The History & Culture category has 154 audiobooks on Listento.it, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 371 ratings. The most-rated is Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You.
The Downstairs Girl
Summary
From the critically-acclaimed author of Under a Painted Sky and Outrun the Moon and founding member of We Need Diverse Books comes a powerful novel about identity, betrayal, and the meaning of family. By day, 17-year-old Jo Kuan works as a lady's maid for the cruel daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Atlanta. But by night, Jo moonlights as the pseudonymous author of a newspaper advice column for the genteel Southern lady, "Dear Miss Sweetie". When her column becomes wildly popular, she uses the power of the pen to address some of society's ills, but she's not prepared for the backlash that follows when her column challenges fixed ideas about race and gender. While her opponents clamor to uncover the secret identity of Miss Sweetie, a mysterious letter sets Jo off on a search for her own past and the parents who abandoned her as a baby. But when her efforts put her in the crosshairs of Atlanta's most notorious criminal, Jo must decide whether she, a girl used to living in the shadows, is ready to step into the light. With prose that is witty, insightful, and at times heartbreaking, Stacey Lee masterfully crafts an extraordinary social drama set in the New South.
©2019 Stacey Lee (P)2019 Tantor
Exploding the Phone
Summary
Before smartphones, back even before the Internet and personal computer, a misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out how to hack the world’s largest machine: the telephone system. Starting with Alexander Graham Bell’s revolutionary "harmonic telegraph", by the middle of the 20th century the phone system had grown into something extraordinary, a web of cutting-edge switching machines and human operators that linked together millions of people like never before. But the network had a billion-dollar flaw, and once people discovered it, things would never be the same. Exploding the Phone tells this story in full for the first time. It traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T’s monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell’s Achilles’ heel. Phil Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine underground of "phone phreaks" who turned the network into their electronic playground, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, the explosion of telephone hacking in the counterculture, and the war between the phreaks, the phone company, and the FBI. The product of extensive original research, Exploding the Phone is a groundbreaking, captivating book.
©2013 Philip D. Lapsley. Recorded by arrangement with Grove/Atlantic, Inc. (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
The Nature of Technology
Summary
"More than any thing else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being," says W. Brian Arthur. Yet until now, the major questions of technology have gone unanswered. Where do new technologies come from -- how exactly does invention work? What constitutes innovation, and how is it achieved? Why are certain regions -- Cambridge, England, in the 1920s and Silicon Valley today -- hotbeds of innovation, while others languish? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? How do new industries, and the economy itself, emerge from technologies? In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur sets forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology that gives answers to these questions.The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of technology's origins and evolution. It achieves for the progress of technology what Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress. Arthur explains how transformative new technologies arise and how innovation really works.Conventional thinking ascribes the invention of technologies to "thinking outside the box", or vaguely to genius or creativity, but Arthur shows that such explanations are inadequate. Rather, technologies are put together from pieces - themselves technologies - that already exist. Technologies therefore share common ancestries and combine, morph, and combine again to create further technologies. Technology evolves much as a coral reef builds itself from activities of small organisms -- it creates itself from itself; all technologies are descended from earlier technologies.Drawing on a wealth of examples, from historical inventions to the high-tech wonders of today, and writing in wonderfully engaging and clear prose, Arthur takes us on a mind-opening journey that will change the way we think about technology and how it structures our lives.
©2009 W. Brian Arthur (P)2009 Audible, Inc.
