Audiobooks narrated by Henry Strozier

A History of the English Language Audiobook

"Professor Drout addresses the foundation of language and its connection to specific portions of the brain. The components of language are explained in easy-to-understand terms and the progression of the language from Germanic to Old, Middle, and Modern English is fully illustrated-including such revolutionary language upheavals as those brought about by the Norman Conquest and the Great Vowel Shift. One of the most interesting aspects of the English language lies in its variants, such as the 'soda' vs. 'pop' debate and the place of African-American English in modern culture. These and other dialectual curiosities are looked at in detail and placed in the context of today's world. Finally, Professor Drout examines the future not only of the English language, but of all the world's languages."

Michael Drout (Author), Henry Strozier (Narrator)

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A Way With Words: Writing, Rhetoric, and the Art of Persuasion

"In A Way with Words: Writing, Rhetoric, and the Art of Persuasion, esteemed professor Michael D.C. Drout brings his expertise in literary studies to the subject of rhetoric. From history-altering political speeches to friendly debates at cocktail parties, rhetoric holds the power to change opinions, spark new thoughts, and ultimately change the world. Professor Drout examines the types of rhetoric and their effects, the structure of effective arguments, and how subtleties of language can be employed to engage in more successful rhetoric."

Michael Drout (Author), Henry Strozier (Narrator)

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First and Always: A New Portrait of George Washington

"George Washington may be the most famous American who ever lived, and certainly is one of the most admired. But although he has been heavily mythologized, it is no myth that the man who led Americans’ fight for independence and whose two terms in office largely defined the presidency was the most highly respected individual among a generation of formidable personalities. In First and Always, celebrated historian Peter Henriques illuminates Washington’s life, more fully explicating his character and his achievements. Arranged thematically, the book’s chapters focus on important and controversial issues, achieving a depth not possible in a traditional biography. First and Always examines factors that coalesced to make Washington such a remarkable and admirable leader, while also chronicling how Washington mistreated enslaved workers, engaged in extreme partisanship, and responded with excessive sensitivity to criticism. Henriques portrays a Washington deeply ambitious and always hungry for public adoration, even as he disclaimed such desires. In its account of an amazing life, First and Always shows how, despite profound flaws, George Washington nevertheless deserves to rank as the nation’s most consequential leader, without whom the American experiment in republican government would have died in infancy"

Peter Henriques (Author), Henry Strozier (Narrator)

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Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior

"A new, definitive life of an American icon, the visionary general who led American forces through three wars and foresaw his nation’s great geopolitical shift toward the Pacific Rim—from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of Gandhi & Churchill Douglas MacArthur was arguably the last American public figure to be worshipped unreservedly as a national hero, the last military figure to conjure up the romantic stirrings once evoked by George Armstrong Custer and Robert E. Lee. But he was also one of America’s most divisive figures, a man whose entire career was steeped in controversy. Was he an avatar or an anachronism, a brilliant strategist or a vainglorious mountebank? Drawing on a wealth of new sources, Arthur Herman delivers a powerhouse biography that peels back the layers of myth—both good and bad—and exposes the marrow of the man beneath. MacArthur’s life spans the emergence of the United States Army as a global fighting force. Its history is to a great degree his story. The son of a Civil War hero, he led American troops in three monumental conflicts—World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. Born four years after Little Bighorn, he died just as American forces began deploying in Vietnam. Herman’s magisterial book spans the full arc of MacArthur’s journey, from his elevation to major general at thirty-eight through his tenure as superintendent of West Point, field marshal of the Philippines, supreme ruler of postwar Japan, and beyond. More than any previous biographer, Herman shows how MacArthur’s strategic vision helped shape several decades of U.S. foreign policy. Alone among his peers, he foresaw the shift away from Europe, becoming the prophet of America’s destiny in the Pacific Rim. Here, too, is a vivid portrait of a man whose grandiose vision of his own destiny won him enemies as well as acolytes. MacArthur was one of the first military heroes to cultivate his own public persona—the swashbuckling commander outfitted with Ray-Ban sunglasses, riding crop, and corncob pipe. Repeatedly spared from being killed in battle—his soldiers nicknamed him “Bullet Proof”—he had a strong sense of divine mission. “Mac” was a man possessed, in the words of one of his contemporaries, of a “supreme and almost mystical faith that he could not fail.” Yet when he did, it was on an epic scale. His willingness to defy both civilian and military authority was, Herman shows, a lifelong trait—and it would become his undoing. Tellingly, MacArthur once observed, “Sometimes it is the order one disobeys that makes one famous.” To capture the life of such an outsize figure in one volume is no small achievement. With Douglas MacArthur, Arthur Herman has set a new standard for untangling the legacy of this American legend."

