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.
Funny Man
Summary
A deeply textured and compelling biography of comedy giant Mel Brooks, covering his rags-to-riches life and triumphant career in television, films, and theater, from Patrick McGilligan, the acclaimed author of Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Grammy award-winner Mel Brooks was behind (and sometimes in front of the camera, too) some of the most influential comedy hits of our time, including The 2,000 Year Old Man, Get Smart, The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. But before this actor, writer, director, comedian, and composer entertained the world, his first audience was his family. The fourth and last child of Max and Kitty Kaminsky, Mel Brooks was born on his family’s kitchen table in Brooklyn, New York, in 1926, and was not quite three years old when his father died of tuberculosis. Growing up in a household too poor to own a radio, Mel was short and homely, a mischievous child whose birth role was to make the family laugh. Beyond boyhood, after transforming himself into Mel Brooks, the laughs that came easily inside the Kaminsky family proved more elusive. His lifelong crusade to transform himself into a brand name of popular humor is at the center of master biographer Patrick McGilligan’s Funny Man. In this exhaustively researched and wonderfully novelistic look at Brooks’ personal and professional life, McGilligan lays bare the strengths and drawbacks that shaped Brooks’ psychology, his willpower, his persona, and his comedy. McGilligan insightfully navigates the epic ride that has been the famous funnyman’s life story, from Brooks’s childhood in Williamsburg tenements and breakthrough in early television - working alongside Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner - to Hollywood and Broadway peaks (and valleys). His audiobook offers a meditation on the Jewish immigrant culture that influenced Brooks, snapshots of the golden age of comedy, behind-the-scenes revelations about the celebrated shows and films, and a telling look at the four-decade romantic partnership with actress Anne Bancroft that superseded Brooks’ troubled first marriage. Engrossing, nuanced, and ultimately poignant, Funny Man delivers a great man’s unforgettable life story and an anatomy of the American dream of success.
©2019 Patrick McGilligan (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers
Solo Faces
Summary
Vernon Rand is a charismatic figure whose great love - whose life, in fact - is climbing. He lives alone in California, where he combats the drudgery of a roofing job with the thrill of climbing in the nearby mountain ranges. Sure of only his talent and nerve, Rand decides to test himself in the French Alps, with their true mountaineering and famed, fearsome peaks. He soon learns that the most perilous moments are, for him, the moments when he feels truly alive. One of the great novels of the outdoors, Solo Faces is as thrilling, beautiful, and immediate as the Alpine peaks that have enthralled climbers for centuries.
©1979 James Salter (P)2015 Audible Inc.
Rococo
Summary
New York Times best seller “Eccentric, unpredictable, entertaining...This novel is a treat.” (The Boston Globe) Bartolomeo di Crespi is the acclaimed interior decorator - not to mention the most eligible bachelor - in Our Lady of Fatima, New Jersey. From the dazzling shores of the Garden State to the legendary fabric houses of New York City, from the prickly purveyors of fine art in London to the Mediterranean coast of Italy, Bartolomeo is on a mission to bring talent, sophistication, and his aesthetic vision to his hometown. So when the renovation of the local church is scheduled, he assumes there is only one man to oversee the job. Recruiting an artist and a stained-glass artisan to help with the project - two handsome men who create romantic mayhem among Bartolomeo’s sister, his erstwhile fiancée, and all the other lovelorn ladies of OLOF - Bartolomeo struggles to create art while remaining the steadfast linchpin of the volatile di Crespi clan. Together, Bartolomeo and his team will do more than blow the dust off the old Fatima frescoes - they will turn the town upside down, challenge the faithful, and restore hope where there once was none. Praise for Rococo: “A veritable crazy quilt of quirky Italian Americans...Trigiani weaves all [the] subplots together with wonderful ease.” (Entertainment Weekly) “A summer must-read...a hilarious mix of...humor, lust, [and] family dynamics.” (The Hartford Courant) “An artfully designed tale [with] characters so lively they bounce off the page [and] wit so subtle that even the best jokes seem effortless.” (People)
©2005 Adriana Trigiani (P)2005 Books on Tape, Inc.
