Audiobooks narrated by Joe Barrett

You Don't Lose 'Til You Quit Trying: Lessons on Adversity and Victory from a Vietnam Veteran and Med

On November 18th, 1967, Private First Class Davis's artillery unit was hit by a massive enemy offensive. At twenty-one years old, he resolved to face the onslaught and prepared to die. Soon he would have a perforated kidney, crushed ribs, a broken vertebra, his flesh ripped by beehive darts, a bullet in his thigh, and burns all over his body. Ignoring his injuries, he manned a two-ton Howitzer by himself, crossed a canal under heavy fire to rescue three wounded American soldiers, and kept fighting until the enemy retreated. His heroism that day earned him a Congressional Medal of Honor-the ceremony footage of which ended up being used in the movie Forrest Gump. You Don't Lose 'Til You Quit Trying chronicles how Davis's childhood in the American Heartland prepared him for the worst night of his life, and how that night set off a lifetime battling against debilitating injuries. But he also battled for his fellow veterans, speaking on their behalf for forty years to help heal the wounds and memorialize the brotherhood that war could forge. Here, listeners will learn of Sammy Lee Davis's extraordinary life-the courage, the pain, and the triumph.

Caroline Lambert, Sammy Lee Davis (Author), Joe Barrett (Narrator)

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Witness to Appomattox

Noted Civil War historian Richard Wheeler brings this narrative to life with haunting images of the final days of the Civil War: President Lincoln walking through the streets of Richmond, drawing an admiring crowd of blacks; Confederate and Union troops gathering in the fields around Appomattox Court House, mingling with former foes, experiencing disbelief, bitterness, relief. Drawing from numerous eyewitness descriptions, Wheeler effectively recreates a moment of the Civil War that is perhaps unequalled for sheer emotion. This account is as much a tribute to Confederate courage as it is a record of the final triumph of the Union cause. "Goes below the surface facts...to get at the stories of the lives and deaths, the struggles, triumphs, sorrows, and joys of real people."-Chicago Tribune

Richard S. Wheeler, Richard Wheeler (Author), Joe Barrett (Narrator)

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Winning Arguments: What Works and Doesn't Work in Politics, the Bedroom, the Courtroom, and the Clas

A lively and accessible guide to understanding rhetoric by the world class English and Law professor and bestselling author of How to Write a Sentence .Filled with the wit and observational prowess that shaped Stanley Fish's acclaimed bestseller How to Write a Sentence, Winning Arguments guides readers through the greatest hitsory of rhetoric. In this clever and engaging guide, Fish offers insight and outlines the crucial keys you need to win any debate, anywhere, anytimedrawn from landmark legal cases, politics, his own career, and even popular film and television. A celebration of clashing minds and viewpoints, Winning Arguments is sure to become a classic.

Stanley Fish (Author), Joe Barrett (Narrator)

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Wild Blueberries: Tales of Nuns, Rabbits & Discovery in Rural Michigan

Some writers look at life with their eyes, others with their heart. In this collection of evocative, funny, and moving stories, Peter Damm does both. These are vignettes of growing up in small town, rural Michigan, but also a closely observed portrait of mid-century America. The tone is alternately wry, elegiac, poignant, and humorous, as Damm recalls the joys of fishing on a northern lake, the rigors and confusion of childhood, or feasting on blueberries in autumn. But this isn’t a collection of pretty postcards. Damm’s family experienced difficulty, alcoholism, and loss, and he writes with a survivor’s compassion. The writing is beautiful—spare, direct, lyrical, truthful. These are stories for all the senses, held in place by strands of memory alternately steel and gold.

Peter Damm (Author), Joe Barrett (Narrator)

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Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief

Why have we humans always longed to connect with something larger than ourselves? Even today in our technologically advanced age, more than seventy percent of Americans claim to believe in God. Why, in short, won't God go away? In this groundbreaking new book, researchers Andrew Newberg and Eugene d'Aquili offer an explanation that is at once profoundly simple and scientifically precise: The religious impulse is rooted in the biology of the brain. In Why God Won't Go Away, Newberg and d'Aquili document their pioneering explorations in the field of neurotheology, an emerging discipline dedicated to understanding the complex relationship between spirituality and the brain. Blending cutting-edge science with illuminating insights into the nature of consciousness and spirituality, they bridge faith and reason, mysticism and empirical data. The neurological basis of how the brain identifies the "real" is nothing short of miraculous. This fascinating, eye-opening book dares to explore both the miracle and the biology of our enduring relationship with God.

