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Bach, Beethoven, and the Boys
- Music History as It Ought to Be Taught
- Narrated by: Jean-Michel George
- Length: 3 hrs and 31 mins
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Bach, Beethoven, and the Boys
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Publisher's summary
David W. Barber has delighted fans around the world with Accidentals on Purpose, When the Fat Lady Sings, and other internationally best-selling books of musical humor. His best-selling Bach, Beethoven and the Boys chronicles the lives of the great (and not-so-great) composers, exploring their sex lives, exposing their foibles, and expanding on our understanding of these all-too-human creatures.
Filled with information, interesting facts, and trivia, this hilarious history covers music from Gregorian chant to the mess we're in now. From Bach's laundry lists to Beethoven's bowel problems, from Gesualdo's kinky fetishes to Cage's mushroom madness, Barber tells tales out of school that ought to be put back there (think how much more fun it would be if they taught this stuff).
"My heartiest commendation for an admirable work of scholarship.... I will not say again that it is funny, since this will compel you to set your jaw and dare Barber to make you laugh." (Anthony Burgess on Bach, Beethoven and the Boys)
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- By: Ray Connolly
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 16 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 55
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 46
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 46
What was it like to be John Lennon? What was it like to be the castoff child, the clown at school, the middle-class suburban boy who pretended to be a working-class hero? How did it feel to have one of the most recognizable singing voices in the world but to dislike it so much he always wanted to disguise it? Being John Lennon is not about the whitewashed Prince of Peace of “Imagine” legend - because that was only a small part of him. The John Lennon depicted in this book is a much more kaleidoscopic figure, sometimes almost a collision of different characters.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Stars taken off for inclusion of MDC’s story
- By rob on 12-09-22
By: Ray Connolly
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John Lennon
- The Life
- By: Philip Norman
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 12 hrs and 52 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 157
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 121
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 120
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 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.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Really Bad Abridgement Job (slash job)
- By Let's Be Reasonable on 12-04-08
By: Philip Norman
-
Fifth Business
- The Deptford Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Robertson Davies
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 793
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 695
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 688
This first novel in The Deptford Trilogy introduces Ramsay, a man who returns from World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross but who is destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As we hear Ramsey tell his story, we begin to realize that, from childhood, he has influenced those around him in a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious way.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Been waiting for this
- By Vinity on 12-10-11
By: Robertson Davies
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The Ballad of Bob Dylan
- A Portrait
- By: Daniel Mark Epstein
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 15 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 50
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 45
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 44
The Ballad of Bob Dylan is a vivid, full-bodied portrait of one of the most influential artists of the 20th-century - a man widely regarded as the most important lyricist America has ever produced. Acclaimed poet and biographer Daniel Mark Epstein frames Dylan against the backdrop of four seminal concerts - all of which he attended. Beautifully written, The Ballad of Bob Dylan is a unique, eye-opening portrait of an artist who has transformed generations and continues to inspire and surprise today.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent book, excellent narration
- By L chandler on 12-22-11
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Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know
- By: Colm Toibin
- Narrated by: Colm Toibin
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 42
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 35
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 35
Elegant, profound, and riveting, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know illuminates not only the complex relationships between three of the greatest writers in the English language and their fathers, but also illustrates the surprising ways these men surface in their work. Through these stories of fathers and sons, Tóibín recounts the resistance to English cultural domination, the birth of modern Irish cultural identity, and the extraordinary contributions of these complex and masterful authors.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Eminently re-readable
- By Ellen-A on 01-02-19
By: Colm Toibin
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The Club
- Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
- By: Leo Damrosch
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 358
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 299
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 294
In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk's Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually, the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as "the Club". In this captivating audiobook, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Wonderful survey
- By Tad Davis on 05-10-19
By: Leo Damrosch
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Tearing Down the Wall of Sound
- The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector
- By: Mick Brown
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 17 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 279
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 190
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 188
Phil Spector, born in the Bronx in 1940, grew up an outsider despised by his peers. But he formed a band, and had a number-one hit with "To Know Him Is to Love Him". He quickly became the top producer of early rock and roll and the originator of such girl groups as the Ronettes. Hit followed hit, and for all of them he used a new recording style called the "wall of sound". But the reign of the boy-man who owned pop music was doomed, and Spector spiraled into paranoid isolation and peculiar behavior.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Descent Into Madness
- By Chris on 06-11-12
By: Mick Brown
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Famous Father Girl
- A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein
- By: Jamie Bernstein
- Narrated by: Jamie Bernstein
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 163
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 149
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 146
The oldest daughter of revered composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein offers a rare look at her father on the centennial of his birth in a deeply intimate and broadly evocative memoir. The composer of On the Town and West Side Story, chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic, television star, humanitarian, friend of the powerful and influential, and the life of every party, Leonard Bernstein was an enormous celebrity during one of the headiest periods of American cultural life, as well as the most protean musician in 20th-century America.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Can't say enough good things
- By barbara on 10-10-18
By: Jamie Bernstein
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The Noise of Time
- By: Julian Barnes
- Narrated by: Daniel Philpott
- Length: 5 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 284
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 255
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 253
In May 1937, a man in his early 30s waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now, and few who are taken to the Big House ever return.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Art belongs to everybody and nobody.