Capitol Murder
Summary
William Bernhardt's best-selling novels featuring Oklahoma defense attorney Ben Kincaid capture the bare-knuckles reality of high-stakes criminal defense, as lofty ideals of justice clash with power, corruption, and wealth. In Capitol Murder, Bernhardt's hard-charging hero takes on his most shocking, headline-making case yet. Kincaid's legal success has earned him a dubious reward: a journey through the looking glass into the Beltway. Here, in the heart of the nation's capital, a powerful U.S. Senator has been caught first in a sordid sex scandal, then in a case of murder. Senate aide Veronica Cooper was found in a secret Senate office beneath the Capitol building, on Senator Todd Glancy's favorite couch, blood pouring from the knife wound in her throat. The young woman's death comes on the heels of the release of a sordid videotape depicting her and Senator Glancy in compromising positions. With the senator's reputation in tatters, the evidence against him, as a sexual predator and possibly a killer, mounts. By the time a nationally televised murder trial begins, Kincaid and his team know they're facing the challenge of a lifetime. According to public opinion, and even in Kincaid's most private thoughts, Glancy is one more politician who cannot admit his own culpability. But while a dramatic trial unfolds in the courtroom, loaded with pitfalls, traps, and an astounding betrayal, another trial is taking place on the mean streets of D.C., as Kincaid's investigator pursues a young woman who was a friend of Veronica Cooper's, plunging Kincaid into a bizarre world of Goths, sadomasochists, and a community of self-proclaimed vampires. Somewhere in this violent underworld lies the secret behind Veronica Cooper's demise...and the crux of Senator Glancy's innocence or guilt. In a case that pits Kincaid and his freewheeling partner Christina McCall against the brutal machinery of Washington politics, the answers they seek are hidden in a murderous maze of lies and hidden motives. And in William Bernhardt’s best novel yet, getting to the truth is an unparalleled experience in pure, satisfying suspense.
©2006 William Bernhardt (P)2006 Books on Tape
In Search of Bill Clinton
Summary
William Jefferson Clinton, the forty-second president of the United States, is undoubtedly the greatest American enigma of our age---a dark horse who captured the White House, fell from grace, and was resurrected as an elder statesman whose popularity rises and falls based on the day's sound bites.John D. Gartner's In Search of Bill Clinton unravels the mystery at the heart of Clinton's complex nature and explains why so many people fall under his spell. Gartner tells the story we all thought we knew, from the fresh viewpoint of a psychologist, as he questions the well-crafted Clinton life story. Gartner, a therapist with expertise in treating individuals with hypomanic temperaments, saw in Clinton the energy, creativity, and charisma that leads a hypomanic individual to success as well as the problems with impulse control and judgment, which frequently result in disastrous decision making. He knew, though, that if he wanted to find the real Bill Clinton he couldn't rely on armchair psychology to provide the answer. He knew he had to travel to Arkansas and around the world to talk with those who knew Clinton and his family intimately. With his boots on the ground, Gartner uncovers long-held secrets about Clinton's mother, the ambitious and seductive Virginia Kelley, and her wild life in Hot Springs, as well as the ghostly specter of his biological father, Bill Blythe, to uncover the truth surrounding Clinton's rumor-filled birth. He considers the abusive influence of Clinton's alcoholic stepfather, Roger Clinton, to understand the repeated public abuse he invited both by challenging a hostile Republican Congress and engaging in the clandestine affair with Monica Lewinsky that led to his downfall.Of course, there is no marriage more dissected than that of the Clintons, both in the White House and on the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign trail. Instead of going down familiar paths, Gartner looks at that relationship with a new focus and cle...
