Stephen Hoye has narrated 130 audiobooks on Listento.it by 122 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 1,559 ratings. The most-rated is The Ideal Team Player.
A Decade of Hope
Summary
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, an occasion that is sure to be observed around the world. But among the memorials, political speeches, and news editorials, the most pressing consideration - and often the most overlooked - is the lives and well-being of the 9/11 first responders, their families, and the victims' families over the past decade. Dennis Smith, a former firefighter and the author of the bestselling Report from Ground Zero, addresses this important topic in a series of interviews with the heroes and families of those most affected by the tragedy either through feats of bravery in the rescue efforts or heroic bearing up in the face of unimaginable loss. Smith provides an intimate look at a terrible moment in history and its challenging and difficult aftermath, allowing these survivors to share their stories of loss, endurance, and resilience in their own words. A Decade of Hope is an honest and vitally important look at a decade in the lives of those for whom a national tragedy was a devastatingly personal ordeal.
©2011 Dennis Smith (P)2011 Tantor
Star Island
Summary
Meet 22-year-old Cherry Pye (née Cheryl Bunterman), a pop star since she was 14 - and about to attempt a comeback from her latest drug-and-alcohol disaster. Now meet Cherry again: in the person of her “undercover stunt double” Ann DeLusia. Ann portrays Cherry whenever the singer is too “indisposed” - meaning wasted - to go out in public. And it is Ann-mistaken-for-Cherry who is kidnapped from a South Beach hotel by obsessed paparazzo Bang Abbott. Now the challenge for Cherry’s handlers (über-stage mother; horndog record producer; nipped, tucked, and Botoxed twin publicists; weed whacker-wielding bodyguard) is to rescue Ann while keeping her existence a secret from Cherry’s public - and from Cherry herself. The situation is more complicated than they know. Ann has had a bewitching encounter with Skink - the unhinged former governor of Florida living wild in a mangrove swamp - and now he’s heading for Miami to find her.... Will Bang Abbott achieve his fantasy of a lucrative private photo session with Cherry Pye? Will Cherry sober up in time to lip-synch her way through her concert tour? Will Skink track down Ann DeLusia before Cherry’s motley posse does? All will be revealed in this hilarious spin on life in the celebrity fast lane.
©2010 Carl Hiaasen (P)2010 Random House
Titan
Summary
Master storyteller Ben Bova continues his multi-volume "Grand Tour" saga chronicling humanity's exploration of near space with Titan, a fast-paced thriller focused on the first manned mission to the Solar System's most intriguing world. Skillfully blending high drama, passionate characters, and daring speculation with the latest discoveries from the current Cassini/Huygens probe of Saturn's moon, Bova has crafted a heart-stopping tale of epic adventure on mankind's next frontier. The gigantic colony ship Goddard has at last made orbit around the ringed planet Saturn, carrying a volatile population of more than 10,000 dissidents, rebels, extremists, and visionaries seeking a new life among the stars. Chief scientist Edouard Urbain's avowed mission is to study the enigmatic moon called Titan, which offers the tantalizing possibility that life may exist amid its windswept islands and chill black seas. But when the exploration vessel Titan Alpha mysteriously fails after reaching the moon's surface, long buried tensions surface among the colonists. Torn by political intrigue, suspicious accidents, and an awesome discovery that could threaten human space exploration, a handful of courageous men and women must fight for the survival of their colony, and the destiny of the human race.
©2006 Ben Bova (P)2006 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC
The Color of Law
Summary
A poor-boy college football hero turned successful partner at a prominent Dallas firm, who long ago checked his conscience at the door, catches a case that forces him to choose between his enviable lifestyle and doing the right thing in this masterful debut legal thriller. Clark McCall, ne'er-do-well son of Texas millionaire senator and presidential hopeful Mack McCall, puts a major crimp in his father's election plans when he winds up murdered, apparently by Shawanda Jones, a heroin-addicted hooker, after a tawdry night of booze, drugs, and rough sex. Scott Fenney, who's worked his way to being a partner at an elite Dallas law firm, is assigned to provide Shawanda's pro bono defense after the federal judge on the case hears him deliver an inspiring, altruistic, and completely insincere, speech to the local bar association. Scott plans to farm the case out to an old law school buddy, do-good-attorney Bobby Herrin. But his plans go awry when Shawanda puts her foot down in court and refuses to be passed off to the lawyer she considers the lesser attorney. As the case unfolds, pressure is exerted on Scott to deter him from being too aggressive in his defense of Shawanda. That pressure becomes palpable as Scott is slowly stripped of the things he's come to care for most. Will he do the right thing, at a terrible cost, or the easy thing and keep his hard-earned fabulous life? With echoes of early John Grisham, The Color of Law is a provocative listen that marks the stunning debut of a major new talent.
