Audiobooks by David Remnick

King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero

The bestselling biography of Muhammad Ali-with an Introduction by Salman Rushdie On the night in 1964 that Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) stepped into the ring with Sonny Liston, he was widely regarded as an irritating freak who danced and talked way too much. Six rounds later Ali was not only the new world heavyweight boxing champion: He was 'a new kind of black man' who would shortly transform America's racial politics, its popular culture, and its notions of heroism. No one has captured Ali-and the era that he exhilarated and sometimes infuriated-with greater vibrancy, drama, and astuteness than David Remnick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lenin's Tomb (and editor of the New Yorker). In charting Ali's rise from the gyms of Louisville, Kentucky, to his epochal fights against Liston and Floyd Patterson, Remnick creates a canvas of unparalleled richness. He gives us empathetic portraits of wisecracking sportswriters and bone-breaking mobsters; of the baleful Liston and the haunted Patterson; of an audacious Norman Mailer and an enigmatic Malcolm X. Most of all, King of the World does justice to the speed, grace, courage, humor, and ebullience of one of the greatest athletes and irresistibly dynamic personalities of our time.

David Remnick (Author), William Andrew Quinn (Narrator)

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Holding the Note: Writing On Music

'Always up close and personal, always tenacious and informed by deep background, and always vivid and veracious' The Times This audio edition is read by the author, David Remnick, and Matt Godfrey. The greatest popular songs, whether it's Aretha Franklin singing 'Respect' or Bob Dylan performing 'Blind Willie McTell', have a way of embedding themselves in our memories. You remember a time and a place and a feeling when you hear that song again. In Holding the Note, David Remnick writes about the lives and work of some of the greatest musicians, songwriters, and performers of the past fifty years. He portrays a series of musical lives - Leonard Cohen, Buddy Guy, Mavis Staples, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and more - and their unique encounters with the passing of that essential element of music: time. These are intimate portraits of some of the greatest creative minds of our time written with a lifetime's passionate attachment to music that has shaped us all.

David Remnick (Author), David Remnick, Matt Godfrey (Narrator)

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The Matter of Black Lives: Writing from The New Yorker

A collection of the New Yorker‘s groundbreaking writing on race in America, including work by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, and more From the pages of the New Yorker comes a bold and telling portrait of Black life in America, with astonishing early work from Rebecca West’s account of a lynching trial and James Baldwin’s ‘Letter from a Region in My Mind’ (which later formed the basis of The Fire Next Time) to more recent writing by Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Zadie Smith, Hilton Als, Jamaica Kincaid, Malcolm Gladwell, Elizabeth Alexander, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Doreen St. Félix, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Kelefa Sanneh, and more. Reaching back across the last century, The Matter of Black Lives includes a wide array of material from the New Yorker archives ranging across essays, reported pieces, profiles, criticism, and historical pieces. This book addresses everything from the arts to civil rights, matters of justice, and politics, and brings us up to the present day with accounts of what Jelani Cobb calls “The American Spring.” The result is a startling, nuanced and, ultimately, indelible portrait of America’s complex relationship with race.

David Remnick, Jd Jackson, Jelani Cobb (Author), Adjoa Andoh, JD Jackson, January LaVoy, January Lavoy, Jd Jackson (Narrator)

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The Fragile Earth: Writing from the New Yorker on Climate Change

A classic collection of the New Yorker’s most urgent and groundbreaking reporting from the front lines of the climate emergency In 1989, just one year after climatologist James Hansen first came before a Senate committee and testified that the earth was now warmer than it had ever been in recorded history, thanks to humankind’s heedless consumption of fossil fuels, New Yorker writer Bill McKibben published a deeply reported and considered piece on climate change and what it could mean for the planet. At the time, the piece was to some speculative to the point of alarmist; read now, McKibben’s work is heroically prescient. Since then, the New Yorker has devoted enormous attention to climate change, describing the causes of the crisis, the political and ecological conditions we now find ourselves in, and the scenarios and solutions we face. The Fragile Earth tells the story of climate change – its past, present, and future – taking readers from Greenland to the Great Plains, and into both laboratories and rain forests. It features some of the best writing on global warming from the last three decades, including Bill McKibben’s seminal essay ‘The End of Nature,’ the first piece to popularize both the science and politics of climate change for a general audience, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Elizabeth Kolbert, as well as Kathryn Schulz, Dexter Filkins, Jonathan Franzen, Ian Frazier, Eric Klinenberg, and others. The result, in its range, depth, and passion, promises to bring light, and sometimes heat, to the great emergency of our age.

