Showing results by narrator "Kevin Pariseau" in All Categories

A humorist, narrator, and social observer, Mark Twain is unsurpassed in American literature. Best known as the author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, not unlike his protagonist, Huck, has a restless spirit. He found adventure prospecting for silver in Nevada, navigating steamboats down the Mississippi, and making people laugh around the world. But Twain also had a serious streak and decried racism and injustice. His fascinating life is captured candidly in this enjoyable biography. 

In The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, John V. Fleming shows how the impulses of the European Enlightenment - generally associated with great strides in the liberation of human thought from superstition and traditional religion - were challenged by tenacious religious ideas or channeled into the "darker" pursuits of the esoteric and the occult.

Almost everyone can sing along with the Beatles, but how many young listeners know their whole story? Geoff Edgers, a Boston Globe reporter and hard-core Beatles fan, brings the Fab Four to life in this Who Was...? book. Listeners will learn about their childhoods in Liverpool, their first forays into rock music, what Beatlemania was like, and why they broke up. It's all here in an easy-to-listen-to narrative!

One day in 1882, Thomas Edison flipped a switch that lit up lower Manhattan with incandescent light and changed the way people live ever after. The electric light bulb was only one of thousands of Edison’s inventions, which include the phonograph and the kinetoscope, an early precursor to the movie camera. As a boy, observing a robin catch a worm and then take flight, he fed a playmate a mixture of worms and water to see if she could fly! An accessible, appealing biography of the inventor. 

After his wife, Sarah, dies, K. loses his metaphorical capacity, becoming so wedded to the notion of clarity that he infuriates everyone, friends and strangers alike. When he intervenes in an armed robbery, K. finds himself both an inadvertent hero and the star of a new reality television program. Together with Claire, a grocery store clerk with a sharp tongue and a yen for celebrity, he travels the country, ruffling feathers and gaining fame at the intersection of American politics and entertainment.

In The Great Divide, Joseph E. Stiglitz expands on the diagnosis he offered in his best-selling book The Price of Inequality and suggests ways to counter America's growing problem. With his signature blend of clarity and passion, Stiglitz argues that inequality is a choice - the cumulative result of unjust policies and misguided priorities.

If not for a stint in reform school, young Louis Armstrong might never have become a musician. It was a teacher at the Colored Waifs' Home who gave him a cornet, promoted him to band leader, and saw talent in the tough kid from the even tougher New Orleans neighborhood called Storyville. But it was Louis Armstrong's own passion and genius that pushed jazz into new and exciting realms with his amazing, improvisational trumpet playing. His 70-year life spanned a critical time in American music as well as black history. 

From Steven Millhauser, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Martin Dressler and one of the most imaginative and essential voices of our time, comes a fable about a race of miniature people and the way of life they have come master within our own. By turns enchanting and provocative, The Little People explores the fascination and unease the little people create in us, examines our private desire to disappear into their world, and reveals what happens when our personal and romantic lives inevitably collide.

Born in Austria in 1756, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed his first piece of music, a minuet, when he was just five years old! Soon after, he was performing for kings and emperors. Although he died at the young age of 35 Mozart left a legacy of more than 600 works. This fascinating biography charts the musician's extraordinary career and personal life while painting a vivid cultural history of 18th-century Europe. 

A leading American philosopher brings the tools of his trade to contentious contemporary debates. How can we have meaningful debates with political opponents? How can we distinguish reliable science from overhyped media reports? How can we talk sensibly about God? In What Philosophy Can Do, Gary Gutting takes a philosopher's scalpel to modern life's biggest questions and the most powerful forces in our society - politics, science, religion, education, and capitalism - to show how we can improve our discussions of contentious contemporary issues.

As a young boy, Charles Darwin hated school and was often scolded for conducting “useless” experiments. Yet his passion for the natural world was so strong that he suffered through terrible seasickness during his five-year voyage aboard The Beagle. Darwin collected new creatures from the coasts of Africa, South America, and the Galapagos Islands, and expanded his groundbreaking ideas that would change people's understanding of the natural world. This audiobook will make Darwin and his theory of evolution an exciting discovery for every young listener. 

From his childhood in rural Illinois to movie-making days in Hollywood and on to a career in politics that took him all the way to the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan kept an abiding faith in America and in what our country stood for. The oldest president ever, he survived a near-fatal assassination attempt and lived to be 93. Who Was Ronald Reagan? covers his life and times in a balanced, entertaining way for children. 

The beloved plays of Shakespeare are still produced everywhere, yet the life of the world's most famous playwright remains largely a mystery. Young Will left the town of Stratford to pursue theater in London, where his work eventually thrived and made him a famous and wealthy man. Celeste Davidson Mannis here puts together the pieces of Shakespeare's life and work for young listeners. 

Twenty-one years after they were driven apart by circumstances beyond their control, two former lovers have a chance encounter on a Manhattan street. What follows is a tense, suspenseful exploration of the many facets of enduring love. Told from alternating points of view through time, If I Forget You tells the story of Henry Gold, a poet whose rise from poverty embodies the American dream, and Margot Fuller, the daughter of a prominent, wealthy family, and their unlikely, star-crossed love affair.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan created one of the dumbest talking points of all time: "I'm not a scientist, but..." Since then, politicians have repeatedly committed egregious transgressions against scientific knowledge prefaced by this seemingly innocuous phrase. Yet, as science journalist Dave Levitan reveals, that line is just the tip of the melting iceberg when it comes to rhetorical tools wielded to attack scientific findings that don't cooperate with political agendas.

Marco Polo was 17 when he set out for China...and 41 when he came back! More than 700 years ago, Marco Polo traveled from the medieval city of Venice to the fabled kingdom of the great Kublai Khan, seeing new sights and riches that no Westerner had ever before witnessed. But did Marco Polo experience the things he wrote about...or was it all made up? Young listeners are presented with the facts in this entertaining Who Was...? biography.

In late summer 1947, 31-year-old Yitzhak Goldah, a camp survivor, arrives in Savannah to live with his only remaining relatives. They are Abe and Pearl Jesler, older, childless, and an integral part of the thriving Jewish community that has been in Georgia since the founding of the colony. There Yitzhak discovers a fractured world, where Reform and Conservative Jews live separate lives - distinctions, to him, that are meaningless given what he has been through. He further complicates things when, much to the Jeslers' dismay, he falls in love with Eva, a young widow.

When Portuguese sailor Ferdinand Magellan set sail from Spain in 1519, he believed he could get to the Spice Islands by sailing west through or around the New World. He was right, but what he didn't know was that the treacherous voyage would take him three years and cost him his life.

For a long time, the main role of First Ladies was to act as hostesses of the White House...until Eleanor Roosevelt. Born in 1884, Eleanor was not satisfied to just be a glorified hostess for her husband, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Eleanor had a voice, and she used it to speak up against poverty and racism. She had experience and knowledge of many issues, and fought for laws to help the less fortunate. She had passion, energy, and a way of speaking that made people listen, and she used these gifts to campaign for her husband and get him elected president - four times!

Ever-turbulent humanity has reached out to the stars and found itself challenged by several “exosapient” species whose motivations are as unusual as their physical forms. But no world is defined just by the characters who occupy center stage. Lost Signals digs deep into the lives - and struggles - of those beyond the spotlight by bringing together 20 new voices and new stories.