Audiobooks narrated by Wayne Ward

A Real Emergency: Ten Years as a Paramedic

Introspective, complicated, and surprising, A Real Emergency is a love letter from a paramedic to the best and worst parts of her career. For fifteen years, Joanna Sokol filled private notebooks with her confusion, humor, and anger about the strange world of American street medicine. As her career progressed, she found herself taking notes on scraps of paper, backs of gloves, and margins of EKG printouts. She read about the history that brought ambulances into their current role as the caretakers of society's forgotten, and spoke to her colleagues about their own experiences and perspectives. Those reflections are collected here, in a series of raw, powerful essays about the state of American medicine. Sokol's life as a paramedic took her to three different counties: the casinos and trailer parks of the Nevada desert, the cozy beach town of Santa Cruz, and eventually the crowded tenements of San Francisco's Tenderloin district. There are no clear villains or heroes in Sokol's world, only a group of patients and medics who are doing their best in a deeply broken system. Sokol combines impactful research and the strong voices of her fellow paramedics to take the reader deep into the crumbling reality of the modern American ambulance.

Joanna Sokol (Author), Araya Mengesha, Emily Nixon, Joanna Sokol, TBD, Wayne Ward (Narrator)

Audiobook

Iron Mike: My Life Behind the Bench

The must-read autobiography of one of the NHL's most controversial and successful coaches, winner of the 1994 Stanley Cup with the New York Rangers. In the fraternity of NHL coaches, some stand out for their winning records, some for their big personalities and some for their unprecedented methods. Mike Keenan stands out on all these counts, and more. Breaking into the NHL as head coach of the Philadelphia Flyers in 1984, Keenan got instant results. The Flyers hadn't won a playoff round in three seasons; he led them to the Cup Final in his first year. In 1987, he coached a fractious Team Canada to victory in the Canada Cup using a strategy few of his peers had to master: if your team doesn't get along, give them somebody to hate, together. Keenan instilled unity in his teams by making sure they all wanted to show him up. The wins took care of themselves. Keenan's teams won at every level. With championships in the OHL and AHL, it seemed only a matter of time before his resume would include the ultimate prize, and in typical Mike Keenan fashion he would win it on the grandest of stages. The NHL's most valuable franchise, the New York Rangers, hadn't won a Cup in 54 years. At the time, it was the league's longest championship drought. But with five-time Stanley Cup champion Mark Messier now captain of a star-studded Rangers lineup, there was only one thing missing for a championship run on Broadway: a coach who could focus all the talent and desire on victory. After a season of controversy and clashing egos, many of them involving the team's bedevilling new coach, in 1994 the Stanley Cup finally returned to Madison Square Garden, considered by many to be the greatest Cup win by a US-based NHL team. In the hands of veteran journalist and bestselling author Scott Morrison, Iron Mike takes readers behind the scenes of one of the most explosive runs to the Cup in NHL history, one that has never been told like Keenan at long last shares in this book. Fans also get their long-awaited chance to understand what one of hockey's greatest and most confounding coaches was up to. There is only one Iron Mike in hockey, and love him or hate him, his memoir is an essential read for any fan of the game.

Mike Keenan, Scott Morrison (Author), TBD, Wayne Ward (Narrator)

Audiobook

Lytton: Climate Change, Colonialism and Life in the Centre of the Universe

From bestselling true-crime author Peter Edwards and Governor General's Award-winning playwright Kevin Loring, two sons of Lytton, BC, which burned to the ground in 2021, offer a meditation on hometown―when hometown is gone. Before it made global headlines as the small town that burned down during a record-breaking heat wave in June 2021, while briefly the hottest place on Earth, Lytton, British Columbia, had a curious past. Named for the author of the infamous line, "It was a dark and stormy night," Lytton was also where Peter Edwards, organized-crime journalist and author of over a dozen books, spent his childhood. Although only about 500 people lived in Lytton, Peter liked to joke that he was only the second-best writer to come from his tiny hometown. His grade-school classmate's nephew Kevin Loring, a member of the Nlaka'pamux Nation at Lytton First Nation, had grown up to be a Governor General's Award-winning playwright. The Nlaka'pamux called Lytton "The Centre of the World," a view Buddhists would share in the late twentieth century, as they set up a temple just outside town. In modern times, many outsiders would seek shelter there, often people who just didn't fit anywhere else and were hoping for a little anonymity in the mountains. You'll meet a whole cast of them in this book. A gold rush in 1858 saw conflict with a wave of Californians come to a head with the Canyon War at the junction of the mighty Fraser and Thompson rivers, one that would have changed the map of what was soon to become Canada had the locals lost. The Nlaka'pamux lost over thirty lives in that conflict, as did the American gold seekers. A century later, Lytton hadn't changed much. It was always a place where the troubles of the world seemed to land, even if very few people knew where it was. This book is the story of Lytton, told from a shared perspective, of an Indigenous playwright and the journalist son of a settler doctor who quietly but sternly pushed back against the divisions that existed between populations (Dr. Edwards gladly took a lot of salmon as payment for his services back in the 1960s). Portrayed with all the warmth, humour and sincerity of small-town life, the colourful little town that burned to the ground could be every town's warning if we don't take seriously what this unique place has to teach us.

Kevin Loring, Peter Edwards (Author), Kevin Loring, TBD, Wayne Ward (Narrator)

Audiobook

Dominion: The Railway and the Rise of Canada

Stephen R. Bown continues to revitalize Canadian history with this thrilling account of the engineering triumph that created a nation. In The Company, his bestselling work of revisionist history, Stephen Bown told the dramatic, adventurous and bloody tale of Canada's origins in the fur trade. With Dominion he continues the nation's creation story with an equally gripping and eye-opening account of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. In the late 19th century, demand for fur was in sharp decline. This could have spelled economic disaster for the venerable Hudson's Bay Company. But an idea emerged in political and business circles in Ottawa and Montreal to connect the disparate British colonies into a single entity that would stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific. With over 3,000 kilometers of track, much of it driven through wildly inhospitable terrain, the CPR would be the longest railway in the world and the most difficult to build. Its construction was the defining event of its era and a catalyst for powerful global forces. The times were marked by greed, hubris, blatant empire building, oppression, corruption and theft. They were good for some, hard for most, disastrous for others. The CPR enabled a new country, but it came at a terrible price. In recent years Canadian history has been given a rude awakening from the comforts of its myths. In Dominion, Stephen Bown again widens our view of the past to include the adventures and hardships of explorers and surveyors, the resistance of Indigenous peoples, and the terrific and horrific work of many thousands of labourers. His vivid portrayal of the powerful forces that were molding the world in the late 19th century provides a revelatory new picture of modern Canada's creation as an independent state.

Stephen Bown (Author), Wayne Ward (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks Narrated by Wayne Ward