Audiobooks Books - Page 3

John Lennon: The Life CD

Philip Norman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Philip Norman turns his formidable talent to the Beatle for whom belonging to the world's most beloved pop group was never enough. Drawing on previously untapped sources, and with unprecedented access to all the major characters, here is the definitive portrait of John Lennon.

This masterly biography takes a fresh and penetrating look at Lennon's much-chronicled life, including the songs that have turned him, posthumously, into almost a secular saint. In three years of research, Norman has turned up an extraordinary amount of new information about even the best-known episodes of Lennon folklore. The book's numerous key informants and interviewees include Sir Paul McCartney, Sir George Martin, and Yoko Ono, who speaks with sometimes shocking candor about the inner workings of her marriage to John.

Honest and unflinching, as John himself would wish, Norman gives us the whole man in all his endless contradictions—tough and cynical, hilariously funny but also naive, vulnerable and insecure—and reveals how the mother who gave him away as a toddler haunted his mind and his music for the rest of his days.

The Glass Castle: A Memoir

Jeannette Walls

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1139 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an "excitement addict." Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever.

Later, when the money ran out, or the romance of the wandering life faded, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town -- and the family -- Rex Walls had done everything he could to escape. He drank. He stole the grocery money and disappeared for days. As the dysfunction of the family escalated, Jeannette and her brother and sisters had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they weathered their parents' betrayals and, finally, found the resources and will to leave home.

What is so astonishing about Jeannette Walls is not just that she had the guts and tenacity and intelligence to get out, but that she describes her parents with such deep affection and generosity. Hers is a story of triumph against all odds, but also a tender, moving tale of unconditional love in a family that despite its profound flaws gave her the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.

For two decades, Jeannette Walls hid her roots. Now she tells her own story. A regular contributor to MSNBC.com, she lives in New York and Long Island and is married to the writer John Taylor.

Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea

Amazon Price: $20.84 List Price: $29.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Simon & Schuster Audio Amazon Marketplace: 45 new & used starting at $14.95

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Total reviews: 267 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In My Horizontal Life, actress and stand-up comedian Chelsea Handler boldly recounted her one-night stands-the good, the bad, and the disastrous. In this wickedly honest new work, she casts the net wider with even funnier results, recalling the most noteworthy highs and lows of her life to date--including her efforts to diversify by dating red-haired men, her obsession with midgets, and the dog-sitting interlude in which her boyfriend became overly familiar with a Peekapoo.

Whether it's a vacation with her dad during which he tells airline staff they're a honeymoon couple in order to get an upgrade, or her elaborate attempts to convince her third-grade classmates that she's starring in a Private Benjamin sequel, Chelsea lets it rip in these relentlessly entertaining essays. Displaying the candor and irresistible turn of phrase that have earned her a recurring stint as a correspondent on The Tonight Show as well as her own E! series, Chelsea Lately, this deliciously skewed collection is a guilty pleasure.

Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

H.W. Brands

Amazon Price: $23.07 List Price: $34.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Random House Audio Amazon Marketplace: 34 new & used starting at $19.85

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Presidents & Heads of State

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A sweeping, magisterial biography of the man generally considered the greatest president of the twentieth century, admired by Democrats and Republicans alike. Traitor to His Class sheds new light on FDR's formative years, his remarkable willingness to champion the concerns of the poor and disenfranchised, his combination of political genius, firm leadership, and matchless diplomacy in saving democracy in America during the Great Depression and the American cause of freedom in World War II.

Drawing on archival materials, public speeches, personal correspondence, and accounts by family and close associates, acclaimed bestselling historian and biographer H. W. Brands offers a compelling and intimate portrait of Roosevelt’s life and career.

Brands explores the powerful influence of FDR’s dominating mother and the often tense and always unusual partnership between FDR and his wife, Eleanor, and her indispensable contributions to his presidency. Most of all, the book traces in breathtaking detail FDR’s revolutionary efforts with his New Deal legislation to transform the American political economy in order to save it, his forceful—and cagey—leadership before and during World War II, and his lasting legacy in creating the foundations of the postwar international order.

