Michael D’Antonio
All Books By Michael D’Antonio
A Ball, a Dog, and a Monkey
- By: Michael D’Antonio
- Length: 10 hours 53 minutes
- Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
- Publish date: October 02, 2007
- Language: English
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3.76(194 ratings)
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Michael D’Antonio captures the wackiness of the first year of the space race as the Americans scrambled desperately to match the Soviets and President Eisenhower intervened to guarantee that the space program would not be run by the military.
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite into orbit around the earth. Little more than a month later, the Soviets launched Sputnik II. News of Sputnik created panic in Washington, D.C., and throughout the United States. Within days, the U.S. military began a madcap race to space full of crashes, skullduggery, and backstabbing until Eisenhower’s secret civilian program surpassed the Soviets by putting the first American-a hero monkey named Gordo-into orbit.
D’Antonio draws on archives, film footage, and interviews with many of the scientists, reporters, and others who were involved in the first year of the space race. He recounts the early days of the space race with all the zaniness and urgency of the time, just in time for fiftieth anniversary commemorations.
A Consequential President
- By: Michael D’Antonio
- Narrator: George Newbern
- Length: 8 hours 2 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2017
- Language: English
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3.72(38 ratings)
Once a most unlikely candidate, Barack Obama’s successful campaign for the White House made him a worldwide sensation and a transformative figure even before he was inaugurated. Elected as the Iraq War and Great Recession discouraged millions of Americans, Obama’s promise of hope revived the national spirit. Had he only saved the economy, Obama would be considered a truly successful president. However he has achieved so much more, against ferocious opposition, that he can be counted as one of the most consequential presidents in history. With health care reform, he ended a crisis of escalating costs and inadequate access that threatened 50 million people. His energy policies drove down the cost of power generated by the sun, wind, and even fossil fuels. His climate change efforts produced the first treaty to address global warming in a meaningful way, and his diplomacy produced a dramatic reduction in the nuclear threat posed by Iran. Add the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, the normalization of relations with Cuba, and the “pivot” toward Asia, and his successes abroad match those at home. In A CONSEQUENTIAL PRESIDENT, Michael D’Antonio tallies Obama’s long record of achievement, both his major successes and less-noticed ones that nevertheless contribute to his legacy. Obama’s greatest achievement came as he restored dignity and ethics to the office of the president, proof that he delivered the hope and change he promised.
... Read moreA Full Cup
- By: Michael D’Antonio
- Length: 12 hours 15 minutes
- Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
- Publish date: July 12, 2010
- Language: English
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3.82(127 ratings)
Today Lipton means tea. However, in his time Sir Thomas Lipton was known for much more. Raised in desperate poverty, he became rich beyond his wildest dreams. he built a global empire of markets, factories, plantations, and stockyards. And his colorful pursuit of the America’s Cup trophy made him a beloved figure on both sides of the Atlantic.
In A Full Cup, Michael D’Antonio tells the tale of this larger-than-life figure. Beginning with a journey across the United States just after the Civil War, Thomas J. Lipton developed the ambition and learned the business techniques that helped him create the first chain of grocery stores. Wealthy before age thirty, he set his sights on the tea trade, and soon his name became synonymous with the product. Lipton’s great business success makes for a compelling story of innovation and achievement. Moreover, though, Lipton’s most intriguing creation was a public persona-one of the first formed with the help of a modern mass media-that appealed to millions of ordinary people, as well as the elites in America and Europe. Concocting simple stunts like elephant parades, Lipton mastered the new art of obtaining free publicity. With shameless self-promotion, he became one of the world’s most eligible bachelors and a patron of the poor, and he ultimately reached legendary heights when he revived the competition for the America’s Cup. With one losing attempt after another, the gallant Lipton, who didn’t even know how to sail his own yacht, became ever more popular. D’Antonio’s biography brings to vivid life this remarkable figure.
Hershey
- By: Michael D’Antonio
- Length: 13 hours 34 minutes
- Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
- Publish date: January 17, 2019
- Language: English
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3.79(910 ratings)
The name Hershey evokes many things: chocolate bars, the company town in Pennsylvania, one of America’s most recognizable brands. But who was the man behind the name? In this compelling biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael D’Antonio gives us the real-life rags-to-riches story of Milton S. Hershey, a largely uneducated businessman whose idealistic sense of purpose created an immense financial empire, a town, and a legacy that lasts to this day.
