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Oysters, soldiers, and Le Corbusier | November Audio in Advance | Nonfiction

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Audio in Advance offers previews of selected audiobooks two months ahead of publication, along with recommended picks and occasional interviews with notable authors and narrators.

Bush, George W. 41: A Portrait of My Father. Books on Tape. Read by the author.
A biography of the elder President Bush written by the younger.

Cavett, Dick. Brief Encounters: Conversations, Magic Moments, and Assorted Hijinks. Macmillan Audio. Read by the author?
The talk-show host introduces listeners to such luminaries as Mel Brooks, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Ali, and Nora Ephron. With a foreword by Jimmy Fallon.

modern man Oysters, soldiers, and Le Corbusier | November Audio in Advance | NonfictionFlint, Anthony. Modern Man: The Life of Le Corbusier, Architect of Tomorrow. Brilliance Audio. Read by Mel Foster.
Corbusier’s genius for architecture and modernism was matched only by his fascinating private life (he counted Josephine Baker among his lovers). Flint (Wrestling with Moses) examines his legacy.

Golinkin, Lev. A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka. Blackstone Audio. Reader TBA.
Golinkin and his family fled Russia when he was nine; he retraces the journey as an adult, telling the intertwined stories.

Guiliano, Mireille. Meet Paris Oyster: A Love Affair with the Perfect Food. Hachette Audio, digital exclusive. Read by the author.
The author of French Women Don’t Get Fat turns her attention to the oyster: where to eat it, with what, and with whom.

Huston, Anjelica. Watch Me. S. & S. Audio. Read by the author.
This second volume of Huston’s memoirs (after A Story Lately Told) describes her years in Hollywood, relationship with Jack Nicholson, marriage to sculptor Robert Graham, and the death of her father, John Huston.

Iyer, Pico, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere. S. & S. Audio. Reader TBA.
Iyer follows up his essay “The Joy of Quiet” with this meditation on whether a move toward constant movement and connectedness may make staying in one place a more exciting prospect.

Johnson, Boris. The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History. Books on Tape. Read by the author.
On the 50th anniversary of Churchill’s death, former London mayor Johnson examines the prime minister’s legacy.

Krist, Gary. Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans. Dreamscape. Reader TBA.
The story of Tom Anderson, who ran the red-light district of Storyville in the early 20th century, and the colorful cast of characters in his orbit.

lamott Oysters, soldiers, and Le Corbusier | November Audio in Advance | NonfictionLamott, Anne. Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace. Books on Tape. Read by the author.
Lamott’s (Bird by Bird) latest collection of essays urges listeners to seek light when things seems dark.

Leibovitz, Liel. A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen. Brilliance Audio. Read by the author.
Leibovitz (God in the Machine) here uses access to the musician’s personal papers to support an examination of Cohen’s work and the man himself.

McCain, John & Mark Salter. Thirteen Soldiers: A Personal History of America at War. S. & S. Audio. Reader TBA.
A history of Americans at war told through the personal accounts of 13 soldiers who fought in major military conflicts from the Revolutionary War to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

McCandless, Carine. The Wild Truth. Harper Audio. Read by Matt Gardner and Shelly McCandless.
The sister of Chris McCandless, whose attempt to live off the grid in Alaska—and ensuing death—was chronicled by Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild,

NPR Driveway Moments: Love Stories. HighBridge. Multiple readers.
A collection of NPR stories that focus on the many facets of love: between family members, within couples, for objects…

O’Connell, Libby. The American Plate: A Culinary History in 100 Bites. Tantor Audio. Read by Tanya Eby.
An exploration of American food traditions from scrapple and Cracker Jack to beaver tail and shoo-fly pie.

palmer Oysters, soldiers, and Le Corbusier | November Audio in Advance | NonfictionPalmer, Amanda. The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help. Hachette Audio. Read by the author.
Musician and crowdfunding pioneer Palmer discusses barriers to asking for help creatively, in business, and emotionally. The audiobook contains an exclusive musical performance.

Shields, Brooke. There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me. Penguin Audio. Read by the author.
Shields on lessons learned from her tumultuous relationship with her mother/manager, Teri, and how it’s affected her own parenting.

Schultz, Howard & Rajiv Chandrasekaran. For Love of Country: What Our Veterans Can Teach Us About Citizenship, Heroism, and Sacrifice. Books on Tape. Read by Rajiv Chandrasekaran.
Starbucks CEO Schultz and the Washington Post‘s Chandrasekaran share stories of heroism and bravery from both deployed veterans and those at home.

Todd, Chuck. The Stranger: Barack Obama in the White House. Blackstone. Narrator TBA.
NBC’s chief White House correspondent writes an insider’s account of Obama’s presidency.

Williams, Kate. Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte. Tantor Audio. Read by Corrie James.
How Josephine de Beauharnais became half of one of history’s great love stories—and a powerful figure in her own right.


Snipers, tycoons, and a new Pepys | December Audio in Advance | Nonfiction

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Audio in Advance offers previews of selected audiobooks two months ahead of publication, along with recommended picks and occasional interviews with notable authors and narrators.

Avadian, Brenda  & Eric M. Riddle. Stuffology 101: Get Your Mind out of the Clutter. Blackstone. Reader to be announced.
“Stuffologists” Avadian and Riddle share four decades of experience dealing with stuff—or rather, clutter. Funny, serious, and humbling stories are woven in with tips to help you clear the toxic clutter out of your life.

002b673e medium 170x170 Snipers, tycoons, and a new Pepys | December Audio in Advance | NonfictionBailey, Catherine. Black Diamonds: The Downfall of an Aristocratic Dynasty and the Fifty Years That Changed England. Tantor. Read by Gareth Armstrong.
Bailey (The Secret Rooms) chronicles the Fitzwilliam coal-mining dynasty and their breathtaking Wentworth estate, the largest private home in England. When the sixth Earl Fitzwilliam died in 1902, he left behind the second largest estate in 20th-century England; tens of thousands of people worked either in the family’s coal mines or on their estate. As Bailey retraces the family history, she uncovers a legacy riddled with bitter feuds, scandals, and civil unrest as the conflict between the coal industry and its miners came to a head.

Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Recorded Bks. Read by Jim Frangione.
The epic story of the rise and fall of the empire of cotton, the material’s centrality in the world economy, and how it came to be the fabric of our lives.

Davis, Joshua. Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream. Macmillan Audio. Read by Will Damron. digital exclusive.
In 2004, four impoverished, undocumented Latino teenagers, Oscar, Cristian, Luis, and Lorenzo, won the Marine Advanced Technology Education Robotics Competition at UC Santa Barbara. Their stories went on to include first-generation college graduations, deportation, bean-picking in Mexico, and service in Afghanistan.

0191 170x170 Snipers, tycoons, and a new Pepys | December Audio in Advance | Nonfiction Gibbon, Edward. Memoirs of My Life. Naxos. Read by David Timson.
Gibbon (1737-1794) was an English historian and member of Parliament known for his monumental The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire. His memoirs are a portrait of a rich and productive life and offers a compelling insight into a towering literary figure.

Johnson, Paul. Eisenhower: A Life. Recorded Bks. Read by Jonathan Davis.
Johnson’s (Churchill) lively, succinct biography of Dwight Eisenhower focuses particularly on his years as a five-star general and his two terms as president of the United States.

Kundtz, David. Quiet Mind: One-Minute Retreats from a Busy World.  Brilliance. Read by Fred Stella.
Kundtz’s (Moments in Between) meditation guide offers listeners advice on using the moments between activities as opportunities to focus on resting, finding peace, awakening, and remembering.

Lipp, Doug  Disney U: How Disney University Develops the World’s Most Engaged, Loyal, and Customer-Centric Employees. Brilliance. Read by Tim Lundeen.
For the first time, the secrets of the legendary Disney University are revealed. The book contains never-before-told stories from numerous Disney legends, reveals the heart of the Disney culture, and describes the company’s values and operational philosophies that support its iconic brand. Lipp (The Changing Face of Today’s Customer) lays out 13 timeless lessons Disney has used to drive profits and growth worldwide for more than half a century.

Martin, Chris. Modern American Snipers: From The Legend to The Reaper—on the Battlefield with Special Operations Snipers. Macmillan Audio. Read by Peter Larkin.
The inside story of some of the best snipers in recent American history, including Chris Kyle, SEAL Team 3 Chief and the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history, and Nick Irving, the first African American to serve as a sniper in the 3rd Ranger Battalion, and its deadliest, with 33 confirmed kills.

Morris, Charles R. The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J.P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy. Blackstone. Read by William Hughes.
The modern American economy, says Morris, 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. Morris (The Dawn of Innovation) vividly brings these men and their times to life.

Navarro, Joe with Toni Sciarra Poynter. Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows How To Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People. Brilliance. Read by Stephen Hoye.
Former FBI profiler Navarro shows listeners how to identify the four most common dangerous personalities—the Narcissist, the Predator, the Paranoid, and the Unstable Personality—and analyze how much of a threat each one can be. Listeners learn how to protect themselves both immediately and long-term—as well as how to recover from the trauma of being close to such a destructive force.

Payne, Mark. How To Kill a Unicorn: How the World’s Hottest Innovation Factory Builds Bold Ideas that Make It to Market. Recorded Bks. Read by David Chandler.
The success of innovation consulting firm Fahrenheit 212 is driven by its unique methodology; combining what it calls Magic—the creative side of innovation—with Money, the business side. Payne, cofounder, president, and head of idea development, offers inside accounts of how the company solved their biggest challenges. Embedded in their approach to new ideas are hard-earned lessons about what separates innovations that work from those that don’t.

Pepys, Samuel. Diary of Samuel Pepys. Blackstone. Read by Kris Marshall, Katherine Jakeways, and a full cast
Pepys was 26 when he decided to start keeping a diary in January 1660. For the next ten years he faithfully recorded the day’s events and confessed his innermost thoughts. That diary has since become one of our most important, and fascinating, historical documents. Pepys provides an eyewitness account of the 17th century, describing what people ate and wore, what they did for fun, the tricks they played on each other, what they expected of marriage, and even how they conducted love affairs. This collection comprises all ten BBC Radio 4 series plus a special Saturday Drama centering on the Great Fire of London.

Preisler, Jerome. First to Jump: How the Band of Brothers Was Aided by the Brave Paratroopers of Pathfinders Company.  Tantor. Read by Tom Perkins.
Preisler (Code Name Caesar) here looks at World War II’s special operations commandos, men who relied on their stealth, expert prowess, and matchless courage and audacity to set the stage for airborne drops and glider landings throughout Europe. Narrator Perkins was an audio engineer for more than 40 years.

Shenk, Joshua Wolf. Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs. Recorded Bks. Read by Andrew Garman.
Shenk (In Lincoln’s Hand) examines scores of creative duos from John Lennon and Paul McCartney to Marie and Pierre Curie to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and reveals the six essential stages through which creative intimacy unfolds. Shenk draws on new scientific research and builds an argument for the social foundations of creativity and the pair as its primary embodiment.

hyq5k3ykofhayir1f0ix 170x170 Snipers, tycoons, and a new Pepys | December Audio in Advance | NonfictionSundquist, Josh. We Should Hang Out Sometime: Embarrassingly, a True Story. Hachette Audio. Read by the author.
A bright, poignant, and deeply funny autobiographical account of coming of age as an amputee cancer survivor who set out to learn why he was still single. To find out, he tracked down the girls he had tried to date and asked them what went wrong? From a disastrous mini-golf date involving a backward prosthetic foot, to his introduction to CFD (Close Fast Dancing), to a misguided “grand gesture” at a Miss America pageant, this story is about looking for love—or at least a girlfriend—in all the wrong places.

Thompson, Leigh. Creative Conspiracy: The New Rules of Breakthrough Collaboration. Recorded Bks. Read by Karen Saltus.
Management expert Thompson guides listeners to develop collaborations that are conscious, planned, and focused on generating new ideas. The author combines broad-ranging research with real-life examples to offer strategies and practices designed to help teams and their leaders capitalize on what actually works when it comes to creative collaboration.

Life in Gitmo, the Underground Railroad, and murder in America | Jan. 2015 Audio in Advance | Nonfiction

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Anthony, Lawrence & Graham Spence. Babylon’s Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo. Tantor Audio. ISBN 9781494507985. Read by Simon Vance.
When the Iraq war began, conservationist Anthony was concerned about the fate of the Baghdad Zoo, caught in the crossfire at the heart of the city. Once Anthony entered Iraq he discovered that hostilities and uncontrolled looting had devastated the zoo and its animals. Originally published in 2007, this work chronicles Anthony’s hair-raising efforts to save a pride of Saddam’s lions, close a deplorable black-market zoo, run ostriches through shoot-to-kill checkpoints, and rescue the dictator’s personal herd of thoroughbred horses.

2ceb2473aad2caa025bb1ada4f130096 Life in Gitmo, the Underground Railroad, and murder in America  | Jan. 2015 Audio in Advance | NonfictionClose, Jessie & Pete Earley. Resilience: Two Sisters and a Story of Mental Illness. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478924524. Read by the author and Glenn Close.
When the Close sisters were very young, their parents joined a cult called the MRA, or Moral Rearmament, which led the family to Switzerland and then the Belgian Congo where their father became the personal physician to President Mobutu. After the girls returned to the States for boarding school, Jessie started to exhibit symptoms of severe bipolar disorder. The condition worsened throughout her life and was passed on to her son, Calen. It wasn’t until Calen entered McLean’s psychiatric hospital that Jessie herself was diagnosed. Fifteen years and 12 years of sobriety later, Jessie is a stable,  productive member of society. Here the sisters share their story of triumphing over Jessie’s illness.

Cullen, Maura. 35 Dumb Things Well-Intended People Say: Surprising Things We Say That Widen the Diversity Gap. Brilliance Audio. ISBN 9781501226571. Read by Mary Robinette Kowal.
Statements such as “Some of my best friends are… (black, white, Asian, etc.),” “I don’t think of you as… (gay, disabled, Jewish, etc.),” or “I don’t see color, I’m colorblind” can build a divide between people, even when the speaker’s intent is the opposite. They often widen the diversity gap, sometimes causing irreparable harm personally and professionally. Cullen holds a doctorate in social justice and diversity education from UMass Amherst and has led seminars on diversity since 1987. Here she presents a guide to becoming more inclusive and diversity-smart.

Davis, William C. Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee—The War They Fought, the Peace They Forged. Blackstone Audio. ISBN 9781483024240. Reader to be announced.
This dual biography of two iconic leaders examines how they fought a bloody, brutal war then forged a lasting peace that fundamentally changed our nation. Each the subject of innumerable biographies, Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee have never before been paired as they are here. Davis (The Rogue Republic) finds surprising similarities between the two men as well as new perspectives on how their lives prepared them for the war they fought and influenced how they fought it: Lee’s sense of failure before the war, Grant’s optimism during disaster, and the sophisticated social and political instincts that each had when waging a war between democracies.

Doidge, Norman. The Brain’s Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101888094. Read by George Newbern.
Doidge (The Brain That Changes Itself) here presents astounding advances in the treatment of brain injury and illness. He advocates exploring neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to change its own structure and function in response to mental experience—to alleviate the symptoms of such conditions as strokes, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and cerebral palsy, as well as to stave off dementia.

Foner, Eric. Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad. HighBridge. ISBN 9781622315901. Read by J.D. Jackson.
Sydney Howard Gay, an abolitionist newspaper editor; Louis Napoleon, a furniture polisher; and Charles B. Ray, a black minister, operated the Underground Railroad in New York at great risk to themselves. In secret coordination with black dockworkers who alerted them to the arrival of fugitives and with counterparts in Norfolk, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Albany, and Syracuse, Underground Railroad operatives in New York helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Foner (The Fiery Trial) uses fresh evidence—including the meticulous record of slave rescues secretly kept by Gay—to explore the courageous efforts of men and women who broke the law to help escaped slaves reach freedom.

Fuller, Alexandra. Leaving Before the Rains Come. Recorded Bks. ISBN 9781490637051. Reader to be announced.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and her dissolving marriage and feeling alienated from her adopted homeland, America, Fuller (Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight) returns to Africa and finds in her father’s harsh, simple and uncompromising ways the key to her salvation. Casting a fresh eye on her parents’ boisterous strengths and debilitating weaknesses, painting a vivid picture of America at the end of decades of false certainty and security, and revealing her Africa, vital and resilient, this is a remarkable memoir.

51PGYuC5C+L. SY344 BO1204203200  Life in Gitmo, the Underground Railroad, and murder in America  | Jan. 2015 Audio in Advance | NonfictionGopal, Anand. No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes. HighBridge. ISBN  9781622316663. Read by Assaf Cohen.
Gopal covered the war in Afghanistan for The Wall Street Journal and The Christian Science Monitor and here traces in vivid detail the lives of three Afghans caught in America’s war on terror. He follows a Taliban commander, who rises from scrawny teenager to leading insurgent; a U.S.-backed warlord, who uses the American military to gain personal wealth and power; and a village housewife trapped between the two sides, who discovers the devastating cost of neutrality. Though their dramatic stories, Gopal shows that the Afghan war, so often regarded as a hopeless quagmire, could have gone very differently. This heartbreaking story of mistakes and misdeeds challenges perceptions of the Afghan conflict, its victims, and its supposed winners.

Lehr, Dick & Gerard O’Neill. Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob. Recorded Bks. ISBN 9781464023828. Read by Christopher Evan Welch.
This gritty New York Times best-seller, originally published in 2001, tells the story of John Connolly and James “Whitey” Bulger, who grew up together in South Boston. Decades later, in the mid 1970s, Connolly was a major figure in the FBI’s Boston office and Bulger had become godfather of the Irish Mob. What happened next—a dirty deal to bring down the Italian mob in exchange for protection for Bulger—would spiral out of control, leading to murders, drug dealing, racketeering indictments, and, ultimately, the biggest informant scandal in the history of the FBI.

