William Hughes has narrated 48 audiobooks on Listento.it by 51 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 322 ratings. The most-rated is NeuroTribes.
The Republican Brain
Summary
Best-selling author Chris Mooney uses cutting-edge research to explain the psychology behind why today’s Republicans reject reality - it’s just part of who they are. From climate change to evolution, the rejection of mainstream science among Republicans is growing, as is the denial of expert consensus on the economy, American history, foreign policy, and much more. Why won’t Republicans accept things that most experts agree on? Why are they constantly fighting against the facts? Science writer Chris Mooney explores brain scans, polls, and psychology experiments to explain why conservatives today believe more wrong things, appear more likely than Democrats to oppose new ideas and less likely to change their beliefs in the face of new facts, and sometimes respond to compelling evidence by doubling down on their current beliefs. Certain to spark discussion and debate, The Republican Brain also promises to add to the lengthy list of persuasive scientific findings that Republicans reject and deny. Chris Mooney is the best-selling author of The Republican War on Science, the host of the Point of Inquiry podcast, and the author of The Intersection blog for Science Progress. He has written several books, as well as articles for Mother Jones, American Prospect, Harper’s, Washington Post, USA Today, and Slate. He has appeared on The Last Word, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Book TV, Science Friday, Morning Joe, and Fresh Air, among other programs.
©2012 Chris Mooney (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Planet Google
Summary
After one of the most successful IPOs in history, Google set forth on a bold new strategy for its future, a vision so large and controversial that the company has worked very hard to keep it under wraps. The business world has been desperate to learn what Google is up to, because they know that Google is the arbiter of the future of the web. Now, with unprecedented access to Google's top management, Randy Stross reveals for the first time the audacious scope of Google's new plan, including such potentially disruptive initiatives as free downloadable software, which could put providers like Microsoft out of business, and GoogleEarth and GoogleMaps satellite technology, which is rapidly mapping the entire surface of the Earth in high-powered detail. Stross explores the profound implications not only for the business world but for our culture at large.
©2008 Randall Stross (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Superparenting for ADD
Summary
Dr. Edward Hallowell - a veteran pediatric psychiatric clinician, best-selling author, and himself a man with attention deficit disorder (ADD) - teams up with Peter S. Jensen, M.D., one of the country's foremost academics on ADD and the father of an ADD child, to present a specific and detailed program for parents to assist their ADD child in finding success, health, and joy. Sure to become an invaluable parenting resource and a classic in ADD literature, this book will help parents unlock the gifts of ADD.
©2008 Edward M. Hallowell, MD and Peter S. Jensen, MD (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Tycoons
Summary
The modern American economy was the creation of four men: Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan. They were the giants of the Gilded Age, a moment of riotous growth that established America as the richest, most inventive, and most productive country on the planet.
Acclaimed author Charles R. Morris vividly brings these men and their times to life. The ruthlessly competitive Carnegie, the imperial Rockefeller, and the provocateur Gould were obsessed with progress, experiment, and speed. They were balanced by Morgan, the gentleman businessman, who fought, instead, for a global trust in American business. Through their antagonism and verve, they built an industrial behemoth - and a country of middle-class consumers. The Tycoons tells the incredible story of how these four determined men wrenched the economy into the modern age, inventing a nation of full economic participation that could not have been imagined only a few decades earlier.
©2005 Charles R. Morris (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
A Disease in the Public Mind
Summary
By the time his body hung from the gallows for his crimes at Harper’s Ferry, abolitionists had made John Brown a "holy martyr" in the fight against Southern slave owners. But Northern hatred for Southerners had been long in the making. Northern rage was born of the conviction that New England, whose spokesmen and militia had begun the American Revolution, should have been the leader of the new nation. Instead, they had been displaced by Southern "slavocrats" like Thomas Jefferson. And Northern envy only exacerbated the South’s greatest fear: race war. In the 60 years preceding the outbreak of civil war, Northern and Southern fanatics ramped up the struggle over slavery. By the time they had become intractable enemies, only the tragedy of a bloody civil war could save the Union. In this riveting and character-driven history, one of America’s most respected historians traces the "disease in the public mind" - distortions of reality that seized large numbers of Americans - in the decades-long run-up to the Civil War.
