John Bloom has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.5★ across 7 ratings. The most-rated is Evidence of Love.
Evidence of Love
Summary
Candy Montgomery and Betty Gore had a lot in common: They sang together in the Methodist church choir, their daughters were best friends, and their husbands had good jobs working for technology companies in the North Dallas suburbs known as Silicon Prairie. But beneath the placid surface of their seemingly perfect lives, both women simmered with unspoken frustrations and unanswered desires. On a hot summer day in 1980, the secret passions and jealousies that linked Candy and Betty exploded into murderous rage. What happened next is usually the stuff of fiction. But the bizarre and terrible act of violence that occurred in Betty's utility room that morning was all too real. Based on exclusive interviews with the Montgomery and Gore families, Evidence of Love is the riveting account of a gruesome tragedy and the trial that made national headlines when the defendant entered the most unexpected of pleas: not guilty by reason of self-defense (Fort Worth Star-Telegram). Adapted into the Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning television movie A Killing in a Small Town, this chilling tale of sin and savagery will "fascinate true crime aficionados" (Kirkus Reviews).
©1983 John Bloom and James R. Atkinson (P)2019 Tantor
Eccentric Orbits
Summary
The incredible story of Iridium - the most complex satellite system ever built, the cell phone of the future, and one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in American history - and one man's desperate race to save it. In the early 1990s, Motorola, the legendary American technology company, developed a revolutionary satellite system called Iridium that promised to be its crowning achievement. Light-years ahead of anything previously put into space, and built on technology developed for Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars", Iridium's constellation of 66 satellites in polar orbit meant that no matter where you were on Earth, at least one satellite was always overhead, and you could call Tibet from Fiji without a delay and without your call ever touching a wire. Iridium the satellite system was a mind-boggling technical accomplishment, surely the future of communication. The only problem was that Iridium the company was a commercial disaster. Only months after launching service, it was $11 billion in debt, burning through $100 million a month, and crippled by baroque rate plans and agreements that forced calls through Moscow; Beijing; Fucino, Italy; and elsewhere. Bankruptcy was inevitable - the largest to that point in American history. And when no real buyers seemed to materialize, it looked like Iridium would go down as just a "science experiment". That is, until Dan Colussy got a wild idea. Colussy, a former head of Pan Am now retired and working on his golf game in Palm Beach, heard about Motorola's plans to "de-orbit" the system and decided he would buy Iridium and somehow turn around one of the biggest blunders in the history of business. In Eccentric Orbits, John Bloom masterfully traces the conception, development, and launching of Iridium and Colussy's tireless efforts to stop it from being destroyed, from meetings with his motley investor group to the Clinton White House, the Pentagon, and the hunt for customers in special ops, shipping, aviation, mining, search and rescue - anyone who would need a durable phone at the end of the Earth. Impeccably researched and wonderfully told, Eccentric Orbits is a rollicking, unforgettable tale of technological achievement, business failure, the military-industrial complex, and one of the greatest deals of all time.
©2016 John Bloom (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.