Arthur Herman (Author), Henry Strozier (Narrator)

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The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

"They were a mixed multitude-- from England, the Netherlands, the German and Italian states, France, Africa, Sweden, and Finland. They moved to the western hemisphere for different reasons, from different social backgrounds and cultures, and under different auspices and circumstances. Even the majority that came from England fit no distinct socioeconomic or cultural pattern. They came from all over the realm, from commercialized London and the southeast; from isolated farmlands in the north still close to their medieval origins; from towns in the Midlands, the south, and the west; from dales, fens, grasslands, and wolds. They represented the entire spectrum of religious communions from Counter-Reformation Catholicism to Puritan Calvinism and Quakerism. They came hoping to re-create if not to improve these diverse lifeways in a remote and, to them, barbarous environment. But their stories are mostly of confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility as they sought to normalize abnormal situations and recapture lost worlds. And in the process they tore apart the normalities of the people whose world they had invaded. Later generations, reading back into the past the outcomes they knew, often gentrified this passage in the peopling of British North America, but there was nothing genteel about it. Bailyn shows that it was a brutal encounter-- brutal not only between the Europeans and native peoples and between Europeans and Africans, but among Europeans themselves. All, in their various ways, struggled for survival with outlandish aliens, rude people, uncultured people, and felt themselves threatened with descent into squalor and savagery. In these vivid stories of individual lives-- some new, some familiar but rewritten with new details and contexts-- Bailyn gives a fresh account of the history of the British North American population in its earliest, bitterly contested years."

Bernard Bailyn (Author), Henry Strozier (Narrator)

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His Ownself: A Semi-Memoir

"The colorful, sentimental, funny, affectionate, cantankerous memoir by the most colorful, funniest, most cantankerous-- and probably the most revered-- sportswriter of the last fifty years. Dan Jenkins is accepted as one of the greatest (if not the greatest) golf writer of all time, wrote beloved bestselling novels and abused more corporate expense accounts than anyone who ever lived. It's a touching, laugh-out-loud tribute to the romanticism of old-time sportswriting-- and the glory days of sports. As Dan Jenkins says in the first few pages of his memoir: 'Sometimes, I envy my own childhood.' A lot of us can say that about Dan's entire life. He grew up in the Great Depression, but he doesn't seem ever to have been depressed. He was too busy having fun and enjoying life. In His Ownself, we now get to share in the fun. Dan takes us back to his youth in Texas and his eccentric, wealthy mother-- with whom he never lived; he lived with his grandparents while his mother flitted in and out of his life-- and his sports fan father, whom he barely knew. We see Dan's growth as a sportswriter-- from his high school paper through to his first job at the Fort Worth Press-- and we understand what it was like to be a sports fan in Texas (it basically meant understanding a lot about passion, religion, heroes, and drinking). And then it's on to the glory days of Sports Illustrated, the most entertaining and most star-studded pages in the book. Dan was one of the handful of writers who made SI what it was for so many decades-- the most important sports magazine ever. Not coincidentally, Dan was also at the center of New York night life in those days-- hanging out at Elaine's while swapping stories with politicians and movie stars and New York's best writers and best bartenders. Above all, this is a sports nostalgia fan's dream book. And, in particular, a golfer's dream book. There are two chapters on Ben Hogan, whom Dan knew well-enough to play many rounds of golf with. There are up close and very personal looks at Byron Nelson, Palmer, Nicklaus, Tiger. Dan has covered every Masters and U.S. Open and British Open for the past 40+ years. He takes us behind the scenes of those tournaments to capture the drama, the humor and the absurdity of those events. This book is Dan Jenkins remembering, spewing and mouthing off about everything under the sun-- politics, hypocrites, political correctness, the past, the present, Hollywood, money, athletes-- and, of course, writing the way very few sportswriters have ever been able to write."

Dan Jenkins (Author), Henry Strozier (Narrator)

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About Love and Other Stories

"Raymond Carver called Anton Chekhov 'the greatest short story writer who has ever lived.' This unequivocal verdict on Chekhov's genius has been echoed many times by writers as diverse as Katherine Mansfield, Somerset Maugham, John Cheever and Tobias Wolf. While his popularity as a playwright has sometimes overshadowed his achievements in prose, the importance of Chekhov's stories is now recognized by readers as well as by fellow authors. Their themes--alienation, the absurdity and tragedy of human existence--have as much relevance today as when they were written, and these superb new translations capture their modernist spirit. Elusive and subtle, spare and unadorned, the stories in this selection are among Chekhov's most poignant and lyrical. The book includes well-known pieces such as 'The Lady with the Little Dog,' as well as less familiar work like 'Gusev,' inspired by Chekhov's travels in the Far East, and 'Rothschild's Violin,' a haunting and darkly humorous tale about death and loss. The stories are arranged chronologically to show the evolution of Chekhov's art."