The Weather Machine
Summary
From the acclaimed author of Tubes, a lively and surprising tour of the infrastructure behind the weather forecast, the people who built it, and what it reveals about our climate and our planet The weather is the foundation of our daily lives. It’s a staple of small talk, the app on our smartphones, and often the first thing we check each morning. Yet behind these quotidian interactions is one of the most expansive machines human beings have ever constructed - a triumph of science, technology, and global cooperation. But what is this "weather machine" and who created it? In The Weather Machine, Andrew Blum takes listeners on a fascinating journey through an everyday miracle. In a quest to understand how the forecast works, he visits old weather stations and watches new satellites blast off. He follows the dogged efforts of scientists to create a supercomputer model of the atmosphere, and traces the surprising history of the algorithms that power their work. He discovers that we have quietly entered a golden age of meteorology - our tools allow us to predict weather more accurately than ever, and yet we haven’t learned to trust them, nor can we guarantee the fragile international alliances that allow our modern weather machine to exist. Written with the sharp wit and infectious curiosity Andrew Blum is known for, The Weather Machine pulls back the curtain on a universal part of our everyday lives, illuminating our relationships with technology, the planet, and the global community.
©2019 Andrew Blum (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers
Every Falling Star
Summary
Every Falling Star, the first book to portray contemporary North Korea to a young audience, is the intense memoir of a North Korean boy named Sungju, who is forced at age 12 to live on the streets and fend for himself. To survive, Sungju creates a gang and lives by thieving, fighting, begging, and stealing rides on cargo trains. Sungju richly recreates his scabrous story, depicting what it was like for a boy alone to create a new family with his gang, his "brothers"; to be hungry and to fear arrest, imprisonment, and even execution. This riveting memoir allows young listeners to learn about other cultures where freedoms they take for granted do not exist.
©2016 Sungju Lee (P)2016 Tantor
![Cover art for Los innovadores: Los genios que inventaron el futuro [The Innovators: The Geniuses Who Invented the Future]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51tb7PjsILL._SL500_.jpg)
Los innovadores: Los genios que inventaron el futuro [The Innovators: The Geniuses Who Invented the Future]
Summary
En una era que busca fomentar la innovación, la creatividad y el trabajo en equipo, Los innovadores es la obra que mejor muestra cómo se producen. Tras su extraordinaria biografía de Steve Jobs, el nuevo libro de Walter Isaacson cuenta la fascinante historia de las personas que inventaron el ordenador e internet; Los innovadores está destinado a convertirse en la historia definitiva de la revolución digital y en una guía indispensable para entender cómo sucede realmente la innovación. ¿Qué talentos y habilidades permitieron a algunos inventores y empresarios convertir sus ideas visionarias en realidades disruptivas? ¿De dónde vinieron esos saltos creativos? ¿Por qué algunos triunfaron y otros fracasaron? En esta magistral saga, Isaacson arranca con Ada Lovelace, la hija de lord Byron, una pionera de la programación informática en la década de 1840. Además, presenta a las extraordinarias personas que crearon la revolución digital que nos rodea, gente como Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee o Larry Page. Esta es la historia de cómo funcionan sus cerebros y por qué han sido tan inventivos, pero también de cómo su capacidad para colaborar y dominar el arte del trabajo en equipo les hizo aún más creativos. Please note: This audiobook is in Spanish.
©2014 Walter Isaacson (P)2016 Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S.A.U.
They Went Left
Summary
A tour de force historical mystery from Monica Hesse, the best-selling and award-winning author of Girl in the Blue Coat. Germany, 1945. The soldiers who liberated the Gross-Rosen concentration camp said the war was over, but nothing feels over to 18-year-old Zofia Lederman. Her body has barely begun to heal; her mind feels broken. And her life is completely shattered: Three years ago, she and her younger brother, Abek, were the only members of their family to be sent to the right, away from the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Everyone else - her parents, her grandmother, radiant Aunt Maja - they went left. Zofia's last words to her brother were a promise: "Abek to Zofia, A to Z. When I find you again, we will fill our alphabet." Now her journey to fulfill that vow takes her through Poland and Germany and into a displaced persons camp where everyone she meets is trying to piece together a future from a painful past: Miriam, desperately searching for the twin she was separated from after they survived medical experimentation. Breine, a former heiress, who now longs only for a simple wedding with her new fiancé. And Josef, who guards his past behind a wall of secrets and is beautiful and strange and magnetic all at once. But the deeper Zofia digs, the more impossible her search seems. How can she find one boy in a sea of the missing? In the rubble of a broken continent, Zofia must delve into a mystery whose answers could break her - or help her rebuild her world.