©2008 John D. Gartner (P)2008 Tantor
C
Summary
Serge Carrefax spends his childhood at Versoie House, where his father teaches deaf children to speak when he's not experimenting with wireless telegraphy. Sophie, Serge's sister and only connection to the world at large, takes outrageous liberties with Serge's young body - which may explain the unusual sexual predilections that haunt him for the rest of his life. After recuperating from a mysterious illness at a Bohemian spa, Serge serves in World War I as a radio operator. C culminates in a bizarre scene in an Egyptian catacomb where all Serge's paths and relationships at last converge. Tom McCarthy's mesmerizing, often hilarious accomplishment effortlessly blends the generational breadth of Ian McEwan with the postmodern wit of Thomas Pynchon and marks a writer rapidly becoming one of the most significant and original voices of his generation.
©2010 Tom McCarthy (P)2010 Tantor
Secret Ingredients
Summary
Since its earliest days, The New Yorker has been a tastemaker - literally. As the home of A. J. Liebling, Joseph Wechsberg, and M. F. K. Fisher, who practically invented American food writing, the magazine established a tradition that is carried forward today by irrepressible literary gastronomes including Calvin Trillin, Bill Buford, Adam Gopnik, Jane Kramer, and Anthony Bourdain. Now, in this indispensable collection, The New Yorker dishes up a feast of delicious writing on food and drink, from every age of its fabled 80-year history. There are memoirs, short stories, tell-alls, and poems - ranging in tone from sweet to sour and in subject from soup to nuts. M. F. K. Fisher pays homage to “cookery witches,” those mysterious cooks who possess “an uncanny power over food,” while John McPhee valiantly trails an inveterate forager and is rewarded with stewed persimmons and white-pine-needle tea. There is Roald Dahl’s famous story “Taste,” in which a wine snob’s palate comes in for some unwelcome scrutiny, and Julian Barnes’s ingenious tale of a lifelong gourmand who goes on a very peculiar diet for still more peculiar reasons. Adam Gopnik asks if French cuisine is done for, and Calvin Trillin investigates whether people can actually taste the difference between red wine and white. We journey with Susan Orlean as she distills the essence of Cuba in the story of a single restaurant, and with Judith Thurman as she investigates the arcane practices of Japan’s tofu masters. Closer to home, Joseph Mitchell celebrates the old New York tradition of the beefsteak dinner, and Mark Singer shadows the city’s foremost fisherman-chef. Selected from the magazine’s plentiful larder, Secret Ingredients celebrates all forms of gustatory delight.
©2007 David Remnick (P)2007 Books on Tape
Fool's Gold
Summary
How the bold dream of a small tribe at J.P. Morgan was corrupted by Wall Street greed and unleashed a catastrophe.... Drawing on exclusive access to J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and a tightly bonded team of bankers known on Wall Street as the "Morgan Mafia"---as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of other key players, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner---Gillian Tett brings to life in gripping detail how the Morgan team's bold ideas for a whole new kind of financial alchemy helped to ignite a revolution in banking, and how that revolution escalated wildly out of control. The deeply reported and lively narrative takes listeners behind the scenes, to the inner sanctums of elite finance and to the secretive reaches of what came to be known as the "shadow banking" world. The story begins with an intense Morgan brainstorming session in 1994 beside a pool in Boca Raton, where the team cooked up a dazzling new idea for the exotic financial product known as credit derivatives. That idea would rip around the banking world, catapult Morgan to the top of the turbocharged derivatives trade, and fuel an extraordinary banking boom that seemed to have unleashed banks from ages-old constraints of risk. But when the Morgan team's derivatives dream collided with the housing boom and was perverted---through hubris, delusion, and sheer greed---by such titans of banking as Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and the thundering herd at Merrill Lynch (even as J.P. Morgan itself stayed well away from the risky concoctions others were peddling), catastrophe followed. Tett's access to Dimon and the J.P. Morgan leaders who so skillfully steered their bank away from the wild excesses of others sheds invaluable light not only on the untold story of how they engineered their bank's escape from carnage but also on how possible it was for the larger banking world, regulators, and rating agencies to have spotted, and heeded, the terrible risks of a meltdown.
