Audiobooks narrated by Frank Bruni

From bestselling author and longtime New York Times columnist Frank Bruni comes a lucid, powerful examination of the ways in which grievance has come to define our current culture and politics, on both the right and left. The twists and turns of American politics have become nearly impossible to predict, but the tone is a troubling given. It's one of grievance. A perilous share of Americans across the full breadth of the political spectrum respond to every big disappointment, every little frustration, every way in which the world doesn't hew precisely to their liking by deciding that they've been wronged, identifying the people responsible for that and raging at the injustice of it all. The blame game is the country's most popular sport and victimhood its most fashionable garb. Grievance isn't always and necessarily bad. It has often done enormous good. The United States is a nation born of grievance, in the revolt of royal subjects unwilling to accept a bad deal, and across the nearly 250 years of our existence as a country, grievance has been the engine of morally urgent change. But what happens when all sorts of grievances—the greater ones, the lesser ones, the authentic, the invented—are jumbled together? When grievances become all-encompassing lenses, all-purpose reflexes, default settings? When people take their grievances to extreme and even violent lengths that they didn't before? A mob storms the US Capitol, rejecting the results of a presidential election and embracing the fiction that it was rigged. Conspiracy theories flourish. Politicians appeal not to our better angels but to our worst impulses, encouraging selfishness instead of selflessness, trading inspiration for retribution. Fox News, the country's most watched cable news network, and Tucker Carlson, its sneering star, knowingly peddle lies in the service of profit. The Supreme Court loses touch with the country, overturning Roe v. Wade and shrugging off Clarence Thomas's transgressions. College students chase away speakers and college administrators dismiss instructors for dissenting from progressive orthodoxy. Will Smith slaps Chris Rock. And there's a potentially devastating erosion of the civility, common ground and compromise necessary for our democracy to survive. How did we get here? What does it say about us, and where does it leave us? Timely, important, and enlightening, The Age of Grievance examines these critical questions and charts a path forward for a nation that may be growing tired of outrage.

Frank Bruni (Author), Frank Bruni, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found

From New York Times columnist and bestselling author Frank Bruni comes a wise and moving memoir about aging, affliction, and optimism after partially losing his eyesight. One morning in late 2017, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni woke up with strangely blurred vision. He wondered at first if some goo or gunk had worked its way into his right eye. But this was no fleeting annoyance, no fixable inconvenience. Overnight, a rare stroke had cut off blood to one of his optic nerves, rendering him functionally blind in that eye—forever. And he soon learned from doctors that the same disorder could ravage his left eye, too. He could lose his sight altogether. In The Beauty of Dusk, Bruni hauntingly recounts his adjustment to this daunting reality, a medical and spiritual odyssey that involved not only reappraising his own priorities but also reaching out to, and gathering wisdom from, longtime friends and new acquaintances who had navigated their own traumas and afflictions. The result is a poignant, probing, and ultimately uplifting examination of the limits that all of us inevitably encounter, the lenses through which we choose to evaluate them and the tools we have for perseverance. Bruni's world blurred in one sense, as he experienced his first real inklings that the day isn't forever and that light inexorably fades, but sharpened in another. Confronting unexpected hardship, he felt more blessed than ever before. There was vision lost. There was also vision found.

Frank Bruni (Author), Frank Bruni (Narrator)

Audiobook

Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania

Over the last few decades, Americans have turned college admissions into a terrifying and occasionally devastating process, preceded by test prep, tutors, all sorts of stratagems, all kinds of rankings, and a conviction among too many young people that their futures will be determined and their worth established by which schools say yes and which say no. That belief is wrong. It's cruel. And in WHERE YOU GO IS NOT WHO YOU'LL BE, Frank Bruni explains why, giving students and their parents a new perspective on this brutal, deeply flawed competition and a path out of the anxiety that it provokes. Bruni, a bestselling author and a columnist for the New York Times, shows that the Ivy League has no monopoly on corner offices, governors' mansions, or the most prestigious academic and scientific grants. Through statistics, surveys, and the stories of hugely successful people who didn't attend the most exclusive schools, he demonstrates that many kinds of colleges-large public universities, tiny hideaways in the hinterlands-serve as ideal springboards. And he illuminates how to make the most of them. What matters in the end are a student's efforts in and out of the classroom, not the gleam of his or her diploma. Where you go isn't who you'll be. Americans need to hear that-and this indispensable manifesto says it with eloquence and respect for the real promise of higher education.

Frank Bruni (Author), Frank Bruni (Narrator)

Audiobook

Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater

The New York Times restaurant critic's heartbreaking and hilarious account of how he learned to love food just enough after decades of struggling with his outsize appetite. Frank Bruni was born round, round as in stout, chubby, and hungry, always and endlessly hungry. He grew up in a big, loud Italian family in White Plains, New York, where meals were epic, outsize affairs. At those meals, he demonstrated one of his foremost qualifications for his future career: an epic, outsize love of food. But Bruni's relationship with eating was tricky, and his difficulties with managing it began early. When Bruni was named the restaurant critic for The New York Times in 2004, he knew enough to be nervous. The restaurant critic at the Times performs one of the most closely watched tasks in the epicurean universe; a bumpy ride was certain, especially for someone who had never written about food, someone who for years had been busy writing about politics, presidential campaigns, and the pope. What qualified him to be one of the most loved and hated tastemakers in the New York food world? Did his decades-long obsession with food suffice? Food was his friend and enemy both, something he craved but feared, and his new-job jitters focused primarily on whether he'd finally made some sense of that relationship .In this coveted job, he'd face down his enemy at meal after indulgent meal. As his grandmother often put it, "Born round, you don't die square." Would he fall back into his old habits or could he establish a truce with the food on his plate? Born Round traces the highly unusual path Bruni traveled to become a restaurant critic; it is the captivating account of an unpredictable journalistic ride from an intern's desk at Newsweek to a dream job at The New York Times, as well as the brutally honest story of Bruni's lifelong, often painful, struggle with food.

Frank Bruni (Author), Frank Bruni (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks Narrated by Frank Bruni