Steve Inskeep has narrated 3 audiobooks on Listento.it by 2 authors. The most-rated is Jacksonland.
NPR Driveway Moments: All About Animals
Summary
What’s a "driveway moment"? It’s when you’re so captivated by a story you’re hearing on NPR that you stay in your car to hear it to the end - even if you’re sitting in your driveway with the motor running. For years, listeners have written to NPR to describe such moments. Now animal lovers especially will want to make sure their tanks are full. Heard on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Talk of the Nation, and Wait Wait - Don’t Tell Me!, hosted by Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep, these stories will make you laugh out loud and shed a tear or two. Contents: "The Dog Who Loved to Suck on Toads" "My Mother, My Parrot" "The Sad Story of Ziggy, the Too Perfect Parrot" "Pet Tricks - and an Accidental Career" "A Dog Walker’s Dog Walker" "Search for Lost Pets Continues in Louisiana" "Turtle Holds On in Center of Vietnam’s Capital" A Dog’s Life in Vietnam" "Precisionist Nears a New Pasture" "An Entrepreneurial Dog’s Private Life" "The Dog Stays in the Picture" "Cute and Fuzzy as the Nation’s Lead Story" "The Wait Wait Petting Zoo" "No Chump Change for Chimp Art" "Miss Pudding: A Feline Farewell" "Vacuuming Prairie Dogs" "When Hummingbirds Come Home" "Bird Clothes" "Drive-Up Boar Semen" "The Boy Who Ran Like a Deer" "The Soul of a Dog"
©2012 HighBridge Company (P)2012 National Public Radio
Imperfect Union
Summary
Steve Inskeep tells the riveting story of John and Jessie Frémont, the husband and wife team who in the 1800s were instrumental in the westward expansion of the United States, and thus became America's first great political couple. John C. Frémont, one of the United States' leading explorers of the 19th century, was relatively unknown in 1842, when he commanded the first of his expeditions to the uncharted West. But in only a few years, he was one of the most acclaimed people of the age - known as a wilderness explorer, best-selling writer, gallant army officer, and latter-day conquistador, who in 1846 began the United States' takeover of California from Mexico. He was not even 40 years old when Americans began naming mountains and towns after him. He had perfect timing, exploring the West just as it captured the nation’s attention. But the most important factor in his fame may have been the person who made it all possible: his wife, Jessie Benton Frémont. Jessie, the daughter of a United States senator who was deeply involved in the West, provided her husband with entrée to the highest levels of government and media, and his career reached new heights only a few months after their elopement. During a time when women were allowed to make few choices for themselves, Jessie - who herself aspired to roles in exploration and politics - threw her skill and passion into promoting her husband. She worked to carefully edit and publicize his accounts of his travels, attracted talented young men to his circle, and lashed out at his enemies. She became her husband’s political adviser, as well as a power player in her own right. In 1856, the famous couple strategized as John became the first-ever presidential nominee of the newly established Republican Party. With rare detail and in consummate style, Steve Inskeep tells the story of a couple whose joint ambitions and talents intertwined with those of the nascent United States itself. Taking advantage of expanding news media, aided by an increasingly literate public, the two linked their names to the three great national movements of the time - westward settlement, women’s rights, and opposition to slavery. Together, John and Jessie Frémont took parts in events that defined the country and gave rise to a new, more global America. Theirs is a surprisingly modern tale of ambition and fame; they lived in a time of social and technological disruption and divisive politics that foreshadowed our own. In Imperfect Union, as Inskeep navigates these deeply transformative years through Jessie and John’s own union, he reveals how the Frémonts’ adventures amount to nothing less than a tour of the early American soul.
©2020 Steve Inskeep (P)2020 Penguin Audio
Jacksonland
Summary
Jacksonland is the thrilling narrative history of two men - President Andrew Jackson and Cherokee chief John Ross - who led their respective nations at a crossroads of American history. Five decades after the Revolutionary War, the United States approached a constitutional crisis. At its center stood two former military comrades locked in a struggle that tested the boundaries of our fledgling democracy. Jacksonland is their story. One man we recognize: Andrew Jackson - war hero, populist, and exemplar of the expanding South - whose first major initiative as president instigated the massive expulsion of Native Americans known as the Trail of Tears. The other is a half-forgotten figure: John Ross - a mixed-race Cherokee politician and diplomat - who used the United States' own legal system and democratic ideals to oppose Jackson. Representing one of the Five Civilized Tribes who had adopted the ways of white settlers - cultivating farms, publishing a newspaper in their own language, and sending children to school - Ross championed the tribes' cause all the way to the Supreme Court. He gained allies like Senator Henry Clay, Chief Justice John Marshall, and even Davy Crockett. In a fight that seems at once distant and familiar, Ross and his allies made their case in the media, committed civil disobedience, and benefited from the first mass political action by American women. Their struggle contained ominous overtures of later events like the Civil War and set the pattern for modern-day politics. At stake in this struggle was the land of the Five Civilized Tribes. In shocking detail Jacksonland reveals how Jackson, as a general, extracted immense wealth from his own armies' conquest of native lands. Later, as president, Jackson set in motion the seizure of tens of millions of acres - "Jacksonland" - in today's Deep South.
©2015 Steve Inskeep (P)2015 Penguin Audio