Oswalt, Patton. Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film. S. & S. Audio. ISBN 9781442375130. Read by the author.
Comedian and actor Oswalt (Zombie Spaceship Wasteland) here writes about coming of age as a performer and writer in the late ’90s while obsessively watching classic films at the legendary New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles at least three nights a week. Silver screen celluloid became Patton’s life schoolbook, informing his notions of acting, writing, comedy, and relationships. Set in the nascent days of the alternative comedy scene, Oswalt’s memoir chronicles his journey from fledgling stand-up comedian to self-assured sitcom actor, with the colorful New Beverly collective supporting him all along the way.

Leovy, Jill. Ghettoside: A Story of Murder in America. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780449009734. Ready by Rebecca Lowman.
On a warm spring evening in South Los Angeles, a young man is shot and killed on a sidewalk minutes away from his home, one of the thousands of black Americans murdered that year. His assailant ran down the street, jumped into an SUV, and vanished, hoping to join the vast majority of killers in American cities who are never arrested. But as soon as the case was assigned to Detective John Skaggs, the odds shifted. This fast-paced narrative of a devastating crime is a surprising new lens into the subject of murder in America. Leovy, a reporter and editor with the Los Angeles Times, started The Homicide Report, an interactive map, database, and blog that chronicles homicides in Los Angeles County.

Mitchell, Andie. It Was Me All Along. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780553546279. Read by the author.
In this heartbreakingly honest, endearing memoir of incredible weight loss, a young food blogger (canyoustayfordinner.com) battles body image issues and overcomes food addiction. Mitchell travels from working-class Boston to the romantic streets of Rome, from morbidly obese to half her size, from seeking comfort in junk food to finding balance in exquisite (but modestly portioned) bowls of handmade pasta. This story is about much more than a woman who loves food and abhors her body. It is about someone who made changes when her situation seemed too far gone and how she discovered balance in an off-kilter world. More than anything, though, it is the story of her finding beauty in acceptance and learning to love all parts of herself.

Moore, Wes. The Work: My Search for a Life That Matters. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780804190930. Read by the author.
Moore (The Other Wes Moore) continues his inspirational quest for a meaningful life and shares the powerful lessons—about self-discovery, service, and risk-taking—that led him to a new definition of success for our times. Moore graduated from a difficult childhood in the Bronx and Baltimore to an adult life that would find him at some of the most critical moments in our recent history: as a combat officer in Afghanistan; a White House fellow in a time of wars abroad and disasters at home; and a Wall Street banker during the financial crisis. In this insightful book, Moore shares the lessons he learned from people he met along the way and tells the stories of other 21st-century change-makers who’ve inspired him in his search.

bd50 square 400 Life in Gitmo, the Underground Railroad, and murder in America  | Jan. 2015 Audio in Advance | NonfictionRitland, Mike & Gary Brozek. Team Dog: How To Train Your Dog—the Navy SEAL Way. Blackstone Audio. ISBN 9781481504485. Read by John Pruden.
Former Navy SEAL Ritland teaches you how to give your dog the exceptional training and loyalty of a combat dog. He taps into 15 years’ worth of experience and shares, in accessible and direct language, the science behind gaining a dog’s trust. He also offers invaluable steps for achieving any level of obedience. His unique approach incorporates entertaining examples and anecdotes from his work with dogs on and off the battlefield and tips from the Navy SEAL guidebook to teach dog owners how to choose the perfect dog for their household, establish themselves as the “team leader,” master “command and control,” employ “situational awareness,” and solidify their dog’s position as the family’s ultimate best friend.

Shankman, Peter. Zombie Loyalists: Using Great Service to Create Rabid Fans. Dreamscape Media. ISBN 9781633795297. Reader to be announced.
Shankman (Nice Companies Finish First) works with companies to create what he calls “zombie loyalists,” fervent fans who help companies massively increase their customer base, brand awareness, and revenue. Shankman examines how large companies (e.g., the Ritz Carlton, Commerce Bank, and Starwood Hotels) and smaller businesses turn their customers into zombie loyalists and shows how listeners can create their own customer armies.

Slahi, Mohamedou Ould. Guantánamo Diary. Blackstone Audio. ISBN 9781478957997. Reader to be announced.
Slahi has been imprisoned at the detainee camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since 2002. The United States has never charged him with a crime, and although his release was ordered by a federal judge, the U.S. government fought that decision, and there is no sign that the United States plans to let him go. Three years into his captivity, Slahi began a diary, recounting his life before he disappeared into U.S. custody and daily life as a detainee. His diary is not merely a vivid record of a miscarriage of justice, but a deeply personal memoir—terrifying, darkly humorous, and surprisingly gracious.

Wittenborn, Dirk & Jazz Johnson. The Social Climber’s Bible: A Book of Manners, Practical Tips, and Spiritual Advice for the Upwardly Mobile. Recorded Bks. ISBN 9781490642260. Read by Mazhan Marno.
This tongue-in-cheek—or is it?—work will teach listeners the art of social climbing at gallery openings, cocktail parties, and funerals; social climbing as a family; how to handle sex, dating, marriage, and love; and how to spot what the authors call big fish, whales, turtles, and unicorns, and what they can do for you. Wittenborn (Fierce People) was the screenwriter and producer of the documentary Born Rich, which profiled such wealthy youngsters as his coauthor, Johnson & Johnson heiress Jazz Johnson.

Lincoln as Lawyer, OCD, and the Beauty of Code | Feb. 2015 Audio in Advance | Nonfiction

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Albracht, William & Marvin Wolf. Abandoned in Hell: The Fight for Vietnam’s Fire Base Kate. Recorded Bks. ISBN 9781490656748. Reader to be announced.
In October 1969, Captain William Albracht, the youngest Green Beret in Vietnam, took command of a remote hilltop outpost called Fire Base Kate, held by only 27 American soldiers and 150 Montagnard militiamen. At dawn the next morning, three North Vietnamese Army regiments—some 6,000 men—attacked. Albracht’s men held off repeated ground assaults with fierce hand-to-hand fighting, air support, and a dangerously close B-52 strike. After five days, Kate’s defenders were out of ammo and water. Refusing to allow his men to surrender, Albracht led his troops, including many wounded, off the hill and on a daring night march through enemy lines.

Adam, David. The Man Who Couldn’t Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought. Recorded Bks. ISBN 9781490643571. Read by Daniel Philpott.
This book offers an intimate look at the power of intrusive thoughts, how our brains can turn against us, and what it means to live with obsessive compulsive disorder. In this captivating fusion of science, history, and personal memoir, Adam explores the weird thoughts that exist within every mind, and how they drive millions of us towards obsessions and compulsions. David has suffered from OCD for 20 years, and this work is his unflinchingly honest attempt to understand the condition and his experiences.

Axelrod, David. Believer: My Forty Years in Politics. Penguin. ISBN 9781611763638. Read by the author.
As a young newspaperman in the Chicago of the 1970s and 1980s, Axelrod reported on the dissolution of the last of the big city political machines, along with the emergence of a black, independent movement that made Obama’s ascent possible. Axelrod switched careers to become a political strategist, working for pathbreakers such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and morally conflicted characters such as John Edwards.

91saCKpAaVL Lincoln as Lawyer, OCD, and the Beauty of Code | Feb. 2015 Audio in Advance | NonfictionBrowder, Bill. Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder and One Man’s Fight for Justice. Recorded Bks. ISBN 9781490649658. Reader to be announced.
Browder, one of the first capitalist investors into Russia after the end of Communism, made billions of dollars by taking on and exposing the Russian oligarchs’ corruption in the nineties. When Vladimir Putin came to power, Browder’s Russian visa was withdrawn and a group of corrupt Russian government officials scammed him out of $230 million. Sergei Magnitsky, Browder’s young lawyer in Moscow, exposed that fraud, then was arrested and beaten to death in a Russian prison. Browder set out to achieve justice for Sergei and his family, shutting down his company and turning himself into a human rights entrepreneur.

Busby, Cylin & John Busby. The Year We Disappeared: A Father-Daughter Memoir. Brilliance. ISBN 9781501237454. Read by Cylin Busby David Baker, & The Full Cast Family.
Police officer John Busby was shot by an unknown assailant and, though horribly wounded, he survived. But the perpetrator remained at large, meaning Busby and his family remained in danger. In alternating chapters, John Busby and his daughter, Cylin, tell the harrowing true story of the year that followed—John from his perspective as parent, Cylin from the point of view of the nine-year-old child that she was. Together, father and daughter craft an unforgettable picture of fear, police corruption, and a malignant thug, as well as redemption, hope, and healing.

Chandra, Vikram. Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty. Tantor Audio. ISBN 9781494508654. Read by Neil Shah.
Chandra (Red Earth and Pouring Rain) has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary new book, his first work of nonfiction, he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology. Exploring such varied topics as logic gates and literary modernism, the machismo of tech geeks, the omnipresence of an “Indian Mafia” in Silicon Valley, and the writings of the 11th-century Kashmiri thinker Abhinavagupta, this is both an idiosyncratic history of coding and a fascinating meditation on the writer’s art.

Charan, Ram. The Attacker’s Advantage: Turning Uncertainty into Breakthrough Opportunities. HighBridge. ISBN 9781622315000. Read by Mark Bramhall.
Business leaders are operating in an era of persistent uncertainty that moves at an unprecedented rate of change. Here Charan reveals the upside of uncertainty for those leaders who are nimbly positioned to anticipate the catalysts of disruption and embrace change. He addresses the current turbulent business environment, cutting through the veil of complexity to concentrate on new customer needs and expectations and providing the tools for corporate leaders to take their companies to a higher level.

Connors, Phillip. All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found. HighBridge. ISBN 9781622315949. Read by Adam Verner.
Connors’s Fire Season was an account of the decade he spent working in a fire-lookout tower in the remotest part of New Mexico. Now the author returns with the story of what drove him up the tower in the first place: the wilderness years he spent reeling in the wake of a family tragedy. This unforgettable account of grappling with a shattered sense of purpose moves from his family’s failing pig farm in Minnesota to a crack-addled Brooklyn neighborhood and the mountains of New Mexico, where he puts the pieces of his life back together.

bold 9781476709567 lg Lincoln as Lawyer, OCD, and the Beauty of Code | Feb. 2015 Audio in Advance | NonfictionDiamandis, Peter H. & Steven Kotler. Bold: How To Go Big, Make Bank, and Better the World. S. & S. Audio. ISBN 9781442380714. Read by Steven Kotler.
Diamandis and Kotler’s (Abundance) resource on the use of emerging technologies, thinking at scale, and the power of crowd-powered tools unfolds in three parts. Part One focuses on the exponential technologies: 3D printing, artificial intelligence, robotics, networks and sensors, and synthetic biology. Part Two draws on insights from entrepreneurs such as Larry Page, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos. The last section is a look at the best practices that will allow anyone to leverage today’s hyper-connected crowd.

Dowling, Tim. How To Be a Husband. Recorded Bks.  ISBN 9781490650722. Read by the author.
Guardian columnist Dowling asks what it takes to make a husband, and looks to his own married life to provide the answer. A husband of some 20 years, Dowling considers his marriage resounding proof that even the most impossible partnership can work out for the best. Neither a how-to guide nor a compendium of petty remarks and brinkmanship (although it contains plenty of both), How To Be a Husband is a cautionary tale about throwing caution to the wind. It’s a new manifesto for marriage and an answer to why, even when we suck at it, we stick at it.

Goodman, Marc. Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780804193054. Read by Robertson Dean.
Drawing on his experience in law enforcement and counterterrorism, Goodman explores how bad actors are primed to hijack the technologies of tomorrow, including robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. In this glimpse into the dark side of technological innovation and the unintended consequences of our connected world, Goodman offers listeners a way out with clear steps to survive the progress unfolding before us. Provocative, thrilling, and ultimately empowering, Future Crimes will serve as an urgent call to action that shows how we can take back control over our own devices and harness technology’s tremendous power for the betterment of humanity—before it’s too late.

Doyle, Don H. The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War. Recorded Bks. ISBN 9781490642420. Read by Adam Grupper.
Doyle explains that the Civil War was more than an internal American conflict; it was a struggle that spanned the Atlantic. This book follows the agents of the North and South who went abroad to tell the world what they were fighting for, and the foreign politicians, journalists, and intellectuals who told America and the world what they thought this war was really about—or ought to be about. Foreigners looked upon the American contest as an epic battle in a grand historic struggle that would decide the fate of democracy as well as slavery for generations to come. An account of the international dimensions of Americas defining conflict, this work frames the Civil War as a crucial turning point in the global struggle over the future of democracy.

Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Tantor Audio. ISBN 9781494556907. Read by Derek Perkins.
At least six different species of humans inhabited Earth 100,000 years ago. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us? Harari examines the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem and the rise of empires, integrating history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas.

61BdRR7mMJL Lincoln as Lawyer, OCD, and the Beauty of Code | Feb. 2015 Audio in Advance | NonfictionJacquet, Jennifer. Is Shame Necessary?: New Uses for an Old Tool. Brilliance. ISBN 9781501201073. Read by the author.
Jacquet here explores the social nature of shame, and the ways it might be used to promote political change and social reform, arguing that the solution to the limitations of guilt can be found in shame, retrofitted for the age of democracy and social media. She demonstrates how shaming can function as a nonviolent form of resistance that, in turn, challenges institutions, organizations, and even governments to actuate large-scale change. She argues that when applied in the right way, the right quantity, and at the right time, shame has the capacity to keep us from failing other species and, ultimately, ourselves.

Loyd, Alexander. Beyond Willpower: The Secret Principle To Achieving Success in Life, Love, and Happiness. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101913116. Read by Erik Singer.
Loyd’s 40-day program, based on more than 25 years of clinical experience, will help listeners identify and clarify what fundamentally defines success for them. He teaches listeners to use three simple tools to internally shift from fear to love, physically (using the energy medicine tool), mentally (using the reprogramming statements tool), and spiritually (using the heart screen tool).

Brian McGinty. Lincoln’s Greatest Case: The River, The Bridge, and The Making of America. Recorded Bks. ISBN 9781490658605. Reader to be announced.
On May 6, 1856, the steamboat Effie Afton barreled into a pillar of the Rock Island Bridge—the first railroad bridge ever to span the Mississippi River. The vessel erupted into flames and sank, taking much of the bridge with it. No one was killed, but the question of who was at fault cried out for an answer. Recreating the Effie Afton case from its unlikely inception to its controversial finale, McGinty animates the most consequential trial in Lincoln’s nearly quarter century as a lawyer, as well as the future president’s consummate legal skills and instincts, the history of steamboat traffic on the Mississippi, the progress of railroads west of the Appalachians, and the epochal clashes of railroads and steamboats at the river’s edge.

Stewart, David O. Madison’s Gift: Five Partnerships that Built America. HighBridge. ISBN 9781622316144. Read by Grover Gardner.
Stewart makes the argument that Madison is the most significant framer of our nation, through his successive partnerships with mentor George Washington; co-author Alexander Hamilton; political ally Thomas Jefferson; successor James Monroe; and wife, Dolley. Stewart makes a compelling case for Madison’s centrality and tells an absorbing story of his friendships with most influential men of his times.

9781482956368 Lincoln as Lawyer, OCD, and the Beauty of Code | Feb. 2015 Audio in Advance | NonfictionStringer, Lee. Grand Central Winter. Blackstone. ISBN 9781482956382. Read by Kevin Kenerly.
Originally published in 1998, this memoir chronicles the unraveling of Stringer’s seemingly secure existence as a marketing executive and his odyssey of survival on the streets of New York. Homeless and drug-addicted for 11 years, Stringer began a writing habit that eventually won out over drugs. He conveys the vitality and complexity of a down-and-out life as he portrays “God’s corner,” as he calls 42nd Street; his friend Suzi, a prostitute whose infant he sometimes babysits; and recounts taking shelter underneath Grand Central by night and collecting cans by day.

Thomas, Dana. Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. Recorded Bks. ISBN 9781490631165. Reader to be announced.
In February 2011, John Galliano, the head of Christian Dior, imploded with a drunken, anti-Semitic public tirade. Exactly a year earlier, celebrated designer Alexander McQueen took his own life three weeks before his women’s wear show. Both, Thomas argues, were casualties of the war between art and commerce that rages within fashion. The designers had shaken the establishment out of its bourgeois, minimalist stupor with daring, sexy designs and theatrical fashion shows, but executives pushed the designers to meet increasingly rapid deadlines and the pace was unsustainable.

Trimble, Lee. Beyond the Call: The True Story of One World War II Pilot’s Covert Mission to Rescue POWs on the Eastern Front. Recorded Bks. ISBN 9781490656564. Reader to be announced.
Near the end of World War II, thousands of Allied ex-POWs were abandoned on the Eastern Front with no food, shelter, or supplies. A plan was conceived for an undercover rescue mission. In total secrecy, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) chose an obscure American air force detachment stationed at a Ukrainian airfield; it would provide the base and the cover for the operation. The man they picked to undertake it was veteran bomber pilot Captain Robert Trimble. With little covert training, already scarred by the trials of combat, Trimble took the mission. Alone he faced up to the terrifying Soviet secret police, saving hundreds of lives. At the same time he battled to come to terms with the trauma of war and find his own way home to his wife and child.

Training a Hawk, Researching a Family Ghost, Finding Lost Treasure | Mar. 2015 Audio in Advance | Nonfiction

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Andraka, Jack. Breakthrough: How One Teen Innovator Is Changing the World. Blackstone. ISBN 9781483079462. Reader TBA.
When Andraka was 15, he created a means for early cancer detection: a four-cent strip of paper capable of detecting pancreatic, ovarian, and lung cancers 400 times more effectively than the previous standard. He discusses this breakthrough, but also talks about overcoming bullying and depression and finding the resilience to persevere. His account will interest and inspire both adults and teens. Do-it-yourself science experiments are included in each chapter.