Traitor to His Class brilliantly captures the qualities that have made FDR a beloved figure to millions of Americans.

Against Medical Advice: One Family's Struggle with an Agonizing Medical Mystery

James Patterson, Hal Friedman

Amazon Price: $23.09 List Price: $34.98 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Hachette Audio Amazon Marketplace: 44 new & used starting at $11.74

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Cory Friedman woke up one morning when he was five years old with the uncontrollable urge to shake his head and his life was never the same again. From that day forward his life became a hell of uncontrollable tics, urges, and involuntary utterances. Eventually he is diagnosed with Tourette's Syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive disorder, and Cory embarks on an excruciating journey from specialist to specialist, enduring countless combinations of medications in wildly varying doses. Soon it becomes unclear what tics are symptoms of his disease and what are side effects of the drugs. The only certainty is that it kept getting worse. Despite his lack of control, Cory is aware of every embarrassing movement, and sensitive to every person's reaction to his often aggravating presence. Simply put: Cory Friedman's life is a living hell.


AGAINST MEDICAL ADVICE is the true story of Cory and his family's decades-long battle for survival in the face of extraordinary difficulties and a maddening medical establishment. It is a heart-rending story of struggle and triumph with a climax as dramatic as any James Patterson thriller.

Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10

Marcus Luttrell

Amazon Price: $10.19 List Price: $14.98 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Hachette Audio Amazon Marketplace: 28 new & used starting at $7.96

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 785 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Four US Navy SEALS departed one clear night in early July, 2005 for the mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border for a reconnaissance mission. Their task was to document the activity of an al Qaeda leader rumored to have a small army in a Taliban stronghold. Five days later, only one of those Navy SEALS made it out alive. This is the story of the only survivor of Operation Redwing, SEAL team leader Marcus Luttrell, and the extraordinary firefight that led to the largest loss of life in American Navy SEAL history. His squadmates fought valiantly beside him until he was the only one left alive, blasted by an RPG into a place where his pursuers could not find him. Over the next four days, terribly injured and presumed dead, Luttrell crawled for miles through the mountains and was taken in by sympathetic villagers who risked their lives to keep him safe from surrounding Taliban warriors. A born and raised Texan, Marcus Luttrell takes us from the rigors of SEAL training, where he and his fellow SEALs discovered what it took to join the most elite of the American special forces, to a fight in the desolate hills of Afghanistan for which they never could have been prepared. His account of his squadmates' heroism and mutual support renders an experience for which two of his squadmates were posthumously awarded the Navy Cross for combat heroism that is both heartrending and life-affirming. In this rich chronicle of courage and sacrifice, honor and patriotism, Marcus Luttrell delivers a powerful narrative of modern war.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle CD: A Year of Food Life

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 325 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Pretentious and preachy 1 out of 5 stars.
1 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I really wanted to like this book. I agree with the author in that as a culture we've clearly gotten out of touch with living off the land and have become a fast food society. But I struggled to even get through the first chapter. The tone of the book is much too preachy and pretentious giving it a "holier than thou" feel. It's hard to get past that.

Editorial Review:

Hang on for the ride: with characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table.

Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life, and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.

Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 223 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

It was wonderful to be young and working on Wall Street in the 1980s: never had so many twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time.

In this shrewd and wickedly funny audiobook, Michael Lewis describes an astonishing era and his own rake’s progress through a powerful investment bank. From an unlikely beginning (art history at Princeton?) he rose in two short years from Salomon Brothers trainee to Geek (the lowest form of life on the trading floor) to Big Swinging Dick–a bond salesman who could turn over millions of dollars’ worth of doubtful bonds with just one call.