©2009 Gillian Tett (P)2009 Tantor
Capitol Conspiracy
Summary
Oklahoma defense attorney Ben Kincaid has found himself smack in the middle of more than a few controversies and deadly predicaments - and the unexpected leap from his modest Tulsa law offices to Washington, D.C.’s Senate chamber hasn’t taken the edge off Ben’s knack for stepping into the line of fire. Now the idealistic junior senator is plunged into the thick of lethal intrigue when a shocking campaign of terror against key government officials rocks the nation’s capital. The nightmare begins with the abduction and murder of the director of Homeland Security; escalates with the killing of the Senate minority leader; and comes to a shattering climax at the site of the Oklahoma City Memorial, where a fusillade of sniper fire meant for the president claims unintended victims. In all, 12 people perish in the melee. But the smoke has barely cleared when the stunned nation is sent reeling yet again by the president’s impassioned call to amend the U.S. Constitution with an antiterrorism law that would drastically curtail civil liberties. It’s a hot-button issue, and the chief executive has handpicked Ben to help harvest the support that will make the amendment a reality. Shaken by the carnage, Ben embraces the president’s radical cause and takes the battle for the controversial bill to the Senate floor. But he can’t ignore his growing suspicion that what’s haunting Capitol Hill isn’t the specter of foreign terrorism but something much closer to home. Now, with his support team backing his play, Ben squares off against what could be the most dangerous Goliath he’s ever challenged.
©2008 William Bernhardt (P)2008 Books on Tape
Our First Revolution
Summary
The ideals of freedom and individual rights that inspired America's Founding Fathers did not spring from a vacuum. Along with many other defining principles of our national character, they can be traced directly back to one of the most pivotal events in British history: the late-17th-century uprising known as the Glorious Revolution. In a work of popular history that stands with recent favorites such as David McCullough's 1776 and Joseph J. Ellis' Founding Brothers, Michael Barone brings the story of this unlikely and largely bloodless revolt to American readers and reveals that, without the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution may never have happened. Unfolding in 1688-89, Britain's Glorious Revolution resulted in the hallmarks of representative government, guaranteed liberties, the foundations of global capitalism, and a foreign policy of opposing aggressive foreign powers. But as Barone shows, there was nothing inevitable about the Glorious Revolution. It sprang from the character of the English people and depended on the talents, audacity, and good luck of two men: William of Orange (later William III of England), who launched history's last successful cross-channel invasion, and John Churchill, an ancestor of Winston, who commanded the forces of the deposed James II but crossed over to support William one fateful November night. The story of the Glorious Revolution is a rich and riveting saga of palace intrigue, loyalty, and shocking betrayal, and bold political and military strategizing. With narrative drive, a sure command of historical events, and unforgettable portraits of kings, queens, soldiers, parliamentarians, and a large cast of full-blooded characters, Barone takes an episode that has fallen into unjustified obscurity and restores it to the prominence it deserves.
©2007 Michael Barone (P)2007 Tantor Media Inc.
The Network
Summary
The astonishing story of America's airwaves, the two friends - one a media mogul, the other a famous inventor - who made them available to us, and the government that figured out how to put a price on air. This is the origin story of the airwaves - the foundational technology of the communications age - as told through the 40-year friendship of an entrepreneurial industrialist and a brilliant inventor. David Sarnoff, the head of RCA and equal parts Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, and William Randolph Hearst, was the greatest supporter of his friend, Edwin Armstrong, developer of the first amplifier, the modern radio transmitter, and FM radio. Sarnoff was convinced that Armstrong's inventions had the power to change the way societies communicated with each other forever. He would become a visionary captain of the media industry, even predicting the advent of the Internet. In the mid-1930s, however, when Armstrong suspected Sarnoff of orchestrating a cadre of government officials to seize control of the FM airwaves, he committed suicide. Sarnoff had a very different view of who his friend's enemies were. Many corrupt politicians and corporations saw in Armstrong's inventions the opportunity to commodify our most ubiquitous natural resource - the air. This early alliance between high tech and business set the precedent for countless legal and industrial battles over broadband and licensing bandwidth, many of which continue to influence policy and debate today.
