Scott Brick is a super-prolific audiobook narrator and a favorite among Main library staff. He’s narrated books by just about everyone – people like Steve Berry, Terry Brooks, Harlan Coben, Philip K. Dick, John Grisham, Frank Herbert, Jon Krakauer, Erik Larson, and Brad Meltzer, to name a few (really, that’s the short list).
Most of those authors fall into the category of Manly Adventure, which really isn’t my thing. But I do quite enjoy alarming and/or depressing nonfiction, and Scott Brick does that, too. Here are a few examples!
I never noticed the eyes at the top before and now I’m all creeped out.
In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote – Truman Capote set off the whole true-crime-genre thing with his account of the murder of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas and the flight, capture, trial, and execution of their killers. Whenever I can’t decide what to listen to next, I just grab this one – it’s hypnotic, in an occasionally creepy way.
Just by looking at the cover, you can tell that this won’t end well.
Dead Wake, by Erik Larson – I’ve just finished listening to this book, which is about the sinking of the Lusitania. It was really interesting: Winston Churchill attempted to drive an old admiral batty, a German submarine had a litter of puppies, Woodrow Wilson tried to get some, and more! You’ll even learn the fate of the One Hot Dude That Everyone Remembered – apparently he was having a great time on the old Lusitania, up until that whole torpedo thing.
Conserving electricity obviously wasn’t a thing back then.
The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson – The book that every librarian is obliged to write about. It’s the story of the architect who designed the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and of the serial killer who stalked its grounds. You’ll probably end up fascinated by architecture. Or serial killers. Or both (I went with both).
Check out the print book for a handy diagram of a Titan II missile silo.
Command and Control, by Eric Schlosser – This super long audio book is a terrifying catalog of America’s near-misses with nuclear weapons accidents – everything from a dropped wrench that lead to a fuel tank explosion to the tale of a warhead (undetonated, obviously and thankfully) that’s still lost somewhere in North Carolina. It’s a great book for anyone who has fond memories of the Cold War (I rather miss the James Bond villians; they were better then) or who is just wondering what all the fuss was about.
All of the links above point to books on CD in our catalog, but you can also find tons of downloadable Bricky goodness in our OverDrive collection – a simple search for his name pulls up 171 titles!
– Amy
Eleventh Stack 