Cat Gould, David Remnick, Henry Finder (Author), Cat Gould, Gabra Zackman, Kaleo Griffith (Narrator)

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Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days Of The Soviet Empire

In the tradition of John Reed’s classic Ten Days That Shook the World, this bestselling account of the collapse of the Soviet Union combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. “A moving illumination . . . Remnick is the witness for us all.” —Wall Street Journal.

David Remnick (Author), Michael Prichard (Narrator)

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King of the World

There had been mythic sports figures before Cassius Clay, but when he burst upon the sports scene in the 1950s, he broke the mold. Those were the years when boxing and boxers were at the mercy of the mob and the whim of the sportswriters. If you wanted a shot at a title, you did it their way. Young Clay did it his way - with little more than an Olympic gold medal to his credit, he danced into Sonny Liston's baleful view and provoked the terrifying champ into accepting him as his next challenger. The rest is history. Muhammad Ali has become a mythic hero, an American icon, a self-invented legend. As both a mirror and a molder of his times, Ali became the most recognizable face on the planet, a key figure in the cultural battles of the times. This is the story of his self-creation, and his rise to glory, told by a master storyteller.

David Remnick (Author), Dick Hill (Narrator)

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The Bridge

No story has been more central to America's history this century than the rise of Barack Obama, and until now, no journalist or historian has written a book that fully investigates the circumstances and experiences of Obama's life or explores the ambition behind his rise. Those familiar with Obama's own best-selling memoir or his campaign speeches know the touchstones and details that he chooses to emphasize, but now, from a writer whose gift for illuminating the historical significance of unfolding events is without peer, we have a portrait, at once masterly and fresh, nuanced and unexpected, of a young man in search of himself, and of a rising politician determined to become the first African-American president. The Bridge offers the most complete account yet of Obama's tragic father, a brilliant economist who abandoned his family and ended his life as a beaten man; of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who had a child as a teenager and then built her career as an anthropologist living and studying in Indonesia; and of the succession of elite institutions that first exposed Obama to the social tensions and intellectual currents that would force him to imagine and fashion an identity for himself. Through extensive on-the-record interviews with friends and teachers, mentors and disparagers, family members and Obama himself, David Remnick allows us to see how a rootless, unaccomplished, and confused young man created himself first as a community organizer in Chicago, an experience that would not only shape his urge to work in politics but give him a home and a community, and that would propel him to Harvard Law School, where his sense of a greater mission emerged. Deftly setting Obama's political career against the galvanizing intersection of race and politics in Chicago's history, Remnick shows us how that city's complex racial legacy would make Obama's forays into politics a source of controversy and bare-knuckle tactics: his clashes with older black politicians in the Illinois State Senate, his disastrous decision to challenge the former Black Panther Bobby Rush for Congress in 2000, the sex scandals that would decimate his more experienced opponents in the 2004 Senate race, and the story, from both sides, of his confrontation with his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. By looking at Obama's political rise through the prism of our racial history, Remnick gives us the conflicting agendas of black politicians: the dilemmas of men like Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and Joseph Lowery, heroes of the civil rights movement, who are forced to reassess old loyalties and understand the priorities of a new generation of African-American leaders. The Bridge revisits the American drama of race, from slavery to civil rights, and makes clear how Obama's quest is not just his own but is emblematic of a nation where destiny is defined by individuals keen to imagine a future that is different from the reality of their current lives. From the Hardcover edition.

