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Ben Hecht
- Fighting Words, Moving Pictures
- Narrated by: Adina Hoffman
- Length: 6 hrs and 17 mins
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Ben Hecht
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Publisher's summary
A vibrant portrait of one of the most accomplished and prolific American screenwriters, by an award-winning biographer and essayist.
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When Nicholas Meyer was asked to direct the troubled second Star Trek film, he was something less than a true believer. A best-selling author and successful director, he had never been a fan of the TV series. But as he began to ponder the appeal of Kirk, Spock, et al., he realized that their story was a classical nautical adventure yarn transplanted into space and - armed with that insight - set out on his mission: to revitalize Trek.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Anyone interested in film or Star Trek
- By Nick C Simon on 05-24-21
By: Nicholas Meyer
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The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock
- An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense
- By: Edward White
- Narrated by: Qarie Marshall
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 78
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 63
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 62
Author Edward White explores the Hitchcock phenomenon - what defines it, how it was invented, what it reveals about the man at its core, and how its legacy continues to shape our cultural world. Illuminating different aspects of Hitchcock's life and work, the book's 12 chapters reveal something fundamental about the man he was and the mythological creature he has become, presenting not just the life Hitchcock lived, but also the various versions of himself that he projected and those projected on his behalf.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Very Good History of Hitch
- By aaron on 07-31-21
By: Edward White
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Shakespeare in a Divided America
- What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future
- By: James Shapiro
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 324
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 280
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 277
The plays of William Shakespeare are rare common ground in the United States. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes—presidents and activists, soldiers and writers, conservatives and liberals alike—have turned to Shakespeare’s works to explore the nation’s fault lines. In a narrative arching from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading scholar James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned.
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5 out of 5 stars
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An Entertaining History Lesson
- By David on 08-17-20
By: James Shapiro
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Sontag
- Her Life and Work
- By: Benjamin Moser
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 106
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 85
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 84
No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Cloying voice
- By Suzanne on 11-02-19
By: Benjamin Moser
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Possessed
- The Life of Joan Crawford
- By: Donald Spoto
- Narrated by: Christina Delaine
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 60
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 53
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 53
New York Times best-selling author Donald Spoto has brilliantly explored the lives and careers of numerous Hollywood stars and entertainment icons. In Possessed, his subject is the inimitable Joan Crawford, one of the most electrifying divas of the Golden Age of American film. A more thorough, revealing, and sympathetic portrait of the often maligned movie star - most notably lambasted, perhaps, in the scandalous best seller, Mommie Dearest - Possessed is a fascinating study of the real Joan Crawford, a remarkable actress, businesswoman, mother, and lover.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Waste of money
- By bkw74 on 07-19-21
By: Donald Spoto
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Genius & Anxiety
- How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947
- By: Norman Lebrecht
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 18 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 77
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 66
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 65
Norman Lebrecht has devoted half of his life to pondering and researching the mindset of the Jewish intellectuals, writers, scientists, and thinkers who turned the tides of history and shaped the world today as we know it. In Genius & Anxiety, Lebrecht begins with the Communist Manifesto in 1847 and ends in 1947, when Israel was founded. This robust, magnificent volume, beautifully designed, is an urgent and necessary celebration of Jewish genius and contribution.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Post-anxiety
- By Amaze on 03-27-20
By: Norman Lebrecht
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Chasing the Light
- Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game
- By: Oliver Stone
- Narrated by: Oliver Stone
- Length: 14 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 301
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 252
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Story5 out of 5 stars 249
An intimate memoir by the controversial, Oscar-winning director and screenwriter about his rarefied New York childhood, volunteering for combat, and his struggles and triumphs making such films as Platoon, Midnight Express, and Scarface.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Impressive
- By Merle O. Tanner on 10-07-20
By: Oliver Stone
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"The Rest of Us"
- The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews
- By: Stephen Birmingham
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 18 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 36
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 33
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 31
The wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who swept into New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by way of Ellis Island were not welcomed by the Jews who had arrived decades before. These refugees from czarist Russia and the Polish shtetls who came to America to escape pogroms and persecution were considered barbaric, uneducated, and too steeped in the traditions of the "old country" to be accepted by the more refined and already well-established German-Jewish community. But the new arrivals were tough, passionate, and determined.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Book 3 of 3
- By Etoile NEOhio on 11-15-22
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Ayn Rand and the World She Made
- By: Anne C. Heller
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 19 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 337
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 201
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Story4 out of 5 stars 207
Ayn Rand is the author of two phenomenally best-selling ideological novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which have sold over 12 million copies in the United States alone. Through them, she built a right-wing cult following in the late 1950s and became the guiding light of Libertarianism and of White House economic policy in the 1960s and '70s. Her defenses of radical individualism and of selfishness as a "capitalist virtue" have permanently altered the American cultural landscape.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great history of both Rand and her era
- By Mark on 08-07-10
By: Anne C. Heller
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life
- By: Gerald Martin
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 22 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 74
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 57
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 61
In his novels and short stories, Gabriel García Márquez has transformed the particulars of his own life and the lives of his fellow Colombians into wondrous fiction. While telling the story of the sloppily dressed, skinny young man who rose from obscurity as a provincial journalist to international fame as the progenitor of a new literature, Gerald Martin also considers the tensions in García Márquez's life between celebrity and the personal quest for literary quality, between politics and writing, and between the seductions of power, solitude, and love.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Great content, somewhat disappointing narrator.