Bellow, Saul. There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction. Blackstone. ISBN 9781481517409. Reader TBA.
The year 2015 is the centennial of Saul Bellow’s birth and the tenth anniversary of his death. Bellow—a Nobel laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and the only novelist to receive three National Book Awards—is one of America’s most cherished authors. Here, Benjamin Taylor, editor of Saul Bellow: Letters, presents lesser-known aspects of the iconic writer. Arranged chronologically, this collection of six classic pieces and an abundance of previously uncollected material includes criticism, interviews, speeches, and other reflections.

afff2f04b8354020ed527752174d5569Bruni, Frank. Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania. Blackstone Audio. ISBN 9781478959205. Reader TBA.
Expanding on an April 2014 column, “Our Crazy College Crossroads,” Bruni’s manifesto puts the college admissions process into desperately needed perspective. It not only dissects the limited meaning of a rigged and sometimes random admissions process, it also discusses many of the hugely successful Americans who didn’t go to Ivy League schools, makes the case that the attitude with which a student approaches college matters more than the college itself, and presents data and expert opinions that question the advantages of diplomas from Ivy League schools (and their ilk). All the while, Bruni weaves in larger life lessons—that setbacks can be springboards, that the wisest course isn’t always the most obvious one—that make this book a corrective tool and a balm not just for high school graduates eyeing the horizon.

Gura, Philip F. The Life of William Apess, Pequot. Blackstone. ISBN 9781481511971. Read by Traber Burns.
The Pequot Indian intellectual, author, and itinerant preacher William Apess was one of the most important voices of the 19th century, and his 1829 autobiography, A Son of the Forest, was the first published by a Native American writer. Here Gura offers the first book-length chronicle of Apess’s life. After an impoverished childhood marked by abuse, Apess soldiered with American troops during the War of 1812, converted to Methodism, and rose to fame as a lecturer who lifted a powerful voice of protest against the plight of Native Americans in New England and beyond.

Henion, Leigh Ann. Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer’s Search for Wonder in the Natural World. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101887783. Read by Nicol Zanzarella.
A journalist and young mother, Henion combines her own conflicted but joyful experiences as a parent with a panoramic tour of the world’s most extraordinary natural wonders. Convinced that the greatest key to happiness—both her own and that of her family—lies in periodically allowing herself to venture into the wider world beyond home, Henion sets out on a global trek to rekindle her sense of wonder. The author’s spiritual wanderlust takes her around the world and puts her in the path of modern-day shamans, reindeer herders, and astrophysicists.

9780307986313Hsu, Huan. The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780804192200. Read by the author.
In 1938, when the Japanese arrived in Hsu’s great-great-grandfather Liu’s Yangtze River hometown of Xingang, Liu was forced to bury his valuables, including a collection of antique porcelain. Many years and upheavals later, Hsu, raised in Salt Lake City, moves to China to work in his uncle’s semiconductor chip business. Once there, a conversation with his grandmother, his last living link to dynastic China, ignites a desire to learn more about not only his lost ancestral heirlooms but also porcelain itself. Mastering the language enough to venture into the countryside, Hsu sets out to separate the layers of fact and fiction that have obscured both China and his heritage and finally complete his family’s long march back home.

Keillor, Garrison. A Prairie Home Companion 40th Anniversary Celebration. HighBridge. ISBN 9781622315574.
Since A Prairie Home Companion first went on air, July 6, 1974, a steady stream of great musicians has crossed its stage—The Steele Sisters, Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, Peter Ostroushko, The Wailin’ Jennys, Robin and Linda Williams, Iris DeMent, Howard Levy—plus the radio detective Guy Noir, the cowboys Dusty and Lefty, the librarian Ruth Harrison, Duane and his Mother, and the good people of Lake Wobegon, MN. An all-star roster of favorite performers joined to celebrate the anniversary on the lawn of Macalester College in St. Paul, a stone’s throw from the hall where the first broadcast was made. Some highlights from that show are presented here, interwoven with archival performances by Doc Watson, Odetta, Pete Seeger, Helen Schneyer, Chet Atkins, Bill Hinkley & Judy Larson, Soupy Schindler, and Tom Keith.

9780307408860Larson, Erik. Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780553551648. Read by Scott Brick.
On May 1, 1915, a luxury ocean liner sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone, and for months, its U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania‘s captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack. He knew, moreover, that his ship—the fastest then in service—could outrun any threat. Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. As U-20 and the Lusitania made their way toward Liverpool, an array of forces converged to produce one of the great disasters of history.

Leeds, Regina. Rightsize…Right Now!: The 8-Week Plan to Organize, Declutter, and Make Any Move Stress-Free. Tantor Audio. ISBN 9781494556716. Read by the author.
Moving is rarely considered an enjoyable or relaxing experience. There’s the planning, the packing, the hauling, the unpacking, the misplaced or missing items, the chaotic clutter of boxes; the overall stress can overwhelm even the most easygoing person. But does it have to be that way? For almost 25 years, Leeds has helped her clients prepare for new spaces with practical support and a fresh perspective. Here she outlines her eight-week plan to clear clutter, organize, and relocate without stress. From making a plan and taking the first steps to addressing unmade decisions and final details, Leeds turns the stress of moving into the excitement of a life-changing opportunity.

Lyndsey, Anna. Girl in the Dark. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101890028. Read by Hannah Curtis.
In this memoir, a young woman writes of the sensitivity to light that has forced her to live in darkness, and of the love that has saved her. Initially, Lyndsey’s face felt like it was burning whenever she was in front of the computer. Soon this progressed to an intolerance of fluorescent light, then of sunlight itself, and the reaction spread to her entire body. Now, when her symptoms are at their worst, she must spend months on end in a blacked-out room, listening to audiobooks and playing elaborate word games in an attempt to ward off despair. During periods of relative remission she can venture cautiously out at dawn and dusk, into a world that, from the perspective of her normally cloistered existence, is filled with remarkable beauty.

61aLIftAK0L._SL300_Macdonald, Helen. H Is for Hawk. Blackstone Audio. ISBN 9781481530941. Reader to be announced.
When Macdonald’s father died suddenly, she was devastated. An experienced falconer, she’d never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators: the goshawk. Resolving to purchase and raise the deadly creature as a means to cope with her loss, she adopted Mabel. By turns heartbreaking and hilarious, this book is an unflinching account of bereavement, a unique look at the magnetism of an extraordinary beast, and the story of an eccentric falconer and legendary writer. Weaving together obsession, madness, memory, myth, and history, this blend of nature writing and memoir won the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction.

Martin, Sasha. Life from Scratch: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Forgiveness. Blackstone Audio. ISBN 9781483085371. Read by Andi Arndt.
Martin’s ambitious goal—to cook and eat her way around the world with 196 recipes from 196 countries in 196 weeks—led to the Global Table Adventure, a project that proves to be more than just a culinary challenge as she attempts to navigate the vicissitudes of marriage, motherhood, and life’s failures and successes, all inextricably linked to her troubled past. She and her brother lived with their mother in Boston before being placed in foster care with a family in Europe. Among the hard moments of her young life, the most difficult occurred when Sasha was just 12 years old—she witnessed her brother’s suicide. As she mines her past to make sense of her childhood, food allows Sasha to find her own place in the world—and create the home she has been craving her whole life.

Nordhaus, Hannah. American Ghost: A Family’s Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest. Tantor Audio. ISBN 9781494558161. Read by Xe Sands.
In one second-floor suite at Santa Fe’s La Posada hotel, guests reported alarming events: blankets ripped off while they slept, the room temperature plummeting, disembodied breathing, and dancing balls of light. When the hotel was still a private house, that second-floor room had belonged to Julia Schuster Staab, the wife of the home’s original owner. She died in 1896, nearly a century before the hauntings were first reported. In American Ghost, Nordhaus traces the life, death, and unsettled afterlife of her great-great-grandmother Julia, uncovering a larger tale of how a true-life story becomes a ghost story and how difficult it can sometimes be to separate history and myth.

51ivkKecXML._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Sampson, Scott. How To Raise a Wild Child. HighBridge. ISBN 9781622316106. Read by Sean Runnette.
American children today spend 90 percent less time playing outdoors than their parents did; instead, they spend an average of seven hours a day interacting with a screen. Sampson, a dinosaur paleontologist and VP of research and collections at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, asserts that not only does exposure to nature help relieve stress, depression, and attention deficits, but it provides long-term benefits linked to cognitive, emotional, and moral development. Distilling the latest research in disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, biology, and education, Sampson reveals how parents and educators can help kids fall in love with nature and instill a sense of place that will help keep the planet healthy.

Stern, Jessica & J.M. Berger. ISIS: The State of Terror. Blackstone. ISBN 9781481532723. Read by Ray Porter.
Stern and Berger analyze the tools ISIS uses both to frighten innocent citizens and lure new soldiers—including their pro-jihadi videos, the seductive appeal of “jihadic chic,” and its startlingly effective social media expertise. The authors offer practical ideas on potential government responses, emphasizing that we must alter our present conceptions of terrorism and terrorists and quickly react to the rapidly changing jihadi landscape, both online and off. As it lays out what our next move—as a country, as a government, as the world—should be, it offers a vital assessment of the future of counterterrorism and countering violent extremism.

Szwed, John. Billie Holiday: A Musical Biography. Recorded Bks. ISBN 9781490676364. Reader to be announced.
Most of the writing on Holiday has focused on the tragic details of her life—her prostitution at the age of 14, her heroin addiction and alcoholism, her series of abusive relationships—or tried to correct the many fabrications of her autobiography. Szwed stays close to the music, to Holiday’s performance style, and to the self she created and put into print, on record, and on stage. Drawing on a vast amount of new material that has surfaced in the last decade, the author considers how her life inflected her art, her influences, her uncanny voice and rhythmic genius, a number of her signature songs, and her legacy.

Candice Bergen, Philip Glass, & the Dalai Lama’s Brother | Audio in Advance Apr. 2015 | Nonfiction

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Acuff, Jon. Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck. Blackstone. ISBN 9781481519960. Reader TBA.
Acuff’s (Start) latest is a guide to making big career changes—by choice or necessity—and escaping the horrible feeling of being trapped in the wrong job. Throughout the book, Acuff features inspiring and funny true stories—not merely his own but those of friends who restarted their careers after a layoff, an extended maternity leave, or simply the realization that they were suffering 50 weeks a year just to pay the bills and enjoy two weeks of vacation.

9780525953708Adams, Mark. Meet Me in Atlantis : My Quest to Find the 2,000-Year-Old Sunken City. Recorded Bks. ISBN 9781470384586. Reader TBA.
Adams (Turn Right at Machu Picchu) interview Atlantis obsessives to determine why they believe it’s possible to find the world’s most famous lost city and whether any of their theories could prove or disprove its existence. He visits scientists who use cutting-edge technology to find legendary civilizations once thought to be fictional. He examines the numerical and musical codes hidden in Plato’s writings, and with the help of some charismatic sleuths traces their roots back to Pythagoras, the sixth-century BC mathematician. And he learns how ancient societies transmitted accounts of cataclysmic events and how one might dig out the kernel of truth in Plato’s original tale about Atlantis.

Bard, Elizabeth. Picnic in Provence. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478977339. Read by the author.
In this mouthwatering follow-up to Lunch in Paris, American Bard, her French husband, and their newborn son bid farewell to Paris for rural life in a tiny village in Provence. This is the story of how they embarked on a new adventure and became culinary entrepreneurs, starting an artisanal ice cream shop and experimenting with local ingredients such as saffron, sheep’s milk yogurt, and olive oil.

Barnett, Cynthia. Rain: A Natural and Cultural History. Brilliance Audio. ISBN 9781501224683. Reader TBA.
A natural history of rain, told through a blend of science, cultural history, and human drama. The story begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science—the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of colored rains—with the human story of our attempts to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River. It offers a glimpse of our “founding forecaster,” Thomas Jefferson, who measured every drizzle long before modern meteorology. Two centuries later, rainy skies would help inspire Morrissey’s mopes and Kurt Cobain’s grunge. As climate change upends rainfall patterns and unleashes increasingly severe storms and drought, Barnett shows rain to be a unifying force in a fractured world.

Bergen, Candice. A Fine Romance. S. & S. Audio. ISBN 9781442377028. Read by the author.
In the follow-up to Knock Wood, Bergen shares the big events. She is happily married to French director Louis Malle, but Bergen’s real romance begins when she discovers overpowering love for her daughter after years of ambivalence about motherhood. As Chloe grows up, Bergen finds her comic genius in the biggest TV role of the 80s, Murphy Brown, and makes unwanted headlines when Dan Quayle pulls her into the 1992 presidential campaign. Fifteen years into their marriage, Malle is diagnosed with cancer, and Candice is unflinching in describing her and Chloe’s despair over his death. But after years of widowhood, she feels the sweet shock of finding a different kind of soulmate.

Berry, Amanda, Gina DeJesus, Kevin Sullivan, & Mary Jordan. Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101914786. Read by Jorjeana Marie, Marisol Ramirez, and Arthur Morey.
Two victims of infamous Cleveland kidnapper Ariel Castro share the story of their abductions, their decade in captivity, and their dramatic escape. Castro, a local school bus driver, had separately lured Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight to his home, where he kept them chained. Drawing upon their recollections and the diary kept by Berry, Berry and DeJesus describe a tale of unimaginable torment, and Washington Post reporters Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan interweave the events within Castro’s house with original reporting on efforts to find the missing girls.

5365ae216ad5322c2365725159bf7a0bBogosian, Eric. Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478986423. Reader TBA.
In 1921 a small group of self-appointed patriots set out to avenge the deaths of almost one million victims of the Armenian Genocide. Over several years the men tracked down and assassinated former Turkish leaders. The story of this secret operation has never been fully told—until now. Bogosian (Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead) sets the killings in context by providing a summation of Ottoman and Armenian history as well as the history of the genocide itself.

Bourgeault, Cynthia. The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity. Brilliance Audio. ISBN 9781501227530.Read by Gabra Zackman.
Mary Magdalene is one of the most influential symbols in the history of Christianity—yet, if you look in the Bible, you’ll find only a handful of verses that speak of her. How did she become such a compelling saint in the face of such paltry evidence? Bourgeault (The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three) examines the Bible, church tradition, art, legend, and newly discovered texts, applies her own reasoning and intuition, and emerges with a radical view of Mary Magdalene as Jesus’s most important disciple, the one he thought understood his teaching best.

Bradley, James. The China Mirage. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478957171. Reader TBA.
Beginning in the 1850s, Bradley (Flags of Our Fathers) introduces listeners to the prominent Americans who made their fortunes in the China opium trade. As they—good Christians all—profitably addicted millions, American missionaries arrived, promising salvation for those who adopted Western ways. And that was just the beginning. From drug dealer Warren Delano to his grandson Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from the port of Hong Kong to the towers of Princeton University, from the era of Appomattox to the age of the A-Bomb, this work explores a difficult century that defines U.S.-Chinese relations to this day.

Browne, David. So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead. HighBridge. ISBN 9781622316700. Read by Sean Runnette.
Drawing on new interviews with surviving members and people in their inner circle along with previously unknown details gleaned from the group’s extensive archives, Browne lends the Dead’s epic story the vivid feel of a novel. He sheds new light on the band’s beginnings, music, dynamics, and struggles since Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995.

Butcher, Amy. Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Friendship and Murder. Blackstone. ISBN 9781481521789. Read by Emily Woo Zeller.
Four weeks before their college graduation, 21-year-old Kevin Schaeffer walked Amy Butcher to her home in their college town of Gettysburg, PA. Hours later, he fatally stabbed his ex-girlfriend, Emily Silverstein. While he awaited trial, psychiatrists concluded he had suffered an acute psychotic break. Amy was severely affected by Kevin’s crime but remained devoted to him as a friend. Over time she became obsessed—determined to discover the narrative that explained what Kevin had done. She drove across the country back to Gettysburg to sift through 200 pages of public records—mental health evaluations, detectives’ notes, inventories of evidence, search warrants, testimonies, even Kevin’s own confession.

Carson, Rachel. The Sea Around Us. Recorded Bks. ISBN 9781490650869. Reader TBA.
Published in 1951, this is one of the most remarkably successful books ever written about the natural world. Carson (Silent Spring) had a rare ability to combine scientific insight with moving, poetic prose. Reintroducing a classic work to a new generation of listeners, this edition features a new chapter written by Jeffrey Levinton, a leading expert in marine ecology, that incorporates the most recent thinking on continental drift, coral reefs, the spread of the ocean floor, the deterioration of the oceans, mass extinction of sea life, and many other topics.

511PRsH1AiL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Clark, Dorie. Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It. Brilliance Audio. ISBN 9781491552124. Read by the author.
To make a name for yourself, you have to capitalize on your unique perspective and knowledge and inspire others to listen and take action. But becoming a “thought leader” is a mysterious and opaque process. Where do the ideas come from, and how do they get noticed? Dorie Clark explains how to identify the ideas that set you apart and promote them successfully. The key is to recognize your own value, cultivate your expertise, and put yourself out there.

Downing, Taylor. Secret Warriors: Key Scientists, Code Breakers, and Propagandists of the Great War. Blackstone. ISBN 9781481520522. Read by Derek Perkins.
Downing (Churchill’s War Lab) uncovers how wartime code-breaking, aeronautics, and scientific research laid the foundation for many of the innovations of the 20th century. World War I is often viewed as a war fought by armies of millions living and fighting in trenches, aided by brutal machinery that cost the lives of many. But behind all of this an intellectual war was also being fought between engineers, chemists, code-breakers, physicists, doctors, mathematicians, and intelligence gatherers. This hidden war was to make a lasting contribution to how war was conducted on land, at sea, and in the air and to life at home.

Dwyer, Johnny. American Warlord. Recorded Bks. ISBN 9781490657684. Reader TBA.
Chucky Taylor was in many ways an average American kid: growing up in Florida he had friends, a high school sweetheart, and some brushes with the law. But then, in 1992, at age 15, he traveled to Liberia to meet his estranged father, Charles Taylor—the warlord and future president of Liberia. Adrift in a strange country, Chucky became the commander of the infamous Anti-Terrorist Unit, aka “Demon Forces.” Suddenly powerful amidst the lawlessness of his father’s rule, any semblance of morality vanished: the savagery and pointlessness of his crimes shocked even his brutal father. Fleeing Liberia as his father’s government fell, Chucky was caught sneaking into the United States and became the first American convicted of the war crime of torture.

