Pacific, the 345th racked up a devastating score against the enemy. Armed to the teeth with machine guns and fragmentation bombs, and flying their B-25s at impossibly low altitudes - often below 50 feet - the pilots and air crews strafed and bombed enemy installations and shipping with a fury that helped cripple Japan. One of the sharpest tools in the US arsenal, the 345th performed essential missions during Gen. Douglas MacArthur's campaigns in New Guinea and the Philippines, earning an impressive four Distinguished Unit Citations. This was punishingly dangerous work, and the 345th lost 177 aircraft and 712 men - young men doing their duty in the spirit of the Greatest Generation. Neither was this the more gentlemanly war of Europe, with its more temperate climate, resistance networks aiding downed crews, and POW camps. Airmen shot down in the Pacific theater faced drowning in the ocean, disappearing in the jungle, or torturing and beheading by the Japanese in a war of no quarter expected, no quarter given. A compelling follow-up to Stout's Hell's Angels, Air Apaches reconstructs the missions of the 345th Bomb Group in striking detail, with laser focus on the men who manned the cockpits, navigated the B-25s, dropped the bombs, serviced the planes, and helped win the war. To tell this remarkable story, Stout worked closely with the group's surviving veterans and dug deep into firsthand accounts. The result is a compelling narrative of men at war that will keep listeners on the edge of their seats.
©2019 Jay A. Stout (P)2019 Audible, Inc.
The Greatest Game Ever Played
Summary
Francis Ouimet and Harry Vardon came from different worlds and different generations, but their passion for golf set them on parallel paths that would collide in the greatest match their sport had ever known. A young Massachusetts native, Francis was only three years removed from his youthful career as a lowly caddie. Harry was twice his age, the greatest British champion in history, and innovator of the modern grip and swing. Through exacting hard work, perseverance, and determination, Harry Vardon had escaped a hopeless life of poverty; the unknown Ouimet dared to dream of following in his hero's footsteps. When the two men finally came together in their legendary battle at the 1913 US Open, its heart-stopping climax gave rise to the sport of golf as we know it today. Weaving the stories of Ouimet and Vardon as his narrative, Mark Frost creates a uniquely involving, intimate epic that is equal parts sports biography, sweeping social history, and emotional human drama. The Greatest Game Ever Played is a must-listen for millions of sports and history fans - and all who have ever dared to reach for their dreams.
©2002 Good Comma Ink, Inc. (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
See No Evil
Summary
“See No Evil is a compelling account of America’s failed efforts to ‘listen in’ on the rest of the world, especially the parts of it that intend to do us harm.” (The Wall Street Journal) In his explosive New York Times best seller, top CIA operative Robert Baer paints a chilling picture of how terrorism works on the inside and provides startling evidence of how Washington politics sabotaged the CIA's efforts to root out the world's deadliest terrorists, allowing for the rise of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and the continued entrenchment of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. A veteran case officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations in the Middle East, Baer witnessed the rise of terrorism first hand and the CIA's inadequate response to it, leading to the attacks of September 11, 2001. This riveting book is both an indictment of an agency that lost its way and an unprecedented look at the roots of modern terrorism, and includes a new afterword in which Baer speaks out about the American war on terrorism and its profound implications throughout the Middle East. “Robert Baer was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East.” (Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker)
©2002 Robert Baer (P)2005 Books on Tape