M.D. D'Aquili, MD Newberg, Vince Rause (Author), Joe Barrett (Narrator)

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Where The Ley Lines Meet: Final Chapter to the Claire Saga

The Claire Trilogy taught us the meaning of family and loyalty in every sense of those words through the bonding of Claire the Mule and her family of mystical misfits under the most trying of circumstances. Its prequel, Finding Jimmy Moran, introduced the world to the magical young boy who grows into the man that leads Claire's family across the galaxy. Where The Ley Lines Meet is what happens when the mystical misfits and their alien brethren are recalled to earth to reunite and save the world. The storylines and characters the fans have come to love in the prior four books reappear in this continuation and conclusion of The Claire Saga. Or is it?

Tom Mccaffrey (Author), Joe Barrett (Narrator)

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We Don't Live Here Anymore: Collected Short Stories and Novellas, Volume 1

In the early 1970s, literary journals that contained Andre Dubus' short stories were passed around among admiring readers. When his debut collection, Separate Flights, arrived in 1975, it was immediately celebrated and won the Boston Globe's Laurence L. & Thomas Winship / PEN New England Award. The collection includes the novella We Don't Live Here Anymore, which served as the basis for the 2004 film of the same title (nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival); the novella also introduces Dubus' writer-protagonist Hank Allison, a character who continues to appear throughout his work. Two years later, the title story of Dubus' sophomore collection Adultery and Other Choices continued the exploits of Hank Allison. 'The title story alone will make it worth your while to go out and get the book,' wrote the New York Times Book Review. While the collection's opening stories focus on the fragile nature of youth, later stories shift to darker struggles of adulthood, such as in 'Andromache'-Dubus' first story to appear in the New Yorker (1968)-which traces the aftermath of a tragic death during wartime.

Andre Dubus (Author), Andre Dubus III, Andre Dubus Iii, Bronson Pinchot, Cassandra Campbell, Hillary Huber, Joe Barrett, Robert Fass, Traber Burns, Various, Various Narrators (Narrator)

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Watergate: A Novel

From one of our most esteemed historical novelists comes a remarkable retelling of the Watergate scandal, as seen through a kaleidoscope of its colorful perpetrators and investigators. For all the monumental documentation that Watergate generated-uncountable volumes of committee records, court transcripts, and memoirs-it falls at last to a novelist to perform the work of inference (and invention) that allows us to solve some of the scandal's greatest mysteries-who did erase those eighteen-and-a-half minutes of tape?-and to see this gaudy American catastrophe in its human entirety. In Watergate, Thomas Mallon conveys the drama and high comedy of the Nixon presidency through the urgent perspectives of seven characters we only thought we knew before now. Praised by Christopher Hitchens for his "splendid evocation of Washington," Mallon achieves with Watergate a scope and historical intimacy which surpasses even that attained in his previous novels and turns a "third-rate burglary" into tumultuous, first-rate entertainment. "Mallon, astute and nimble, continues his scintillating, morally inquisitive journey through crises great and absurd in American politics by taking on Watergate…Mallon himself is deliciously witty. But it is his political fluency and unstinting empathy that transform the Watergate debacle into a universal tragicomedy of ludicrous errors and malignant crimes, epic hubris and sorrow."-Booklist (starred review)

Thomas Mallon (Author), Joe Barrett (Narrator)

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War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865