Ford, Martin. Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future. Brilliance Audio. ISBN 9781480574731. Read by Jeff Cummings.
In Silicon Valley the phrase “disruptive technology” is tossed around casually. No one doubts that technology has the power to devastate entire industries and upend various sectors of the job market. But Ford (The Lights in the Tunnel) asks a bigger question: can accelerating technology disrupt our entire economic system to the point where a fundamental restructuring is required? Some might imagine that this industrial revolution will unfold like the last: even as some jobs are eliminated, more will be created to deal with the new devices of a new era. Ford posits that, instead, machines will be able to take care of themselves, and fewer jobs will be necessary.

Freedman, Lawrence. Strategy: A History. Brilliance Audio. ISBN 9781501227721. Read by Michael Butler Murray.
Freedman (A Choice of Enemies) captures the vast history of strategic thinking, from the surprisingly advanced strategy practiced in primate groups, to the opposing strategies of Achilles and Odysseus in The Iliad, the strategic advice of Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, the great military innovations of Baron Henri de Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz, the grounding of revolutionary strategy in class struggles by Marx, the insights into corporate strategy found in Peter Drucker and Alfred Sloan, and the contributions of the leading social scientists working on strategy today.

Gessen, Masha. The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101923436. Reader TBA.
On April 15, 2013, two homemade bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding 264 others. The elder of the brothers suspected of committing this atrocity, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died in the ensuing manhunt; jury selection recently began in Dzhokhar’s trial. Gessen (Words Will Break Cement) follows the brothers from their displaced beginnings as descendants of ethnic Chechens deported to Central Asia in the Stalin era, from strife-ridden Kyrgyzstan to war-torn Dagestan, and then, as émigrés to the United States, into an utterly disorienting new world. She also reconstructs the struggle between assimilation and alienation that fuels their apparent metamorphosis into a new breed of homegrown terrorist.


6a00d83452510769e201b8d0c62c00970c-800wiGlass, Philip. Words Without Music. Blackstone. ISBN 9781481529143. Reader TBA.

A world-renowned composer of symphonies, operas, and film scores, Glass has, almost single-handedly, crafted the dominant sound of late 20th-century classical music. Biography lovers will be inspired by the story of a precocious Baltimore boy, the son of a music-shop owner, who entered college at age 15 before traveling to Paris to study under the legendary Nadia Boulanger; Glass devotees will be fascinated by the stories behind Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha, among other works. Whether recalling his experiences working at Bethlehem Steel, traveling in India, driving a cab in 1970s New York, or his professional collaborations with Allen Ginsberg, Ravi Shankar, Robert Wilson, Doris Lessing, and Martin Scorsese, Glass’s memoir affirms the power of music to change the world.

Grazer, Brian & Charles Fishman. A Curious Mind: The Key to a Good Life. S. & S. Audio. ISBN 9781442382084. Reader TBA.
For decades, film and TV producer Grazer has scheduled a weekly “curiosity conversation” with an accomplished stranger. From scientists to spies, and adventurers to business leaders, Grazer has met with anyone willing to answer his questions for a few hours. These informal discussions sparked the creative inspiration behind many of Grazer’s movies and TV shows, including Splash, 24, A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, Arrested Development, and 8 Mile.

Greene, Heather. Whisk(e)y Distilled: A Populist Guide to the Water of Life. Blackstone. ISBN 9781469030234. Read by Tavia Gilbert.
Over the past decade, whiskey expert Greene has been bombarded with thousands of questions such as, Can I have ice in my whiskey? Why is it sometimes spelled whisky? and What makes bourbon different? As New York City’s first female whiskey sommelier, Greene introduces audiences to the spirit’s charms, challenges, the boys’-club sensibilities that have made the drink seem inaccessible, and surprising new research that shows the crucial importance of nosing whiskey.

Korson, Kim. I Don’t Have a Happy Place: Cheerful Stories of Despondency and Gloom. Tantor Audio. Read by Xe Sands.
It’s a skill to find something wrong in just about every situation, but Korson has an exquisite talent for negativity. It is only after half a lifetime of finding kernels of unhappiness where others find joy that she begins to wonder if she is even capable of experiencing happiness. Here she untangles what it means to be a true malcontent.

Kruse, Kevin M. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. Brilliance Audio. ISBN 9781501238185. Read by Jeff Cummings.
Conventional wisdom holds that America has been a Christian nation since the Founding Fathers. But Kruse (White Flight) argues that the idea of “Christian America” is nothing more than a myth—and a relatively recent one at that. The assumption that America was, is, and always will be a Christian nation dates back no further than the 1930s, when a coalition of businessmen and religious leaders united in opposition to FDR’s New Deal. With the full support of Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, these activists—the forerunners of the Religious Right—propelled religion into the public sphere. Church membership skyrocketed; Congress added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, made “In God We Trust” the country’s official motto, and, for the first time, America became a thoroughly religious nation.

Lawson, Gary. Arms and the Dudes: How Three Stoners from Miami Beach Became the Most Unlikely Gunrunners in History. Recorded Bks. ISBN 9781490658551. Reader TBA.
In January of 2007, two young stoners from Miami Beach won a $300 million Department of Defense contract to supply ammunition to the Afghanistan military. Instead of fulfilling the order with high-quality arms, Efraim Diveroli and David Packouz bought cheap Communist-style surplus ammunition from Balkan gunrunners and secretly repackaged millions of rounds of shoddy Chinese ammunition and shipped it to Kabul—until they were caught by Pentagon investigators. Lawson (Octopus) exposes the mysterious world of global arms dealing, showing how the American military came to use private contractors such as Diveroli and Packouz as middlemen to secure weapons from illegal arms dealers.

Lende, Heather. Find the Good. HighBridge Audio. ISBN 9781622315703. Reader TBA.
As she was digging deep into the lives of community members, Lende, the obituary writer for her tiny hometown newspaper in Haines, AK, began to notice something. Even the crustiest old Alaskan sourpuss who died in a one-room cabin always had Halloween candy for the neighborhood kids; the eccentric owner of the seafood store who regularly warned her about government conspiracies knew how to be a true friend—his memorial service was packed. When Lende started intentionally seeking what was positive and true in people and situations in her own life she felt happier and life seemed more meaningful, too. Awful events are always followed by dozens and dozens of good deeds, the author points out—there’s so much to gain by taking responsibility for your own happiness and nothing to lose.

9780399171666Macks, Jon. Monologue: What Makes America Laugh Before Bed. Tantor Audio. ISBN 978-1494558741. Read by Johnny Heller.
Macks, a veteran writer for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, takes listeners behind the scenes of the late-night world for an in-depth, colorful look at what really makes these hosts the arbiters of public opinion. From the opening monolog—what’s funny, what’s dangerous, what’s untouchable—to the best vs. worst guests (think Billy Crystal and Martin Short vs. Kristen Stewart and John Edwards), Macks covers the landscape of late-night comedy and punctuates the narrative with hysterical personal anecdotes and draws from more than half a million of his own jokes written over the span of 20 years.

Mulgrew, Kate. Born With Teeth. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478986089. Read by the author.
At 22 Mulgrew gave birth to a daughter. Having already signed the adoption papers, she was allowed only a fleeting glimpse of her child. Three days later she returned to work as the star of a popular soap opera. Twenty years later she went in search of the daughter she had given away. Listeners likely know Mulgrew for the strong women she’s played—Captain Janeway on Star Trek; the tough-as-nails “Red” on Orange Is the New Black. Now, in her memoir, they will meet the most inspiring and lovable character of all: herself, as she weaves together the details of her career with the romance, adventure, and heartbreak behind the scenes.

Norris, Mary. Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. Recorded Bks. ISBN 9781490664392. Reader TBA.
Norris has spent more than three decades in The New Yorker‘s copy department, maintaining its celebrated high standards. Now she brings her vast experience, good cheer, and finely sharpened pencils to help the rest of us. She draws on examples from Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and the Lord’s Prayer, as well as from The Honeymooners, The Simpsons, David Foster Wallace, and Gillian Flynn. Readers and writers will find in Norris neither a scold nor a softie but a wise and witty new friend in love with language and alive to the glories of its use in America.

Osborne, Steve. The Job: True Tales from the Life of a New York City Cop. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101889480. Read by the author.
Osborne has seen a thing or two in his 20 years in the NYPD—some harmless things, some definitely not. In “Stakeout,” Steve and his partner mistake a Manhattan dentist for an armed robbery suspect and reduce the man to a puddle of snot and tears when questioning him. In “Mug Shot,” the mother of a suspected criminal makes a strange request and provides a sobering reminder of the humanity at stake in his profession. And in “Home,” the image of his family provides the adrenaline he needs to fight for his life when assaulted by two armed and violent crackheads. From his days as a rookie cop to the time spent patrolling in the Anti-Crime Unit—and his visceral, harrowing recollections of working during 9/11—Osborne’s stories capture both the absurdity of police work and the bravery of those who do it.

y450-293Roberts, Cokie. Capital Dames. Blackstone. ISBN 9781481534741. Reader TBA.
Roberts (Founding Mothers) marks the sesquicentennial of the Civil War by offering a riveting look at Washington, DC, and the experiences, influence, and contributions of its women during this momentous period of American history. Roberts chronicles these women’s increasing independence, their political empowerment, and their indispensable role in keeping the Union unified through the war and in helping heal it once the fighting was done. She concludes that the war not only changed Washington, it also forever changed the place of women in the United States. Sifting through newspaper articles, government records, and private letters and diaries—many never before published—Roberts brings the war-torn capital into focus through the lives of its formidable women.

Robinson, Ken & Lou Aronica. Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education. Tantor Audio. ISBN  9781494504007. Read by Ken Robinson.
Robinson (The Element) focuses on how to transform the nation’s troubled educational system. At a time when standardized testing businesses are raking in huge profits, when many schools are struggling, and students and educators everywhere are suffering under the strain, Robinson argues for an end to our outmoded industrial educational system and proposes a highly personalized, organic approach that draws on today’s unprecedented technological and professional resources to engage all students, develop their love of learning, and enable them to face the real challenges of the 21st century.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. Naxos. ISBN 978-1843799023. Read by Neville Jason.
Rousseau explores the concept of freedom and the political structures that may enable people to acquire it. He argues that the sovereign power of a state lies not in any one ruler, but in the will of the general population. Rousseau argues that the ideal state would be a direct democracy where executive decision-making is carried out by citizens who meet in assembly, as they would in the ancient city-state of Athens. The thoughts contained in the work, first published in 1762, were instrumental to the advent of the American Revolution and became sacred to those leading the French Revolution.

9790-square-240Thondup, Gyalo & Anne F. Thurston. The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong: The Dalai Lama’s Brother and His Struggle for Tibet. Blackstone. ISBN 9781483027340. Read by Lane Nishikawa & Bernadette Dunne.
In December 2010 residents of Kalimpong, a town on the Indian border with Tibet, turned out en masse to welcome the Dalai Lama. It was only then they realized that the neighbor they knew as the noodle maker of Kalimpong was also the Dalai Lama’s older brother. Gyalo Thondup had long lived out of the spotlight, but his whole life has been dedicated to the cause of his younger brother and Tibet. He served for decades as the Dalai Lama’s special envoy, the trusted interlocutor between Tibet and foreign leaders. Traveling the globe and meeting behind closed doors, Thondup has been an important witness to some of the epochal events of the 20th century. Only the Dalai Lama himself has played a more important role in the political history of modern, tragedy-ridden Tibet.

Welch, Jack & Suzy Welch. The Real-Life MBA: Your No-BS Guide to Winning the Game, Building a Team, and Growing Your Career. HarperAudio. ISBN 9780062394859. Read by Sean Pratt.
Jack and Suzy Welch (Winning) draw on their experiences to address the biggest problems facing modern management—and offer pragmatic solutions to overcome them. Going beyond theories, concepts, and ideologies, they tackle the real stuff of work today. When you get down to it, they argue, winning in business is all about mastering the gritty, inescapable, make-or-break, real-life dilemmas that define the new economy, the old economy, and everything in between. Work is a grind. My boss is driving me nuts. I’m stuck in career purgatory. My team has lost its mojo. IT is holding us hostage. Our strategy is outdated the day we launch it. We don’t know what our Chinese partners are talking about. We’re just not growing. Jack’s years of iconic leadership and Suzy’s insights as former editor of the Harvard Business Review imbue their stories with powerful solutions that every manager at any level can use right now.

Willie Nelson, Lucid Dreaming, & Peyton Place | May 2015 Audio in Advance | Nonfiction

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Bays, Jan Chozen. How to Train a Wild Elephant & Other Adventures in Mindfulness: Simple Daily Mindfulness Practices for Living Life More Fully & Joyfully. Brilliance. ISBN 9781501227424. Read by the author.
A growing body of research is showing that mindfulness can reduce stress, improve physical health, and improve one’s overall quality of life. Bays, a physician and Zen teacher, has developed a series of simple practices to help cultivate mindfulness as people go about their daily lives. Exercises include taking three deep breaths before answering the phone, noticing and adjusting your posture throughout the day, eating mindfully, and leaving no trace of yourself after using the kitchen or bathroom.

Bello, Maria. Love Is Love: A New Way of Talking about Family and Partnership. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504611206. Reader TBA.
When actress and activist Bello told her son that she had fallen in love with her best friend, a woman, she was relieved at his easy and immediate acceptance. In her first book, she looks at the idea of partnership in women’s lives. She examines the myths that so many of us believe about partnership and explores how different relationships—romantic, platonic, spiritual, familial, educational—helped define her life. She encourages women to realize that the only labels we have are the ones we put on ourselves, and that the best, happiest partnerships are the ones that make your life better, even if they don’t fit the mold of “typical.”

9780679644422Betts, Kate. My Paris Dream: An Education in Style, Slang, and Seduction in the Great City on the Seine. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101913222. Read by the author.
After college—and not without trepidation—Betts took off for Paris, determined to master French slang, style, and savoir faire, and to find a job that would give her a reason to stay. After a series of dues-paying jobs, she caught the eye of John Fairchild, the publisher of Women’s Wear Daily. Betts’s earliest assignments—investigating the mineral water preferred by high society, chasing after a costumed band of fox hunters through the forests of Brittany—were a rough apprenticeship, but she was rewarded for her efforts and initiated into the elite ranks of Mr. Fairchild’s trusted few. The author gives listeners a view of what it was like to be a young American girl, learning about herself, falling in love, and finding her tribe. She brings to life the enchantment of France—from the nightclubs of 1980s Paris to the lavender fields of Provence and the grand spectacle of the Cour Carrée—and recreates that moment when a young woman discovers whom she’s meant to be.

Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Brilliance. ISBN 9781501227745. Read by Napolean Ryan.
Bostrom (philosophy, Oxford) lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life. If machine brains surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful—possibly beyond our control. As the fate of gorillas now depends more on humans than on the species itself, so the fate of humankind depends on the actions of the machine superintelligence. But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed Artificial Intelligence, to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable?

Bradley, Rusty. Lions of Kandahar: The Story of a Fight Against All Odds. Brilliance. ISBN 9781501252655. Read by Kevin Maurer & Eric G. Dove.
An inside account from the unique perspective of an active-duty U.S. Army Special Forces commander. Then-Captain Rusty Bradley began his third tour of duty in Afghanistan in 2006 as the Taliban were poised to reclaim Kandahar Province. To stop them, the NATO coalition launched Operation Medusa, the largest offensive in its history. The battlefield was the Panjwayi Valley, a densely packed warren of walled compounds. Bradley’s Special Forces A-team, along with their Afghan Army allies, watched from across the valley as the NATO force was engulfed in a vicious counterattack. Key to relieving it was possession of a modest patch of high ground called Sperwan Ghar. Bradley’s small detachment assaulted the hill and, in the midst of a savage and unforgettable firefight, soon learned they were facing nearly a thousand seasoned fighters—from whom they seized an impossible victory.

1920-150x224Burns, Eric. 1920: The Year that Made the Decade Roar. Blackstone. ISBN 9781483085111. Reader TBA.
The Roaring Twenties is the only decade in American history with a widely applied nickname, and our collective fascination with this era continues. But how did this surge of innovation and cultural milestones emerge out of the ashes of World War I? Burns investigates the year 1920, which was not only a crucial 12-month period of its own, but one that foretold the future.

Burriesci, Matt. Dead White Guys: A Father, His Daughter, and the Great Books of the Western World. Blackstone. ISBN 978-1-4815-3138-2. Reader TBA.
After his daughter was born prematurely in 2010, Burriesci set out to write a book for her 18th birthday. In short, honest, and simple letters, Burriesci teaches his daughter about 32 great books, by authors from Plato to Karl Marx, and how their lessons have applied to his life.

Cameron, Ardis. Unbuttoning America: A Biography of Peyton Place. Blackstone. ISBN 9781481528283. Reader TBA.
Published in 1956, Peyton Place became a bestseller and a literary phenomenon. A lurid and gripping story of murder, incest, female desire, and social injustice, it was loosely based on real-life places, people, and events. More than half a century later, the term “Peyton Place” is still in circulation as a code for a community harboring sordid secrets. Here Cameron mines extensive interviews, fan letters, and archival materials, including contemporary cartoons and cover images from film posters and foreign editions, to tell how the story of a patricide in a small New England village circulated over time and became a cultural phenomenon.

Doctor Dread. The Half That’s Never Been Told: The Real-Life Reggae Adventures of Doctor Dread. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504625166. Reader TBA.
Doctor Dread has committed his life to producing reggae music and releasing it on his label, RAS Records. In this memoir, he reveals how he came to be one of the world’s foremost reggae producers and what it’s like to have worked with almost all the genre’s icons, including Bunny Wailer, Black Uhuru, Ziggy and Damian Marley, and Gregory Isaacs.

Geist, Bill & Willie Geist. Good Talk, Dad : The Birds and the Bees…and Other Conversations We Forgot To Have. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478903888. Reader TBA.
Bill Geist, the long-time special correspondent for CBS: Sunday Morning, and Today Show host Willie Geist here share an extended father and son conversation on areas of mutual interest, agreement, and disagreement. They riff on fatherhood, religion, music, sports, summer camp disasters, driving lessons gone horribly wrong, being on TV, and their wonderfully odd family life.