©2013 Thomas Fleming (P)2013 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Lion of Liberty
Summary
Known to generations of Americans for his stirring call to arms, “Give me liberty or give me death,” Patrick Henry is all but forgotten today as the first of the Founding Fathers to call for independence, the first to call for revolution, and the first to call for a bill of rights. If Washington was the “Sword of the Revolution” and Jefferson, “the Pen”, Patrick Henry more than earned his epithet as “the Trumpet” of the Revolution for rousing Americans to arms in the Revolutionary War. Henry was one of the towering figures of the nation’s formative years and perhaps the greatest orator in American history. To this day, many Americans misunderstand what Patrick Henry’s cry for “liberty or death” meant to him and to his tens of thousands of devoted followers in Virginia. A prototype of the 18th- and 19th-century American frontiersman, Henry claimed individual liberties as a “natural right” to live free of “the tyranny of rulers”—American, as well as British. Henry believed that individual rights were more secure in small republics than in large republics, which many of the other Founding Fathers hoped to create after the Revolution. Henry was one of the most important and colorful of our Founding Fathers—a driving force behind three of the most important events in American history: the War of Independence, the enactment of the Bill of Rights, and, tragically, as America’s first important proponent of states’ rights, the Civil War. Harlow Giles Unger, a former distinguished visiting fellow in American history at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, is a veteran journalist, broadcaster, educator, and historian. His books include The Last Founding Father and four other biographies of America’s Founding Fathers, plus many more. He lives in New York.
©2010 Harlow Giles Unger (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Fever Dream
Summary
It has been nearly a year since psychologist Daniel Rinaldi, a trauma expert who consults with the Pittsburgh Police, helped unravel a baffling murder, and now he finds himself drawn into another case. In the midst of a blistering summer heat wave, a daring bank robbery has gone horribly wrong, resulting in the deaths of all the hostages except one, Treva Williams, and Rinaldi is called in to treat the young woman. However, what seemed a simple, straightforward robbery soon explodes into a series of events that plunge Rinaldi and the investigating officers, Sergeant Harry Polk and Detective Eleanor Lowrey, into a vortex of mistaken identity and kidnapping. Meanwhile, thrown together by the demands of the case, Rinaldi and Eleanor deal with the growing attraction between them, even as Sergeant Polk, recently divorced, spirals into an alcoholdriven, selfdestructive free fall. All of this is played out against the gubernatorial campaign of Rinaldi’s former romantic rival, District Attorney Leland Sinclair. Suddenly, as death threats against Sinclair fuel a mounting frenzy of accusations and political maneuvering, Rinaldi finds himself facing the reality that the two cases might somehow be connected and, therefore, what he knows—or thinks he knows—makes him a target as well. Fever Dream is the second book in the Daniel Rinaldi series, following Mirror Image.
©2011 Dennis Palumbo (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Act of Treason
Summary
In this meticulously researched classic of the JFK conspiracy genre that Library Journal calls "sensational", Mark North argues convincingly that President John F. Kennedy died as the result of a plot masterminded by Louisiana Mafia chieftain Carlos Marcello - and, more importantly, that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover learned early on about the plan but did nothing to stop it. Hoover warned no one - not the Dallas police, not the Secret Service. His motives, North suggests, stemmed from a fervent hatred of Kennedy and fear that the President would eventually fire him. He is documented as longing to succeed Vice President Lyndon Johnson - a man Hoover "controlled" due to blackmail and scandals. Hoover’s day-to-day running of the FBI, his strange personality, and his backroom dealings are brought to life using an extensive collection of press clippings, government documents, and other original sources. Act of Treason is a must-listen for any citizen who believes the Warren Commission failed miserably in its attempt to solve one of modern America’s most pressing mysteries: Who killed JFK?
