Tom Perkins has narrated 89 audiobooks on Listento.it by 113 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 705 ratings. The most-rated is Whoever Fights Monsters.
To Explain the World
Summary
In this rich, irreverent, and compelling history, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg takes us across centuries, from ancient Miletus to medieval Baghdad and Oxford, from Plato's Academy and the Museum of Alexandria to the cathedral school of Chartres and the Royal Society of London. He shows that the scientists of ancient and medieval times not only did not understand what we understand about the world--they did not understand what there is to understand or how to understand it. Yet over the centuries, through the struggle to solve such mysteries as the curious backward movement of the planets and the rise and fall of the tides, the modern discipline of science eventually emerged. Weinberg examines the historic clashes and collaborations that happened along the way between science and the competing spheres of religion, technology, poetry, mathematics, and philosophy. An illuminating exploration of the way we consider and analyze the world around us, To Explain the World is a sweeping, ambitious account of how difficult it was to discover the goals and methods of modern science and the impact this discovery had on human knowledge and development.
©2015 Steven Weinberg (P)2015 Tantor
Tasty
Summary
Taste has long been considered the most basic of the five senses because its principal mission is a simple one: to discern food from everything else. Taste is a whole-body experience, and breakthroughs in genetics and microbiology are casting light not just on the experience of french fries and foie gras but the mysterious interplay of body and brain. Tasty explains the scientific research taking place on multiple fronts: how genes shape our tastes, how the mind assembles flavors from the five senses and signals from the body's metabolic systems, why something disgusts one person and delights another, and what today's obsessions with extreme tastes tell us about the brain. Brilliantly synthesizing science, ancient myth, philosophy, and literature, Tasty offers a delicious smorgasbord of where taste originated and where it's going - and why it changes by the day.
©2015 John McQuaid (P)2015 Tantor
The Education of John Adams
Summary
The Education of John Adams is the first biography of John Adams by a biographer with legal training. It examines his origins in colonial Massachusetts, his education, and his struggle to choose a career and define a place for himself in colonial society. It explores the flowering of his legal career and the impact that law had on him and his understanding of himself; his growing involvement with the American Revolution as polemicist, as lawyer, as congressional delegate, and as diplomat; and his commitment to defining and expounding ideas about constitutionalism and how it should work as the body of ideas shaping the new United States. The book traces his part in launching the government of the United States under the US Constitution; his service as the nation's first vice president and second president; and his retirement years, during which he was first a vexed and rejected ex-president and then became the revered Sage of Braintree. It describes the relationships that sustained him - with his wife, the brilliant and eloquent Abigail Adams; with his children; with such allies and supporters as Benjamin Rush and John Marshall; with such sometime friends and sometime adversaries as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson; and with such foes as Alexander Hamilton and Timothy Pickering.
©2020 Oxford University Press (P)2020 Tantor
The Last Volcano
Summary
Volcanoes have fascinated - and terrified - people for ages. They have destroyed cities and ended civilizations. In this book, John Dvorak, the acclaimed author of Earthquake Storms, looks into the early years of volcanology and its "father", Thomas Jaggar. Jaggar was the youngest of five scientists to investigate the explosion of Mount Pelee in Martinique, which leveled the entire city of St. Pierre and killed its entire population in two minutes. This explosion changed science forever, and Jaggar became obsessed with understanding the force of nature that could do this. Falling in love with a widowed schoolteacher who shared his passion, Jaggar devoted his life to studying volcanic activity and the mysteries beneath the earth's surface. From their precarious perch, this dynamic husband and wife duo would discover a way to predict volcanic eruptions and tsunamis, promote geothermal energy, and theorize new ways to study the ocean bottom.
