United States Audiobooks | Travel

On The Road With Charles Kuralt Audiobook

Charles Kuralt's classic bestseller is now on audio! On The Road With Charles Kuralt Featuring Charles Kuralt with an introduction by Wallace Kuralt "To read the front pages, you might conclude that Americans are mostly out for themselves...but you can't travel the back roads very long without discovering a multitude of gentle people doing good for others with no expectation of gain or recognition." In this collection of short audio essays, Charles Kuralt takes us from the countryside to the big cities to introduce us to the fascinating people and places that only he could find. Kuralt captures the humor and compassion of ordinary people leading extraordinary lives. From the best selling book On The Road With Charles Kuralt, these classic stories represent Kuralt's defining, and perhaps finest, work. Never before released on audio, this collection ensures that his unforgettable voice will be heard by generations to come.

Charles Kuralt (Author), Charles Kuralt (Narrator)

Audiobook

A Tale of Two Valleys: Wine, Wealth and the Battle for the Good Life in Napa and Sonoma

When acclaimed journalist Alan Deutschman came to the California wine country as the lucky house guest of very rich friends, he was surprised to discover a raging controversy. A civil war was being fought between the Napa Valley, which epitomized elitism, prestige and wealthy excess, and the neighboring Sonoma Valley, a rag-tag bohemian enclave so stubbornly backward that rambunctious chickens wandered freely through town. But the antics really began when new-money invaders began pushing out Sonoma's poets and painters to make way for luxury resorts and trophy houses that seemed a parody of opulence. A Tale of Two Valleys captures these stranger-than-fiction locales with the wit of a Tom Wolfe novel and uncorks the hilarious absurdities of life among the wine world's glitterati. Deutschman found that on the weekends the wine country was like a bunch of gracious hosts smiling upon their guests, but during the week the families feuded with each other and their neighbors like the Hatfields and McCoys. Napa was a comically exclusive club where the super-rich fought desperately to get in. Sonoma's colorful free spirits and iconoclasts were wary of their bohemia becoming the next playground for the rapacious elite. So, led by a former taxicab driver and wine-grape picker, a cheese merchant, and an artist who lived in a barn surrounded by wild peacocks, they formed a populist revolt to seize power and repel the rich invaders. Deutschman's cast of characters brims with eccentrics, egomaniacs, and a mysterious man in black who crashed the elegant Napa Valley Wine Auction before proceeding to pay a half-million dollars for a single bottle. What develops is nothing less than a battle for the good life, a clash between old and new, the struggle for the soul of one of America's last bits of paradise. A dishy glimpse behind the scenes of a West Coast wonderland, A Tale of Two Valleys makes for intoxicating reading.

Alan Deutschman (Author), Michael Cerveris (Narrator)

Audiobook

Roads

"I wanted to drive the American roads at the century's end to look at the country again, from border to border and beach to beach... "From earliest boyhood the American road has been a part of my life - central to it, I would even say. The ranch house in which I spent my first seven years sits only a mile from highway 281, the long road that traverses the central plains, all the way from Manitoba to the Mexican border..." - Larry McMurtry Author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry sets out in Roads on an automotive odyssey exploring America's highways and the culture that has grown up on either side of them. "My method, to the extent that I have one, is modeled on rereading; I want to reread some of the roads as I might a book," he writes. Crisscrossing America in search of the present, the past and himself, McMurtry's route is also his destination.

Larry McMurtry (Author), George Guidall (Narrator)

Audiobook

Crossing the Craton

With his Pulitzer Prize-winning Annals of the Former World, John McPhee explores not only the richly varied surface of the United States, but the geological wonders hidden deep beneath our feet. In this final book of the series, he embarks on a fascinating journey across the basement of the continent-the land masses forming Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and thereabouts-with a professor and geochronologist acting as a guide. Whether Randy Van Schmus is out in the field with his students, or grinding rock in the university lab, he insists the flat plains of middle America are anything but dull. He tells the story of eons of violent upheaval that is written in the features lying far below the shimmering wheat fields. As he shares how scientists are unlocking the secrets of the earth's timetable, millions of years seem but brief moments. John McPhee's enthusiasm and peerless writing style make the study of geology both accessible and entertaining. Nelson Runger's thought-provoking performance ensures you will view the earth with fresh insight.

John McPhee (Author), Nelson Runger (Narrator)

Audiobook

Confederates in the Attic

When prize-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he thinks he's put war zones behind him. But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire, Horwitz starts filing front-line dispatches again this time from a war close to home, and to his own heart. Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America's greatest conflict. The result is an adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance. In Virginia, Horwitz joins a band of 'hardcore' reenactors who crash-diet to achieve the hollow-eyed look of starved Confederates; in Kentucky, he witnesses Klan rallies and calls for race war sparked by the killing of a white man who brandishes a rebel flag; at Andersonville, he finds that the prison's commander, executed as a war criminal, is now exalted as a martyr and hero; and in the book's climax, Horwitz takes a marathon trek from Antietam to Gettysburg to Appomattox in the company of Robert Lee Hodge, an eccentric pilgrim who dubs their odyssey the 'Civil Wargasm.' Written with Horwitz's signature blend of humor, history, and hard-nosed journalism, Confederates in the Attic brings alive old battlefields and new ones 'classrooms, courts, country bars' where the past and the present collide, often in explosive ways. Poignant and picaresque, haunting and hilarious, it speaks to anyone who has ever felt drawn to the mythic South and to the dark romance of the Civil War.

Tony Horwitz (Author), Michael Beck (Narrator)

Audiobook

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