Anton Chekhov (Author), Adam Grupper, Henry Strozier, T. Ryder Smith (Narrator)

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The Catholic Church in the Modern Age

"In the nearly two thousand years since its founding, the Catholic Church has provided a spiritual home for billions of followers. Renowned professor Thomas F. Madden leads listeners through the events that have helped create the modern church from the Renaissance period to the twenty-first century. Along the way, the audience will learn about the people who influenced and guided the church-priests and saints, laymen and popes-through some of its most difficult times and in some of its most glorious moments."

Thomas F. Madden (Author), Henry Strozier (Narrator)

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The Damnation of Theron Ware

"Theron Ware is a promising young Methodist pastor recently assigned to a congregation in the Adirondack Mountains, which Frederic modeled after Utica, New York. His education and experiences have been limited to church society and his strict enforcement of its norms. Theron begins to question the Methodist religion, his role as a minister, and the existence of God. His “illumination” consists of his awakening to new intellectual and artistic experiences embodied by several of his new acquaintances. These figures include the town’s Catholic priest, who introduces him to the latest Biblical scholarship; a local man of science; and a local Irish Catholic girl with musical talent and artistic pretensions, with whom Theron becomes infatuated. But ultimately, these characters grow disappointed in Theron, who initially represented an interesting social specimen but whose emergence from naïveté and disparagement of his congregation disappoint them. Having lost his vocation and his new friends, Theron departs for Seattle, where he imagines he might use his oratorical skills to enter politics."

Harold Frederic (Author), Henry Strozier (Narrator)

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Dwell Here and Prosper

"Dick, a blunt and bawdy Philly sports fan, finds himself in an assisted living facility following a stroke. Determined to regain his independence, he does daily laps around the grounds with his quad cane. But when recovery never comes, and days swell into years, Dick finds purpose instead by studying his fellow residents, chronicling their odd obsessions and their nasty arguments, their breakdowns, their drunken debaucheries—and yes, even their sexual escapades. Dwell Here and Prosper is a gritty but heartfelt novel, heavily informed by the author’s father and his experiences in assisted living near Philadelphia in the 90s. With its set of memorable outcasts—a shady jokester who insists he worked for the FBI, a schizophrenic Catholic who roams local cemeteries at night in search of the Virgin Mary, a twenty-six-year-old whose teeth mysteriously fell out, a middle-aged alcoholic who prostitutes herself to other residents for booze and cigarettes—it’s a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for a different generation and a different kind of institution. This timeless book offers a funny yet honest meditation on aging and community, and what it means to thrive in purgatory."

Chris Eagle (Author), Henry Strozier (Narrator)

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Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

"A brilliant new theory of how and why some nations recover from trauma and others don't, by the author of the landmark bestsellers Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse. In his earlier bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now, in the final book in this monumental trilogy, he reveals how successful nations recover from crisis through selective change -- a coping mechanism more commonly associated with personal trauma. In a dazzling comparative study, Diamond shows us how seven countries have survived defining upheavals in the recent past -- from US Commodore Perry's arrival in Japan to the Soviet invasion of Finland to Pinochet's regime in Chile -- through a process of painful self-appraisal and adaptation, and he identifies patterns in the way that these distinct nations recovered from calamity. Looking ahead to the future, he investigates whether the United States, and the world, are squandering their natural advantages, on a path towards political conflict and decline. Or can we still learn from the lessons of the past? Adding a psychological dimension to the awe-inspiring grasp of history, geography, economics, and anthropology that marks all Diamond's work, Upheaval reveals how both nations and individuals can become more resilient. The result is a book that is epic, urgent, and groundbreaking."

Jared Diamond (Author), Henry Strozier (Narrator)

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Little Big Man

"The story of Jack Crabbe, raised by both a white man and a Cheyenne chief. As a Cheyenne, Jack ate dog, had four wives and saw his people butchered by General Custer's soldiers. As a white man, he participated in the slaughter of the buffalo and tangled with Wyatt Earp. From the Trade Paperback edition."

Larry McMurtry, Thomas Berger (Author), David Aaron Baker, Henry Strozier, Scott Sowers (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Henry Strozier