Thursday, August 7, 2014

SYNC Summer 2014: Week 13 #syncya


The end of summer is nigh! And so is the end of the 2014 SYNC program! :( That means this is the last week for free audiobooks! SYNC recently announced the list of audiobook pairings up for grabs this summer, and here's what you can grab through Wednesday of next week...for free!

This week's YA title is Living a Life That Matters: From Nazi Nightmare to American Dream by Ben Lesser, performed by Jonathan Silverman and Ben Lesser for Remembrance Publishing.

Add to Goodreads

In his highly readable, educational, and inspiring memoir, Holocaust Survivor Ben Lesser’s warm, grandfatherly tone invites the reader to do more than just visit a time when the world went mad. He also shows how this madness came to be–and the lessons that the world still needs to learn.

In this true story, the reader will see how an ordinary human being–an innocent child–not only survived the Nazi Nightmare, but achieved the American Dream–and how you can achieve it too.




This week's classic title is The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick, performed by Yelena Shmulenson for HighBridge Audio.

Add to Goodreads

At once fiercely immediate and complex in its implications, The Shawl succeeds in imagining the unimaginable: the horror of the Holocaust and the emptiness of its aftermath. It was written in 1977 but was first published in the early 1980s in The New Yorker. The Shawl won first prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories and was chosen for Best American Short Stories.

In The Shawl, a woman named Rosa Lublin watches a concentration camp guard murder her daughter. And there is a shawl–a shawl that can sustain a starving child or inadvertently destroy her, or even magically conjure her back to life.





The Holocaust has always fascinated me in a perverse way. I've been to the Holocaust Museum here in Dallas, and I studied the time period extensively in school. My family was lucky to evade persecution during this dark time in history because they'd already migrated to the States, but I know others were not so lucky, and so I feel it's my duty to honor those individuals by learning their stories. This week's audiobook pairing is sad, but it's also full of triumph.

Will you be picking up either of these titles?  Remember, they're only available through Wednesday, and new titles will be put up on Thursday for download.  Other things to note:


To download this week's titles, just click on the image below to be taken directly to the SYNC download page:


I hope you take advantage of this program. I've been doing it for the last few years, and I've had the opportunity to listen to a ton of great audio for free.  If you've never tried audiobooks before, it's a great opportunity to do so without the obligation of buying one that you might not enjoy.  And if you love audiobooks, well, it's a great time to stock up on some titles you may have missed.  Win/win.  =)

I hope you've enjoyed the SYNC program as much as I have this summer. The titles at the beginning of the summer were a bit more to my liking than recent pairings, but all are still worth a listen. And they're a great way to experience new narrators.

Happy listening!


No comments:

Post a Comment