- By Darwin8u on 06-13-16
By: Julian Barnes
-
World’s End
- The Lanny Budd Novels, Book 1
- By: Upton Sinclair
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 26 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 82
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 74
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 74
Lanning “Lanny” Budd spends his first 13 years in Europe, living at the center of his mother’s glamourous circle of friends on the French Riviera. In 1913, he enters a prestigious Swiss boarding school and befriends Rick, an English boy, and Kurt, a German. The three schoolmates are privileged, happy, and precocious - but their world is about to come to an abrupt and violent end. When the gathering storm clouds of war finally burst, raining chaos and death over the continent, Lanny must put the innocence of youth behind him.
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3 out of 5 stars
-
didn't finish
- By Bird Miller on 05-08-22
By: Upton Sinclair
-
City Boy
- My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s
- By: Edmund White
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 72
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 66
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 67
In the New York of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult.
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1 out of 5 stars
-
Pretense upon pretense.
- By Shalin Desai on 06-01-15
By: Edmund White
-
Made in Scotland
- My Grand Adventures in a Wee Country
- By: Billy Connolly
- Narrated by: Gordon Kennedy
- Length: 6 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 212
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 194
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 193
Billy Connolly may be a citizen of the world, but in his heart he's never been far from his homeland. Made in Scotland is Billy's unique and intimate portrait of his native Scotland, a love letter to the places and people that made him. It's an adventure inspired by a single incident: the moment Billy received his Knighthood and was asked, 'How does it feel to have achieved all this when you came from nothing?' His response was, 'But I did come from something!'
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1 out of 5 stars
-
I can't believe I wasted a credit on this blather.
- By J. M. Popa on 01-23-20
By: Billy Connolly
-
Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World
- By: Leo Damrosch
- Narrated by: David Stifel
- Length: 20 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 73
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 66
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 65
Jonathan Swift is best remembered today as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, the satiric fantasy that quickly became a classic and has remained in print for nearly three centuries. Yet Swift also wrote many other influential works, was a major political and religious figure in his time, and became a national hero, beloved for his fierce protest against English exploitation of his native Ireland. What is really known today about the enigmatic man behind these accomplishments? Can the facts of his life be separated from the fictions?
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5 out of 5 stars
-
JOHNATHAN SWIFT AND POWER OF THE PEN
- By chetyarbrough.blog on 09-30-14
By: Leo Damrosch
-
Bygone Badass Broads
- 52 Forgotten Women Who Changed the World
- By: Mackenzi Lee
- Narrated by: Lucy James
- Length: 4 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 620
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 525
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 523
Based on Mackenzi Lee's popular weekly Twitter series of the same name, Bygone Badass Broads features 52 remarkable and forgotten trailblazing women from all over the world. With tales of heroism and cunning, in-depth bios and witty storytelling, Bygone Badass Broads gives new life to these historic female pioneers. Starting in the fifth century BC and continuing to the present, the book takes a closer look at bold and inspiring women who dared to step outside the traditional gender roles of their time.
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3 out of 5 stars
-
Awesome history, heavy-handed political agenda
- By Charlie on 07-08-18
By: Mackenzi Lee
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What listeners say about Bach, Beethoven, and the Boys
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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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
- Jack Frasier
- 03-02-19
funny and whimsical
very enjoyable and quick audiobook. only 3 hours or so. nice for funny history lesson
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1 person found this helpful
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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
- Amazon Customer
- 10-31-18
MARVELOUS
I highly recommend this to any student of music that has endured a 3:00pm music history class.
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2 people found this helpful
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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
- Jeri
- 04-11-20
The Most Fun You’ll Have Learning Something
A delightfully irreverent take on classical music 🎶 it is quite funny and definitely a great way to spend time. The narrator is a perfect fit for the material.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Ruffkutt
- 08-20-18
Wanted: More audiobooks from the author
Fun listen owed in large part to narrator JM George's patrician nobility accent which adds a Pythonesque quality. Would purchase Mr. Barber's other works as audiobooks with this form of narration.
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5 people found this helpful
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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
- MichaelP
- 05-23-22
Very Entertaining
Not a lot of new information of you have any background in Music History - BUT, VERY entertaining. Worth the time!
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1 person found this helpful