91LjWSFLwxLHodgman, George. Bettyville. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781490659046. Reader TBA.
When Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, MO, he finds himself an unlikely caretaker to his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. He can’t bring himself to force her from the home both treasure, the place where his father’s voice lingers, the scene of shared jokes, skirmishes, and’ a rarely acknowledged conflict: Betty has never really accepted the fact that her son is gay. As they try to bring their different worlds together, Hodgman reveals the challenges of Betty’s life and his own struggle for self-respect.

Innskeep, Steve. Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101914953. Read by the author.
NPR Morning Edition cohost Inskeep here tells the harrowing, inspiring, and deeply moving narrative history of two men—President Andrew Jackson and Cherokee Chief John Ross—who led their respective nations at a crossroads of American history.

Jackson, Shirley. Life Among the Savages. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781681411125. Reader TBA.
In her celebrated fiction, Jackson explored the darkness lurking beneath the surface of small-town America, but here she takes on the lighter side of small-town life. In this witty and warm memoir of her family’s life in rural Vermont, first published in 1953, she exposes a domestic side in cheerful contrast to her quietly terrifying fiction. With a novelist’s gift for character, an unfailing maternal instinct, and her signature humor, Jackson turns everyday family experiences into brilliant adventures.

41iEgekLmJL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Kotler, Steven. Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact. Brilliance. ISBN 9781501230615. Reader TBA.
Kotler here guides listeners on a mind-bending tour of the far frontier—from the ways science and technology are fundamentally altering our bodies and our world (the world’s first bionic soldier, the future of evolution) to explosive collisions between science and culture (life extension and bioweapons) in a work that takes a deep dive into those future technologies happening now—and examines what it means to be a part of this brave new world.

Krebs, Brian. Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime—from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door. Brilliance. ISBN 9781501210433. Read by Christopher Lane.
Investigative journalist and cybersecurity expert Krebs traces the rise, fall, and alarming resurrection of the digital mafia behind the two largest spam pharmacies—and countless viruses, phishing, and spyware attacks, delivering the first definitive narrative of the global spam problem and its threat to consumers everywhere. Blending cutting-edge research, investigative reporting, and firsthand interviews, this terrifying true story reveals how we unwittingly invite these digital thieves into our lives every day and proposes concrete solutions for protecting ourselves online and stemming this tidal wave of cybercrime.

Kreutzmann, Bill with Benjy Eisen. Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427261519. Reader TBA.
For 30 years, beginning in the hippie scene of San Francisco in 1965, the Grateful Dead were a musical institution. Kreutzmann, one of the band’s founding members and drummer for every one of their more than 2,300 concerts, has written an unflinching and wild account of playing in the greatest improvisational band of all time.

Loomis, Susan Hermann. In a French Kitchen: Tales and Traditions of Everyday Home Cooking in France. Blackstone. ISBN 9781481531849. Reader TBA.
Loomis, an American living in France, demystifies in lively prose the seemingly effortless je ne sais quoi behind a simple French meal. Listeners meet the busy people of Louviers and surrounding villages and towns of Loomis’s adopted home, from runway-chic Edith, who has zero passion for cooking—but a love of food that inspires her to whip up an array of mouthwatering dishes—to Nathalie, who becomes misty-eyed as she talks about her mother’s Breton cooking and then goes on to reproduce it. Through friends and neighbors like these, Loomis learns that delicious, even decadent meals don’t have to be complicated.

51ji9CT0qqL._SL375_McCullough, David. The Wright Brothers. S. & S. Audio. ISBN 9781442376083. Reader TBA.
On December 17, 1903 at Kitty Hawk, NC, Wilbur and Orville Wright’s Wright Flyer became the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled, sustained flight with a pilot aboard. The Age of Flight had begun. How did they do it? And why? McCullough tells the extraordinary and truly American story of the two brothers who changed the world, drawing on nearly 1,000 letters of family correspondence—plus diaries, notebooks, and family scrapbooks in the Library of Congress—to tell the full story of the Wright brothers and their heroic achievement.

McGonigal, Kelly. The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How To Get Good at It. Penguin Audio. ISBN 978-1611764086.
McGonigal (The Willpower Instinct) turns her attention to long-held beliefs about stress. While most people do everything they can to reduce it, McGonigal makes the case that stress isn’t bad. She highlights new research indicating that stress can, in fact, make us stronger, smarter, and happier—if we learn how to embrace it and take advantage of the correlation between resilience—the human capacity for stress-related growth—and mind-set, the power of beliefs to shape reality. The author combines science, stories, and exercises to show listeners how stress can provide focus and energy and help people connect and strengthen close relationships, why your brain is built to learn from stress, and how to increase the mind’s ability to learn from challenging experiences

Moore, Tim. Gironimo!: Riding the Very Terrible 1914 Tour of Italy. Blackstone. ISBN 9781483085036. Reader TBA.
The 1914 Giro d’Italia was the most difficult bike race in history; 81 riders started and only eight finished. Its 400-kilometer stages were filled with cataclysmic storms, roads strewn with nails, and even the loss of an eye by one competitor—and it was all on a diet of raw eggs and red wine. Moore decides to attempt it himself, and he’s committed to total authenticity: To truly capture the essence of what these riders endured a century ago, he acquires the ruined husk of a gearless, wooden-wheeled 1914 road bike, some maps, and a period outfit topped off with a pair of blue-lensed welding goggles, riding up and over the Alps and then down to the Adriatic (with only wine corks for brakes).

Morell, Michael with Bill Harlow. The Great War of Our Time : An Insider’s Account of the CIA vs. al Qa’ida. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478954637. Reader TBA.
Morell, the CIA’s recently retired deputy director, provides a look inside the Agency’s inner workings and a harrowing assessment of the threats that still loom large today. He offers an unprecedented assessment of the CIA while at the forefront of our nation’s war against al-Qa’ida and during the most remarkable period in the history of the Agency.

514NgWNzEDL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Nelson, Willie with David Ritz. It’s a Long Story: My Life. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478952527. Reader TBA.
Having recently turned 80, Nelson is ready to shine on a light on all aspects of his life, including his drive to write music, the women in his life, his collaborations, and his biggest lows and highs—from his bankruptcy to the founding of Farm Aid.

Offerman, Nick. Gumption: Relighting the Torch of Freedom with America’s Gutsiest Troublemakers. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101914892. Read by the author.
Both Offerman and his Parks and Recreation character, Ron Swanson, are known for their humor and patriotism in equal measure. Here Offerman focuses on the lives of those who inspired him. From George Washington to Willie Nelson, he describes a few dozen of these heroic figures and why they inspire in him such great meaning. He  combines both serious history with light-hearted humor—comparing, say, George Washington’s wooden teeth to his own experience as a woodworker. The subject matter also allows Offerman to expound upon his favorite topics—areas such as religion, politics, woodworking and handcrafting, agriculture, creativity, philosophy, fashion, and, of course, meat.

Reston, James Jr. Luther’s Fortress: Martin Luther and His Reformation Under Siege. Blackstone. ISBN 978-1-4815-3168-9. Reader TBA.
In 1521, the Catholic Church was hunting for Martin Luther. Knowing that inquisitors would murder the monk and crush his fragile movement if they caught him, Luther’s followers spirited him away to Wartburg Castle in central Germany. There Luther hid for the next eight months as his fate—and that of the Reformation—hung in the balance. While at Wartburg, Luther translated the Bible, fought his inner demons, and held together his fractious and increasingly radicalized movement from afar. Reston reveals how Luther and his Reformation emerged from Wartburg Castle stronger than ever.

9780698153929Rivers, Melissa. The Book of Joan: Tales of Mirth, Mischief, and Manipulation. Penguin Audio. ISBN 9781101923344. Read by the author.
Joan and Melissa Rivers had one of the most celebrated mother-daughter relationships of all time. If you think Joan said some outrageous things to her audiences as a comedian, you won’t believe what she said and did in private. Her love for her daughter knew no bounds—or boundaries, apparently. (“Melissa, I acknowledge that you have boundaries. I just choose to not respect them.”) Here Melissa shares stories, bon mots, and life lessons from growing up in the family that Melissa describes as more Addams than Cleaver. And at the center of it all was a tiny blond force of nature.

Wallace, B. Alan. Dreaming Yourself Awake: Lucid Dreaming and Tibetan Dream Yoga for Insight and Transformation. Brilliance. ISBN 9781501221545. Read by Brian Hodel & Tom Pile.
Lucid dreaming is the ability to alter your own dream reality any way you like simply by being aware of the fact that you’re dreaming while you’re in the midst of a dream. There is a range of techniques anyone can learn to become a lucid dreamer—and this audiobook provides all the instruction you need to get started. Wallace also shows how to take the experience of lucid dreaming beyond entertainment to use it to heighten creativity, solve problems, and increase self-knowledge.

Russian Oligarchs, Sunken Pirate Ships, & Aziz Ansari on Romance | June 2015 Audio in Advance | Nonfiction

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51M5O-SQTqL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Ahlers, Amy & Christine Arylo. Reform Your Inner Mean Girl: 7 Steps to Stop Bullying Yourself and Start Loving Yourself. Tantor. ISBN 9781494560553. Read by the authors.
The Inner Mean Girl is the judgmental, critical, and belittling inner bully that almost every woman hears running through her mind on a daily basis. The Inner Mean Girl creates undue anxiety, cajoles you into making bad choices, and then berates you when they don’t work out. The authors introduce a seven-step program to help women transform their relationships with themselves from self-sabotage to self-love.

Ansari, Aziz & Eric Klinenberg. Modern Romance: An Investigation. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101914717. Read by Aziz Ansari.
For years, Ansari has been aiming his comic insight at modern romance, but for Modern Romance the book, he teamed up with New York University sociologist Klinenberg and designed a massive research project, including hundreds of interviews and focus groups conducted around the world from Tokyo to Wichita. They analyzed behavioral data and surveys and created their own online research forum on Reddit, which drew thousands of messages. They also enlisted the world’s leading social scientists, including Eli Finkel, Helen Fisher, Sheena Iyengar, Barry Schwartz, Sherry Turkle, and Robb Willer. The result is unlike any social science or humor book listeners have heard before.

Benforado. Adam. Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Justice. HighBridge. ISBN 9781622319497. Read by Joe Barrett.
Weaving together historical examples, scientific studies, and compelling court cases—from the border collie put on trial in Kentucky to the five teenagers who falsely confessed in the Central Park Jogger case—Benforado shows how American judicial processes fail to uphold our values and protect society’s weakest members. With clarity and passion, he lays out the scope of the problem and proposes a wealth of reforms that could prevent injustice and help us achieve true fairness and equality before the law.

Christensen, Thomas J. The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power. HighBridge. ISBN 9781622317592. Read by Alan Sklar.
Christensen argues that the West should focus on dissuading China from regional aggression while eliciting its global cooperation. Drawing on decades of scholarship and experience as a senior diplomat, Christensen offers a deep perspective on China’s military and economic capacity, showing how nationalism and the threat of domestic instability influence the party’s decisions about regional global affairs. Articulating a balanced strategic approach along with perceptive historical analysis, Christensen describes how we might help influence China’s choices in the coming decades so that it contributes to the international system from which it benefits.

Clark, Ron. Move Your Bus: An Extraordinary New Approach to Accelerating Success in Work and Life. S. & S. Audio. ISBN 9781442391673. Reader TBA.
Clark (The End of Molasses Classes) asks listeners to imagine a company as a bus filled with people who either help or hinder a team’s ability to move it forward: drivers (who steer the organization), runners (who consistently go above and beyond for the good of the organization), joggers (who do their jobs without pushing themselves), walkers (who are just getting pulled along), and riders (who hinder success and drag the team down). It’s the team leader’s job to recognize how members fall into these categories, encourage them to keep the “bus” moving by working together, and know when it’s time to kick the riders off.

Cruver, Brian. Anatomy of Greed: The Unshredded Truth from an Enron Insider. Brilliance. ISBN 9781501272110. Read by Mel Foster.
Cruver was hired by Enron in March 2001 when he was 29 years old. But, from his first day to his last—when he and his colleagues were given 30 minutes to leave the building—the author found himself enmeshed in a business cult that each day grew only more bizarre. Cruver lays out firsthand the giddy group-think nurtured by Enron’s leadership, the traders who made dubious deals to ensure their own lucrative bonuses, and the sinister designs and funding of Enron’s fraudulent off-the-books partnerships in this day-by-day chronicle, which includes a running stock ticker to show the trajectory of Enron’s collapse.

Elliott, Clark. The Ghost in My Brain: How a Concussion Stole My Life and How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Helped Me Get It Back. Brilliance. ISBN 9781501230400. Reader TBA.
In 1999, Elliott suffered a concussion when his car was rear-ended. Overnight his life changed from that of a professor with a research career in artificial intelligence to a humbled man struggling to get through a single day. At times he couldn’t walk across a room, or even name his five children. Doctors told him he would never fully recover. As a result of one final effort to recover, he crossed paths with two brilliant research-clinicians working on the leading edge of brain plasticity and was substantially improved within weeks. Remarkably, Elliott kept detailed notes throughout his experience, from the moment of impact to the final stages of his recovery, astounding documentation that is the basis of this fascinating audiobook.

Flaxington, Beverly. Self-Talk for a Calmer You: Learn How To Use Positive Self-Talk To Control Anxiety and Live a Happier, More Relaxed Life. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781490675664. Read by Mike Slemmer.
Filled with practical advice and positive self-talk scripts, this guide provides a variety of strategies for dealing with uneasy thoughts in a constructive manner and moving past detrimental hangups. The book is complete with quick assessments that reveal anxiety triggers, and listeners will also learn how to create a self-talk plan that fits their needs. Flaxington offers the tools and confidence to develop a healthier way of thinking, overcome stressful situations, and reclaim their lives.

Fotopulos, Dawn. Accounting for the Numberphobic: A Survival Guide for Small Business Owners. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781490675688. Read by Karen Saltus.
Fotopulos here demystifies—in plain English—such documents as the net income statement, cash flow statement, and balance sheet. Illustrated with real-world examples and packed with practical action steps, the book takes the fear out of the numbers, and empowers small business owners to steer their way toward profitability.

Frenkel-LMFrankel, Edward. Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781469059945. Read by Tony Craine.
What if you had to take an art class in which you were only taught how to paint a fence? What if you were never shown the paintings of van Gogh and Picasso, weren’t even told they existed? Alas, this is how math is taught. Here mathematician Frenkel reveals a side of math that’s suffused with all the beauty and elegance of a work of art. This work tells two intertwined stories: of the wonders of mathematics and of one young man’s journey learning and living it.

Gaines, Caseen. We Don’t Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy. Tantor. ISBN 9781494511883. Read by Ron Butler.
Long before Marty McFly and Doc Brown traveled through time in a flying DeLorean, director Robert Zemeckis and his friend and writing partner Bob Gale worked tirelessly to make a hit film. This work includes original interviews with Zemeckis, Gale, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Huey Lewis, and more than 50 others who contributed to one of the most popular and profitable film trilogies of all time.

Gessner, David. All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781490659008. Reader TBA.
Gessner writes an homage to the West and to two great writers who set the standard for all who celebrate and defend it: archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner. Gessner travels from Stegner’s birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey’s pilgrimages to Arches, braiding their stories and considering their responses to such challenges as fracking and overpopulation. As he travels, the author renews his own commitment to cultivating a meaningful relationship with the wild, confronting American consumption, and fighting environmental injustice

Graham, Matt & Josh Young. Epic Survival: Extreme Adventure, Stone Age Wisdom, and Lessons in Living from a Modern Hunter-Gatherer. Tantor. ISBN 9781494512361. Read by Tom Perkins.
Graham chose to set aside his comfortable urban life and live entirely off the land. Here he shares with listeners the secrets of the Tarahumara Indians who helped him run the 1,600-mile Pacific Crest Trail in 58 days and what it was like when he trekked into the wilderness to live alone for half a year, armed with nothing but a loincloth, a pair of sandals, a stone knife, and chia seeds. He recounts near-death experiences of hiking alone through the snowdrifts at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and writes about growing closer to the land.

Keret, Etgar. The Seven Good Years. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101914472. Reader TBA.
The seven years between the birth of Keret’s (Suddenly, a Knock on the Door) son Lev and the death of his father were good years, though still full of reasons to worry. Lev is born in the midst of a terrorist attack. Keret’s father gets cancer. The threat of constant war permeates daily life. What emerges from this dark reality is a series of ruminations on everything from Keret’s three-year-old son’s impending military service to the terrorist mind-set behind Angry Birds. This memoir—the Israeli author’s first nonfiction book published in America—is full of wonder and life and love, poignant insights, and irrepressible humor.

Kozol, Jonathan. The Theft of Memory: Losing My Father, One Day at a Time. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504616577. Reader TBA.
National Book Award winner Kozol tells the story of his father’s life and work as a specialist in disorders of the brain and his astonishing ability, at the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, to explain the causes of his sickness and then to narrate, step-by-step, his slow descent into dementia. The heart of the book lies in the bond between a father and his son and the ways that bond intensified even as Harry’s verbal skills and cogency progressively abandoned him.

516BUvuhsdL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Kurson, Robert. Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780553550870. Read by George Newbern.
In Kurson’s (Shadow Divers) latest, two men—John Chatterton and John Mattera—search for the ship of the 17th-century pirate Joseph Bannister. If Chatterton and Mattera succeed, they will make history—it will be just the second time ever that a pirate ship has been discovered and positively identified—but cutting-edge technology and a willingness to lose everything aren’t enough to track down Bannister’s ship. They must travel the globe in search of historic documents and accounts of the great pirate’s exploits, face down dangerous rivals, battle the tides of nations and governments and experts, and learn to think and act like pirates.

Loomis, Susan Herrmann. In a French Kitchen: Tales and Traditions of Everyday Home Cooking in France. Blackstone. ISBN 9781481531849. Read by the author.
Loomis (On Rue Tatin), here demystifies the seemingly effortless je ne sais quoi behind a simple French meal. Listeners meet the busy people of Louviers and surrounding villages and towns of Loomis’s adopted home as the author shares the everyday tips, secrets, and 85 recipes that allow them to turn every meal into a sumptuous occasion.