©2015 John Dvorak (P)2015 Tantor
Indelible Ink
Summary
The untold story of the battle to legalize free expression in America by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ashes to Ashes. The liberty of written and spoken expression has been fixed in the firmament of our social values since our nation's beginning - the government of the United States was the first to legalize free speech and a free press as fundamental rights. But when the British began colonizing the New World, strict censorship was the iron rule of the realm; any words, true or false, that were thought to disparage the government were judged a criminally subversive - and duly punishable - threat to law and order. Even after Parliament lifted press censorship late in the 17th century, printers published what they wished at their peril. So when in 1733 a small newspaper, the New York Weekly Journal, printed scathing articles assailing the new British governor, William Cosby, as corrupt and abusive, colonial New York was scandalized. The paper's publisher, an impoverished printer named John Peter Zenger with a wife and six children, in fact had no hand in the paper's vitriolic editorial content - he was only a front man for Cosby's adversaries, New York Supreme Court Chief Justice Lewis Morris and the shrewd attorney James Alexander. Zenger nevertheless became the endeavor's courageous fall guy when Cosby brought the full force of his high office down upon it. Jailed for the better part of a year, Zenger faced a jury on August 4, 1735, in a proceeding matched in importance during the colonial period only by the Salem Witch Trials. In Indelible Ink, acclaimed social historian Richard Kluger recreates in rich detail this dramatic clash of powerful antagonists that marked the beginning of press freedom in America and its role in vanquishing colonial tyranny. Here is an enduring lesson that resounds to this day on the vital importance of free public expression as the underpinning of democracy.
©2016 Richard Kluger (P)2016 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Honky Tonk Angel
Summary
Patsy Cline, the beloved country singer, soared from obscurity to worldwide fame before her life tragically ended at age 30. After breaking all the barriers in the Nashville boys' club of the music business in the 1950s, she brought the Nashville sound to the nation with her torch ballads and rockabilly tunes like "Walking After Midnight," "Crazy," and "I Fall to Pieces." Earthy, sexy, and vivacious, she has been the subject of a major movie and countless articles, and her albums are still among the top five best sellers for MCA almost 30 years after her death. In the end it is her music, a standard feature on jukeboxes from Seattle to Siberia, that prevails and keeps on keeping on.
©1993 Ellis Nassour (P)2020 Tantor
Games for Your Mind
Summary
Logic puzzles were first introduced to the public by Lewis Carroll in the late 19th century and have been popular ever since. Games like Sudoku and Mastermind are fun and engrossing recreational activities, but they also share deep foundations in mathematical logic and are worthy of serious intellectual inquiry. In this informative and entertaining book, Jason Rosenhouse begins by introducing listeners to logic and logic puzzles and goes on to reveal the rich history of these puzzles. He shows how Carroll's puzzles presented Aristotelian logic as a game for children, yet also informed his scholarly work on logic. He reveals how another pioneer of logic puzzles, Raymond Smullyan, drew on classic puzzles about liars and truthtellers to illustrate Kurt Gödel's theorems and illuminate profound questions in mathematical logic. Rosenhouse then presents a new vision for the future of logic puzzles based on nonclassical logic, which is used today in computer science and automated reasoning to manipulate large and sometimes contradictory sets of data. Featuring a wealth of sample puzzles ranging from simple to extremely challenging, this lively and engaging book brings together many of the most ingenious puzzles ever devised, including the "Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever", metapuzzles, paradoxes, and the logic puzzles in detective stories.
©2020 Princeton University Press (P)2020 Tantor
Ancient Brews
Summary
Patrick E. McGovern takes us on a fascinating journey through time to the dawn of brewing, when our ancestors might well have made a paleo brew of wild fruits, honey, cereals, and botanicals. Early beverage makers must have marveled at the magical process of fermentation. Their amazement grew as they drank the mind-altering drinks, which were to become the medicines, religious symbols, and social lubricants of later cultures. McGovern recounts how the re-created ancient ales and spirits of Dogfish Head came about as he circles the globe - to China, Turkey, Egypt, Italy, Scandinavia, Honduras, Peru, and Mexico. He interweaves archaeology and science and tells the stories and struggles in making the most authentic versions possible of these liquid time capsules. Accompanying homebrew interpretations - brimming with unusual spicy, fruity, and malty aromas and tastes - help bring the past alive as our senses and imaginations travel the globe.
