Michael Hiltzik has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Dealers of Lightning.
Dealers of Lightning
Summary
Dealers of Lightning is the riveting story of the legendary Xerox PARC - a collection of eccentric young inventors brought together by Xerox Corporation at a facility in Palo Alto, California, during the mind-blowing intellectual ferment of the '70s and '80s. Here for the first time is revealed in piercing detail the true story of the extraordinary group that aimed to bring about a technological dawn that would change the world - and succeeded. Based on extensive interviews with scientists, engineers, administrators, and corporate executives who lived the story, Dealers of Lightning takes the listener on a journey from PARC's beginnings in a dusty, abandoned building at the edge of the Stanford University campus to its triumph as a hothouse of ideas that spawned not only the first personal computer, but the windows-style graphical user interface, the laser printer, much of the indispensable technology of the Internet, and a great deal more. It shows how and why Xerox, despite its willingness to grant PARC unlimited funding and the responsibility for developing breakthroughs to keep the corporation on the cutting edge of office technology, remained forever unable to grasp (and, consequently, exploit) the innovations that PARC delivered, and details the increasing frustration of the original PARC scientists, many of whom would go on to build their fortunes upon the very ideas Xerox so rashly discarded.
(P) and ©1999 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., All Rights Reserved, Harper Audio, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers
The New Deal
Summary
New York Times best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Michael Hiltzik tells the epic story of the New Deal through the outsized personalities of the people who fought for it, opposed it, and benefited from it, rendering vital lessons for our own time. As America struggles with an economic debacle akin to the Great Depression, nothing could be timelier than an authoritative account of the New Deal, masterfully written by Michael Hiltzik, author of the acclaimed history of the Hoover Dam, Colossus. In this richly peopled, vividly rendered narrative, Hiltzik describes how the urgent short-term relief measures of Franklin Roosevelt’s Hundred Days evolved into a transformative concept of the federal role in American life. Rather than the product of a single ideology, the New Deal emerged from the clash of ideas held by advisors from very different backgrounds. With historical and psychological insight, Hiltzik sheds light on the lives of the gargantuan characters who fought for and against it: Herbert Hoover, whose own administration gave birth to many of the programs that would become part of the New Deal; General Hugh Johnson, the West Pointer whose pugnacious leadership of the National Recovery Administration symbolized the New Deal for millions of Americans; Harry Hopkins, whose closeness to Roosevelt earned him the moniker “deputy president”; and many other fascinating figures. What emerges is a saga of how FDR managed to recast the federal government into something that still inspires: a unifying structure with the concept of social justice at its heart.
©2011 Michael Hiltzik (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Iron Empires
Summary
In 1869, when the final spike was driven into the Transcontinental Railroad, few were prepared for its seismic aftershocks. Once a hodgepodge of short, squabbling lines, America’s railways soon exploded into a titanic industry helmed by a pageant of speculators, crooks, and visionaries. The vicious competition between empire builders such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, and E. H. Harriman sparked stock market frenzies, panics, and crashes; provoked strikes that upended the relationship between management and labor; transformed the nation’s geography; and culminated in a ferocious two-man battle that shook the nation’s financial markets to their foundations and produced dramatic, lasting changes in the interplay of business and government. Spanning four decades and featuring some of the most iconic figures of the Gilded Age, Iron Empires reveals how the robber barons drove the country into the 20th century - and almost sent it off the rails. Narrated by Nick Tecosky.
©2020 Michael Hiltzik (P)2020 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
Big Science
Summary
Since the 1930s, the scale of scientific endeavors has grown exponentially. Machines have become larger, ambitions bolder. The first particle accelerator cost less than $100 and could be held in its creator's palm while its descendant, the Large Hadron Collider, cost $10 billion and is 17 miles in circumference. Scientists have invented nuclear weapons, put a man on the moon, and examined nature at the subatomic scale - all through Big Science, the industrial-scale research paid for by governments and corporations that have driven the great scientific projects of our time. The birth of Big Science can be traced to Berkeley, California, nearly nine decades ago, when a resourceful young scientist with a talent for physics and an even greater talent for promotion pondered his new invention and declared, "I'm going to be famous!" Ernest Orlando Lawrence's cyclotron would revolutionize nuclear physics, but that was only the beginning of its impact. It would change our understanding of the basic building blocks of nature. It would help win World War II. Its influence would be felt in academia and international politics. It was the beginning of Big Science. This is the incredible story of how one invention changed the world and of the man principally responsible for it all. Michael Hiltzik tells the riveting full story here for the first time.
©2015 Michael Hiltzik (P)2015 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books, recorded by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.
Colossus
Summary
As breathtaking today as when it was completed, Hoover Dam ranks among America's greatest achievements. The story of its conception, design, and construction is the story of the United States at a unique moment in history: when facing both a global economic crisis and the implacable elements of nature, we prevailed. The United States after Hoover Dam was a different country from the one that began to build it, going from the glorification of individual effort to the value of shared enterprise and communal support. The dam became the physical embodiment of this change. A remote regional construction project was transformed from a Republican afterthought into a New Deal symbol of national pride. Hoover Dam went on to shape not only the American West but the American century. Michael Hiltzik populates the epic tale of the dam's construction with larger-than-life characters, such as Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, William Mulholland, and the dam's egomaniacal architect, Frank Crowe. Shedding real light on a one-of-a-kind moment in 20th-century American history, Hiltzik combines exhaustive research, trenchant observation, and a gift for unforgettable storytelling in a book that is bound to become a classic in its genre.
©2010 Michael Hiltzik (P)2010 Tantor