Hershey, the son of a minister’s daughter and an irresponsible father who deserted the family, began his career inauspiciously when the two candy shops he opened both went bankrupt. Undeterred, he started the Lancaster Caramel Company, which brought him success at last. Eventually he sold his caramel operation and went on to perfect the production process of chocolate to create a stable, consistent bar with a long shelf life . . . and an American icon was born.
Hershey was more than a successful businessman-he was a progressive thinker who believed in capitalism as a means to higher goals. He built the world’s largest chocolate factory and a utopian village for his workers on a large tract of land in rural Pennsylvania, and used his own fortune to keep his workers employed during the Great Depression. In addition, he secretly willed his fortune to a boys’ school and orphanage, both of which now control a vast endowment.
Extensively researched and vividly written, Hershey is the fascinating story of this uniquely American visionary.
High Crimes
- By: Michael D’Antonio
- Narrator: Robert Fass
- Length: 16 hours 22 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: October 20, 2020
- Language: English
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4.43(30 ratings)
Two award-winning journalists offer the most comprehensive inside story behind our most significant modern political drama: the House impeachment of Donald Trump.
Having spent a year essentially embedded inside several House committees, Michael D’Antonio and Peter Eisner draw on many sources, including key House leaders, to expose the politicking, playcalling, and strategies debated backstage and to explain the Democrats’ successes and apparent public failures during the show itself.
High Crimes opens with Nancy Pelosi deciding the House should take up impeachment, then, in part one, leaps back to explain what Ukraine was really all about: not just Joe Biden and election interference, but a money grab and oil. In the second part, the authors recount key meetings throughout the run up to the impeachment hearings, including many of the heated confrontations between the Trump administration and House Democrats. And the third part takes listeners behind the scenes of those hearings, showing why certain things happened the way they did for reasons that never came up in public.
In the end, having illuminated every step of impeachment, from the schemes that led Giuliani to the Ukraine in 2016 to Fiona Hill’s rebuking the Republicans’ conspiracy theories, High Crimes promises to be Trump’s Final Days.
A Macmillan Audio production from Thomas Dunne Books
... Read moreMortal Sins
- By: Michael D’Antonio
- Length: 16 hours 58 minutes
- Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
- Publish date: December 25, 2018
- Language: English
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4.07(370 ratings)
An explosive, sweeping account of the scandal that has sent the Catholic Church into a tailspin-and the brave few who fought for justice
In the mid-1980s a dynamic young monsignor assigned to the Vatican’s embassy in Washington set out to investigate the problem of sexually abusive priests. He found a scandal in the making, confirmed by secret files revealing complaints that had been hidden from police and covered up by the Church hierarchy. He also understood that the United States judicial system was eager to punish offenders and those who aided them. He presented all of this to the American bishops, warning that the Church could be devastated by negative publicity and bankrupted by its legal liability. They ignored him.
Meanwhile, a young lawyer listened to a new client describe an abusive sexual history with a priest that began when he was ten years old. His parents’ complaints were downplayed by Church officials who offered them money to go away. The lawyer saw a claim that any defendant would want to settle. Then he began to suspect he was onto something bigger, involving thousands of priests who had abused countless children while the Church had done almost nothing about it. The lawsuit he filed would touch off a legal war of historic and global proportions.
Part history, part journalism, and part true-crime thriller, Michael D’Antonio’s Mortal Sins brings to mind landmark books such as All the President’s Men, And the Band Played On, and The Informant, as it reveals a long and ferocious battle for the soul of the largest and oldest organization in the world.
Mosquito
- By: Michael D’Antonio
- Length: 7 hours 14 minutes
- Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
- Publish date: May 19, 2020
- Language: English
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3.89(358 ratings)
Now in audio-a fascinating work of popular science from a world-renowned expert on mosquitoes and a prize-winning reporter.
In this lively and comprehensive portrait of the mosquito, its role in history, and its threat to mankind, Spielman and D’Antonio take a mosquito’s-eye view of nature and man. They show us how mosquitoes breed, live, mate, and die, and introduce us to their enemies, both natural and man-made. The authors present tragic and often grotesque examples of how the mosquito has insinuated itself into human history, from the malaria that devastated invaders of ancient Rome to the current widespread West Nile fever panic. Filled with little-known facts and remarkable anecdotes that bring this tiny being into larger focus, Mosquito offers fascinating, alarming, and convincing evidence that the sooner we get to know this pesky insect, the better off we’ll be.