©2017 Patrick E. McGovern; foreword copyright 2017 by Sam Calagione (P)2017 Tantor
The Gulf of Mexico
Summary
The Gulf of Mexico presents a compelling, salt-streaked narrative of the Earth's 10th-largest body of water. In this beautifully written volume, John S. Sledge explores the people, ships, and cities that have made the Gulf's human history and culture so rich. Many famous figures who sailed the Gulf's viridian waters are highlighted, including Ponce de Leon, Robert Cavelier de La Salle, Francis Drake, Elizabeth Agassiz, Ernest Hemingway, and Charles Dwight Sigsbee. Sledge also introduces a fascinating array of people connected to maritime life in the Gulf, among them Maya priests, French pirates, African-American stevedores, and Greek sponge divers. Gulf events of global historical importance are detailed, such as the only defeat of armed and armored steamships by wooden sailing vessels, the first accurate deep-sea survey and bathymetric map of any ocean basin, the development of shipping containers by a former truck driver frustrated with antiquated loading practices, and the worst environmental disaster in American annals. Occasionally shifting focus ashore, Sledge explains how people representing a gumbo of ethnicities built some of the world's most exotic cities - Havana, New Orleans, and oft-besieged Veracruz, Mexico's oldest city, founded in 1519 by Hernán Cortes.
©2019 Univseristy of South Carolina (P)2019 Tantor
Mosby's Rangers
Summary
Mosby's Rangers were some of the most feared Confederate troops of the American Civil War. Under the command of Col. John S. Mosby, they executed small raids behind Union lines, raiding at will and then vanishing quickly into the countryside to remain undetected. Formally known as the 43rd Battalion, Virginia Cavalry, they were formed after the Partisan Ranger Act of 1862. By the summer of 1864, Mosby had around 400 men at his disposal in six cavalry companies and one artillery company. Their success led to the area around Fauquier and Loudoun counties becoming known as "Mosby's Confederacy", due to the grip that he and his men held on the area. James Joseph Williamson was a private who fought under Mosby from April, 1863, through until the end of the war. He records in fascinating detail the activity of Mosby and his men from their companies' organization until the moment that they were disbanded. Williamson provides brilliant insight into the campaigns that Mosby's men fought, how they were organized, who led them, and the difficulties they faced, as well as their greatest victories. The effectiveness of Mosby and his small band can be seen in these two statements: General Lee said that Mosby was "zealous, bold, and skillful, and with very small resources he has accomplished a great deal." While on the Union side, "General at one point reported that seventeen thousand of his men were engaged in keeping Mosby from attacking his weak points, and thus away from active service on the firing line. Finally it was not safe to send despatches by a courier unless a regiment was sent along to guard him." Yet, after the war, Grant held no animosity against his former foe and stated, "I have come to know Mosby personally and somewhat intimately. He is a different man entirely from what I supposed. He is able and thoroughly honest and truthful. There were probably but few men in the South who could have commanded successfully a separate detachment in the rear of an opposing army, and so near the borders of hostilities as long as he did without losing his entire command." Thus demonstrating the respect that Mosby and his men engendered with their enemies even after the war. Mosby's Rangers is a perfect book for anyone interested in the partisan activities of Mosby and his men through the course of the American Civil War.