Although previously undervalued for their strategic impact because they represented only a small percentage of total forces, the Union and Confederate navies were crucial to the outcome of the Civil War. In War on the Waters, James M. McPherson has crafted an enlightening, at times harrowing, and ultimately thrilling account of the war's naval campaigns and their military leaders. McPherson recounts how the Union navy's blockade of the Confederate coast, leaky as a sieve in the war's early months, became increasingly effective as it choked off vital imports and exports. Meanwhile, the Confederate navy, dwarfed by its giant adversary, demonstrated daring and military innovation. Commerce raiders sank Union ships and drove the American merchant marine from the high seas. Southern ironclads sent several Union warships to the bottom, naval mines sank many more, and the Confederates deployed the world's first submarine to sink an enemy vessel. But in the end, it was the Union navy that won some of the war's most important strategic victories-as an essential partner to the army on the ground at Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, Port Hudson, Mobile Bay, and Fort Fisher, and all by itself at Port Royal, Fort Henry, New Orleans, and Memphis. "McPherson, professor emeritus of Princeton and dean of Civil War historians, enhances our knowledge with this history of the conflict's naval aspects. As definitive as it is economical, the work establishes beyond question the decisive contributions of maritime power to Union victory."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

James M. McPherson, James M. Mcpherson, James McPherson (Author), Joe Barrett (Narrator)

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War at the End of the World: Douglas MacArthur and the Forgotten Fight for New Guinea 1942-1945

One American soldier called it "a green hell on earth." Monsoon-soaked wilderness, debilitating heat, impassable mountains, torrential rivers, and disease-infested swamps-New Guinea was a battleground far more deadly than the most fanatical of enemy troops. Japanese forces numbering some 600,000 men began landing in January 1942, determined to seize the island as a cornerstone of the Empire's strategy to knock Australia out of the war. Allied commander-in-chief General Douglas MacArthur committed 340,000 Americans, as well as tens of thousands of Australian, Dutch, and New Guinean troops, to retake New Guinea at all costs. In this gripping narrative, historian James P. Duffy chronicles the most ruthless combat of the Pacific War, a fight complicated by rampant tropical disease, violent rainstorms, and unforgiving terrain that punished both Axis and Allied forces alike. Drawing on primary sources, War at the End of the World fills in a crucial gap in the history of World War II while offering listeners a narrative of the first rank.

James P. Duffy (Author), Joe Barrett (Narrator)

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Vendetta: Bobby Kennedy Versus Jimmy Hoffa

One of America's greatest investigative reporters brings to life the gripping, no-holds-barred clash of two American titans: Robert Kennedy and his nemesis Jimmy Hoffa. From 1957 to 1964, Robert Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa channeled nearly all of their considerable powers into destroying each other. Kennedy's battle with Hoffa burst into the public consciousness with the 1957 Senate Rackets Committee hearings and intensified when his brother named him attorney general in 1961. RFK put together a "Get Hoffa" squad within the Justice Department, devoted to destroying one man. But Hoffa, with nearly unlimited Teamster funds, was not about to roll over. Drawing upon a treasure trove of previously secret and undisclosed documents, James Neff has crafted a brilliant, heart-pounding epic of crime and punishment, a saga of venom and relentlessness and two men willing to do anything to demolish each other.

James Neff (Author), Joe Barrett (Narrator)

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Vanished Hero: The Life, War and Mysterious Disappearance of America's WWII Strafing King

A hell-bent-for-leather fighter pilot, Elwyn G. Righetti remains one of the most unknown, yet compelling, colorful, and controversial commanders of World War II. Arriving late to the war, he led the England-based 55th Fighter Group against the Nazis during the closing months of the fight with a no-holds-barred aggressiveness that transformed the group from a middling organization of no reputation into a headline-grabbing team that had to make excuses to no one. Indeed, Righetti's boldness paid off as he quickly achieved ace status and additionally scored more strafing victories-twenty-seven-than any other Eighth Air Force pilot. However, success came at a high cost in men and machines. Some of Righetti's pilots resented him as a Johnny-come-lately intent on winning a sack of medals at their expense. But most lauded their spirited new commander and his sledgehammer audacity. Indeed, he made his men most famous for 'loco busting,' as they put more than six hundred enemy locomotives out of commission-170-in just two days! Ultimately, Righetti's calculated recklessness ran full speed into the odds. His aircraft was hit while strafing an enemy airfield only four days before the 55th flew its last mission.

Jay A. Stout (Author), Joe Barrett (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Joe Barrett