Audiobooks narrated by Alan Alda

The Empathy Effect: Seven Neuroscience-Based Keys for Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Work, and

“We are all connected on a neurobiological level far more than we have previously realized. Consciously or not, we are in constant, natural resonance with one another’s feelings. When we are engaged in shared mind awareness, the possibilities for mutual aid and collaborative problem solving abound.” —Helen Riess, MD A Revolutionary Guide for Understanding and Changing the Way We Connect Empathy is undergoing a new evolution. In a global and interconnected culture, we can no longer afford to identify only with people who seem to be a part of our “tribe.” As Dr. Helen Riess has learned, our capacity for empathy is not just an innate trait—it is also a skill that we can learn and expand. With The Empathy Effect, Dr. Riess presents a definitive resource on empathy: the science behind how it works, new research on how empathy develops from birth to adulthood, and tools for building your capacity to create authentic emotional connection with others in any situation. Dr. Riess emerged as leading researcher on empathy by creating a breakthrough training curriculum now used internationally in health care, business, and education. Drawing from this successful program and the latest science, she presents:The E.M.P.A.T.H.Y.® method—a powerful seven-step system for understanding and increasing empathy, starting with Eye Contact and ending with Your ResponseHow empathy works—a comprehensive synthesis emerging from neuroscience, sociology, developmental psychology, and evolutionary theoryTools for recognizing and promoting empathic behavior in yourself and othersParenting and teaching empathy in kids—guidance for every stage of developmentTexts, emojis, and digital empathy—the modern challenge of authentic connection in the information ageEmpathy through art and literature—exploring the power of creative expression to expand our emotional experienceLeading with empathy—how political and business leaders can combine compassion with efficiency through group empathy skills and shared mind intelligenceDigging deep for empathy—how to reverse scapegoating and recognize shared humanity with those we normally keep at a distanceSelf-compassion—why your ability to express love toward yourself affects every other relationship in your life“Nourishing empathy lets us help not just ourselves,” says Dr. Riess, “but also everyone we interact with, whether for a moment or a lifetime.” The Empathy Effect is a life-changing book that will revolutionize the way you understand yourself, relate to your loved ones, and connect to every person in your life.

Helen Riess, M.D., Md Helen Riess (Author), Alan Alda, Emily Durante (Narrator)

Audiobook

If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Rel

Alan Alda, the award-winning actor and bestselling author, tells us the fascinating story of his quest to learn how to communicate better, and to teach others to do the same. With his trademark humor and candor, he explores how to develop empathy as the key factor. Alan Alda has been on a decades-long journey to discover new ways to help people communicate and relate to one another more effectively. If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? is the warm, witty, and informative chronicle of how Alda found inspiration in everything from cutting-edge science to classic acting methods. His search began when he was host of PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers, where he interviewed thousands of scientists and developed a knack for helping them communicate complex ideas in ways a wide audience could understand—and Alda wondered if those techniques held a clue to better communication for the rest of us. In his wry and wise voice, Alda reflects on moments of miscommunication in his own life, when an absence of understanding resulted in problems both big and small. He guides us through his discoveries, showing how communication can be improved through learning to relate to the other person: listening with our eyes, looking for clues in another’s face, using the power of a compelling story, avoiding jargon, and reading another person so well that you become “in sync” with them, and know what they are thinking and feeling—especially when you’re talking about the hard stuff. Drawing on improvisation training, theater, and storytelling techniques from a life of acting, and with insights from recent scientific studies, Alda describes ways we can build empathy, nurture our innate mind-reading abilities, and improve the way we relate and talk with others. Exploring empathy-boosting games and exercises, If I Understood You is a funny, thought-provoking guide that can be used by all of us, in every aspect of our lives—with our friends, lovers, and families, with our doctors, in business settings, and beyond. Advance praise for If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? “In this charming, witty, and thought-provoking book, full of rich anecdotes, Alan Alda describes some of the tools of communication that he teaches in his work with the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and shows how everyone—from lovers to politicians to scientists—can benefit from being better communicators. The issues he touches on are more important now than ever.”—Lawrence M. Krauss, author of The Greatest Story Ever Told . . . So Far “I’ve spent a lifetime trying to understand and use the art of communication. And then comes this fellow Alda—actor, interviewer, academic, and, mostly, student—who teaches me new, useable ideas. Communicating is at the heart of connectedness. Alda, with his laudable curiosity, has learned something you and I can use right now.”—Charlie Rose “Sit back and enjoy Alan Alda’s scientific journey of communication.”—Barbara Walters “Alda, who has made a distinguished and valuable career out of empathy—in acting, writing, and political thinking—now gives us a book that shows empathy to be the key to understanding, and thus to a much improved life. The exchange of feeling of one person with another makes it possible for each to grasp something different and larger than both: a delightful and useful surprise of knowledge. Alda proves his theory almost casually, with self-effacing good fun, but it is a true revelation. You wonder, How has one done without such a book?”—Roger Rosenblatt, author of Thomas Murphy

Alan Alda (Author), Alan Alda (Narrator)

Audiobook

Just Kids from the Bronx: Telling It the Way It Was: An Oral History

The vivid oral histories in Arlene Alda's Just Kids from the Bronx reveal what it was like to grow up in the place that bred the influencers in just about every field of endeavor today. The Bronx is where Michael Kay, the New York Yankees' play-by-play broadcaster, first experienced baseball, where J. Crew's Millard (Mickey) Drexler got his street smarts and his first jobs, where Neil deGrasse Tyson and Dava Sobel were urged to pursue science and where music-making inspired hip hop's Grandmaster Melle Mel to change the world of music forever. The parks, the pick-up games, the tough and tender mothers, the politics, the gangs, the food for people who grew up in the Bronx, childhood recollections are fresh. Arlene Alda's own Bronx memories were a jumping-off point from which to reminisce with a nun, a police officer, an urban planner, and with Carl Reiner, Colin Powell, Maira Kalman, and many other leading artists, athletes, scientists and entrepreneurs experiences spanning six decades. Alda then arranged these pieces of the past, the mornings on the Grand Concourse and afternoons in the halls of Bronx Science, into one great collective story, a film-like portrait of the Bronx and of America from the early twentieth century until today.