A born storyteller, Michael Lewis shows us how things really worked on Wall Street. The bond traders, wearing greed and ambition as badges of honor, might well have swaggered straight from the pages of Bonfire of the Vanities. But for all their outrageous behavior, they were in fact presiding over enormous changes in the world economy. Lewis’s job was to transfer money, in the form of bonds, from those outside American who saved to those inside America who consumed. In doing so, he generated tens of millions of dollars for Salomon Brothers, and earned for himself a ringside seat on the greatest financial spectacle of the decade: the leveraging of America.

Same Kind of Different As Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together

Ron Hall, Denver Moore

Amazon Price: $11.55 List Price: $16.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Thomas Nelson Amazon Marketplace: 30 new & used starting at $9.45

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 211 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Don't catch and release this book too soon! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Great book chosen/read for a book club (of all white women) I read this over a 4-day holiday and it brought me to tears a few times. It's emotional and historical, modern and joyful. I didn't feel the references to religion were so overt that someone like me (a non-practicing Catholic) was inundated to feel a certain way. I can relate to some of the books spiritual moments (from my own life) and it's interesting to see how they're written.

My personal take away is a better understanding of the homeless persona; how my volunteering in those environments may be mis/construed and received by the other parties. I think this would be a decent book for young adults preparing to volunteer as well as ALL of us and friendship. We're so superficial anymore, finding and keeping friends is important to our sanity. More than likely we give up (catch and release) one another too quickly because of petty things. We need more investment in ourselves and others- this book may remind us of it.

I'm not a book connoisseur so I can't dissect character forms or flawed themes, but I know what I like and this book was something that I'd like to either keep for later reading or pass on and allow others to enjoy as much as I did.

Editorial Review:

Meet Denver, a man raised under plantation-style slavery in Louisiana in the 1960s; a man who escaped, hopping a train to wander, homeless, for eighteen years on the streets of Dallas, Texas. No longer a slave, Denver's life was still hopeless-until God moved. First came a godly woman who prayed, listened, and obeyed. And then came her husband, Ron, an international arts dealer at home in a world of Armani-suited millionaires. And then they all came together.

But slavery takes many forms. Deborah discovers that she has cancer. In the face of possible death, she charges her husband to rescue Denver. Who will be saved, and who will be lost? What is the future for these unlikely three? What is God doing?

Same Kind of Different As Me is the emotional tale of their story: a telling of pain and laughter, doubt and tears, dug out between the bondages of this earth and the free possibility of heaven. No reader or listener will ever forget it.

Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl

Stacey O'Brien

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 62 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Not For All Animal Lovers 2 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I know I'm going to get blasted for writing a negative review, but I just couldn't like this book. As an animal lover, as are most of the people who will read this book, I expected to like it, I wanted to like it. The story of the owl itself is ok, and the book is a quick, easy read.

The problem arose for me when, in the first few pages, the author remembers crying all day as a child when her mother flushed a spider down a toilet, using that to portray what an animal lover she is. But a few pages later, the adult biologist writes "there is a cultural pressure among biologists to withstand the extremely gross without reacting" and goes on to describe cleaning up rotten, maggot infested rats parts that the owls have dropped. Later on, she works desperately to save a hamster but is blase about microwaving mice. She jokes about rats that "must have been doing genetic experiments" because they were so large before she sliced them into "rat pucks".

Now of course I know that in the wild, mice, rats, and other such creatures are always in danger of being eaten. But I also know they also have the chance to get away. It is the author's seeming total lack of concern for the animals that are killed to keep her owl alive that concerns me. I could not read this story without feeling for the animals that have been compartmentalized in her mind as "food" and therefore not worth any compassion. This story just made me sad.

Editorial Review:

Written with the same heartwarming sentiment that made the memoir Marley & Me a runaway bestseller, biologist and owl expert Stacey O'Brien chronicles her rescue of an adorable, abandoned baby barn owl---and their astonishing and unprecedented nineteen-year life together.