©2020 Monica Hesse (P)2020 Hachette Audio
![Cover art for Lugares asombrosos [Amazing Places]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61q8+krAxlL._SL500_.jpg)
Lugares asombrosos [Amazing Places]
Summary
Luisito Comunica viaja de un extremo a otro del planeta. La curiosidad es el motor de las aventuras que lo lanzan hasta los terrenos más inhóspitos y misteriosos. En Lugares asombrosos. Travesías insólitas y otras maneras extrañas de conocer el mundo podrás viajar -con Luisito como compañero y guía- a los lugares más recónditos de uno, dos y más continentes: a sitios abandonados que conservan la huella de un hecho inexplicable; espacios delineados por trazos y personajes místicos; habitáculos hechizados por almas que vagan entre dimensiones desconocidas; zonas marcadas por los errores de la historia y sus fantasmas, y pintorescas comisuras del orbe con el sello de una costumbre o un suceso perturbador. Una guía de viajes y aventuras bizarras con tips de cómo llegar, cuánto se gasta, dónde comer, dónde hospedarse, qué visitar, qué llevar en tu maleta... y muchos otros consejos acerca de reglamentación, precauciones, tipos de divisa, documentos especiales ¡y más! Apto para viajeros temerarios y trotamundos implacables. "Quiero que reflexiones sobre lo hermoso que es nuestro mundo y al mismo tiempo te sientas aterrorizado de vivir aquí. ¿Qué no se trata de eso la vida: de sorprendernos constantemente por lo que fue y será?" (Luisito Comunica) Please note: This audiobook is in Spanish.
©2019 Luisito Comunica (P)2019 Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial
A Deadly Wandering
Summary
An ordinary Utah college student named Reggie Shaw fatally strikes two rocket scientists while texting and driving. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Matt Richtel follows Reggie from the moment of the tragedy, through the police investigation, the state's groundbreaking prosecution, and ultimately, Reggie's wrenching admission of responsibility. Richtel parallels Reggie's journey with leading-edge scientific findings regarding human attention and the impact of technology on our brains. Remarkably, today Reggie is a leading advocate who has helped spark a national effort targeting distracted driving, and the arc of his story provides a window through which Richtel pursues actionable solutions to help manage this crisis individually and as a society. A propulsive listen filled with fascinating scientific detail, riveting narrative tension, and rare emotional depth, A Deadly Wandering is an audiobook that can change - and save - lives.
©2014 Matthew Richtel (P)2014 HarperCollins Publishers
Across Five Aprils
Summary
This compelling classic of a boy's coming of age during the Civil War is based on stories the author's grandfather told her about his own life.
©1965 Irene Hunt (P)2002 Audio Bookshelf
The Glass Cage
Summary
At once a celebration of technology and a warning about its misuse, The Glass Cage will change the way you think about the tools you use every day. In The Glass Cage, bestselling author Nicholas Carr digs behind the headlines about factory robots and self-driving cars, wearable computers and digitized medicine, as he explores the hidden costs of granting software dominion over our work and our leisure. Even as they bring ease to our lives, these programs are stealing something essential from us. Drawing on psychological and neurological studies that underscore how tightly people’s happiness and satisfaction are tied to performing hard work in the real world, Carr reveals something we already suspect: shifting our attention to computer screens can leave us disengaged and discontented. From nineteenth-century textile mills to the cockpits of modern jets, from the frozen hunting grounds of Inuit tribes to the sterile landscapes of GPS maps, The Glass Cage explores the impact of automation from a deeply human perspective, examining the personal as well as the economic consequences of our growing dependence on computers. With a characteristic blend of history and philosophy, poetry and science, Carr takes us on a journey from the work and early theory of Adam Smith and Alfred North Whitehead to the latest research into human attention, memory, and happiness, culminating in a moving meditation on how we can use technology to expand the human experience.