Arlene Alda (Author), Alan Alda, Christina Delaine (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Marshmallow Test

A child is presented with a marshmallow and given a choice: Eat this one now, or wait and enjoy two later. What will she do? And what are the implications for her behavior later in life? Walter Mischel’s now iconic Marshmallow Test proved that the ability to delay gratification is critical to living a successful and fulfilling life: self-control not only predicts higher SAT scores, better social and cognitive functioning, and a greater sense of self-worth but also helps us manage stress, pursue goals more effectively, and cope with painful emotions. But is willpower prewired, or can it be taught? In his groundbreaking new audiobook, Dr. Mischel draws on decades of compelling research and life examples to explore the nature of willpower, identifying the cognitive skills and mental mechanisms that enable it and showing how these can be applied to challenges in everyday life—from controlling weight to quitting smoking, overcoming heartbreak, making major decisions, and planning for retirement. With profound implications for the choices we make in parenting, education, public policy, and self-care, The Marshmallow Test will change the way we think about who we are and what we can be. “This marvelous book is unique, and beautifully written from beginning to end. The range that Walter Mischel covers—from creative cognitive science to neuroscience to genetics—is breathtaking.” —Eric R. Kandel, MD, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, professor of neuroscience, Columbia University, author of The Age of Insight and In Search of Memory

Walter Mischel (Author), Alan Alda (Narrator)

Audiobook

Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself

On the heels of his acclaimed memoir, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, beloved actor and bestselling author Alan Alda has written Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself, an insightful and funny look at some of the impossible questions he’s asked himself over the years: What do I value? What, exactly, is the good life? (And what does that even mean?) Picking up where his bestselling memoir left off–having been saved by emergency surgery after nearly dying on a mountaintop in Chile–Alda finds himself not only glad to be alive but searching for a way to squeeze the most juice out of his new life. Looking for a sense of meaning that would make this extra time count, he listens in on things he’s heard himself saying in private and in public at critical points in his life–from the turbulence of the sixties, to his first Broadway show, to the birth of his children, to the ache of September 11, and beyond. Reflecting on the transitions in his life and in all our lives, he notices that “doorways are where the truth is told,” and wonders if there’s one thing–art, activism, family, money, fame–that could lead to a “life of meaning.” In a book that is candid, wise, and as questioning as it is incisive, Alda amuses and moves us with his unique and hilarious meditations on questions great and small. Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself is another superb Alan Alda performance, as inspiring and entertaining as the man himself.

Alan Alda (Author), Alan Alda (Narrator)

Audiobook

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed

He's one of America's most recognizable and acclaimed actors-a star on Broadway, an Oscar nominee for The Aviator, and the only person to ever win Emmys for acting, writing, and directing, during his eleven years on M*A*S*H. Now Alan Alda has written a memoir as elegant, funny, and affecting as his greatest performances. "My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six," begins Alda's irresistible story. The son of a popular actor and a loving but mentally ill mother, he spent his early childhood backstage in the erotic and comic world of burlesque and went on, after early struggles, to achieve extraordinary success in his profession. Yet Never Have Your Dog Stuffed is not a memoir of show-business ups and downs. It is a moving and funny story of a boy growing into a man who then realizes he has only just begun to grow. It is the story of turning points in Alda's life, events that would make him what he is-if only he could survive them. From the moment as a boy when his dead dog is returned from the taxidermist's shop with a hideous expression on his face, and he learns that death can't be undone, to the decades-long effort to find compassion for the mother he lived with but never knew, to his acceptance of his father, both personally and professionally, Alda learns the hard way that change, uncertainty, and transformation are what life is made of, and true happiness is found in embracing them. Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, filled with curiosity about nature, good humor, and honesty, is the crowning achievement of an actor, author, and director, but surprisingly, it is the story of a life more filled with turbulence and laughter than any Alda has ever played on the stage or screen.

Alan Alda (Author), Alan Alda (Narrator)

Audiobook

Camping With Henry & Tom

President Harding wants to be with his mistress. Industrialist Henry Ford wants to be President. And inventor Thomas Edison wonders how the three of them got stuck in the woods together. Inspired by an actual camping trip taken by the three men in 1921, this Off - Broadway hit is a hilarious adventure with surprising relevance to today’s politics. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Alan Alda, Lee Arenberg, David Dukes and Charles Durning.

Mark St. Germain (Author), Alan Alda, Charles Durning, David Dukes (Narrator)

Audiobook

Six Degrees of Separation

In a Fifth Avenue apartment high above Central Park, art dealer Flanders Kittredge and his wife Ouisa are trying to interest a moneyed friend in a $2 million investment. When an unexpected young guest arrives, claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier, the plot takes some wonderfully unexpected turns. Veering effortlessly from hilarity to pathos, this dazzling play was lauded by The New York Times as “transcendent, magical and a masterwork.” An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Alan Alda, Pam Blair, Gabrielle Carteris, Gabriel Dell, Alastair Duncan, Melissa Greenspan, Oded Gross, Chuma Hunter-Gault, Swoosie Kurtz, Charles Levin, Daniel Passer and Danny Strauss.

John Guare (Author), Alan Alda, Chuma Hunter-Gault, Swoosie Kurtz (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks Narrated by Alan Alda