©1991 Mark North (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Mirror Image
Summary
Mirror Image, a complex, erotic novel of suspense, is the first in a series of mysteries featuring Dr. Daniel Rinaldi, a psychologist who consults with the Pittsburgh Police. His specialty is treating victims of violent crime, those who’ve survived an armed robbery or kidnapping but whose traumatic experience still haunts them. Kevin Merrick, a college student and victim of an armed assault, is one of these people. A fragile, troubled kid desperate for a role model and a sense of identity, Kevin has begun dressing like Rinaldi, acting like him, mirroring his appearance. Before Daniel has a chance to work this through with his patient, he finds Kevin brutally murdered. Stunned, he and the police suspect that he, not Kevin, had been the intended target. Feeling responsible, Rinaldi is determined to help find the killer, who’s begun leaving death threats for the psychologist. His journey takes him through a labyrinth of friends and colleagues, any one of whom may be the killer. It also includes an affair with a beautiful, free-spirited assistant district attorney with secrets of her own. And when Kevin’s identity as the estranged son of a Bill Gates-like biotech giant is revealed, the investigation of his murder turns into a national story, even as another person turns up dead. A Poisoned Pen Press Mystery.
©2001 Dennis Palumbo (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Slavery's Capitalism
Summary
During the 19th century, the United States entered the ranks of the world's most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human bondage. This was no mere coincidence. Slavery's Capitalism argues for slavery's centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. According to editors Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, the issue is not whether slavery itself was or was not capitalist but rather the impossibility of understanding the nation's spectacular pattern of economic development without situating slavery front and center. American capitalism - renowned for its celebration of market competition, private property, and the self-made man - has its origins in an American slavery predicated on the abhorrent notion that human beings could be legally owned and compelled to work under force of violence. Drawing on the expertise of 16 scholars who are at the forefront of rewriting the history of American economic development, Slavery's Capitalism identifies slavery as the primary force driving key innovations in entrepreneurship, finance, accounting, management, and political economy that are too often attributed to the so-called free market. Approaching the study of slavery as the originating catalyst for the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism casts new light on American credit markets, practices of offshore investment, and understandings of human capital. Rather than seeing slavery as outside the institutional structures of capitalism, the essayists recover slavery's importance to the American economic past and prompt enduring questions about the relationship of market freedom to human freedom. Contributors: Edward E. Baptist, Sven Beckert, Daina Ramey Berry, Kathryn Boodry, Alfred L. Brophy, Stephen Chambers, Eric Kimball, John Majewski, Bonnie Martin, Seth Rockman, Daniel B. Rood, Caitlin Rosenthal, Joshua D. Rothman, Calvin Schermerhorn, Andrew Shankman, and Craig Steven Wilder.
©2016 University of Pennsylvania Press (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Pennsylvania Avenue
Summary
With keen inside analysis and great stories drawn from astonishing access to Washington's key players,
Pennsylvania Avenue takes us behind the scenes to show what really happens on the first street in America and how that affects the country.
The last decade produced one of the greatest political transformations in American history: a shift from the Reagan revolution, which had begun to dismantle the Democratic establishment. Since the Reagan era, the way Americans pick their representatives has undergone changes that have produced a new kind of politician and new institutions, turning upside down the way things get done on Pennsylvania Avenue. Harwood and Seib expose the forces that produced this great change and reveal how contemporary politicians are making the new power game work, along with the consequences for us all.
©2008 John Harwood and Gerald Seib (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The 10 Rules of Successful Nations
Summary
A pithy guide to real-world economics, abridged from Sharma’s New York Times best seller The Rise and Fall of Nations. This slim primer distills Sharma's decades of experience into 10 rules for identifying nations that are poised to take off or crash. A wake-up call to economists who failed to foresee every recent crisis, including the cataclysm of 2008, 10 Rules is full of pioneering insights on signs of political, economic, and social change. Sharma explains, for example, why autocrats are bad for the economy; robots are a blessing, not a curse; and consumer prices don’t tell you all you need to know about inflation. He shows how currency crises begin with the flight of savvy locals, not evil foreigners; debt crises start in private companies, not government; and the best news for any country is none at all. Rethinking economics as a practical art, 10 Rules is a must-listen for business, political, and academic leaders who want to understand the most important forces that shape a nation's future.