Mezrich, Ben. Once Upon a Time in Russia: The Rise of the Oligarchs and the Greatest Wealth in History. S. & S. Audio. ISBN 9781442387171. Reader TBA.
Mezrich (Bringing Down the House) tells the true story of larger-than-life billionaire oligarchs who reaped riches after the fall of the Soviet regime: Boris Berezovsky and his protégé, Roman Abramovich. This story of amassing obscene wealth and power depicts a rarefied world seldom seen up close. Under Berezovsky’s guidance, Abramovich built one of Russia’s largest oil companies from the ground up, but their relationship frayed when Berezovsky spoke out against President Vladimir Putin and had to flee to the UK. Abramovich continued to prosper. Threats followed Berezovsky to London, where an associate of his, Alexander Litvinenko, died painfully and famously of polonium poisoning. Then Berezovsky himself was later found dead, declared a suicide.

Miller, David. AWOL on the Appalachian Trail. Brilliance. ISBN 9781491593233. Read by Christopher Lane.
In 2003, software engineer David Miller left his job, family, and friends to hike 2,172 miles of the Appalachian Trail. In this account of his hike from Georgia to Maine, listeners will hear rich descriptions of the Appalachian Mountains, the isolation and reverie, the inspiration that fueled his quest, and the rewards of taking a less conventional path through life, as well as useful passages about hiking gear and planning.

Murphy, Brian. 81 Days Below Zero: The Incredible Survival Story of a World War II Pilot in Alaska’s Frozen Wilderness. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781490621067. Reader TBA.
This is the first full-length retelling of the story of Leon Crane, the only surviving crew member of a World War II B-24 crash on a remote mountain near the Arctic Circle. Crane managed to stay alive for 81 days in sub-zero temperature by and ended his ordeal by walking along a river to safety.

y450-293Newkirk, Pamela. Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781681410616. Reader TBA.
In 1904, Ota Benga, a young Congolese “pygmy”—a person of petite stature—arrived from central Africa and was featured in an anthropology exhibit at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Two years later, the New York Zoological Gardens displayed him in its Monkey House, caging the 103-pound, 4′ 11″ man with an orangutan. The attraction became an international sensation, drawing thousands of New Yorkers and commanding headlines from across the nation and Europe. Newkirk explores the circumstances of Ota Benga’s captivity, the international controversy it inspired, and his efforts to adjust to American life.

Pascente, Fred & Sam Reaves. Mob Cop: My Life of Crime in the Chicago Police Department. Tantor. ISBN 9781494561871. Read by Johnny Heller.
Former Chicago police officer and mafia associate Pascente is the man who links Tony Spilotro, one of Chicago’s most notorious mob figures, to William Hanhardt, chief of detectives of the Chicago Police Department. Here he tells about the decline of traditional organized crime in the United States, and reveals information about the inner workings of the Chicago Outfit that have never been publicly released.

Ribowsky, Mark. Dreams to Remember: Otis Redding, Stax Records, and the Transformation of Southern Soul. HighBridge. ISBN 9781622319398. Read by Dan John Miller.
Ribowsky contextualizes Redding’s life within the larger cultural movements of his era, whisking listeners from the “sinful” clubs of Macon to the trendsetting studios in Memphis, and, finally, to the pulsating stage of the Monterey Music Festival where, in a single set, Redding immortalized himself as a soul legend.

Ricard, Matthieu. Altrusim: The Power of Compassion To Change Yourself and the World. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478958024. Reader TBA.
In Happiness, Ricard demonstrated that true happiness is not tied to fleeting moments or sensations but is rooted in mindfulness and compassion for others. Now he turns his lens from the personal to the global with a rousing argument that altruism—genuine concern for the well-being of others—could be the saving grace of the 21st century. It is, he believes, the vital thread that can answer the main challenges of our time: the economy in the short term, life satisfaction in the mid-term, and the environment in the long term.

Schultz, Kevin M. Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties. HighBridge. ISBN 978162231757. Read by Peter Berkrot.
Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley, Jr., were towering figures who argued publicly about every major issue of the 1960s: the counterculture, Vietnam, feminism, civil rights, the Cold War. Behind the scenes, the two were close friends and trusted confidantes who lived surprisingly parallel lives. Here Schultz delves into their personal archives to tell the rich story of their friendship, arguments, and the tumultuous decade they did so much to shape.

9781846147760Sjöberg, Fredrik. The Fly Trap. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504601467. Translated by Thomas Teal. Read by Robert Fass.
Weaving a fascinating web of associations, histories, and personal memories, this book begins with Sjöberg’s own experiences as an entomologist on a tranquil, remote Swedish island and pulls in the tales of past heroic scientific expeditions to Burma and the wilderness of Kamchatka. As confounded by his unusual love of collecting flies as anyone, Sjöberg pauses to reflect on a range of ideas—the passage of time, art, freedom—drawing into dialog writers such as Bruce Chatwin and D.H. Lawrence, and considering the lives and mindsets of collectors.

Unkefer, Dean. 90 Church: Inside America’s Notorious First Narcotics Squad. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504633703. Read by Keith Szarabajka.
In the 1960s, with few rules and almost no oversight, the battle-hardened agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics were often more vicious than the criminals they chased. Unkefer was a naive kid when he joined up, but all that quickly changed once he got thrown into the lion’s den of 90 Church, the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. When he finally got the chance to prove his mettle by going undercover in the field, the lines became increasingly blurred. As he spiraled into the hell of addiction and watched his life become a complex balancing act of lies and half-truths, he began to wonder what side he was really on.

Westheimer, Ruth. The Doctor Is In: Dr. Ruth on Love, Life, and Joie de Vivre. Brilliance. ISBN 9781501248986. Read by Laural Merlington.
Everyone knows Dr. Ruth as America’s most famous sex therapist, but few people know she was raised in an orphanage in Switzerland, narrowly escaping death during the Holocaust—or that she was an ace sniper in the Israeli army. Through intimate and funny stories, Dr. Ruth sheds light on how she’s learned to live a life filled with joie de vivre. And she shows listeners how they too can learn to deal with tragedy and loss, challenges and successes, all while nourishing an intellectual and emotional spark and, above all, having fun!


Cocaine, Creativity, & Life on Mars | Audio in Advance July 2015 | Nonfiction

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Braestrup, Kate. Anchor and Flares: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hope, and Service. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478933953. Read by the author.
When her eldest son joins the Marines, Braestrap is at a crossroads: can she reconcile her desire to protect her children with her family’s legacy of service? Can parents balance the joy of a child’s independence with the fear of letting go? Here she examines the twinned emotions of faith and fear—inspired by the families she meets as a chaplain and by her son’s journey towards purpose and familyhood.

51wH0ePqwJL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Bryant, Jonathan M. Dark Places of the Earth: The Voyage of the Slave Ship Antelope. HighBridge. ISBN 9781622318810. Read by Tom Zingarelli.
Here Bryant (How Curious a Land) examines a significant and long-forgotten Supreme Court case. In 1820, the slave ship Antelope was captured off the Florida coast. Though the slave trade was prohibited, slavery was still legal in half of the United States, and it was left to the Supreme Court to determine whether nearly 300 Africans on board were considered slaves and if so, to whom they belonged.

Chaney, Jen. As If!: The Oral History of Clueless As Told by Amy Heckerling and the Cast and Crew. Tantor. ISBN 9781494513726. Read by Jorjeana Marie.
On the 20th anniversary of the film’s release, Chaney’s oral history of the making of Amy Heckerling’s Clueless contains recollections and insights collected from key cast and crew members on such topics as how Emma influenced Heckerling to write the script and how the stars were cast into each of their roles.

Cope, Tim. On the Trail of Genghis Khan: An Epic Journey Through the Land of the Nomads. Brilliance. ISBN 9781491599105. Read by Philip Rose.
Cope (coauthor, Off the Rails) traveled by horseback across the entire length of the Eurasian steppe, from Mongolia to the Danube River in Hungary, a 6,000-mile, three-year-long trip. Alone except for a trusty dog (and a succession of 13 horses, many stolen from him along the way), Cope treks through wolf-infested plateaus, over glaciers and the subzero “starving steppe,” the scorching Kazakh desert, and the deep forests and treacherous mountains of the Carpathians.

DeStefano, Anthony M. Gangland New York: Faces and Places of Mob Lore. Tantor. ISBN 978-1494556556. Read by Fary Galone.
From the Bowery Boys and the Five Points Gang through the rise of the Jewish “Kosher Nostra” and the ascendance of the Italian Mafia, mobsters have played a major role in the city’s history. As families and factions fought for control, the city became a backdrop for crime scenes, the rackets spreading after World War II to docks, airports, food markets, and garment districts. Divided into five sections—one for each borough— DeStefano’s (Vinny Gorgeous) latest traces criminal activities and area exploits from the 19th century to now.

51Y4TQ-1QKL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Dickey, Christopher. Our Man in Charleston: Britain’s Secret Agent in the Civil War South. HighBridge. ISBN 9781622317691. Read by Anthony Ferguson.
Robert Bunch, an American-born Englishman, maneuvered his way to the position of British consul in Charleston, SC, and grew to loathe slavery and the righteousness of its practitioners, eventually becoming the Crown’s best secret source on the Confederacy. But doing so required living a double life. To his Charleston neighbors, Bunch was increasingly a pillar of Southern society. But to the British government, he was a student abolitionist, eviscerating Southern dissembling on plans regarding the slave trade.

DuVal, Kathleen. Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution. Tantor. ISBN 9781494563288. Read by Susan Boyce.
DuVal (The Native Ground) recounts the history of the Revolutionary Era as experienced by slaves, American Indians, women, and British loyalists living on Florida’s Gulf Coast, introducing listeners to Mobile slave Petit Jean, who organized militias to fight the British at sea; Chickasaw diplomat Payamataha, who worked to keep his people out of war; New Orleans merchant Oliver Pollock and his wife, Margaret O’Brien Pollock, who worked to garner Spanish support for the American Revolution; and Scottish loyalists James and Isabella Bruce, whose work on behalf of the British Empire placed them in grave danger.

Faruqi, Sonia. Project Animal Farm: An Accidental Journey into the Secret World of Farming and the Truth about Our Food. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504609364. Reader TBA.
After witnessing animal cruelty, Faruqi, a 25-year-old investment banker, made a commitment to change the current system of food production. Here Faruqi takes listeners on a tour of egg warehouses in Canada, dairy feedlots in the United States, farm offices in Mexico, lush Mennonite pastures in Belize, flocks of chickens in Indonesia, and factory farms in Malaysia.

Feiling, Tom. The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over the World. Brilliance. ISBN 9781486297375. Read by Adrian Mulraney.
Feiling (Short Walks from Bogota) travels the trade routes from Colombia via Miami, Kingston, and Tijuana to London and New York, along the way meeting Medellín hitmen, U.S. kingpins, Brazilian traffickers and soldiers and narcotics officers who fight the gangs and cartels. He traces cocaine’s progress from legal ‘pick-me-up’ to luxury product to global commodity, looks at legalization programs in countries like Switzerland, and shows how America’s anti-drugs crusade is actually increasing demand.

Hiltzik, Mitchell. Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention the Launched the Military-Industrial Complex. HighBridge. ISBN 9781622318872. Read by Bob Souer.
From a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist comes the untold story of how science went big, built the bombs that helped World War II, and became dependent on government and industry and the forgotten genius who started it all. The birth of Big Science can be traced to Berkeley, CA, nearly nine decades ago, when Ernest Orlando Lawrence invented the cyclotron. It would change our understanding of the basic building blocks of nature, help win World War II, and make its influence felt in academia and international politics.

{0DA71E5E-E1DD-4E69-BE26-CAE487DD691F}Img400Holmes, Hannah. The Well-Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself. Brilliance. ISBN 9781501272035. Read by Joyce Bean.
Science journalist Holmes casts the inquisitive eye of a trained researcher and reporter on…herself. And not just on herself, but on our whole species, exploring how the human animal fits into the natural world, even as we humans change that world in both constructive and destructive ways. And not only are we animals, we are, in some important ways (such as our senses of smell and of vision), pitiably inferior ones. At the same time, Holmes reveals the ways in which Homo sapiens stands apart from other animals. Deftly mixing personal stories and observations with the latest scientific theories and research results, Holmes fashions an engaging and informative field guide to that oddest and yet most fascinating of primates: ourselves.

Jackson, Shirley. Life Among the Savages. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781681411125. Reader TBA.
In her celebrated fiction, Jackson (We Have Always Lived in the Castle) explored the darkness lurking beneath the surface of small-town America. But here she takes on the lighter side of small-town life. In this witty and warm memoir of her family’s life in rural Vermont, she delightfully exposes a domestic side in cheerful contrast to her quietly terrifying fiction.

Klein, Christopher. Strong Boy: The Life and Times of John L. Sullivan, America’s First Sports Hero. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504615709. Read by Joe Barrett.
John L. Sullivan, the first modern heavyweight boxing champion of the world, was the gold standard of American sports for more than a decade and the first athlete to earn more than a million dollars. His womanizing, drunken escapades, and chronic police-blotter presence were godsends to a burgeoning newspaper industry.As he rose from Boston’s Irish working class to become the most recognizable man in the nation, the “Boston Strong Boy” transformed boxing from outlawed bare-knuckle fighting into the gloved spectacle we know today.

Levoy, Gregg. Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion. Blackstone. ISBN 9781469061276. Read by the author.
What inspires passion in your life and what defeats it? How do you lose it and how do you get it back? Levoy (Callings) explores how you can cultivate not just a specific passion, but passion as a mindset that helps bring vitality to all your engagements, from work and relationships to creativity and spiritual life. He examines the endless tug of war between passion and security and shows us how to stay engaged with the world and resist the downward-pulling forces that can drain our vitality.

Markoff, John. Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground between Humans and Robots. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504614269. Reader TBA.
As robots are increasingly integrated into modern society—on the battlefield and the road, in business, education, and health—Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times science writer John Markoff searches for an answer to one of the most important questions of our age: Will these robots help us … or will they replace us? Markoff travels across the country, from the brain trusts in Palo Alto and Silicon Valley to the expanding tech corridor between Boston and New York. He goes deep inside the sf worlds of Battlestar Galactica, Terminator, and the Jetsons, which are fast becoming a reality; and talks to the insiders—scientists, entrepreneurs, ethicists, hackers, and others—who are shaping the future.

51DrfDxYXhL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Mazor, Barry. Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504623926. Read by Dom Flemons, Ketch Secor, & the author.
This is the first biography of Ralph Peer, the adventurous—even revolutionary—A&R man and music publisher who brought regional roots music to the world. The book tracks Peer’s role in such breakthrough events as the recording of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” (the record that sparked the blues craze), the first country recording sessions with Fiddlin’ John Carson, his discovery of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family at the famed Bristol sessions, the popularizing of Latin American music during World War II, and the postwar transformation of music on the airwaves that set the stage for the dominance of R&B, country, and rock ’n’ roll.

McFadden, Johnjoe & Jim Al-Khalili. Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781681413181. Reader TBA.
Life is the most extraordinary phenomenon in the known universe; but how did it come to be? Even in an age of cloning and artificial biology, the remarkable truth remains: nobody has ever made anything living entirely out of dead material. Life remains the only way to make life. Are we still missing a vital ingredient in its creation? Al-Khalili and Macfadden reveal the hitherto missing ingredient to be quantum mechanics and the strange phenomena that lie at the heart of this most mysterious of sciences.

Ohmart, Ben. Welcome, Foolish Mortals: The Life and Voices of Paul Frees. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504631655. Read by Fred Frees.
Paul Frees was Disney’s Haunted Mansion Ghost Host, Boris Badenov, Professor Ludwig von Drake, Pillsbury Dougboy, Toucan Sam, the Green Lama, and thousands of other voices on records, radio, television, and in films. He was voice acting genius Paul Frees. Paul’s son Fred Free, a successful voice actor in his own right who has been called upon to recreate his dad’s characters and create new ones, reads.

Parker, Elizabeth & Mark Ebner. Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam; Inside Dalia Dippolito’s Plot To Kill. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504638043. Reader TBA.
Tipped off by one of former madam Dalia Dippolito’s lovers, an undercover detective posing as a hit man met with Dalia to plot her husband’s murder while his team planned, then staged, the murder scenario—brazenly inviting the reality TV show Cops along for the ride. The Cops video went viral, sparking tales of illicit drugs, secret boyfriends, sex for hire, a cuckolded former con man, and the defense’s ludicrous claim that the entire hit had been staged by the intended victim for reality TV fame.

Petranek, Stephen. How We’ll Live on Mars. S. & S. Audio. ISBN 9781442375864. Reader TBA.
Petranek says humans will live on Mars by 2027 and makes the case that living on Mars is not just plausible, but inevitable, explaining in detail how he believes it will happen. Petranek introduces the lively characters engaged in a dramatic effort to be the first to settle the Red Planet. Private companies driven by iconoclastic entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen, and Sir Richard Branson; Dutch reality show and space mission Mars One; NASA; and the Chinese government are among the many groups competing to plant the first stake on Mars and open the door for human habitation.

Safina, Carl. Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. Tantor. ISBN 9781494512545. Read by the author.
Weaving decades of field observations with exciting new discoveries about the brain, Safina offers an intimate view of animal behavior to challenge the fixed boundary between humans and nonhuman animals. In these extraordinary stories of animal joy, grief, jealousy, anger, and love, listeners travel to Amboseli National Park in of Kenya and witness struggling elephant families work out how to survive poaching and drought, then to Yellowstone National Park to observe wolves sort out the aftermath of one pack’s personal tragedy, and finally plunge into the astonishingly peaceful society of killer whales living in the crystalline waters of the Pacific Northwest.