Never Enough
- By: Michael D’Antonio
- Narrator: Eric Pollins
- Length: 16 hours 15 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: September 22, 2015
- Language: English
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3.54(318 ratings)
In the summer of 2015, as he vaulted to the lead among the many GOP candidates for president, Donald Trump was the only one dogged by questions about his true intentions. This most famous American businessman had played the role of provocateur so often that pundits, reporters, and voters struggled to believe that he was a serious contender. Trump stirred so much controversy that his candidacy puzzled anyone who applied ordinary political logic to the race. But as Michael D’Antonio shows in Never Enough, Trump has rarely been ordinary in his pursuit of success and his trademark method is based on a logic that begins with his firm belief that he is a singular and superior human being.
As revealed in this landmark biography, Donald Trump is a man whose appetite for wealth, attention, power, and conquest is practically insatiable. Declaring that he is still the person he was as a rascally little boy, Trump confesses that he avoids reflecting on himself “because I might not like what I see” and he believes “most people aren’t worthy of respect.”
A product of the media age and the Me Generation that emerged in the 1970s, Trump was a Broadway showman before he became a developer. Mentored by the scoundrel attorney Roy Cohn, Trump was a regular on the New York club scene and won press attention as a dashing young mogul before he had built his first major project. He leveraged his father’s enormous fortune and political connections to get his business off the ground, and soon developed a larger-than-life persona. In time, and through many setbacks, he made himself into a living symbol of extravagance and achievement.
Drawing upon extensive and exclusive interviews with Trump and many of his family members, including all his adult children, D’Antonio presents the full story of a truly American icon, from his beginnings as a businessman to his stormy romantic life and his pursuit of power in its many forms. For all those who wonder: Just who is Donald Trump?, Never Enough supplies the answer. He is a promoter, builder, performer and politician who pursues success with a drive that borders on obsession and yet, has given him, almost everything he ever wanted.
... Read moreSpend Shift
- By: Michael D’Antonio
- Length: 8 hours 59 minutes
- Publisher: Ascent Audio
- Publish date: July 20, 2020
- Language: English
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3.31(68 ratings)
How we, consumers, responded to the 2008 recession and continue to respond to its aftermath is the crux of much speculation. Will we remain “frugal” or will we go back to our spending ways? What about this economic crisis has changed the way we live and how will it affect America’s future? After decades of unfettered indulgence, Americans are spent. We over-consumed–financed with debt–which has overleveraged our country and erased 13 trillion of consumer wealth and nearly 45% in America’s equities and housing values. In the process, we have decimated trust in our financial system, government, and business. In SPEND SHIFT, John Gerzema, Chief Insights Officer at Young how we are moving from mindless to mindful consumption; and how we are opting for better goods and services, rather than just “more.” As a consequence, companies are presented with an extraordinary opportunity to revolutionize their models to reconnect with the new, unwound consumer. Businesses that adapt to these new consumer behaviors will drive business that scale reputation, not debt, and that will expand profit margins by delivering both “value” and “values.” Through insight, social data, and in depth observation, SPEND SHIFT analyzes the changing American consumer psyche, documents the five shifting values and consumer behaviors that are remaking America, and explains what it means to businesses and leaders. This will be a must-read for anyone interested in how consumerism is changing and how to understand and connect with consumer during and after the recession.
... Read moreThe Athena Doctrine
- By: Michael D’Antonio
- Length: 9 hours 37 minutes
- Publisher: Ascent Audio
- Publish date: July 20, 2020
- Language: English
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3.35(260 ratings)
Among 64,000 people surveyed in thirteen nations, two-thirds feel the world would be a better place if men thought more like women. This marks a burgeoning global trend away from the winner-takes-all, masculine approach to getting things done. Drawing from interviews at innovative organizations in eighteen nations and at Fortune 500 boardrooms, the authors reveal how men and women alike are recognizing significant value in traits commonly associated with women, such as nurturing, cooperation, communication, and sharing. The Athena Doctrine shows why femininity is the operating system of 21st century prosperity: Leadership: values traditionally associated with women create more effective leadership and organizational strategies in todays society. Career management and self-improvement: traits associated with womenflexibility, empathy, and honestyunderpin career mobility and personal fulfillment. Change management: feminine traits help us adapt seamlessly and effectively to todays changes. Brought to life through real world portraits of women and men who lead Fortune 1000 businesses, new ventures, government and nonprofit agencies, and community groups–and backed by rigorous data–social theorist John Gerzema and author Michael D’Antonio show how traditionally feminine traits are ascending and bringing success to people and organizations around the world. By nurturing, listening, collaborating and sharing, women and men are solving problems, finding profits, and redefining success in every realm.