©2016, 2019 by Ruchir Sharma (P)2020 by Blackstone Publishing
Animal Factory
Summary
Swine flu. Bird flu. Unusual concentrations of cancer and other diseases. Massive fish kills from flesh-eating parasites. Recalls of meats, vegetables, and fruits because of deadly E. coli bacterial contamination. Recent public-health crises raise urgent questions about how our animal-derived food is raised and brought to market. In Animal Factory, best-selling author and investigative journalist David Kirby exposes the powerful business and political interests behind large-scale factory farms and tracks the far-reaching fallout that contaminates our air, land, water, and food. In this thoroughly researched book, Kirby follows three families and communities whose lives are utterly changed by immense neighboring animal farms. These farms (known as “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations,” or CAFOs), confine thousands of pigs, dairy cattle, and poultry in small spaces, often under horrifying conditions, and generate enormous volumes of fecal and biological waste as well as other toxins. Weaving together science, politics, law, big business, and everyday life, Kirby accompanies these families in their struggles against animal factories. A North Carolina fisherman takes on pig farms upstream to preserve his river, his family’s life, and his home. A mother in a small Illinois town pushes back against an outsized dairy farm and its devastating impact. And, a Washington state grandmother becomes an unlikely activist when her home is covered with soot and her water supply is compromised by runoff from leaking lagoons of cattle waste. Animal Factory is an important book about our American food system gone terribly wrong—and the people who are fighting to restore sustainable farming practices and save our limited natural resources.
©2010 David Kirby (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
A Safeway in Arizona
Summary
A riveting account of the state of Arizona, seen through the lens of the Tucson shootings. On January 8, 2011, twenty-two-year-old Jared Lee Loughner opened fire at a Tucson meet and greet held by US representative Gabrielle Giffords. The incident left six people dead and thirteen injured, including Giffords, whom he shot in the head. Award-winning author and fifth-generation Arizonan Tom Zoellner, a longtime friend of Giffords’ and a field organizer on her congressional campaign, uses the tragedy as a jumping off point to expose the fault lines in Arizona’s political and socioeconomic landscape that allowed this to happen: the harmful political rhetoric, the inept state government, the lingering effects of the housing market’s boom and bust, the proliferation and accessibility of guns, the lack of established communities, and the hysteria surrounding issues of race and immigration. Zoellner offers a revealing portrait of the southwestern state at a critical moment in history - and as a symbol of the nation’s discontents and uncertainties. Ultimately, it is his rallying cry for a saner, more civil way of life. Tom Zoellner is the author of Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World, winner of the 2010 American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award; The Heartless Stone: A Journey through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire; and coauthor of the New York Times bestseller An Ordinary Man. He has worked as a reporter for the Arizona Republic and San Francisco Chronicle.
©2011 Tom Zoellner (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Julip
Summary
Jim Harrison takes us on a journey of the human heart in three new novellas. Julip follows a bright and resourceful young woman as she tries to spring her brother from a Florida jail after he shot three of her former lovers "below the belt". The Seven-Ounce Man continues the picaresque adventures of Brown Dog, a Michigan scoundrel who loves to eat, drink, and chase women, all while sailing along in the bottom 10 percent. The Beige Dolorosa is the haunting tale of an academic who, recovering from the repercussions of a sexual-harassment scandal, turns to the natural world for solace.
©1994 Jim Harrison (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
At the Edge of the Precipice
Summary
A National Book Award-winning historian brilliantly portrays Henry Clay’s heroic brokering of the Compromise of 1850, with its timely message about bipartisanship in times of crisis. It has been said that if Henry Clay had been alive in 1860, there would have been no Civil War. Based on his performance in 1850, it may well be true. In that year, the United States faced one of the most dangerous crises in its history, having just acquired a huge parcel of land from the war with Mexico. Northern and Southern politicians fought over whether slavery should be legal on the new American soil. After a Northern congressman introduced a proviso to forbid slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico, Southerners threatened to secede from the Union. Only Henry Clay, America’s great compromiser, could keep the Union together, saving it from dissolution for 10 crucial years. In this masterful contribution to American history, Remini explores Henry Clay’s final and most important act of bipartisanship.
©2010 Robert V. Remini (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Snake Charmer
Summary
One of the most brilliant biologists of our time, and a charismatic daredevil, Dr. Joe Slowinski had been obsessed with venomous snakes since his youth. In 2001 Slowinski led a team of young scientists deep into the wilds of Burma on a final tragic expedition. Immediately after being bitten by the many-banded krait, the deadliest serpent in Asia, Joe knew his life was in grave and imminent peril. Thus began one of the most remarkable wilderness rescue attempts of modern times, as Joe's teammates kept him alive for 30 hours by mouth-to-mouth respiration. The Snake Charmer is at once a brilliant biography, a pulse-pounding adventure story, an exotic travel book, and a fascinating introduction to the bizarre world of snake science.