©2014 Nicholas Carr (P)2014 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
Hidden Girl
Summary
Shyima Hall was born in Egypt on September 29, 1989, the seventh child of desperately poor parents. When she was eight, her parents sold her into slavery. Shyima then moved two hours away to Egypt's capitol city of Cairo to live with a wealthy family and serve them eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. When she was ten, her captors moved to Orange County, California, and smuggled Shyima with them. Two years later, an anonymous call from a neighbor brought about the end of Shyima's servitude - but her journey to true freedom was far from over. A volunteer at her local police department since she was a teenager, Shyima is passionate about helping to rescue others who are in bondage. Now a U.S. citizen, she regularly speaks out about human trafficking and intends to one day become an immigration officer. In Hidden Girl, Shyima candidly reveals how she overcame her harrowing circumstances and brings vital awareness to a timely and relevant topic.
©2014 Shyima Hall (P)2014 Tantor
Artificial Intelligence
Summary
If you want to learn key AI concepts to get you quickly up to speed with all things AI, then pay attention... Two manuscripts in one audiobook: Artificial Intelligence: What You Need to Know About Machine Learning, Robotics, Deep Learning, Recommender Systems, Internet of Things, Neural Networks, Reinforcement Learning, and Our Future Internet of Things: What You Need to Know About IoT, Big Data, Predictive Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Cybersecurity, Business Intelligence, Augmented Reality and Our Future This audiobook covers everything from machine learning to robotics and the internet of things. You can use it as a nifty guidebook whenever you come across news headlines that talk about some new advancement in AI by Google or Facebook. By the time you finish listening, you will be aware of what artificial neural networks are, how gradient descent and back propagation work, and what deep learning is. You will also learn a comprehensive history of AI, from the first invention of automations in antiquity to the driver-less cars of today. In part one of this audiobook, you will: Understand how machines can “think” and how they learn Enter the vast world of the internet of things technologies Find out why AI is the new business degree And much, much more! Some of the topics covered in part two of this audiobook include: Origins of IoT IoT Security Ethical Hacking Internet of Things Under The Cushy Foot of Tech Giants The Power of Infinite Funds IoT Toys Bio-robotics Business Intelligence Augmented Reality Virtual Reality Our Future And much, much more If you want to learn more about the artificial intelligence and internet of things, then get this audiobook today!
©2019 Neil Wilkins (P)2019 Neil Wilkins
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.
Cybersecurity
Summary
If you want to avoid getting hacked, having your information spread and discover the world of ethical hacking then pay attention.... Two manuscripts in one audiobook: Cybersecurity: An Essential Guide to Computer and Cyber Security for Beginners, Including Ethical Hacking, Risk Assessment, Social Engineering, Attack and Defense Strategies, and Cyberwarfare Ethical Hacking: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Using Penetration Testing to Audit and Improve the Cybersecurity of Computer Networks, Including Tips on Social Engineering Do you create tons of accounts you will never again visit? Do you get annoyed thinking up new passwords, so you just use the same one across all your accounts? Does your password contain a sequence of numbers, such as “123456”? Do you automatically click all links and download all email attachments coming from your friends? This audiobook will show you just how incredibly lucky you are that nobody's hacked you before. In part one of this audiobook, you will learn about: How hackers use raunchy photos to eke out private information Examples of preposterous social engineering attacks How there's only one surefire way to protect against hacking How to lower your exposure to hacking Why companies pester you to attach a phone number to an account Why social media is the most insecure way to spend your afternoon and much, much more Some of the topics covered in part two of this audiobook include: Fighting against companies Ethical hacking defined Patents Penetration testing Jailbreaking Android/iPhone Shut up Cortana How a hacker could go about hacking your Wi-Fi and much, much more!