©2005 Mark Gimenez (P)2005 Books on Tape, Inc.
Dandelion Wine
Summary
Ray Bradbury's moving recollection of a vanished golden era remains one of his most enchanting novels. Dandelion Wine stands out in the Bradbury literary canon as the author's most deeply personal work, a semi-autobiographical recollection of a magical small-town summer in 1928. Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding knows Green Town, Illinois, is as vast and deep as the whole wide world that lies beyond the city limits. It is a pair of brand-new tennis shoes, the first harvest of dandelions for Grandfather's renowned intoxicant, the distant clang of the trolley's bell on a hazy afternoon, It is yesteryear and tomorrow blended into an unforgettable always. But as young Douglas is about to discover, summer can be more than the repetition of established rituals whose mystical power holds time at bay. It can be a best friend moving away, a human time machine who can transport you back to the Civil War, or a sideshow automaton able to glimpse the bittersweet future. Come and savor Bradbury's priceless distillation of all that is eternal about boyhood and summer.
©1957 Ray Bradbury, renewed 1985 by Ray Bradbury (P)2010 Tantor
The Men Who Would Be King
Summary
For 60 years, since the birth of United Artists, the studio landscape was unchanged. Then came Hollywood’s Circus Maximus---created by director Steven Spielberg, billionaire David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who gave the world The Lion King---an entertainment empire called DreamWorks. Now Nicole LaPorte, who covered the company for Variety, goes behind the hype to reveal for the first time the delicious truth of what happened. Audiences will feel they are part of the creative calamities of moviemaking as LaPorte's fly-on-the-wall detail shows us Hollywood's bizarre rules of business. We see the clashes between the often otherworldly Spielberg's troops and Katzenberg's warriors, the debacles and disasters, but also the Oscar-winning triumphs, including Saving Private Ryan. We watch as the studio burns through billions, its rich owners get richer, and everybody else suffers. We see Geffen seducing investors like Microsoft's Paul Allen, showing his steel against CAA's Michael Ovitz, and staging fireworks during negotiations with Paramount and Disney. Here is Hollywood, up close, glamorous, and gritty.
©2010 Nicole LaPorte (P)2010 Tantor
The Big Thirst
Summary
The water coming out of your tap is four billion years old and might have been slurped by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. We will always have exactly as much water on Earth as we have ever had. Water cannot be destroyed, and it can always be made clean enough for drinking again. In fact, water can be made so clean that it actually becomes toxic. As Charles Fishman brings vibrantly to life in this delightful narrative excursion, water runs our world in a host of awe-inspiring ways, which is both the promise and the peril of our unexplored connections to it. Taking listeners from the wet moons of Saturn to the water-obsessed hotels of Las Vegas, and from a rice farm in the Australian outback to a glimpse into giant vats of soup at Campbell's largest factory, he reveals that our relationship to water is conflicted and irrational, neglected and mismanaged. Whether we will face a water scarcity crisis has little to do with water and everything to do with how we think about water - how we use it, connect with it, and understand it. Portraying and explaining both the dangers - in 2008, Atlanta came just 90 days from running completely out of drinking water - and the opportunities, such as advances in rainwater harvesting and businesses that are making huge breakthroughs in water productivity, The Big Thirst will forever change the way we think about water, our crucial relationship to it, and the creativity we can bring to ensuring we always have plenty of it.
©2011 Charles Fishman (P)2011 Tantor
Flags of Our Fathers
Summary
Flags of Our Fathers is the unforgettable chronicle of perhaps the most famous moment in American military history: the raising of the US flag at Iwo Jima. Here is the true story behind the immortal photograph that has come to symbolize the courage and indomitable will of America. In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima - and into history. The son of one of the flag raisers has written a powerful account of six very different men who came together in the heroic battle for the Pacific’s most crucial island.