- By Paola Herrington on 01-08-13
By: Gerald Martin
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So We Read On
- How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures
- By: Maureen Corrigan
- Narrated by: Maureen Corrigan
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 237
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 198
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 197
Conceived nearly a century ago by a man who died believing himself a failure, it's now a revered classic and a rite of passage in the reading lives of millions. But how well do we really know The Great Gatsby? As Maureen Corrigan, Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out, while Fitzgerald's masterpiece may be one of the most popular novels in America, many of us first read it when we were too young to fully comprehend its power.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Reading Gatsby as an adult reveals its greatness!
- By Mark on 10-06-14
By: Maureen Corrigan
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Nazi Literature in the Americas
- By: Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 71
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 60
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Story4 out of 5 stars 59
A tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition, Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical dictionary of writers who espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the 20th and 21st centuries.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Eerie and fascinating
- By Jikai Zenshin on 03-19-21
By: Roberto Bolaño, and others
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She Made Me Laugh
- My Friend Nora Ephron
- By: Richard Cohen
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 114
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 93
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 94
Award-winning journalist Richard Cohen, wrote this about his "third-person memoir": "I call this book a third-person memoir. It is about my closest friend, Nora Ephron, and the lives we lived together and how her life got to be bigger until, finally, she wrote her last work, the play, Lucky Guy, about a newspaper columnist dying of cancer while she herself was dying of cancer. I have interviewed many of her other friends - Mike Nichols, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, Arianna Huffington.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Loved it!
- By Leigh Lerro on 10-27-17
By: Richard Cohen
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The Last Love Song
- A Biography of Joan Didion
- By: Tracy Daugherty
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 26 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 77
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 65
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 65
Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Riveted for 1591 miles
- By Kaysi12 on 04-11-16
By: Tracy Daugherty
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The Man in the Red Coat
- By: Julian Barnes
- Narrated by: Saul Reichlin
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 71
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 62
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Story4 out of 5 stars 60
In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' intellectual shopping: a prince, a count, and a commoner with an Italian name. In time, each of these men would achieve a certain level of renown, but who were they then and what was the significance of their sojourn to England? Answering these questions, Julian Barnes unfurls the stories of their lives which play out against the backdrop of the Belle Epoque in Paris. Our guide through this world is Samuel Pozzi, the society doctor, free-thinker, and man of science with a famously complicated private life....
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1 out of 5 stars
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Pathetic narration makes this title unbearable
- By Chris Quigg on 02-27-20
By: Julian Barnes
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Author in Chief
- The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote
- By: Craig Fehrman
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 15 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 27
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 27
In Craig Fehrman’s groundbreaking work of history, Author in Chief, the story of America’s presidents and their books opens a rich new window into presidential biography. From volumes lost to history - Calvin Coolidge’s Autobiography, which was one of the most widely discussed titles of 1929 - to ones we know and love - Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, which was very nearly never published - Fehrman unearths countless insights about the presidents through their literary works.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fascinating
- By Jean on 03-12-20
By: Craig Fehrman
What listeners say about Ben Hecht
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Christopher McCue
- 02-25-21
Huh
Feel like I know less about Ben Hecht after listening to this. The narration feels like a speed reading session.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- j
- 09-20-21
Succinct and informative
I found this book to be a concise and informative account of Hecht’s life and career. The author’s performance in the reading was vigorous and clear.
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