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The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach
- Narrated by: Peter Schickele
- Length: 1 hr and 19 mins
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The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach
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- By: Sue Prideaux
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 17 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 328
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 286
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 284
Nietzsche wrote that all philosophy is autobiographical, and in this vividly compelling, myth-shattering biography, Sue Prideaux brings listeners into the world of this brilliant, eccentric, and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand history's most misunderstood philosopher.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fascinating; tragic
- By Cineaste21 on 12-30-18
By: Sue Prideaux
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The Rest Is Noise
- Listening to the 20th Century
- By: Alex Ross
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 23 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 484
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 303
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Story4 out of 5 stars 299
The Rest Is Noise takes the listener inside the labyrinth of modern music, from turn-of-the-century Vienna to downtown New York in the '60s and '70s. We meet the maverick personalities and follow the rise of mass culture on this sweeping tour of 20th-century history through its music.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Learned so much!
- By Paula on 02-18-08
By: Alex Ross
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The Professor and the Madman
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 5,249
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 4,044
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Story4 out of 5 stars 4,059
Part history, part true-crime, and entirely entertaining, listen to the story of how the behemoth Oxford English Dictionary was made. You'll hang on every word as you discover that the dictionary's greatest contributor was also an insane murderer working from the confines of an asylum.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Perfect example of a quality audible book.
- By Jerry on 07-07-03
By: Simon Winchester
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The Noise of Time
- By: Julian Barnes
- Narrated by: Daniel Philpott
- Length: 5 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 284
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 255
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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
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A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
- 1599
- By: James Shapiro
- Narrated by: James Shapiro
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 141
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 88
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 88
1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England. During that year, Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Note!--Abridged version
- By Scott on 01-05-16
By: James Shapiro
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Keats
- A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
- By: Lucasta Miller
- Narrated by: Sally Scott
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 44
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 37
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Story5 out of 5 stars 36
Miller, through Keats’s poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his complexity and spirit, living dangerously, disdaining respectability and cultural norms, and embracing subversive politics. Keats was a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and fractured family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression, who delighted in the sensation of the moment.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Romantic Life
- By David on 05-03-22
By: Lucasta Miller
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Beethoven
- A Life in Nine Pieces
- By: Laura Tunbridge
- Narrated by: Laura Tunbridge
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 24
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 20
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 21
The iconic image of Beethoven is of him as a lone genius: hair wild, fists clenched, and brow furrowed. Beethoven may well have shaped the music of the future, but he was also a product of his time, influenced by the people, politics, and culture around him. Oxford scholar Laura Tunbridge offers an alternative history of Beethoven's career, placing his music in contexts that shed light on why particular pieces are valued more than others, and what this tells us about his larger-than-life reputation.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Engaging, interesting, nice format
- By George on 07-04-22
By: Laura Tunbridge
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Alice Behind Wonderland
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 2 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 103
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 89
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Story4 out of 5 stars 87
On a summer's day in 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church College in Oxford, Charles Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics, photographed six-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding camera, recently purchased in London. Simon Winchester deftly uses the resulting image - as unsettling as it is famous, and the subject of bottomless speculation - as the vehicle for a brief excursion behind the lens, a focal point on the origins of a classic work of English literature.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Not Long Enough
- By thefrogman on 06-18-12
By: Simon Winchester
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What Is Man?
- By: Mark Twain
- Narrated by: Carl Reiner
- Length: 3 hrs
- Abridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 60
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 51
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 50
What Is Man? appears in the form of a Socratic dialogue between a romantic young idealist and an elderly cynic, who debate issues of mankind, such as whether man is free to act or is more of a machine, whether personal merit is meaningless given how the environment shapes us, and whether man truly has impulses other than to pursue pleasure and avoid pain.
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5 out of 5 stars
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I'm 21, this shit was crazy. But I loved it.
- By Trina on 10-16-17
By: Mark Twain
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Leonardo and the Last Supper
- By: Ross King
- Narrated by: Mark Meadows
- Length: 11 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 183
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 161
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 162
Early in 1495, Leonardo da Vinci began work in Milan on what would become one of history's most influential and beloved works of art - The Last Supper. After a dozen years at the court of Lodovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, Leonardo was at a low point personally and professionally: at 43, in an era when he had almost reached the average life expectancy, he had failed, despite a number of prestigious commissions, to complete anything that truly fulfilled his astonishing promise.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Informative yet creative
- By Isabellabasil on 05-27-15
By: Ross King
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The Secret History of Magic
- The True Story of the Deceptive Art
- By: Peter Lamont, Jim Steinmeyer
- Narrated by: Rory Barnett
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 48
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 41
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Story4 out of 5 stars 42
If you read a standard history of magic, you learn that it begins in ancient Egypt with the resurrection of a goose in front of the Pharaoh. You discover how magicians were tortured and killed during the age of witchcraft. You are told how conjuring tricks were used to quell rebellious colonial natives. The history of magic is full of such stories, which turn out not to be true. Behind the smoke and mirrors, however, lies the real story of magic.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Snoozefest
- By Eric Myers on 06-22-19
By: Peter Lamont, and others
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Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World
- By: Leo Damrosch
- Narrated by: David Stifel
- Length: 20 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 73
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 66
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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
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JOHNATHAN SWIFT AND POWER OF THE PEN
- By chetyarbrough.blog on 09-30-14
By: Leo Damrosch
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The Greater Journey
- Americans in Paris
- By: David McCullough
- Narrated by: Edward Herrmann
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 3,386
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,804
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 2,803
The Greater Journey is the enthralling, inspiring—and until now, untold—story of the adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects, and others of high aspiration who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, ambitious to excel in their work.
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5 out of 5 stars
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McCullough takes it to the next level
- By gregory m loyd on 07-12-11
By: David McCullough
What listeners say about The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
- reggie p
- 11-27-04
enjoyable and informative
The narrator had a very different style and made the story most enjoyable. He made me laugh several times. I didn't know anything about PDQ before listening to this and found this book just about right in length and content. It's enjoyable and informative. I recommend it.
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13 people found this helpful
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
- Elizabeth
- 07-31-08
Dumb, as usual
Peter Schikele has a consistent sense of humor-broad, slapstick, wah-wah-wah. Should've known better.
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