©2019 Lester Evans (P)2019 Lester Evans
The Strangeness That Is Wales
Summary
Discover the strange legends, tales and history of Wales. Did the Welsh sail across the Atlantic in the 12th century? Was King Arthur Welsh? Included are stories on ghosts - both real and fake - and the legend of King Arthur. Welsh animal lore, customs, monsters, and music are also examined. One of the strangest villages in the world gets a chapter to itself, as do witches, miners, and druids. The book is written in a personal, lighthearted style, with geographical references to help identify the places. Although the stories are intended to entertain as much as educate, the historical facts are accurate. Hopefully, you will come away with a different view on Wales - and a smile on your face.
©2018 Jack Strange (P)2019 Jack Strange
Horrible Histories: Savage Stone Age
Summary
Learn all about the Savage Stone Age, with all the nasty bits left in. You probably thought that Stone Age people spent all their time standing stones up on one end and rubbing sticks together to make fires.
©1999 Terry Deary & Martin Brown (P)2013 Scholastic UK
Free Is Bad
Summary
Almost everything we consume online is free. Email, search, news, entertainment. But those apps on our phones aren't really free - so if we're not paying, who is? The surveillance marketing industry. It doesn't have to be this way. Web pioneers tried to invent new payment methods. Google's founders were dead set against advertising. Email wasn't always open to data mining. Yet here we are. Why? Because business can exploit our desire that "Information wants to be free", and yet someone needs to pay. It started way back in the early days of the republic, evolved with newspapers, radio and broadcast TV, and persists today online. Be the customer, not the product. In Free Is Bad, digital marketing entrepreneur John Marshall explores the web industry's early history and its search for viable business models. It's an investigation of how an evolutionary accident in the design of the web resulted in the ad-tech industry, enabling "free" as the default model for technology products like search and email, and for media products like news and entertainment. How did we become the product? Why that has led to the fracturing of society How new, people-first businesses are improving matters Free Is Bad offers not just a critique but optimism for a future where we control our online destiny. It also provides practical steps that will immediately improve your privacy and quality of information. Ultimately, we're better off being the customer and not the product, because Free Is Bad. This book explains why that is, and what you can do about it.
©2020 John Marshall (P)2020 John Marshall
A Prehistory of the Cloud
Summary
We may imagine the digital cloud as placeless, mute, ethereal, and unmediated. Yet the reality of the cloud is embodied in thousands of massive data centers, any one of which can use as much electricity as a midsized town. Even all these data centers are only one small part of the cloud. Behind that cloud-shaped icon on our screens is a whole universe of technologies and cultural norms, all working to keep us from noticing their existence. Hu shows that the cloud grew out of such older networks as railroad tracks, sewer lines, and television circuits. He describes key moments in the prehistory of the cloud, from the game Spacewar as exemplar of time-sharing computers to Cold War bunkers that were later reused as data centers. Countering the popular perception of a new "cloudlike" political power that is dispersed and immaterial, Hu argues that the cloud grafts digital technologies onto older ways of exerting power over a population. But because we invest the cloud with cultural fantasies about security and participation, we fail to recognize its militarized origins and ideology. Moving between the materiality of the technology itself and its cultural rhetoric, Hu's account offers a set of new tools for rethinking the contemporary digital environment.
©2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)2017 Redwood Audiobooks
Say Her Name
Summary
Inspired by the #SayHerName campaign launched by the African American Policy Forum, these poems pay tribute to victims of police brutality as well as the activists insisting that Black Lives Matter. Elliott engages poets from the past two centuries to create a chorus of voices celebrating the creativity, resilience, and courage of Black women and girls. This collection features 49 powerful poems, four of which are tribute poems inspired by the works of Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Phillis Wheatley. This provocative collection will move every listener to reflect, respond - and act.
©2020 Zetta Elliott (P)2020 Recorded Books