David Remnick (Author), Mark Deakins (Narrator)

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Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink

Since its earliest days, The New Yorker has been a tastemaker, literally. As the home of A. J. Liebling, Joseph Wechsberg, and M. F. K. Fisher, who practically invented American food writing, the magazine established a tradition that is carried forward today by irrepressible literary gastronomes including Calvin Trillin, Bill Buford, Adam Gopnik, Jane Kramer, and Anthony Bourdain. Now, in this indispensable collection, The New Yorker dishes up a feast of delicious writing on food and drink, from every age of its fabled eighty-year history. There are memoirs, short stories, tell-alls, and poems, ranging in tone from sweet to sour and in subject from soup to nuts. M. F. K. Fisher pays homage to 'cookery witches,' those mysterious cooks who possess 'an uncanny power over food,' while John McPhee valiantly trails an inveterate forager and is rewarded with stewed persimmons and white-pine-needle tea. There is Roald Dahl's famous story 'Taste,' in which a wine snob's palate comes in for some unwelcome scrutiny, and Julian Barnes's ingenious tale of a lifelong gourmand who goes on a very peculiar diet for still more peculiar reasons. Adam Gopnik asks if French cuisine is done for, and Calvin Trillin investigates whether people can actually taste the difference between red wine and white. We journey with Susan Orlean as she distills the essence of Cuba in the story of a single restaurant, and with Judith Thurman as she investigates the arcane practices of Japan's tofu masters. Closer to home, Joseph Mitchell celebrates the old New York tradition of the beefsteak dinner, and Mark Singer shadows the city's foremost fisherman-chef. Selected from the magazine's plentiful larder, SECRET INGREDIENTS celebrates all forms of gustatory delight. From the Compact Disc edition.

David Remnick (Author), Various, Various Artists (Narrator)

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Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink

Since its earliest days, The New Yorker has been a tastemaker–literally. As the home of A. J. Liebling, Joseph Wechsberg, and M. F. K. Fisher, who practically invented American food writing, the magazine established a tradition that is carried forward today by irrepressible literary gastronomes including Calvin Trillin, Bill Buford, Adam Gopnik, Jane Kramer, and Anthony Bourdain. Now, in this indispensable collection, The New Yorker dishes up a feast of delicious writing on food and drink, from every age of its fabled eighty-year history. There are memoirs, short stories, tell-alls, and poems–ranging in tone from sweet to sour and in subject from soup to nuts. M. F. K. Fisher pays homage to “cookery witches,” those mysterious cooks who possess “an uncanny power over food,” while John McPhee valiantly trails an inveterate forager and is rewarded with stewed persimmons and white-pine-needle tea. There is Roald Dahl’s famous story “Taste,” in which a wine snob’s palate comes in for some unwelcome scrutiny, and Julian Barnes’s ingenious tale of a lifelong gourmand who goes on a very peculiar diet for still more peculiar reasons. Adam Gopnik asks if French cuisine is done for, and Calvin Trillin investigates whether people can actually taste the difference between red wine and white. We journey with Susan Orlean as she distills the essence of Cuba in the story of a single restaurant, and with Judith Thurman as she investigates the arcane practices of Japan’s tofu masters. Closer to home, Joseph Mitchell celebrates the old New York tradition of the beefsteak dinner, and Mark Singer shadows the city’s foremost fisherman-chef. Selected from the magazine’s plentiful larder, SECRET INGREDIENTS celebrates all forms of gustatory delight.

David Remnick (Author), Various, Various Artists, Various Narrators (Narrator)