©2000 James Bradley and Ron Powers (P)2006 Books on Tape
The Third Rail
Summary
A woman is shot as she waits for her train to work. An hour later, a second woman is gunned down as she rides an elevated train through the Loop. Two hours after that, a church becomes the target of a chemical weapons attack. The city of Chicago is under siege, and Michael Kelly, cynical cop turned private investigator, just happens to be on the scene when all hell breaks loose. Kelly is initially drawn into the case by the killers themselves, then tasked by Chicago’s mayor and the FBI to hunt down the bad guys and, all things being equal, put a bullet in them. Kelly, of course, has other ideas. As he gets closer to the truth, his instincts lead him to a retired cop, a shady train company, and an unnerving link to his own past. Meanwhile, Kelly’s girlfriend, Rachel Swenson, becomes a pawn in a much larger game, while a weapon that could kill millions ticks away quietly in the very belly of the city. The Third Rail is stylish, sophisticated, edge-of-your-seat suspense from a new modern master.
©2010 Michael Harvey (P)2010 Random House
Bigger than the Game
Summary
After nearly a decade in the minors, Dirk Hayhurst defied the odds to climb onto the pitcher's mound for the Toronto Blue Jays. Newly married, with a big league paycheck and a brand new house, Hayhurst was ready for a great season in the Bigs.Then fate delivered a crushing hit. Hayhurst blew out his pitching shoulder in an insane off-season workout program. After surgery, rehab, and more rehab, his major-league dreams seemed more distant than ever.From there things got worse, weirder, and funnier. In a crazy world of injured athletes, autograph-seeking nuns, angry wrestlers, and trainers with a taste for torture, Hayhurst learned lessons about the game—and himself—that were not in any rulebook. Honest, soul-searching, insightful, hilarious, and moving, Dirk Hayhurst's latest memoir is an indisputable baseball classic.
©2014 Dirk Hayhurst (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Snake Stone
Summary
Istanbul, 1838. In his palace on the Bosphorus, Sultan Mahmud II is dying, and the city swirls with rumors and alarms. The unexpected arrival of a French archaeologist determined to track down lost Byzantine treasures throws the Greek community into confusion. Yashim Togalu is once again enlisted to investigate. But when the archaeologist's mutilated body is discovered outside the French embassy, it turns out there is only one suspect: Yashim himself. As the body count starts to rise, Yashim must uncover the startling truth behind a shadowy society dedicated to the revival of the Byzantine Empire, encountering along the way such vibrant characters as Lord Byron's doctor and the Sultan's West Indies - born mother, the Valide. With striking wit and irresistible flair, Jason Goodwin takes us into a world where the stakes are high, betrayal is death - and the pleasure to the listener is immense.
©2008 Jason Goodwin (P)2009 Tantor
V Wars: Blood and Fire
Summary
It's been one year since a virus triggered junk DNA and people all over the world started changing, becoming something else, craving blood. It's been 10 months since the word vampire stopped being something from old monster stories and Hollywood movies. It's been six months since our world and theirs erupted into war, two since an uneasy peace was signed, and one hour since that peace was shattered. The war is here again - the vampire war. Our world will burn; our world will bleed. When anyone can turn, when every street is a battlefield, there is nowhere to run. V Wars: Blood and Fire features all-new stories of the Vampire Wars by Kevin J. Anderson, Scott Sigler, Larry Correia, Joe McKinney, Yvonne Navarro, Weston Ochse, James A. Moore, and Jonathan Maberry. The complete list of narrators includes: Gabrielle de Cuir, Jamye Grant, Richard Gilliland, Roxanne Hernandez, Stephen Hoye, Sunil Malhotra, Arthur Morey, and Stefan Rudnicki.
©2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.; 2014 Weston Ochse, Scott Sigler, Jonathan Maberry, Kevin J. Anderson, James A. Moore, Yvonne Navarro, Joe McKinney, Larry Correia
Kluge
Summary
Are we "noble in reason"? Perfect, in God's image? Far from it, says New York University psychologist Gary Marcus. In this lucid and revealing book, Marcus argues that the mind is not an elegantly designed organ but a "kluge", a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. He unveils a fundamentally new way of looking at the human mind - think duct tape, not supercomputer - that sheds light on some of the most mysterious aspects of human nature. Taking us on a tour of the fundamental areas of human experience - memory, belief, decision making, language, and happiness - Marcus reveals the myriad ways our minds fall short. He examines why people often vote against their own interests, why money can't buy happiness, why leaders often stick to bad decisions, and why a sentence like "people people left left" ties us into knots even though it's only four words long. He also offers surprisingly effective ways to outwit our inner kluge - for example, always consider alternative explanations, make contingency plans, and beware the vivid, personal anecdote. Throughout, he shows how only evolution - haphazard and undirected - could have produced the minds we humans have, while making a brilliant case for the power and usefulness of imperfection.