... Read moreThe Hunting of Hillary
- By: Michael D’Antonio
- Narrator: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 10 hours 51 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: July 28, 2020
- Language: English
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3.77(105 ratings)
The Hunting of Hillary traces how an entire industry of hate, lies, and fear was created to persecute Hillary Clinton for decades and profit from it.
In The Hunting of Hillary, presidential biographer Michael D’Antonio details the years of lies and insults heaped upon Hillary Clinton as she pursued a life devoted to politics and policy. The worst took the form of sexism and misogyny, much of it barely disguised.
A pioneer for women, Clinton was burdened in ways no man ever was. Defined by a right-wing conspiracy, she couldn’t declare what was happening lest she be cast as weak and whiny. Nevertheless, she persisted and wouldn’t let them define her. As The Hunting of Hillary makes clear, her achievements have been all the more remarkable for the unique opposition she encountered. The 2016 presidential election can only be understood in the context of the primal and primitive response of those who just couldn’t imagine that a woman might lead.
For those who seek to understand the experience of the most accomplished woman in American politics, The Hunting of Hillary offers insight. For those who recognized what happened to her, it offers affirmation. And for those who hope to carry Clinton’s work into the future, it offers inspiration and instruction.
A Macmillan Audio production from Thomas Dunne Books
... Read moreThe Shadow President
- By: Michael D’Antonio
- Narrator: Robert Fass
- Length: 11 hours 17 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: August 28, 2018
- Language: English
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3.53(214 ratings)
In this well-rounded, deeply-investigated biography, the first full look at the vice president, two award-winning journalists unmask the real Mike Pence.
Little-known outside his home state until Donald Trump made him his running mate, Mike Pence–who proclaims himself a Christian first, a conservative second, and a Republican third–has long worn a carefully-constructed mask of Midwestern nice. Behind his self-proclaimed humility and self-abasing deference, however, hides a man whose own presidential ambitions have blazed since high school. Pence’s drive for power, perhaps inspired by his belief that God might have big plans for him, explains why he shocked his allies by lending Christian credibility to a scandal-plagued candidate like Trump.
In this landmark biography, Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael D’Antonio and Emmy-nominated journalist Peter Eisner follow the path Pence followed from Catholic Democrat to conservative evangelical Republican. They reveal how he used his time as rightwing radio star to build connections with powerful donors; how he was a lackluster lawmaker in Congress but a prodigious fundraiser from the GOP’s billionaire benefactors; and how, once he locked in his views on the issues–anti-gay, pro-gun, anti-abortion, pro big-business–he became laser-focused on his own pursuit of power.
As THE SHADOW PRESIDENT reveals, Mike Pence is the most important and powerful Christian Right politician America has ever seen. Driven as much by theology as personal ambition, Pence is now positioned to seize the big prize–the presidency–and use it to fashion a nation more pleasing to his god and corporate sponsors.
Praise for The Shadow President:
“It presents an entirely damning portrait of Pence. You’ve seen his colors before, but not so vividly and in this detail.” — Frank Bruni, The New York Times
“Producing a biography of a living, controversial politician is always difficult. D’Antonio and Eisner have succeeded in this well-documented, damning book.”–Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
... Read moreThe Truth About Trump
- By: Michael D’Antonio
- Narrator: Eric Pollins
- Length: 16 hours 15 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: March 08, 2016
- Language: English
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3.54(147 ratings)
For all those who wonder, “Just who is Donald Trump?”,
The Truth About Trump supplies the answer.
Drawing upon exclusive interviews and exhaustive research, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Michael D’Antonio presents Trump’s full story, from his beginnings as a businessman to his juggernaut presidential campaign. Along the way, D’Antonio charts the successes and failures, scandals and triumphs, and relentless pursuit of money and fame that have made Trump who he is today. D’Antonio also details the origins of the Trump family fortune, Trump’s history of using politics to get ahead, and how he has mastered the media to turn publicity into power.
First published in 2015, and now updated to cover Trump’s rise to political prominence, The Truth About Trump is an unsparing, eye-opening account of the life and career of the most talked-about man in America.
This audiobook was previously published as Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success.
“A carefully reported and fair-minded account.”–USA Today
“A brisk and entertaining read, drawing on interviews and documents and distilling decades’ worth of news coverage to tell the story of Trump’s childhood, family, business deals, and political forays.” –The Washington Post
“Balanced, well sourced, and perfectly timed.”–Financial Times (UK)
... Read more