Saviano, Roberto & Virginia Jewiss. ZeroZeroZero. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101914816. Read by Paul Michael.
Saviano (Gomorrah) explores the inner workings of the global cocaine trade and the true depth of its reach into the world economy. Saviano tracks the shift in the cocaine trade’s axis of power from Colombia to Mexico, and relates how the Latin American cartels and gangs have forged alliances, first with the Italian crime syndicates, then with the Russians, Africans, and others. He charts a remarkable increase in sophistication as these criminal entities diversify into many other products and markets and reveals the astonishing increase in the severity of violence as they have fought to protect and extend their power.

51l-S3FbspL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Scottoline, Lisa & Francesca Serritella. Does This Beach make Me Look Fat?: True Stories and Confessions. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427261083. Read by the authors.
Lisa and Francesca are back with another collection of warm and witty stories. This fifth volume will not disappoint as it hits the humorous and poignant note that fans have come to expect from the beloved mother-daughter duo.

Shostak, Seth. Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Brilliance. ISBN 9781501270826. Read by Patrick Lawlor.
This engaging memoir reveals the true story of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). SETI senior astronomer Shostak answers a host of questions about SETI, including where its antennas are aimed, how they know which frequency to monitor, and what their response might be. Methodically busting urban legends about alien crash landings, crop circles, and the like, Shostak pits scientific truth against speculation.

Southard, Susan. Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781490676326. Reader TBA.
On August 9, 1945, three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a small port city on Japan’s southernmost island. An estimated 74,000 people died within the first five months, and another 75,000 were injured. Published on the 70th anniversary of the bombing, this work takes readers from the morning of the bombing to the city today, telling the first-hand experiences of five survivors, all of whom were teenagers at the time of the devastation. Southard weaves together dramatic eyewitness accounts with searing analysis of the policies of censorship and denial that colored much of what was reported about the bombing both in the United States and Japan.

Sturges, Tom. Every Idea Is a Good Idea: Be Creative Anytime, Anywhere. Blackstone. ISBN 9781469061306. Read by the author.
Sturges, former head of creative at Universal Music Publishing Group, here shares techniques for accessing creativity that he learned in his 25-plus years in the music industry. Everyone is innately creative. But many of us wish we knew how to better tap into our creative potential. Is there a way to more easily connect with the part of our minds that knows how to complete a song, finish a poem, or solve a problem? Sturges argues that there is.

Nomads, Dolphins, & America’s Deadliest Natural Disaster | Audio in Advance August 2015 | Nonfiction

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Ananthaswamy, Anil. The Man Who Wasn’t There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101914939. Read by Rene Ruiz.
In the tradition of Oliver Sacks, this book offers a tour of the latest neuroscience of schizophrenia, autism, Alzheimer’s disease, ecstatic epilepsy, Cotard’s syndrome, out-of-body experiences, and other disorders. Ananthaswamy interviews individuals who have all lost some part of themselves, but who offer remarkable, sometimes heart-wrenching insights into what remains.

91vCLLmNCTLBadkhen, Anna. Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504617550. Reader TBA.
Badkhen embeds herself with a family of Fulani cowboys—nomadic herders in Mali’s Sahel grasslands—as they embark on their annual migration across the savanna. The cycle connects the Fulani to their past even as their present is increasingly under threat—from Islamic militants, climate change, and the ever-encroaching urbanization that lures away their young. The Fulani, though, are no strangers to uncertainty—they’ve contended with famines, droughts, and wars for centuries .Badkhen narrates the Fulani’s journeys and her own with compassion and keen observation, transporting listeners from the Neolithic Sahara crisscrossed by rivers and abundant with wildlife to obelisk forests where the Fulani’s Stone Age ancestors painted tributes to cattle.

Beran, Michael. Murder by Candlelight: The Gruesome Slayings Behind Our Romance With the Macabre. Tantor. ISBN 9781494509873. Read by Jonathan Yen.
In the early 19th century, a series of murders took place in and around London that shocked the whole of England. These slayings all took place against the backdrop of a London in which the splendor of the fashionable world was haunted by the squalor of the slums. Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Carlyle, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and others were fascinated by the blood and deviltry of these crimes. Interweaving these cultural vignettes alongside criminal history, Beran paints a vivid picture of the time and the crimes.

Casey, Susan. Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780385367158. Read by Rebecca Lowman.
Casey (The Devil’s Teeth) presents a breathtaking look into the mysterious world of dolphins and their conflicted history with man. Since the dawn of recorded history, humans have felt a kinship with the sleek and beautiful dolphin, an animal whose playfulness, sociability, and intelligence seems like an aquatic mirror of mankind. In recent decades, scientists have discovered that dolphins recognize themselves in reflections, count, feel despondent, adorn themselves, rescue one another (and humans), deduce, infer, form cliques, throw tantrums, gossip, and scheme. For two years Casey traveled the world, and has turned those experiences into a book about the other intelligent life on the planet.

Coburn, Broughton. Everest: Mountain Without Mercy. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504616812. Reader TBA.
David Breashears, the first American to scale Everest twice, was a veteran of nine previous Himalayan filmmaking expeditions when he agreed to lead an expedition to film the first IMAX footage from the peak. Coburn traces each step of the team’s progress to a disaster that riveted the world’s attention—the May 10, 1996, blizzard that claimed eight lives, including two of the world’s top climbing-expedition leaders—and chronicles the courage and cooperation that resulted in the rescue of several men and women who were trapped on the lethal, windswept slopes. In a struggle to overcome both the physical and emotional effects of the disaster on Everest, Breashears and his team rose to the challenge of achieving their goal—humbled by the mountain’s overwhelming power yet exhilarated by their own accomplishment.

Conley, Dalton. Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety. Brilliance. ISBN 9781501270987. Read by Christopher Lane.
Over the past three decades, boundaries between leisure and work, public space and private space, and home and office have blurred and become permeable. Conley connects daily experience with occasionally overlooked sociological changes: women’s increasing participation in the labor force; rising economic inequality generating anxiety among successful professionals; the individualism of the modern era—the belief in self-actualization and expression—being replaced by the need to play different roles in the various realms of one’s existence.

final-coverDay, Felicia. You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost). S. & S. Audio. ISBN 9781442386839. Read by the author.
The Internet isn’t all cat videos. There’s also Felicia Day—violinist, filmmaker, Internet entrepreneur, and compulsive gamer who overcame her isolated childhood to become the ruler of a new world…or at least semi-influential in the world of Internet geeks and Goodreads book clubs. After growing up in the south where she was “homeschooled for hippie reasons,” Day moved to Hollywood to pursue her dream of becoming an actress and was immediately typecast as a crazy cat-lady secretary. But her misadventures in Hollywood led her to produce her own web series, The Guild, own her own production company, and become an Internet star.

de Salcedo, Anastacia Marx. Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the U.S. Military Shapes the Way You Eat. Tantor. ISBN 9781494513863. Read by C.S.E. Cooney.
Supermarkets are filled with foods that have a military origin: canned goods, packaged deli meats, TV dinners, cling wrap, energy bars—the list is almost endless. de Salcedo shows how the Department of Defense Combat Feeding Directorate plans, funds, and disseminates the food science that enables it to produce cheap, imperishable rations, working with an immense network of university, government, and industry collaborators. The conglomerates get exclusive patents or a headstart on the next breakthrough technology; the Army ensures that it has commercial suppliers if it ever needs to manufacture millions of rations. And consumers, who eat this food originally designed for soldiers on the battlefield, are the guinea pigs in a giant public health experiment.

Gifford, Justin. Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim. HighBridge. ISBN 9781622317653. Read by J.D. Jackson.
The first biography of Iceberg Slim, née Robert Beck, author of the memoir Pimp and such novels as Trick Baby and Mama Black Widow, describes his career as a ruthless pimp in the 1940s and 1950s and how he refashioned himself into a “street lit” master. Gifford draws on a wealth of archival material—including FBI files, prison records, and interviews with Beck, his wife, and his daughters—to explore the sexual trauma and racial violence Beck endured and his reinvention as Iceberg Slim.

Goodman, Simon. The Orpheus Clock: The Search For My Family’s Art Treasures Stolen by the Nazis. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781681415055. Reader TBA.
Goodman’s grandparents perished in concentration camps. His father rarely spoke of their family history or heritage, but when he passed away, Simon received his father’s old papers, and a story began to emerge. The Gutmanns, as they were known then, rose from a small Bohemian hamlet to become one of Germany’s most powerful banking families. They also amassed a world-class art collection that included works by Degas, Renoir, Botticelli, and others. But the Nazi regime snatched from them everything they had worked to build: their remarkable art collection, their immense wealth, their prominent social standing, and their very lives. With the help of his family, Goodman initiated the first Nazi looting case to be settled in the United States.

Greene, Ronnie. Shots on the Bridge: Police Violence and Cover-Up in the Wake of Katrina. Tantor. ISBN 9781494514372. Read by Jonathan Yen.
Six days after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in New Orleans, New Orleans Police Department officers opened fire on residents crossing the Danziger Bridge. When the shooting stopped, a mentally challenged man and a 17-year-old boy were dead, and four other seriously wounded. All six of the victims, along with two others arrested at the scene, were black and unarmed. The shooters and their supervisors immediately hatched a cover-up. They would plant a gun, invent witnesses, and charge two of their victims with attempted murder. Investigative journalist Greene reveals the fear that gripped the police of a city fallen into anarchy, and dissects the cover-up that nearly buried the truth and the legal maze that, a decade later, leaves the victims still searching for justice.

Harding, Kate. Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture—and What We Can Do About It. Blackstone. ISBN 9781483038681. Reader TBA.
In the first nonacademic, single-author book since the 1990s to examine sexual assault as a social phenomenon, Harding tackles rape culture and offers some suggestions for moving toward a culture that fully respects and supports victims while protecting the rights of the accused. Sexual violence has been so prominent in recent years that the feminist term “rape culture” has finally entered the mainstream. But what, exactly, is it? And how do we change it? Combining in-depth research with practical knowledge, Harding makes the case that 21st-century America—where it’s estimated that out of every 100 rapes only five result in felony convictions—supports rapists more effectively than victims, and she offers ideas and suggestions for addressing how we as a culture can take rape much more seriously without compromising the rights of the accused.

Hill, Henry & Daniel Simone. The Lufthansa Heist: Behind the Six-Million Dollar Cash Haul That Shook the World. Tantor. ISBN 9781494513511. Read by Jonathan Yen.
On December 11th, 1978, a daring armed robbery rocked Kennedy Airport, resulting in the largest unrecovered cash haul in world history, totaling $6 million. The perpetrators were never apprehended and 13 people connected to the crime were murdered in homicides that, like the crime itself, remain unsolved to this day. In 2013, this infamous criminal act again flared up in the national news when five reputed gangsters were charged in connection to the robbery. This latest twist lends the project an extraordinary sense of timing.

23519922Kershaw, Alex. Avenue of Spies: A True Story of Terror, Espionage, and One American Family’s Heroic Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Paris. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780553551808. Read by Mark Deakins.
The leafy Avenue de Foch was Paris’s hotbed of daring spies, murderous secret police, amoral informers, and Vichy collaborators. So when American physician Sumner Jackson, who lived with his wife and young son at Number 11, got involved with the French resistance, he knew the stakes were impossibly high. After witnessing the brutal round-up of his Jewish friends, Jackson invited Liberation to officially operate out of his home at Number 11, but his secret life was discovered by his Nazi neighbors and he and his family were forced to undertake a journey into the dark heart of war-torn Europe.

Korra, Monika. Kill the Silence: A Survivor’s Life Reclaimed. HighBridge. ISBN 9781622318834. Read by Carla Mercer-Meyer.
In 2009, college sophomore and track star Korra was grabbed by three men on her way home from a party and brutally raped. In this extraordinary story of recovery, she shares how she made herself whole again after the attack, describing the combination of mental, spiritual, and physical work that helped her heal. Korra refused to feel ashamed about her experience, outing herself to the Dallas area media during her attackers’ trial and speaking about her recovery in the frenzy that followed. Today, Korra has become an outspoken advocate raising awareness about rape and sexual abuse and speaking regularly about her recovery.

Lieven, Dominic. The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I and Revolution. Tantor. ISBN 9781494511500. Read by Shaun Grindell.
World War I and the Russian Revolution together shaped the 20th century in profound ways. Here Lieven connects the two events, providing both a history of the First World War’s origins from a Russian perspective and an international history of why the revolution happened. He links World War I to the sweep of 20th-century global history and shows how contemporary hot issues such as the struggle for Ukraine were already crucial elements in the run-up to 1914.

Mitchell, Joseph. Up in the Old Hotel, and Other Stories. Blackstone. ISBN 978-1-5046-5356-5. Reader TBA.
Saloon keepers, street preachers, gypsies, steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady, and a 93-year-old “seafoodetarian” who believes his specialized diet will keep him alive for another two decades are among the people whom Mitchell immortalized in his reportage for the New Yorker and in four books—McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould’s Secret—that are still renowned for their respectful observation, their graveyard humor, and their offhand perfection of style. These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of New York and its odder citizens.

Ramos, Jason A. & Julian Smith. Smokejumper: A Memoir by One of America’s Most Select Airborne Firefighters. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504625586. Reader TBA.
An elite crew of firefighters employed by the Department of the Interior, smokejumpers are specially trained to fight monstrous fires in the deepest wilderness at a moment’s notice—in inaccessible terrain where conventional firefighting is impossible, often alone or with the aid of just a single partner. To stay alive, smokejumpers must combine knowledge of the terrain, meteorological and ground conditions, and their own judgment and instincts to survive. Ramos weaves a compelling history of wilderness firefighting, takes listeners through the brutal training it requires, and explains the psychological strength needed to go to work each day knowing it could be your last. Here are some of his most harrowing missions—when the ground is so hot that truck axles melt and a split-second decision can mean the difference between living and dying.

Rock, David. Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504637732. Read by Bob Walter.
Rock shows how it’s possible for listeners not only to survive in today’s overwhelming work environment but to succeed in it—and still feel energized and accomplished at the end of the day. He explores issues such as why our brains feel so taxed, how to maximize our mental resources, why it’s so hard to focus, how to better manage distractions, how to keep your cool in any situation, how to collaborate more effectively with others, why providing feedback is so difficult, and how to make it easier, and how to be more effective at changing other people’s behavior.

51N7JvA0W9L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Roker, Al with William Hogeland. The Storm of the Century: Tragedy, Heroism, Survival, and the Epic True Story of America’s Deadliest Natural Disaster—the Great Gulf Hurricane of 1900. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504625500. Reader TBA.
The beloved NBC weather personality vividly brings to life the Great Gulf Hurricane of 1900, the deadliest natural disaster in American history. On the afternoon of September 8, 1900, 200-mile-per-hour winds and 15-foot waves slammed into Galveston, TX. By dawn the next day, the city that existed just hours before was gone: 8,000 corpses littered the streets and were buried under the massive wreckage. Rushing water had lifted buildings from their foundations, smashing them into pieces, while intensive winds had upended girders and trestles, driving them through house walls and into sidewalks. In less than 24 hours, one storm destroyed a major American metropolis—and awakened a nation to the terrifying power of nature.

Santamaria, Abigail. Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504616157. Read by Bernadette Dunne.
The first full biography of Joy Davidman brings her out from C.S. Lewis’s shadow, where she has long been hidden, to reveal a powerful writer and thinker. Davidman is known, if she is known at all, as the wife of C.S. Lewis. A poet and radical, Davidman was a frequent contributor to the communist vehicle New Masses and an active member of New York literary circles in the 1930s and ’40s. Born Jewish in the Bronx, she was an atheist, then a practitioner of Dianetics; she converted to Christianity after experiencing a moment of transcendent grace. A mother, a novelist, a vibrant and difficult and intelligent woman, she set off for England in 1952, determined to captivate the man whose work had changed her life. Davidman became the intellectual and spiritual partner Lewis never expected but cherished.

Schechter, Harold. Man-Eater: The Life and Legend of an American Cannibal. Brilliance. ISBN 9781491598597. Reader TBA.
In the winter of 1873, a small band of prospectors lost their way in the frozen wilderness of the Colorado Rockies. Months later, when the snow finally melted, only one of them emerged. His name was Alfred G. Packer, though he would soon become infamous throughout the country under a different name: “the Man-Eater.” After the butchered remains of his five traveling companions were discovered in a secluded valley, Packer vanished for nine years, becoming the West’s most wanted man. What followed was a saga of evasion and retribution as the trial of the century worked to extricate fact from myth and Polly Pry, a once-famed pioneering journalist, took on the cause of Packer.

Stamp, Terence. Double Feature. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504654357. Reader TBA.
In this second installment of Terence Stamp’s captivating memoirs, he takes listeners right into the heart of the swinging ’60s. From his Academy Award nomination for Billy Budd to his coming of age under the direction of the legendary Federico Fellini, the “marmalade skies” are the limit. With beautiful women and beautiful people from London to California, Stamp captures the spirit of the decade. He was the face, the man to be seen with. And then the decade ended, along with his romance to famous model Jean Shrimpton, and Stamp, unemployed and brokenhearted, boards a plane for a solo pilgrimage to India.

Steiner, Leslie Morgan. Crazy Love. Brilliance. ISBN 9781501270833. Read by Tanya Eby.
At 22, Steiner seemed to have it all: a Harvard diploma, a glamorous job at Seventeen magazine, a downtown New York City apartment. Plus a handsome, funny, street-smart boyfriend who adored her. But she’d made a mistake shared by millions: She fell in love with the wrong person. In this memoir, Steiner takes listeners inside the violent, devastating world of abusive love.

Vigeland, Tess. Leap Without a Net: Leaving a Job with No Plan B. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504624848. Read by the author.
Until recently, Vigeland was the longtime host of NPR’s Marketplace; it was a rewarding, high-status job, and she was very good at it—but she’d begun to feel restless. Without any clear sense of what she wanted to do next—but an absolute certainty that what she’d been doing was no longer truly satisfying—she walked away from a job that millions of people would kill to have. With her signature humor, she writes honestly about the fear, uncertainty, and risk involved in leaving the traditional workforce—but also about the excitement, resources, and possibilities that wait on the other side. Part memoir and part field guide, this book offers a funny, thoughtful, and provocative look at how to find happiness, satisfaction, and success when pursuing a career less ordinary.