©2008 Gary Marcus (P)2008 Tantor
Kitty Genovese
Summary
At last, the true story of a crime that shocked the world.New York City, 1964. A young woman is stabbed to death on her front stoop - a murder The New York Times called “a frozen moment of dramatic, disturbing social change.” The victim, Catherine “Kitty” Genovese, became an urban martyr, butchered by a sociopathic killer in plain sight of thirty-eight neighbors who “didn’t want to get involved.” Her sensational case provoked an anxious outcry and launched a sociological theory known as the “Bystander Effect.”That’s the narrative told by the Times, movies, TV programs, and countless psychology textbooks. But as award-winning author Kevin Cook reveals, the Genovese story is just that, a story. The truth is far more compelling - and so is the victim.Now, on the 50th anniversary of her murder, Cook presents the real Kitty Genovese. She was a vibrant young woman - unbeknownst to most, a lesbian - a bartender working (and dancing) her way through the colorful, fast-changing New York of the ’60s, a cultural kaleidoscope marred by the Kennedy assassination, the Cold War, and race riots. Downtown, Greenwich Village teemed with beatniks, folkies, and so-called misfits like Kitty and her lover. Kitty Genovese evokes the Village’s gay and lesbian underground with deep feeling and colorful detail.Cook also reconstructs the crime itself, tracing the movements of Genovese’s killer, Winston Moseley, whose disturbing trial testimony made him a terrifying figure to police and citizens alike, especially after his escape from Attica State Prison.Drawing on a trove of long-lost documents, plus new interviews with her lover and other key figures, Cook explores the enduring legacy of the case. His heartbreaking account of what really happened on the night Genovese died is the most accurate and chilling to date.
©2014 Kevin Cook (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Sanctuary
Summary
A powerful novel examining the nature of evil, informed by the works of T. S. Eliot and Freud, mythology, local lore, and hard-boiled detective fiction, Sanctuary is the dark, at times brutal, story of the kidnapping of Mississippi debutante Temple Drake. She introduces her own form of venality into the Memphis underworld where she is being held.
©1958 William Faulkner (P)2005 Random House, Inc.
The Likeability Factor
Summary
Are you wondering how you can improve your relationships with your friends and family? Are you curious how to get or keep the job of your dreams? Do you want to become a more popular person? This book will show you how to do all that by raising your likeability factor - or how much other people like you. After all, life is a series of popularity contests. The choices other people make about you determine your health, wealth, and happiness. And decades of research prove that people choose who they like. They vote for them, they buy from them, they marry them, and they spend precious time with them. The good news is that you can arm yourself for the contest and win life’s battles for preference. How? By being likeable. The more you are liked - or the higher your likeability factor - the happier your life will be. This book will show you how to raise that likeability factor by teaching you how to boost four critical elements of your personality: Friendliness: your ability to communicate liking and openness to others Relevance: your capacity to connect with others’ interests, wants, and needs Empathy: your ability to recognize, acknowledge, and experience other people’s feelings Realness: the integrity that stands behind your likeability and guarantees its authenticity What happens when you improve in these areas and boost your likeability factor? You bring out the best in others You survive life’s challenges You have better health - and even improve others’ health, too You outperform in your daily roles You win the popularity contests that define your life Join me for a few hours and I’ll share the results of hundreds of thousands of pages of research, numerous seminars, and hundreds of interviews with people just like you! Together let’s build our likeability factor and improve our lives! Also available as a Random House AudioBook
©2005 Tim Sanders (P)2005 Books on Tape, Inc.
The Ghost Mountain Boys
Summary
Lying due north of Australia, New Guinea is among the world's largest islands. In 1942, when World War II exploded onto its shores, it was an inhospitable, cursorily mapped, disease-ridden land of dense jungle, towering mountain peaks, deep valleys, and fetid swamps. Coveted by the Japanese for its strategic position, New Guinea became the site of one of the South Pacific's most savage campaigns. Despite their lack of jungle training, the 32nd Division's Ghost Mountain Boys were assigned the most grueling mission of the entire Pacific campaign: to march 130 miles over rugged mountains and to protect the right flank of the Australian army as they fought to push the Japanese back to the village of Buna. The 32nd Division lacked more than training. They were without even the basics necessary for survival. They waded through brush and vines without the aid of machetes. They did not have insect repellent. Without waterproof containers, their matches were useless, and the quinine and vitamin pills they carried, as well as salt and chlorination tablets, crumbled in their pockets. Exhausted and pushed to the brink of human endurance, the Ghost Mountain Boys fell victim to malnutrition and disease. Forty-two days after they set out, they arrived two miles south of Buna, nearly shattered by the experience. Arrival in Buna provided no respite. The 32nd Division was ordered to launch an immediate assault on the Japanese position. After two months of furious, sometimes hand-to-hand combat, the decimated division finally achieved victory. Reminiscent of classics like Band of Brothers and The Things They Carried, this harrowing portrait of a largely overlooked campaign is part war diary, part extreme adventure tale, and, through letters, journals, and interviews, part biography of a group of men who fought to survive in an environment every bit as fierce as the enemy they faced.
