Simon Parkin has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 2 ratings. The most-rated is A Game of Birds and Wolves.
A Game of Birds and Wolves
Summary
As heard on the New Yorker Radio Hour: The triumphant and "engaging history" (The New Yorker) of the young women who devised a winning strategy that defeated Nazi U-boats and delivered a decisive victory in the Battle of the Atlantic. By 1941, Winston Churchill had come to believe that the outcome of World War II rested on the battle for the Atlantic. A grand strategy game was devised by Captain Gilbert Roberts and a group of 10 Wrens (members of the Women's Royal Naval Service) assigned to his team in an attempt to reveal the tactics behind the vicious success of the German U-boats. Played on a linoleum floor divided into painted squares, it required model ships to be moved across a make-believe ocean in a manner reminiscent of the childhood game Battleship. Through play, the designers developed "Operation Raspberry", a counter-maneuver that helped turn the tide of World War II. Combining vibrant novelistic storytelling with extensive research, interviews, and previously unpublished accounts, Simon Parkin describes for the first time the role that women played in developing the Allied strategy that, in the words of one admiral, "contributed in no small measure to the final defeat of Germany". Rich with unforgettable cinematic detail and larger-than-life characters, A Game of Birds and Wolves is a heart-wrenching tale of ingenuity, dedication, perseverance, and love, bringing to life the imagination and sacrifice required to defeat the Nazis at sea.
©2020 Simon Parkin (P)2020 Little, Brown & Company
Death by Video Game
Summary
In Canada, volunteers are raising money for charity by playing marathon stints of Penn & Teller's Desert Bus, probably the worst video game ever created. Across the globe, thousands of viewers tune in to Kurt J. Mac's epic but seemingly pointless voyage towards the outer realms of Minecraft's procedurally generated world. In Iraq, mothers encourage their children to enter Call of Duty competitions to keep them off the bomb-ravaged streets of Baghdad. And in Taiwan, a spate of deaths at gaming cafés is raising questions about what playing video games does to us. In Death by Video Game, renowned gaming journalist Simon Parkin delves into the lives of obsessive gamers to answer the question: why do we spend so many hours of our lives in virtual playgrounds? Telling the stories of gamers and the developers who create the worlds they obsessively inhabit, Death by Video Game is a window on the human stories that have made video games the 21st century's most vibrant cultural medium.
©2015 Simon Parkin (P)2015 Audible, Ltd