©2008 Jamie James (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
American Tempest
Summary
On Thursday, December 16, 1773, an estimated seven dozen men, many amateurishly disguised as Indians—then a symbol of freedom—dumped about £10,000 worth of tea in the harbor. Whatever their motives at the time, they unleashed a social, political, and economic firestorm that would culminate in the Declaration of Independence two and a half years later. The Boston Tea Party provoked a reign of terror in Boston and other American cities, with Americans inflicting unimaginable barbarities on each other. Tea parties erupted in American cities up and down the colonies. The turmoil stripped tens of thousands of Americans of their dignity, their homes, their properties, and their birthrights—in the name of liberty and independence. Nearly 100,000 Americans left the land of their forefathers forever in what was history’s largest exodus of Americans from America. Nonetheless, John Adams called the Boston Tea Party nothing short of “magnificent.” And he went on to say that the “destruction of tea is so bold, so daring, so firm…it must have important consequences.” Ironically, few if any Americans today—even those who call themselves Tea Party Patriots—would be able to name even one of the estimated eighty participants in the original Boston Tea Party. Nor are many Americans aware of the “important consequences” of the Tea Party. The acute shortage of tea that followed the Tea Party, of course, helped transform Americans into coffee drinkers, but its effects went far beyond culinary tastes. The Tea Party would affect so many American minds, hearts, and souls that it helped spawn a new, independent nation whose citizens would govern themselves.
©2011 Harlow Giles Unger (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Detroit
Summary
When we think of Detroit, we think first of the auto industry and its slow, painful decline, then maybe the sounds of Motown, or the long line of professional sports successes. But economies are made up of people, and the effect of the economic downfall of Detroit is one of the most compelling stories in America. Detroit: A Biography by journalist and author Scott Martelle is about a city that rose because of the most American of traits - innovation, entrepreneurship, and an inspiring perseverance. It’s about the object lessons learned from the city’s collapse, and, most prosaically, it’s about what happens when a nation turns its back on its own citizens. The story of Detroit encompasses compelling human dimensions, from the hope it once posed for blacks fleeing slavery in the early 1800s and then rural Southern poverty in the 1920s, to the American Dream it represented for waves of European immigrants eager to work in factories bearing the names Ford, Chrysler, and Chevrolet. Martelle clearly encapsulates an entire city, past and present, through the lives of generations of individual citizens. The tragic story truly is a biography, for the city is nothing without its people. Scott Martelle is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer and author of three books of nonfiction. He has covered three presidential campaigns as well as postwar reporting from Kosovo. He is the cofounder of the Journalism Shop, a book critic, and an active blogger. He lives with his wife and children in California.
©2012 Scott Martelle (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Washington's Immortals
Summary
In August 1776, a little over a month after the Continental Congress had formally declared independence from Britain, the revolution was on the verge of a sudden and disastrous end. General George Washington found his troops outmanned and outmaneuvered at the Battle of Brooklyn, and it looked like there was no escape. But thanks to a series of desperate rear-guard attacks by a single heroic regiment, famously known as the Immortal 400, Washington was able to evacuate his men, and the nascent Continental Army lived to fight another day. Today, only a modest rusted and scarred metal sign near a dilapidated auto garage marks the mass grave where the bodies of the "Maryland Heroes" lie - 256 men "who fell in the Battle of Brooklyn". In Washington's Immortals, best-selling military historian Patrick K. O'Donnell brings to life the forgotten story of this remarkable band of brothers. Known as "gentlemen of honor, family, and fortune", they fought not just in Brooklyn but also in key battles, including Trenton, Princeton, Camden, Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse, and Yorktown, where their heroism changed the course of the war. Drawing on extensive original sources, from letters to diaries to pension applications, O'Donnell pieces together the stories of these brave men - their friendships, loves, defeats, and triumphs. He explores their arms and tactics, their struggles with hostile loyalists and shortages of clothing and food, their development into an elite unit, and their dogged opponents, including British general Lord Cornwallis. And through the prism of this one group, O'Donnell tells the larger story of the Revolutionary War. Washington's Immortals is gripping and inspiring boots-on-the-ground history, sure to appeal to a wide audience.
©2016 Patrick K. O’Donnell (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.