©2016 Scott Woolley (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers
The South Beach Heart Program
Summary
This year, more than one million Americans will have a heart attack or stroke, making heart disease the leading cause of death in men and women in this country. But thanks to his aggressive prevention approach to treating heart disease, renowned cardiologist Dr. Arthur Agatston, creator of the Agatston Score for measuring coronary calcium, rarely sees a heart attack or stroke in his practice. Now in his most passionate audiobook yet, Dr. Agatston champions a revolution in cardiac care that will empower people to save their own lives. Just as millions of people have successfully adopted Dr. Agatston's South Beach Diet, now millions can lead longer and healthier lives thanks to his South Beach Heart Program. Living without heart disease is clearly within our reach.
©2007 Arthur Agatston, M.D. (P)2007 Books on Tape
Hell on Ice
Summary
The thrilling adventure of one crew's harrowing journey back from the Earth's most foreboding frozen hell In the 1870s, newspaperman James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald drummed up excitement and publicity for his paper through highly publicized missions of exploration. In 1879, Bennett's idea for a voyage was his most audacious to date: the North Pole. To do this, he hired a team of naval veterans in addition to a smattering of civilians with specialized knowledge in meteorology, whaling, and naturalism. The men on board the Jeannette set off in September of 1879. This would be the last time anyone saw them for two years. The product of devoted research into personal histories, memoirs, and classified congressional investigation records, Hell on Ice is a remarkable document: a novelization of history, turning the horrible ordeal of the brave men of the Jeannette into a riveting narrative. Written with a weathered seaman's familiarity, the story brilliantly captures a most perilous voyage from the perspective of the ship's chief engineer. The men of the Jeannette endure months trapped in an Arctic ice pack, and then begin a desperate trek for home.
©1938 Edward Ellsberg and Lucy Buck Ellsberg (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Man Who Saved the Union
Summary
From New York Times best-selling author H. W. Brands, a masterful biography of the Civil War general and two-term president who saved the Union twice, on the battlefield and in the White House, holding the country together at two critical turning points in our history. Ulysses Grant rose from obscurity to discover he had a genius for battle, and he propelled the Union to victory in the Civil War. After Abraham Lincoln's assassination and the disastrous brief presidency of Andrew Johnson, America turned to Grant again to unite the country, this time as president. In Brands' sweeping, majestic full biography, Grant emerges as a heroic figure who was fearlessly on the side of right. He was a beloved commander in the field but willing to make the troop sacrifices necessary to win the war, even in the face of storms of criticism. He worked valiantly to protect the rights of freedmen in the South; Brands calls him the last presidential defender of Black civil rights for nearly a century. He played it straight with the American Indians, allowing them to shape their own fate even as the realities of Manifest Destiny meant the end of their way of life. He was an enormously popular president whose memoirs were a huge best seller; yet within decades of his death his reputation was in tatters, the victim of Southerners who resented his policies on Reconstruction. In this page-turning biography, Brands now reconsiders Grant's legacy and provides a compelling and intimate portrait of a man who saved the Union on the battlefield and consolidated that victory as a resolute and principled political leader.
©2012 H. W. Brands; 2012 Random House Audio
Sailing Bright Eternity
Summary
Millennia of conflict between humans and mechs have driven the human race to near-extinction. Now, as the fierce AI mechs begin their final assault on mankind, it soon becomes apparent that three men - three generations in a family of voyagers - are their targets. Toby Bishop, his father, Killeen Bishop, and his grandfather, Nigel Walmsley, each carry a piece of the lethal secret that can destroy their enemies. But hunted through space and time by relentless assassins, they have no idea that they possess the only weapon that can save humanity.
©1995 Abbenford Associates (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
The Art of Manliness - Manvotionals
Summary
What makes a man manly? Master the art of manliness by learning about the seven manly virtues in this essential guide from authors Brett and Kate McKay. Each chapter covers one of the seven virtues (Manliness, Courage, Industry, Resolution, Self-Reliance, Discipline, Honor) and is packed with the best classic advice ever written down for men. From the philosophy of Aristotle to the speeches and essays of Theodore Roosevelt, these pages contain the manly wisdom of the ages - poems, quotes, and essays that will inspire you to live life to the fullest and realize your complete potential. Learn the art. Change your life. Become a man.
