Audiobook for the holidays - part 3: Rin Tin Tin by Susan Orlean (and a giveaway!)

Today we continue our series 'Audiobook for the holidays', where we review, recommend and give away 4 great audiobooks. In the last weeks we introduced you to Boomerang by Michael Lewis and Our Choice by Al Gore. Today we're excited to introduce you to an audiobook that might seems to be a tale about a dog, but is actually "an extraordinary journey" into the story of some of the most interesting parts of the twentieth century . And what a fascinating journey it is!

Our second audiobook on this series is:

Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean, narrated by the author.

The audiobook is published by Simon & Schuster Audio. Here's an excerpt from the audiobook read by the author, Susan Orlean:



Here's more about "Rin Tin Tin":

Nearly ten years in the making and perfect for the holidays, Susan Orlean’s first original book since the celebrated bestseller The Orchid Thief is the publishing event of the season: a sweeping, surprising, and powerfully moving work of narrative nonfiction about the dog actor and international icon, Rin Tin Tin.

German shepherd Rin Tin Tin’s journey is the story of the twentieth century. From the discovery of Rin Tin Tin on a WWI battlefield in 1918, to the movies, radio programs, and the 1950s television show that would cement his legacy around the world, Rin Tin Tin traces the extraordinary history of the dog and his descendants over more than ninety years. Rin Tin Tin was a star (he received 10,000 fan letters a week); a worldwide sensation; a social figure (as the U.S. Army’s WWII mascot, he inspired thousands of Americans to donate their dogs for use in the war); and a baby-boom touchstone. He was also a real dog, and the book tells the epic love story between Rin Tin Tin and the remarkable people who devoted their lives to him and his legacy.

Rin Tin Tin is also Orlean’s meditation on the nature of heroism, loyalty, and memory, and how Rin Tin Tin has lasted for so many generations. “Rin Tin Tin could leap twelve feet,” she writes, “and he could leap through time.”

Here's another interesting video clip, where author Susan Orlean talks about the audiobook and why she chose to narrate her book:

The audiobook is available on Amazon: http://amzn.to/oPSvFS and on iTunes: http://bit.ly/t7uZBP

GIVEAWAY ALERT!!

We're giving away two copies of this audiobook, courtesy of the publisher, Simon & Simon audio!

How you can win? Very simple. All you have to do is to retweet this post on twitter with the hashtag #rintintin at the end of your tweet. We will have a raffle on Wednesday, December 28, 5:00PM EST between all the readers that will retweet by then. The winners will be announced the following day.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Audiobook for the holidays - part 1: Boomerang by Michael Lewis (and a giveaway!)

Today we start a 4-week series for the holidays, where we will be reviewing, recommending and giving away four great audiobooks.

We believe these audiobooks are great to listen to all year round, but we know this is the time of the year when people look for unique and meaningful gifts, so this is certainly the right time to introduce you with these audiobooks, all published by Simon and Simon Audio.

Our first audiobook on this series is Boomerang by Michael Lewis, read by Dylan Baker.

Just like his last book, the Big Short, Michael Lewis takes the role here of a tour guide. This time he's leading a guided tour through some of the disparate places hard hit by the financial tsunami of 2008, like Greece, Iceland and Ireland. His role is almost Sisyphean as this is incredibly difficult to understand these events, not to mention putting them in some sort of coherent and clear context and even making you laugh once in a while when listening to it. Yet, Michael Lewis succeed to do it. Just like he did in the Big Short, he takes big global events and present them through small personal stories that helps us to understand how the hell these countries got to this situation.

What amazes me every time I listen to his audiobooks is how easily misconceptions are becoming common due to the belief that the people that are making the decisions are reasonable people and know what they do. Even though we get to learn time after time this is not the case we keep believe in it. This is why I won't be surprised if one of the next audiobooks of Michael Lewis will be on another crisis that follows the same patterns of the financial crisis he describes in the Big Short and Boomerang, this time environmental one. Actually, it might be that he's working on it as we speak..

Bottom line: If you want to understand the news coming from Europe and what's really going on there, listen to Boomerang!

Here are more details on Boomerang (From its Amazon page):

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Big Short, Liar’s Poker and The Blind Side!

The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge.

The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a piÑata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack at it. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish.

The trademark of Michael Lewis's bestsellers is to tell an important and complex story through characters so outsized and outrageously weird that you'd think they have to be invented. (You'd be wrong.) In Boomerang, we meet a brilliant monk who has figured out how to game Greek capitalism to save his failing monastery; a cod fisherman who, with three days' training, becomes a currency trader for an Icelandic bank; and an Irish real estate developer so outraged by the collapse of his business that he drives across the country to attack the Irish Parliament with his earth-moving equipment.

Lewis's investigation of bubbles beyond our shores is so brilliantly, sadly hilarious that it leads the American listener to a comfortable complacency: Oh, those foolish foreigners. But when Lewis turns a merciless eye on California and Washington DC, we see that the narrative is a trap baited with humor, and we understand the reckoning that awaits the greatest and greediest of debtor nations.

"No one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Lewis."

--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Disclosure: We received a copy of this audiobook from the publisher (Simon and Simon Audio).

Here's an excerpt from the audiobook:

on Amazon: http://amzn.to/qj7fyn

on iTunes: http://bit.ly/tRZwhq

GIVEAWAY ALERT!!

We're giving away two copies of this audiobook, courtesy of the publisher, Simon & Simon audio!

How you can win? Very simple. All you have to do is to retweet this post on twitter with the hashtag #boomerang at the end of your tweet. We will have a raffle on Friday, December 14, 5:00PM EST between all the readers that will retweet by then. The winners will be announced the following day.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!