Public Domain (P)2018 Tantor
The Gulf
Summary
Pulitzer Prize winner, History, 2018. Winner of the 2017 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction - the tragic collision between civilization and nature in the Gulf of Mexico becomes a uniquely American story in this environmental epic. When painter Winslow Homer first sailed into the Gulf of Mexico, he was struck by its "special kind of providence." Indeed, the Gulf presented itself as America's sea - bound by geography, culture, and tradition to the national experience - and yet, there has never been a comprehensive history of the Gulf until now. And so, in this rich and original work that explores the Gulf through our human connection with the sea, environmental historian Jack E. Davis finally places this exceptional region into the American mythos in a sweeping history that extends from the Pleistocene age to the 21st century. Significant beyond tragic oil spills and hurricanes, the Gulf has historically been one of the world's most bounteous marine environments, supporting human life for millennia. Davis starts from the premise that nature lies at the center of human existence, and takes listeners on a compelling and, at times, wrenching journey from the Florida Keys to the Texas Rio Grande, along marshy shorelines and majestic estuarine bays, profoundly beautiful and life-giving, though fated to exploitation by esurient oil men and real-estate developers. Rich in vivid, previously untold stories, The Gulf tells the larger narrative of the American Sea - from the sportfish that brought the earliest tourists to Gulf shores to Hollywood's engagement with the first offshore oil wells - as it inspired and empowered, sometimes to its own detriment, the ethnically diverse groups of a growing nation. Davis's pageant of historical characters is vast, including the presidents who directed western expansion toward its shores, the New England fishers who introduced their own distinct skills to the region, and the industries and big agriculture that sent their contamination downstream into the estuarine wonderland. Nor does Davis neglect the colorfully idiosyncratic individuals: the Tabasco king who devoted his life to wildlife conservation, the Texas shrimper who gave hers to clean water and public health, as well as the New York architect who hooked the "big one" that set the sportfishing world on fire. Ultimately, Davis reminds us that amidst the ruin, beauty awaits its return, as the Gulf is, and has always been, an ongoing story. Sensitive to the imminent effects of climate change, and to the difficult task of rectifying grievous assaults of recent centuries, The Gulf suggests how a penetrating examination of a single region's history can inform the country's path ahead.
©2017 Jack E. Davis (P)2018 Tantor
Soul by Soul
Summary
Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved.
©1999 The President and Fellows of Harvard College (P)2017 Tantor
Hawking Hawking
Summary
When Stephen Hawking died, he was widely recognized as the world's best physicist, and even its smartest person. He was neither. In Hawking Hawking, science journalist Charles Seife explores how Stephen Hawking came to be thought of as humanity's greatest genius. Hawking spent his career grappling with deep questions in physics, but his renown didn't rest on his science. He was a master of self-promotion, hosting parties for time travelers, declaring victory over problems he had not solved, and wooing billionaires. Confined to a wheelchair and physically dependent on a cadre of devotees, Hawking still managed to captivate the people around him - and use them for his own purposes. A brilliant expose and powerful biography, Hawking Hawking uncovers the authentic Hawking buried underneath the fake. It is the story of a man whose brilliance in physics was matched by his genius for building his own myth.
©2021 Charles Seife (P)2021 Tantor
Flourishing
Summary
More than almost anything else, globalization and the great world religions are shaping our lives, affecting everything from the public policies of political leaders and the economic decisions of industry bosses and employees to university curricula, all the way to the inner longings of our hearts. Integral to both globalization and religions are compelling, overlapping, and sometimes competing visions of what it means to live well. In this perceptive, deeply personal, and beautifully written book, a leading theologian sheds light on how religions and globalization have historically interacted and argues for what their relationship ought to be. Recounting how these twinned forces have intersected in his own life, he shows how world religions, despite their malfunctions, remain one of our most potent sources of moral motivation and contain within them profoundly evocative accounts of human flourishing. Globalization should be judged by how well it serves us for living out our authentic humanity as envisioned within these traditions. Through renewal and reform, religions might, in turn, shape globalization so that it can be about more than bread alone.
©2015 Miroslav Volf (P)2016 Tantor
King Philip's War
Summary
The harrowing story of one of America's first and costliest wars - featuring a new foreword by best-selling author Nathaniel Philbrick At once an in-depth history of this pivotal war and a guide to the historical sites where the ambushes, raids, and battles took place, King Philip's War expands our understanding of American history and provides insight into the nature of colonial and ethnic wars in general. Through a careful reconstruction of events, including first-person accounts, and by providing information on the exact locations of more than 50 battles, King Philip's War is useful as well as informative. Students of history, colonial war buffs, those interested in Native American history, and anyone who is curious about how this war affected a particular New England town, will find important insights into one of the most seminal events to shape the American mind and continent.
©1999 Eric B. Schultz and Michael J. Tougias; foreword copyright 2017 by Nathaniel Philbrick (P)2020 Tantor
The Minutemen and Their World
Summary
Winner of the Bancroft Prize On April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. The "shot heard round the world" catapulted this sleepy New England town into the midst of revolutionary fervor, and Concord went on to become the intellectual capital of the new republic. The town - future home to Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne - soon came to symbolize devotion to liberty, intellectual freedom, and the stubborn integrity of rural life. In The Minutemen and Their World, Robert Gross has written a remarkably subtle and detailed reconstruction of the lives and community of this special place, and a compelling interpretation of the American Revolution as a social movement.
