Jonathan Davis gained his earliest fans with sci-fi, making a big splash with Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, several Star Wars titles, and his performance of Robert J. Sawyer’s Calculating God, which won the Audie Award for Sci-Fi in 2009. But with a varied list of more than 500 books to his name, sci-fi isn’t Davis's only specialty.
If there is such a thing as a nonfiction cult classic in audio, it may very well owe its success to Jonathan Davis. His narration of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World took an often mythologized historical subject and made it as gripping as any thriller. Similarly, his performance of Oliver Sacks’s pop-science hit The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat completely enthralled listeners, and his brilliantly paced handling of Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order took something that might seem above your pay grade and turned it into a story with an engaging narrative arc.
Born in the States, Davis and his family moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico, when he was five to live near his uncle, Sholom Secunda, an esteemed composer of Yiddish theater. Of his uncle, Davis remarks, ''Sholom was a wonderful storyteller, who instilled my desire to become an actor." That upbringing helped to equip him with many of the different accents and dialects that he brings to his work. His fluency in Spanish, Portuguese, and Hebrew has allowed him to imbue many of his performances with a rich authenticity, from Chaim Potok’s The Chosen to Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Discover more great listens narrated by Jonathan Davis
