4 audiobooks by high-profile authors

Here are four audiobooks from veteran writers with proven track records.

3. 'Rogue Lawyer,' by John Grisham

(Read by Mark Deakins; Harper Audio; 9 CDs; 11 hours and 30 minutes)
Though billed as a novel, this is really a collection of short stories featuring Sebastian Rudd, a tough cookie of a lawyer who works out of a bulletproof van and takes clients no one else will. Unfortunately, the stories are all similar and start to sound like a variation on a theme, making this mildly entertaining, but below John Grisham’s usual standards. Mark Deakins, a polished narrator with a deep, pleasant voice, always sounds natural.  Grade: B

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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