©2011 Brett McKay and Kate McKay (P)2011 Tantor
Socialist Dreams and Beauty Queens
Summary
Couchsurfer, hitchhiker, and rogue wanderer Jamie Ma"lin embarks on a couchsurfing adventure to the homeland of "firebrand", "populist", "anti-American” president Hugo Chavez: the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Alone in the crime capital of the world (with a murder rate higher than Iraq's), Maslin immediately finds himself in trouble - arrested by knife-wielding police officers and inoculated with an unwanted vaccination. After a terrifying start in Caracas, he soon leaves the teeming city and travels to the places tourists never see, staying on the couches of people he befriended online just days earlier, and meeting everyone from fervent social revolutionaries to the country's wealthy elite. He sets off in search of mile-high waterfalls, flat-topped jungle plateaus, rolling deserts, and the famous lightning that appears suddenly in the sky with no rain or thunder. Visiting sprawling slums and opulent mansions, Maslin offers a fascinating and timely social, cultural, and historical introduction to a country increasingly in the headlines. Often irreverent, frequently informative, and habitually funny, this is the remarkable account of a young adventurer's journey through a breathtakingly beautiful and dynamic country where the politics of oil and social revolution are never far from the surface.
©2011 Jamie Maslin (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
The Strangler
Summary
For the three Daley brothers, sons of a Boston cop, crime is the family business. They are simply on different sides of it. Joe is the eldest, a tough-talking cop whose gambling habits - fast women, slow horses - drag him down into the city’s gangland. Michael is the middle son; a Harvard-educated lawyer working for an ambitious attorney general, he finds himself assigned to the embattled Strangler task force. And Ricky, the devil-may-care youngest son, floats above the fray as an expert burglar - until the Strangler strikes too close to home and the three brothers - and the women who love them - are forced to take sides. Now each must look deeper into a killer’s murderous rage, into their family’s own lethal secrets, and into the one death that has changed them forever.
©2007 William Landay (P)2007 Books on Tape
Learning to Kill
Summary
Ed McBain made his debut in 1956. In 2004, more than 100 books later, he personally collected 25 of his stories written before he was Ed McBain. All but five of them were first published in the detective magazine Manhunt and none of them appeared under the Ed McBain byline. They were written by Evan Hunter (McBain’s legal name as of 1952), Richard Marsten (a pseudonym derived from the names of his three sons), or Hunt Collins (in honor of his alma mater, Hunter College). Here are kids in trouble and women in jeopardy. Here are private eyes and gangs. Here are loose cannons and innocent bystanders. Here, too, are cops and robbers. These are the stories that prepared Evan Hunter to become Ed McBain, and that prepared Ed McBain to write the beloved 87th Precinct novels. In individual introductions, McBain tells how and why he wrote these stories that were the start of his legendary career.
©2006 Ed McBain (P)2006 Books on Tape
Iranian Rappers and Persian Porn
Summary
When Jamie Maslin decides to hitchhike the entire length of the Silk Road, he decides to travel first and plan later. Then, unexpectedly stranded in Iran - a country he's only read about in newspapers - he wonders whether he'll make it out alive. After crossing the border on foot from Turkey, Maslin finds himself suddenly plunged into the subversive, contradictory world of Iranian subculture, where he is embraced by locals who are happy to show him the true Iran as they see it - where tourists are treated like royalty, where cab drivers shout abuse at Mullahs from their car windows, where unmarried men and women mingle in Western clothes at secret parties, and where cans of whisky (the possession of which is punishable by lashings) are readily available on the black market. This is the charming and astonishing account of one Westerner's life-altering rambles across Iran that illustrates first-hand the attitudes and aspirations of a nation in flux.
©2009 Jamie Maslin (P)2012 Audible, Inc.