Teller of Tales
The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle
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Narrated by:
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Richard Matthews
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By:
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Daniel Stashower
About this listen
Exhaustively researched and elegantly written, Teller of Tales sets aside many myths and misconceptions to present a vivid portrait of the man behind the legend of Baker Street, with a particular emphasis on the Psychic Crusade that dominated his final years, the work that Conan Doyle himself felt to be "the most important thing in the world".
©1999 Daniel Stashower (P)2001 Books on Tape, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Ayn Rand and the World She Made
- By: Anne C. Heller
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 19 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Ayn Rand is the author of two phenomenally best-selling ideological novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which have sold over 12 million copies in the United States alone. Through them, she built a right-wing cult following in the late 1950s and became the guiding light of Libertarianism and of White House economic policy in the 1960s and '70s. Her defenses of radical individualism and of selfishness as a "capitalist virtue" have permanently altered the American cultural landscape.
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Great history of both Rand and her era
- By Mark on 08-07-10
By: Anne C. Heller
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The Club
- Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
- By: Leo Damrosch
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk's Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually, the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as "the Club". In this captivating audiobook, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters.
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Wonderful survey
- By Tad Davis on 05-10-19
By: Leo Damrosch
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The Professor and the Madman
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Part history, part true-crime, and entirely entertaining, listen to the story of how the behemoth Oxford English Dictionary was made. You'll hang on every word as you discover that the dictionary's greatest contributor was also an insane murderer working from the confines of an asylum.
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Perfect example of a quality audible book.
- By Jerry on 07-07-03
By: Simon Winchester
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The Zhivago Affair
- The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book
- By: Peter Finn, Petra Couvée
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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In May of 1956, an Italian publishing scout took a train to the Russian countryside to visit the country's most beloved poet, Boris Pasternak. He left concealing the original manuscript of Pasternak's much anticipated first novel, entrusted to him with these words from the author: "This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world." Pasternak knew his novel would never be published in the Soviet Union, where the authorities regarded it as an assault on the 1917 Revolution, so he allowed it to be published in translation all over the world.
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Read this to understand Doctor Zhivago and Russia
- By KathrynVB on 10-16-14
By: Peter Finn, and others
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Trotsky
- Downfall of a Revolutionary
- By: Bertrand M. Patenaude
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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In Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, Stanford University lecturer Bertrand M. Patenaude tells the dramatic story of Leon Trotsky's final years in exile in Mexico. Shedding new light on Trotsky's tumultuous friendship with painter Diego Rivera, his affair with Rivera’s wife Frida Kahlo, and his torment as his family and comrades become victims of the Great Terror, Trotsky: Downfall ofa Revolutionary brilliantly illuminates the fateful and dramatic life of one of history's most famous yet elusive figures.
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Good Trotsky Book, BAD conclusions at end
- By Darius on 02-09-15
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Thunderstruck
- By: Erik Larson
- Narrated by: Bob Balaban
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men: Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication. Their lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.
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Reader cannot read
- By Bob on 12-08-07
By: Erik Larson
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Fryderyk Chopin
- A Life and Times
- By: Dr. Alan Walker
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 23 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Based on 10 years of research and a vast cache of primary sources located in archives in Warsaw, Paris, London, New York, and Washington, D.C., Alan Walker's monumental Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times is the most comprehensive biography of the great Polish composer to appear in English in more than a century. Walker's work is a corrective biography, intended to dispel the many myths and legends that continue to surround Chopin.
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This book is a masterpiece
- By Carpe Diem on 02-09-19
By: Dr. Alan Walker
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The Golden Age of Murder
- By: Martin Edwards
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
- Length: 16 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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A real-life detective story, investigating how Agatha Christie and colleagues in a mysterious literary club transformed crime fiction, writing books casting new light on unsolved murders whilst hiding clues to their authors' darkest secrets. This is the first book about the Detection Club, the world's most famous and most mysterious social network of crime writers. Drawing on years of in-depth research, it reveals the astonishing story of how members such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers reinvented detective fiction.
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Doesn't work as an audiobook
- By Pat on 08-02-15
By: Martin Edwards
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Hitler
- The Memoir of a Nazi Insider Who Turned Against the Fuhrer
- By: Ernst Hanfstaengl
- Narrated by: Robin Sachs
- Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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An intimate friend of Adolf Hitler’s who turned against him during the Nazi rise to power delves into the character of one of history’s most evil dictators. Of American and German parentage, Ernst Hanfstaengl graduated from Harvard and ran the family business in New York for a dozen years before returning to Germany in 1921. By chance he heard a then little-known Adolf Hitler speaking in a Munich beer hall and, mesmerized by his extraordinary oratorical power, was convinced the man would some day come to power. As Hitler’s fanatical theories and ideas hardened, however, he surrounded himself with rabid extremists...