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Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he described it as a "comic weekly." And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder's description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists of the modern era-among them Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, George S. Kaufman, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Peter De Vries, Mike Nichols, Marshall Brickman, Woody Allen, Donald Barthelme, Calvin Trillin, George W. S. Trow, Veronica Geng, Garrison Keillor, Ian Frazier, Roy Blount, Jr., Bruce McCall, Steve Martin, Christopher Buckley, and Paul Rudnick. This anthology gathers together, for the first time, the funniest work of more than seventy New Yorker contributors. Parodists take on not only writers like Hemingway and Kerouac, but TV documentaries, Italian cinema, and etiquette books. (Enough have been published, Robert Benchley maintains, "that there should be no danger of toppling over forward into the wrong soup, or getting into arguments as to which elbow belongs on which arm.") Other pieces offer perspectives on the heights of fame, the depths of social embarrassment, and the ups and downs of love and sex. Such well-loved sketches as Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" take their place alongside light-hearted essays on food, tennis, and taxis, and flights of fancy that follow an apparently simple premise to the point of no return, and sometimes well beyond. Here you will find large insights (Woody Allen: "Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage") and hard-earned wisdom (Ian Frazier on dating your mom: "Here is a grown, experienced, loving woman-one you do not have to go to a party or a singles bar to meet, one you do not have to go to great lengths to know"). And, not least, a great deal of helpful advice, including Steve Martin's on memory and middle age: "Bored? Here's a way the over-fifty set can easily kill a good half hour: 1. Place your car keys in your right hand. 2. With your left hand, call a friend and confirm a lunch or dinner date. 3. Hang up the phone. 4. Now look for your car keys." A rich selection of humorous verse includes caustic gems by Dorothy Parker, the effortless whimsy of Phyllis McGinley, and Ogden Nash's unforgettable slapstick prosody, as well as forays by luminaries who ought to have known better, like Robert Graves, Elizabeth Bishop, and W. H. Auden. A wonderful gift for others, or a delightful treat for oneself, Fierce Pajamas is a treasury of laughter from a publication described by Auden as "the best comic magazine in existence."

David Remnick, Henry Finder (Author), Chris Gannon, Patrick Frederic (Narrator)

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Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

New York City is not only The New Yorker magazine's place of origin and its sensibility's lifeblood, it is the heart of American literary culture. Wonderful Town, an anthology of superb short fiction by many of the magazine's most accomplished contributors, celebrates the seventy-five-year marriage between a preeminent publication and its preeminent context with this collection of forty-four of its best stories from (so to speak) home. East Side? Philip Roth's chronically tormented alter ego Nathan Zuckerman has just moved there, in 'Smart Money.' West Side? Isaac Bashevis Singer's narrator mingles with the customers in 'The Cafeteria' (who debate politics and culture in four or five different languages) and becomes embroiled in an obsessional romance. And downtown, John Updike's Maples have begun their courtship of marital disaster, in 'Snowing in Greenwich Village.' John Cheever, John O'Hara, Lorrie Moore, Irwin Shaw, Woody Allen, Laurie Colwin, Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, Jean Stafford, Vladimir Nabokov--they and many other stellar literary guides to the city will be found in these pages. Wonderful Town touches on some of the city's famous places and stops at some of its more obscure corners, but the real guidebook in and between its lines is to the hearts and the minds of those who populate the metropolis built by its pages. Like all good fiction, these stories take particular places, particular people, and particular events and turn them into dramas of universal enlightenment and emotional impact. The five boroughs are the five continents. New York is every great and ordinary place. Each life in it, and each life in Wonderful Town, is the life of us all. From the Hardcover edition.

David Remnick, David Remnicki (Author), Joe Morton, Maria Tucci, Tim Jerome, Timothy Jerome, Tyne Daly (Narrator)

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Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker

One of art's purest challenges is to translate a human being into words. The New Yorker has met this challenge more successfully and more originally than any other modern American journal. It has indelibly shaped the genre known as the Profile. Starting with light-fantastic evocations of glamorous and idiosyncratic figures of the twenties and thirties, such as Henry Luce and Isadora Duncan, and continuing to the present, with complex pictures of such contemporaries as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Richard Pryor, this collection of New Yorker Profiles presents readers with a portrait gallery of some of the most prominent figures of the twentieth century. These Profiles are literary-journalistic investigations into character and accomplishment, motive and madness, beauty and ugliness, and are unrivalled in their range, their variety of style, and their embrace of humanity. From the Trade Paperback edition.

David Remnick (Author), Alton Fitzgerald White, Amy Irving, Philip Bosco (Narrator)

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