©1976 Robert A. Gross; Foreword Copyright 2001 by Alan Taylor; Afterword Copyright 2001 by Robert A. Gross. (P)2019 Tantor
Six Days of Impossible
Summary
Hell Week has never been described so effectively. Six days in hell define every SEAL that moves past the point of no return in their minds. Robert Adams, MD, brings the experiences of his classmates into view with real, difficult to believe experiences, described in frightening detail by the men that lived through the frigid cold, filthy muddy days, and body-destroying events of a winter Hell Week. Eleven of 70 men went on to graduate and serve over 40 years in almost every SEAL or UDT team with honor. Listen to their real-time story, and learn why these 11 men succeeded when so many others failed. Colonel Robert Adams, MD, MBA, served 14 years in the navy (12 as a SEAL) and 18 years in the army. He changed services to attend medical school and applies his analytical skill to look back at the men that shivered and struggled through Hell Week together. He brings decades of insight learned caring for others to an insightful analysis of why the men of his BUD/S class 81 achieved the improbable. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2017 Robert Adams (P)2018 Tantor
Is Einstein Still Right?
Summary
Albert Einstein is often viewed as the icon of genius, and his theories are admired for their beauty and correctness. Yet the final judge of any theory is the rigorous test of experiment, not the fame of its inventor or the allure of its mathematics. For decades, general relativity has passed test after test with flying colors, including some remarkable new tests using the recently detected gravitational waves. Still, there are reasons for doubt. Einstein's theory of gravity, as beautiful as it is, seems to be in direct contradiction with another theory he helped create: quantum mechanics. Until recently, this was considered to be a purely academic affair. But as more and more data pours in from the most distant corners of the universe, hinting at bizarre stuff called "dark energy" and "dark matter", some scientists have begun to explore the possibility that Einstein's theory may not provide a complete picture of the cosmos. From the explosions of neutron stars and the collisions of black holes to the modern scientific process as a means to seek truth and understanding in the cosmos, this audiobook takes the listener on a journey of learning and discovery that has been 100 years in the making.
©2020 Clifford M. Will and Nicolás Yunes (P)2020 Tantor
Benjamin Franklin
Summary
Renowned as a printer, scientist, and diplomat, Benjamin Franklin also published more works on religious topics than any other 18th-century American layperson. Born to Boston Puritans, by his teenage years Franklin had abandoned the exclusive Christian faith of his family and embraced deism. But Franklin, as a man of faith, was far more complex than the "thorough deist" who emerges in his autobiography. As Thomas Kidd reveals, deist writers influenced Franklin's beliefs, to be sure, but devout Christians in his life - including George Whitefield, the era's greatest evangelical preacher; his parents; and his beloved sister Jane - kept him tethered to the Calvinist creed of his Puritan upbringing. Based on rigorous research into Franklin's voluminous correspondence, essays, and almanacs, this fresh assessment of a well-known figure unpacks the contradictions and conundrums faith presented in Franklin's life.
©2017 Thomas S. Kidd (P)2017 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
Summary
In his great triptych The Millennium, Bosch used oranges and other fruits to symbolize the delights of Paradise. Whence Henry Miller's title for this, one of his most appealing books; first published in 1957, it tells the story of Miller's life on the Big Sur, a section of the California coast where he lived for 15 years. Big Sur is the portrait of a place - one of the most colorful in the United States - and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there: writers (and writers who did not write), mystics seeking truth in meditation (and the not-so-saintly looking for sex-cults or celebrity), sophisticated children, and adult innocents; geniuses, cranks, and the unclassifiable, like Conrad Moricand, the Devil in Paradise, who is one of Miller's greatest character studies. Henry Miller writes with a buoyancy and brimming energy that are infectious. He has a fine touch for comedy. But this is also a serious book - the testament of a free spirit who has broken through the restraints and cliches of modern life to find within himself his own kind of paradise.
©1957 New Directions Publishing Company (P)2019 Tantor