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AudioBook benefits
Did you know that audio books are becoming more and more popular by each day? For example, in 2004, over $124 million worth of audio books were sold in the UK and $120 million in Germany during 2005. Experts say that this year the market is expected to rise by 20% in Europe, and audio books seem to be even more popular in the USA. A survey showed a 6 % increase over 2005 with audio book sales now estimated at $923 million. You save time, because you can listen to such books anywhere and everywhere just like an mp3 audio, and you can even do other things at the same time. You can listen when driving to and from work, when walking the dog, cycling, working around the house or at the computer, exercising, and so on. The possibilities are endless. With a fast pace of life and work on the increase, many find it hard to find the time to read. The combination of audio books and MP3 players is making it possible for people to now get their reading in where ever they go. The easy listening of to-go audio books enables multitasking while exercising, commuting, or cleaning house.
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About the Author Tracy Hogg
Tracy Hogg who died from cancer on November 25 2004 aged 44, built a career as an expert in child-care and was nicknamed "the baby whisperer" for her ability to placate unruly infants.
Although British, she made her name in the eclectic state of California, where she was hired as a maternity nurse and adviser by many Hollywood stars, among them Jodie Foster, Cindy Crawford, Jamie Lee Curtis and Calista Flockhart; even Arnold Schwarzenegger is said to have sought her counsel. The Yorkshire-born Dr Dolittle of the nursery always addressed her employers as "love" or "duck".
It was a Hollywood producer who first referred to her as "the baby whisperer" - a reference to the book and film The Horse Whisperer, about a racehorse trainer with an uncanny ability to communicate with animals.
She once said: "I've looked after so many thousands of babies, I can understand their language. And I teach new parents to understand their baby too. I also get babies on a routine, so that after three weeks they're sleeping through the night." Her fee for three weeks as a maternity nurse was more than ,000.
If there was nothing particularly original about Tracy Hogg's approach to baby care, she had, according to her web site, "an uncanny ability to understand what babies need by listening to their cries and tuning in to their body language."
This ability had probably been sharpened by earlier work she had undertaken with disabled children, who often lack verbal communication skills.
Tracy Hogg was born to a large dairy-farming family near Doncaster, South Yorkshire, in August 1960. As a child she enjoyed accompanying her grandfather as he made his rounds at a local mental hospital, where he was head nurse. She attended the Doncaster School of Nursing. specialising in children with severe mental and physical disabilities. She underwent further training at Great Ormond Street, at the Children's Hospital in Leeds, and also did a stint with the World Health Organisation in India. At St Catherine's Hospital, Doncaster, she looked after children with learning difficulties.
In 1992 she moved to America with her second husband, a car dealer, leaving her two young daughters from her first marriage in the care of their grandmother. This led some to question her parenting abilities, but Tracy Hogg wanted her children to continue their education in England, and the girls joined her during the holidays.
Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, she was asked to help out a family with a new-born baby. The mother was Marilu Henner, who starred in the television sitcom Taxi. After that, reports of Tracy Hogg's skills spread by word of mouth. She went on to open a baby supplies store and set up an internet site, describing herself as "a British-trained nurse, lactation educator, and newborn consultant".
In addition to working with individual clients, she organised classes for parents and trained child-care workers. In 1997 she produced an audio-tape for breast-feeding mothers which was designed to induce relaxation and reduce anxiety.
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About the Author Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist. She is best known for the novel Little Women, published in 1868. This novel is loosely based on her childhood experiences with her three sisters.
Alcott was a daughter of noted Transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May Alcott. Louisa's father started the Temple School; her uncle, Samuel Joseph May, was a noted abolitionist. Though of New England parentage and residence, she was born in Germantown, which is currently part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She had three sisters: one elder (Anna Pratt Alcott) and two younger (Elizabeth Sewall Alcott and May Alcott). The family moved to Boston in 1834 or 1835, where her father established an experimental school and joined the Transcendental Club with Emerson and Thoreau.
During her childhood and early adulthood, she shared her family's poverty and Transcendentalist ideals. In 1840, after several setbacks with the school, her family moved to a cottage on two acres along the Sudbury River in Concord, Massachusetts. The Alcott family moved to the Utopian Fruitlands community for a brief interval in 1843-1844, and then after its collapse to rented rooms, and subsequently a house in Concord purchased with her mother's inheritance and help from Emerson. Alcott's early education had included lessons from the naturalist Henry David Thoreau but had chiefly been in the hands of her father. She also received some instruction from writers and educators such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller, who were all family friends. She later described these early years in a newspaper sketch entitled "Transcendental Wild Oats", afterwards reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers (1876), which relates the experiences of her family during their experiment in "plain living and high thinking" at Fruitlands.
As she grew older, she developed as both an abolitionist and a feminist. In 1847, the family housed a fugitive slave for one week; in 1848 Alcott read and admired the "Declaration of Sentiments" published by the Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights. Due to the family's poverty, she began work at an early age as an occasional teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic helper, and writer — her first book was Flower Fables (1854), tales originally written for Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In 1860, Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly, and she was nurse in the Union Hospital at Georgetown, D.C., for six weeks in 1862-1863. Her letters home, revised and published in the Commonwealth and collected as Hospital Sketches (1863, republished with additions in 1869), garnered her first critical recognition for her observations and humor. Her novel Moods (1864), was also promising.
A lesser-known part of her work are the passionate, fiery novels and stories she wrote, usually under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. These works, such as A Long Fatal Love Chase and Pauline's Passion and Punishment, were known in the Victorian Era as "potboilers" or "blood-and-thunder tales." Her character Jo in "Little Women" publishes several such stories but ultimately rejects them after being told that they are "dangerous for little minds." Their protagonists are willful and relentless in their pursuit of their own aims, which often include revenge on those who have humiliated or thwarted them. These works achieved immediate commercial success and remain highly readable today.
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AudioBook Narrator - Scott Brick
Since 1999, Scott Brick has recorded nearly 300 audiobooks. While work for Books on Tape represents almost 50% of his output, this tireless reader worked for virtually every audio publisher in 2006. Among the 25+ audiobooks he recorded last year, he delivered outstanding performances for Audio Renaissance (Joseph Finder’s Killer Instinct), Blackstone (Robert Littell’s Vicious Circle), Brilliance (Alex Kershaw’s The Few), Hachette (Nelson DeMille’s Wild Fire), Penguin (Clive Cussler’s Skeleton Coast) and Random House (Lincoln Child’s Deep Storm). PW’s review of his 2006 reading of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood said, “Brick’s surefooted performance is nothing short of stunning. This facile audio actor delivers an award-worthy performance.”
native of Southern California, Scott has been an actor (among other things) since leaving UCLA in the late 1980s. “I spent about 10 years in a traveling Shakespeare company, doing dozens of shows all over the state,” quoth “The Brickman,” as he sometimes calls himself. “I guess I’ve had a pretty solid grounding in the classics, as well as contemporary work. Beyond that, I’ve been a fan of old-time radio my entire life and have always been passionate about the spoken word. That’s the reason I wanted to be an actor, because I’m so fanatic about telling stories. And audiobooks are the purest form of doing that, aren’t they?”
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