©2007 James Campbell (P)2007 Tantor
The Aftermath
Summary
Six-time Hugo Award winner Ben Bova chronicles the saga of humankind's expansion beyond the solar system in The Aftermath. In the wake of the Asteroid Wars that tore across the solar system, Victor Zacharius makes his living running the ore-carrier Syracuse. When the Syracuse stumbles into the middle of a military attack on the habitat Chrysalis, Victor flees in a control pod to draw the attacker's attention away from his family. Now, as his wife and children plunge into the far deeps of space, Victor has been rescued by the seductive Cheena Madagascar. He must do her bidding if he's to have a prayer of ever seeing his family again. Elverda Apacheta, the solar system's greatest sculptor, and the cyborg Dorn, the ruthless military commander responsible for the attack on Chrysalis, are linked by their joint discovery of an alien artifact. Similarly transformed by the artifact's mysterious powers, Apacheta and Dorn now prowl the Belt, determined to find the bodies of the many victims of Harbin's atrocities so that they can be given proper burials. Kao Yuan is the captain of Viking who's determined to kill Dorn and Elverda because they know too much about the artifact and its power. But Viking's second-in-command appears to have the real power on board ship. When Viking catches up to Apacheta and Dorn, their confrontation begins a series of events involving them, the Zacharius family, and the transformation of the human solar system....
©2007 Ben Bova (P)2007 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC
Cubed
Summary
You mean this place we go to five days a week has a history?Cubed reveals the unexplored yet surprising story of the places where most of the world's work - our work - gets done. From "Bartleby the Scrivener" to The Office, from the steno pool to the open-plan cubicle farm, Cubed is a fascinating, often funny, and sometimes disturbing anatomy of the white-collar world and how it came to be the way it is - and what it might become. In the mid-nineteenth century clerks worked in small, dank spaces called “counting-houses.” These were all-male enclaves, where work was just paperwork. Most Americans considered clerks to be questionable dandies, who didn’t do “real work.” But the joke was on them: As the great historical shifts from agricultural to industrial economies took place, and then from industrial to information economies, the organization of the workplace evolved along with them - and the clerks took over. Offices became rationalized, designed for both greater efficiency in the accomplishments of clerical work and the enhancement of worker productivity. Women entered the office by the millions, and revolutionized the social world from within. Skyscrapers filled with office space came to tower over cities everywhere. Cubed opens our eyes to what is a truly "secret history" of changes so obvious and ubiquitous that we've hardly noticed them. From the wood-paneled executive suite to the advent of the cubicles where 60% of Americans now work (and 93% of them dislike it) to a not-too-distant future where we might work anywhere at any time (and perhaps all the time), Cubed excavates from popular books, movies, comic strips (Dilbert!), and a vast amount of management literature and business history, the reasons why our workplaces are the way they are - and how they might be better.
©2014 Nikil Saval (P)2014 Random House Audio
The Prince of Beverly Hills
Summary
Rick Barron, a sharp, capable detective on the Beverly Hills force, finds himself demoted after a run-in with a superior officer, but he soon lands a job other cops only dream about: the security detail for Centurion Pictures, one of the hottest studios in the midst of Hollywood's golden age of the late 1930s. As the protector of the studio's interests, Barron looks after the elite of filmdom's stars - among them Clete Barrow, a British leading man with a penchant for parties, and Glenna Gleason, a peach of a talent on the verge of stardom. Rick's easy charm has society columnists dubbing him "the Prince of Beverly Hills", the white knight of movie stars, until he stumbles across a murder cover-up and a blackmail scam that threaten the studio's business and may have origins with some unsavory characters. When two suspicious deaths begin to look like a double murder and an attempt is made on someone who has become an intimate friend, Barron knows he is up against wise guys whose stakes are nothing less than do or die. A dicey war of nerves is on.
©2005 Stuart Woods (P)2016 Penguin Audio