Tom Holland has narrated 4 audiobooks on Listento.it by 3 authors, with an average listener rating of 3.7★ across 70 ratings. The most-rated is Dominion.
Dominion
Summary
A "marvelous" (Economist) account of how the Christian Revolution forged the Western imagination. Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular victim of crucifixion - an obscure provincial by the name of Jesus - was to be worshipped as a god. Dominion explores the implications of this shocking conviction as they have reverberated throughout history. Today, the West remains utterly saturated by Christian assumptions. As Tom Holland demonstrates, our morals and ethics are not universal but are instead the fruits of a very distinctive civilization. Concepts such as secularism, liberalism, science, and homosexuality are deeply rooted in a Christian seedbed. From Babylon to the Beatles, Saint Michael to #MeToo, Dominion tells the story of how Christianity transformed the modern world.
©2019 Tom Holland (P)2019 Basic Books
Persian Fire
Summary
In 480 BC, Xerxes, the King of Persia, led an invasion of mainland Greece. Its success should have been a formality. For 70 years, victory - rapid, spectacular victory - had seemed the birthright of the Persian Empire. In the space of a single generation, they had swept across the Near East, shattering ancient kingdoms, storming famous cities, putting together an empire which stretched from India to the shores of the Aegean. As a result of those conquests, Xerxes ruled as the most powerful man on the planet. Yet somehow, astonishingly, against the largest expeditionary force ever assembled, the Greeks of the mainland managed to hold out. The Persians were turned back. Greece remained free. Had the Greeks been defeated at Salamis, not only would the West have lost its first struggle for independence and survival, but it is unlikely that there would ever have been such an entity as the West at all. Tom Holland's brilliant book describes the very first 'clash of Empires' between East and West. Once again he has found extraordinary parallels between the ancient world and our own. There is no competing popular book describing these events.
©2005 Tom Holland (P)2019 Hachette Audio UK
Hellraiser: The Toll
Summary
Hellraiser: The Toll tells the story of what happened between Clive Barker's iconic works Hellraiser and its literary follow-up, The Scarlet Gospels. Written by Mark Alan Miller (Next Testament, The Steam Man), featuring narration by director Tom Holland (Child's Play, Fright Night); a full cast that includes Mali Elfman, Kasey Lansdale, Peter Atkins, Robert Parigi, Richard Ankles, Christian Francis, Joshua Holland, and Justin Vonderach; and original music by powerhouse composer Cris Velasco (God of War 1-3, Clive Barker's Jericho). Thirty years after Kirsty escaped from the clutches of the Hell Priest, Pinhead, and lived to fight another day, her life has never been the same. Every few years she fashions a new name, a new identity, and a new home for herself. She is a woman who is running from her past at all costs, which is why it comes as such a surprise when she receives a mysterious letter in the mail, addressed to the identity she's been running from over half her life. Answering the letter's query, she begins a descent down a rabbit hole to the ultimate confrontation. Her actions stir something unnameable in the ether and throw her into a game where nothing...not even what she sees in front of her very eyes...can be trusted. With equal parts economy and eloquence, author Mark Alan Miller brings to life the beginning of the end as The Toll expands the Hellraiser universe and shows that before Detective Harry D'Amour's adventures in The Scarlet Gospels, there was a first witness to Pinhead's infernal plan.
©2018 Mark Alan Miller (P)2018 Mark Alan Miller
Millennium
Summary
Of all the civilisations existing in the year 1000, that of Western Europe seemed the unlikeliest candidate for future greatness. Compared to the glittering empires of Byzantium or Islam, the splintered kingdoms on the edge of the Atlantic appeared impoverished, fearful and backward. But the anarchy of these years proved to be not the portents of the end of the world, as many Christians had dreaded, but rather the birth pangs of a radically new order. Millennium is a stunning panoramic account of the two centuries on either side of the apocalyptic year 1000. This was the age of Canute, William the Conqueror and Pope Gregory VII, of Vikings, monks and serfs, of the earliest castles and the invention of knighthood, and of the primal conflict between church and state. The story of how the distinctive culture of Europe - restless, creative and dynamic - was forged from out of the convulsions of these extraordinary times is as fascinating and as momentous as any in history.
©2008 Tom Holland (P)2019 Hachette Audio UK