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Once a Nazi, always a Nazi
- By Alan on 04-10-13
What listeners say about Teller of Tales
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- GoryDetails
- 03-09-06
A lively, enjoyable look at Conan Doyle
While I knew the rough facts about Doyle's life, I found a great many new bits of information in this biography, and came away with a greater appreciation of Doyle's body of work - though still very puzzled about his inability to be objective about the spiritualism movement. The book is full of wonderful anecdotes, and describes many of Doyle's less-well-known works in ways that made me want to dash out and read them. Narrator Robert Whitfield (aka Simon Vance) does a marvelous job here. Recommended.
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8 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Stan
- 02-06-10
Enjoyable, personal human history on Conan Doyle
A well-presented audio-biography showing Conan Doyle's pioneering history as writer. This should be of interest to a wide variety of readers/listeners and would-be authors - esp.those in the field of specific, clear observation in detection.
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- Tad Davis
- 12-02-19
Wonderful
Read superbly (as usual) by “Richard Matthews” (aka Simon Vance), this biography of Arthur Conan Doyle is a treat. The lucid narrative is peppered with fascinating details about Conan Doyle’s life and insights into his writing. It spurred me on to branch out from Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger and read Conan Doyle’s other work, especially The White Company and the Brigadier Gerard stories. I was surprised to learn that late in life he'd written a science fiction novel about Atlantis that was compared to the work of Jules Verne; so I've added that to my list as well.
His involvement in real-life detective work is well known, although the disappointing outcome of some of his investigations was a surprise to me. More than once he turned up irrefutable evidence of the innocence of the accused, only to find the bureaucracy of British justice unwilling to accept the idea that a conviction was unsound. One of the cases he championed ended with a conviction being overturned on a technicality, but no pardon; the man in question had meanwhile spent 18 years in prison.
He wrote and campaigned vigorously against the horrors of the Belgian Congo — a cause that also drew the support of Mark Twain — only to come under attack himself for the frankness of his descriptions of torture and maiming.
He championed the cause of Roger Casement, the Irish patriot, whose letters from Peru gave him vital background details for the setting of The Lost World. When Casement was sentenced to be hanged for treason — he had (in the middle of the Great War) conspired with the German government to procure arms for an Irish rebellion — Conan Doyle circulated a petition for clemency, insisting that Casement was insane. He refused to withdraw it when the Crown revealed the existence of Casement’s diaries, filled with accounts of his double life as a gay man. Not exactly a stirring endorsement of gay rights; but in his continuing support of Casement despite this “scandal,” Conan Doyle was a lone warrior. Sadly, he failed, and Casement was hanged.
The major dilemma in a biography of Conan Doyle is laying down the Holmes stories side by side with his devotion to seances and other forms of crackpot spiritualism. How could both come from the same person? Yet Stashower succeeds in a remarkable balancing act. He shows an attitude of hard-headed skepticism when it comes to spiritualist doctrine; but he also shows a deep sympathy for the “need to believe” that led Conan Doyle down this primrose path to public ridicule. His devotion cost Conan Doyle both financially and in personal terms. He tried to involve himself in the disappearance of Agatha Christie, consulting a medium for clues. His last novel about Professor Challenger was a preachy tale that ended with Challenger becoming a convert to spiritualism. He became increasingly concerned as spiritualists the world over began raising alarms in the late 1920s about a global ecological catastrophe that would end civilization.
There were costs and embarrassments on a more modest scale. He enjoyed a friendship with the American escape artist Harry Houdini, but their relationship foundered on the rocks of spiritualism. Even after Houdini exposed the trickery behind many spiritualist demonstrations, Conan Doyle remained a staunch believer; he came to suspect Houdini himself possessed psychic powers, including the ability to convert himself into ectoplasm and back again. Houdini, he said, refused to acknowledge this as a matter of professional pride. Their friendship ended in public recriminations.
Stashower’s book is a good literary biography, with generally positive but well-grounded assessments of Conan Doyle’s work in fiction and history. There was, sadly, a falling off of his literary abilities as he aged and as he devoted himself more and more to proselytizing for spiritualism. He was an indefatigable lecturer and, like Charles Dickens, pushed himself beyond endurance on the platform. He died of a heart attack in 1930, sitting quietly in a chair at home. His last words were to his wife: “You are wonderful.”
So is the book, and so is the audiobook.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Leigh A
- 09-01-09
Sympathetic biography
I would recommend this to anyone interested in Conan Doyle, his work, or the history of the turn of the previous century. Well written and sympathetic. A case could be made that it is a little too sympathetic, but if it was not so Conan Doyle could easily be portrayed as a nut case. As it is, the latter portion of his life is more comfortable to listen to. His wit is well displayed which also makes for a good read.
Richard Matthews as usual does a stellar job. It is, however, a little un-nerving to hear Felix Leiter (the American CIA agent in Casino Royal) as the voice of the American newspapers. Perhaps he borrowed the voice from Simon Vance or Robert Whitfield.
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1 person found this helpful