Diana Nyad, Notorious RBG, & Luc Sante’s Paris | Audio in Advance October 2015 | Nonfiction

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Barrymore, Drew. Wildflower. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780147520715. Read by the author.
Barrymore’s memoir, the first book she’s written about her life since the age of 14, includes tales of living on her own at 14 (and how laundry may have saved her life), getting stuck in a gas station overhang on a cross-country road trip, saying goodbye to her father in a way only he could have understood, and many more adventures and lessons that have led her to the successful, happy, and healthy place she is today. 

41EPYSumZvL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200___1439477130_36377Brownstein, Carrie. Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780399565403. Read by the author.
With Sleater-Kinney, Brownstein and her bandmates rose to prominence in the burgeoning underground feminist punk-rock movement that would define music and pop culture in the 1990s. This work is an intimate and revealing narrative of her escape from a turbulent family life into a world where music was the means toward self-invention, community, and rescue. Along the way, Brownstein chronicles the excitement and contradictions within the era’s flourishing and fiercely independent music subculture, including experiences that sowed the seeds for the observational satire of the popular television series Portlandia years later.

Bull, Andy. Speed Kings: The 1932 Olympics and the Fastest Men in the World. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101926772. Read by Eric Meyers.
In the 1930s, bobsledding, the fastest way to travel on land, had become a sensation. Exotic, exciting, and brutally dangerous, it was the must-see event of the 1932 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid. Bobsledding requires exceptional skill and extraordinary courage—qualities the American team had in abundance. There was Jay O’Brien, the high-society playboy; Tippy Grey, a scandal-prone Hollywood has-been; Eddie Eagan, world champion heavyweight boxer and Rhodes Scholar; and the charismatic Billy Fiske, the true heart of the team, despite being barely out of his teens. In the thick of the Great Depression, the nation was gripped by the story of these men, their battle against jealous locals, treacherous U.S. officials, and the very same German athletes they would be fighting against in the war only a few short years later.

Carmon, Irin & Shana Knizhnik. Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. HarperAudio. ISBN 9781504645423. Read by Andi Arndt.
Nearly a half-century into being a feminist and legal pioneer, something funny happened to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: the octogenarian won the Internet. Across America, people who weren’t even born when Ginsburg made her name are tattooing themselves with her face, setting her famously searing dissents to music, and making viral videos in tribute. As the country struggles with the issues of gender equality and civil rights, Ginsburg stands as a testament to how far we can come with a little chutzpah.

Costello, Elvis. Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101924969. Read by the author.
Born Declan Patrick MacManus, Elvis Costello was raised in London and Liverpool, grandson of a trumpet player on the White Star Line and son of a jazz musician. Costello went into the family business and had taken the popular music world by storm before he was 24. He continues to add to one of the most intriguing and extensive songbooks of the day. The memoir, written entirely by Costello, offers his unique view of his unlikely and sometimes comical rise to international success, with diversions through the previously undocumented emotional foundations of some of his best known songs and the hits of tomorrow.

Hamill, Pete. Why Sinatra Matters. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478936527. Reader TBA.
In honor of Sinatra’s 100th birthday, Hamill’s classic tribute returns with a new introduction by the author. In this unique homage to an American icon, Hamill evokes the essence of Sinatra—examining his art and his legend from the inside, as only a friend of many years could do. Shaped by Prohibition, the Depression, and war, Francis Albert Sinatra became the troubadour of urban loneliness. With his songs, he enabled millions of others to tell their own stories, providing an entire generation with a sense of tradition and pride belonging distinctly to them.

51dZhs3QshL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200___1439477185_63180Hamilton, Sheila. All the Things We Never Knew: Chasing the Chaos of Mental Illness. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504636032. Read by the author.
Even as a reporter, Hamilton missed the signs as her husband David’s mental illness unfolded before her. By the time she had pieced together the puzzle, it was too late. Her once brilliant, intense, and hilarious partner was dead within six weeks of a formal diagnosis of bipolar disorder, leaving his nine-year-old daughter and wife without so much as a note to explain his actions, a plan to help them recover from their profound grief, or a solution for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that they would inherit from him. This work takes listeners from David and Sheila’s romance through the last three months of their life together and into the year after his death. Now, a decade after David’s death, Sheila and her daughter, Sophie, have learned the power of choosing life over retreat and understand the importance of forgiveness. 

Holland, Tom. Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504653640. Reader TBA.
Dynasty continues where Holland’s Rubicon ended: with the murder of Julius Caesar. This is the period of the first and perhaps greatest Roman emperors. It’s a colorful story of rule and ruination, from the rise of Augustus to the death of Nero. Holland’s expansive history features five vivid (and in three cases, thoroughly depraved) emperors—Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero—featured, along with numerous fascinating secondary characters. Intrigue, murder, naked ambition and treachery, greed, gluttony, lust, incest, pageantry, decadence—the tale of these five Caesars continues to cast a mesmerizing spell across the millennia.

Jaher, David. The Witch of Lime Street: Séance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101924327. Read by Simon Vance.
The 1920s were an era of fevered yearning for communion with the spirit world, after the loss of tens of millions in the First World War and the Spanish-flu epidemic. Against this backdrop, in 1924, the pretty wife of a distinguished Boston surgeon came to embody the raging national debate over Spiritualism. Reporters dubbed her the blonde Witch of Lime Street, but she was known to her followers simply as Margery. Scientific American offered a large cash prize to the first medium declared authentic by its impressive five-man investigative committee. Admired for both her exceptional charm and her dazzling effects, Margery was the best hope for the psychic practice to be empirically verified. Her supernatural gifts beguiled four of the judges. There was only one left to convince…acclaimed escape artist Harry Houdini.

Knopper, Steve. MJ: The Genius of Michael Jackson. Tantor. ISBN  9781494516840. Read by Eric Michael Summerer.
In a career spanning four decades, Jackson became a global icon, selling over 400 million albums, earning 13 Grammy awards, and spinning dance moves that captivated the world. Songs such as “Billie Jean” and “Black and White” altered our national discussion of race and equality, and Jackson’s signature aesthetic, from the single white glove to the moonwalk, defined a generation. Despite years of scandal and controversy, Jackson’s ultimate legacy will always be his music. Rolling Stone contributing editor Steve Knopper delves deeply into Jackson’s music and talent, drawing on 400 interviews to put all the elements of his career into perspective and celebrate his triumph in art and music.

Larson, Kate Clifford. Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504642743. Read by Bernadette Dunne.
Joe and Rose Kennedy’s strikingly beautiful daughter Rosemary attended exclusive schools, was presented as a debutante to the queen of England, and traveled the world with her high-spirited sisters. And yet, Rosemary was intellectually disabled—a secret fiercely guarded by her powerful family. Major new sources—Rose Kennedy’s diaries and correspondence, school and doctors’ letters, and exclusive family interviews—bring Rosemary to life. Larson reveals both the sensitive care Rose and Joe gave to Rosemary and then the often desperate and duplicitous arrangements the Kennedys made to keep her away from home as she became increasingly intractable in her early twenties. Finally, Larson illuminates Joe’s decision to have Rosemary lobotomized at age 23 and the family’s complicity in keeping the secret.

Levy, Aidan. Dirty Blvd.: The Life and Music of Lou Reed. Tantor. ISBN 9781494566517. Read by Tom Perkins.
This book not only covers the highlights of Lou Reed’s career, but also explores lesser-known facets of his work, such as his first recordings with doo-wop group the Jades, his key literary influences, the impact of Judaism upon his music, and his engagement with the LGBT movement. Drawing from original interviews with many of Reed’s artistic collaborators, friends, and romantic partners, as well as from archival material, concert footage, and unreleased bootlegs of live performances, Levy exposes the man behind the myth, the notoriously uncompromising rock poet who wrote songs that transcended their genre and established himself as one of the most influential and enigmatic American artists of the past half century.

41j12XymVeL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200___1439477235_43368Mar, Alex. Witches of America. Tantor. ISBN 9781494566456. Read by Amanda Dolan.
Witches of America follows Mar on her immersive five-year trip into the occult, charting modern Paganism from its roots in 1950s England to its current American mecca in the San Francisco Bay Area. Along the way she takes part in dozens of rituals and becomes involved with a wild array of characters: a government employee who founds a California priesthood dedicated to a Celtic goddess of war; American disciples of Aleister Crowley, whose elaborate ceremonies turn the Catholic mass on its head; second-wave feminist Wiccans who practice a radical separatist witchcraft; and a growing “mystery cult” whose initiates trace their rites back to a blind shaman in rural Oregon.

McCurley, T. Mark & Kevin Maurer. Hunter Killer: Inside America’s Unmanned Air War. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780553545135. Read by Holter Graham.
Remotely piloted aircraft (RPA), commonly referred to as drones, are a mysterious and headline-making tool in the military’s counterterrorism arsenal. Their story has been pieced together by technology reporters, major newspapers, and on-the-ground accounts from the Middle East, but it has never been fully told by an insider. Here Air Force Lt. Col. McCurley provides an unprecedented look at the aviators and aircraft that forever changed modern warfare. This is the first account by an RPA pilot, told from his unique vantage point supporting and executing Tier One counterterrorism missions. 

Nyad, Diana. Find a Way. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101889039. Read by the author.
On September 2, 2013, at the age of 64, Nyad emerged onto the shores of Key West after completing a 110-mile, 53-hour, record-breaking swim through shark-infested waters from Cuba to Florida and delivered three messages to the world: never, ever give up; you’re never too old to chase your dreams; and it looks like a solitary sport, but it takes a team. Millions of people around the world cheered for her and were moved by her incredible tenacity and determination, her triumph after so many bitter failures, and by the mantra—”find a way”—that enabled her to realize a dream in her sixties that had eluded her as a young Olympian in peak form. Here she tells the passionate, singularly inspiring story of this feat of epic endurance and relates the extraordinary life experiences and lessons that helped her to realize her dream.

Randall, Lisa. Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe. HarperAudio. ISBN 9781504645201 Read by Carrington MacDuffie.
Sixty-six million years ago, an object the size of a city crashed into Earth, killing off the dinosaurs and three-quarters of other species on the planet. Particle physicist Randall proposes that the object was a comet dislodged from its orbit as the solar system passed through a disk of dark matter. In a sense, then, it might have been dark matter that killed the dinosaurs. Randall shares with listeners the latest findings regarding the nature and role of dark matter and the origin of the universe, our galaxy, our solar system, and life, weaving together the cosmos’s history and our own, illuminating the deep relationships that are critical to our world.

51ofWG7MK+L._SX258_BO1,204,203,200___1439477292_89649Sante, Luc. The Other Paris: The People’s City, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. HighBridge. ISBN 9781622319244. Read by the author.
Sante (Low Life) reveals the hidden past of the City of Light. Drawing on testimony from a great range of witnesses—from Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo to assorted boulevardiers, rabble-rousers, and tramps—The Other Paris scuttles through the knotted streets of pre-Haussmann Paris; through the improvised accommodations of the original bohemians; and through the massive garbage dump at Montfaucon, active until 1849, in which, “at any given time the carcasses of 12,000 horses…were left to rot.” Addressing labor conditions, prostitution, drinking, crime, and popular entertainment of the reporters, réaliste singers, pamphleteers, and poets who chronicled their evolution, Sante aims to hold a light to the works and days of the forgotten poor.

Schiff, Stacy. The Witches: Salem, 1692. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478935995. Reader TBA.
It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister’s daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an 80-year-old man crushed to death. The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, parents and children each other. Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment when women played a central role in American history. And, in curious ways, the trials would shape the future republic.

Smith, Patti. M Train. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101923023. Read by the author.
M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, and across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations, listeners travel to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico; to a meeting of an Arctic explorers’ society in Berlin; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York’s Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; and to the graves of Jean Genet, Sylvia Plath, Arthur Rimbaud, and Yukio Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft and on artistic creation, as well as memories of Smith’s life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith.

Steinem, Gloria. My Life on the Road. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780147522429. Read by Debra Winger & the author.
Steinem—writer, activist, organizer, and inspiring leaders—now tells a story she has never told before, a candid account of how her early years led her to live an on-the-road kind of life, traveling, listening to people, learning, and creating change. She reveals the story of her own growth in tandem with the growth of an ongoing movement for equality.

Stiles, T.J. Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101924266. Read by Arthur Morey.
Stiles demolishes Custer’s historical caricature, revealing a volatile, contradictory, intense person—capable yet insecure, intelligent yet bigoted, passionate yet self-destructive, a romantic individualist at odds with the institution of the military (he was court-martialed twice in six years). The key to understanding Custer, Stiles writes, is keeping in mind that he helped to create modern America, but he could never adapt to it. He freed countless slaves yet rejected new civil rights laws. He tried to make a fortune on Wall Street yet never connected with the new corporate economy. Native Americans fascinated him, but he could not see them as fully human. His admirers saw him as the embodiment of the nation’s gallant youth, of all that they were losing; his detractors despised him for resisting a more complex and promising future.

51Src5ePr2L._SX329_BO1,204,203,200___1439477340_63050Vowell, Sarah. Lafayette in the Somewhat United States. S. & S. Audio. ISBN 9781442391086. Reader TBA.
Thirty years after the Revolutionary War, the Marquis de Lafayette returned to the United States, and 80,000 people showed up to cheer for him—three quarters of the population of New York at the time. Lafayette’s arrival in 1824 coincided with one of the most contentious presidential elections in American history, Congress had just fought its first epic battle over slavery, and the threat of a Civil War loomed. But Lafayette, belonging to no political party or faction, was a walking, talking reminder of the sacrifices and bravery of the revolutionary generation and what they wanted this country to be. Vowell’s (Assassination Vacation) latest is a humorous and insightful portrait of the famed Frenchman, the impact he had on the young country, and his ongoing relationship with some of the instrumental Americans of the time, including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson.

Winchester, Simon. Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers. HarperAudio. ISBN  9780062420077. Read by the author.
Winchester (Atlantic) explores the role of the Pacific Ocean in the modern world, exploring humans’ relationship with this imposing force of nature. As the Mediterranean shaped the classical world, and the Atlantic connected Europe to the New World, the Pacific Ocean defines our tomorrow. Its geological history
—tremendous earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis—has long transformed us, but its human history, from a Western perspective, is quite young, beginning with Magellan’s 16th-century circumnavigation. Winchester takes listeners from the Bering Strait to Cape Horn, the Yangtze River to the Panama Canal. He observes the fall of a dictator in Manila, visits aboriginals in northern Queensland, and is jailed in Tierra del Fuego. His journey includes a trip down the Alaska Highway, a stop at the isolated Pitcairn Islands, a trek across South Korea, and a glimpse of its mysterious northern neighbor.

Bill Nye, Carly Simon, & a Biography of Joan Didion | Audio in Advance November 2015 | Nonfiction

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51_8T2lIgHL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200___1441903529_59066Bingham, Emily. Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham. Tantor. ISBN 9781494567972. Read by Christina Delaine.
Raised like a princess in one of the most powerful families in the American South, Henrietta Bingham was offered the helm of a publishing empire. Instead, she ripped through the Jazz Age like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character: intoxicating and intoxicated, selfish and shameless, seductive and brilliant, endearing and often terribly troubled. In New York, Louisville, and London, she drove both men and women wild with desire, and her youth blazed with sex. But her love affairs with women made her the subject of derision and after the speed and pleasure of her early days, the toxicity of judgment from others coupled with her own anxieties resulted in years of addiction and breakdowns. And perhaps most painfully, she became a source of embarrassment for her family. For Emily Bingham, delving into the secret of who her great-aunt was and why her story was concealed for so long led to this work.

Calhoun, Ada. St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street. Tantor. ISBN 9781494568146. Read by Carla Mercer-Meyer.
This idiosyncratic work of reportage tells the many layered history of New York City’s St. Marks Place—from its beginnings as Colonial Dutch Director-General Peter Stuyvesant’s pear orchard to today’s hipster playground. In a narrative enriched by hundreds of interviews, St. Marks native Calhoun profiles iconic characters, including W.H. Auden, Abbie Hoffman, Keith Haring, and the Beastie Boys. She argues that St. Marks has variously been an elite address, an immigrants’ haven, a mafia war zone, and a hippie paradise, but it has always been a place that outsiders call home.

Daugherty, Tracy. The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504672337. Read by Bernadette Dunne.
Joan Didion met her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, while the two were working in New York City: Didion at Vogue and Dunne writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and co-wrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction. Daugherty takes listeners on a journey back through time, following a young Didion in Sacramento through to her adult life as a writer. Daugherty interviews those who know and knew Didion personally while maintaining a respectful distance from the reclusive literary great.

Fenton, Reuven. Stolen Years: Stories of the Wrongfully Imprisoned. Tantor. ISBN 9781494551841. Read by Will Damron, JD Jackson, & Bahni Turpin.
There is a grisly murder in your neighborhood. You stand outside with your neighbors and watch, or maybe you peek out your curtains. Hours pass, then days, maybe years. Then one day there is a knock at your door and the police take you in for questioning. Do you remember what happened? Do you have an alibi? Can you take countless hours of interrogation without breaking? Stories from The Fixer to The Shawshank Redemption have for decades catered to audiences’ grim fascination with wrongful imprisonment—one’s worst nightmare come to life. Here the stories are true. The ten former inmates profiled fended off despair so they could keep fighting for freedom. Then once out, they faced a new struggle: getting back to living after losing so many years behind bars.

Gondelman, Josh & Joe Berkowitz. You Blew It!: An Awkward Look at the Many Ways in Which You’ve Already Ruined Your Life. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501904783. Reader TBA.
Humankind is doomed. Especially you. From overstaying your welcome at a party, to leaving passive-aggressive notes on your roommate’s belongings, to letting your date know the extent of the Internet reconnaissance you did on them—you’re destined to embarrass yourself again and again. Gondelman and Berkowitz dissect a range of painfully hilarious faux pas as they break down the code violations of modern culture—particularly our fervent, ridiculous addiction to technology.

bn9n_square_240__1441903645_90046Good, David. The Way Around: A Life in Two Worlds. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504645935. Reader TBA.
The son of an American anthropologist and a tribeswoman from a distant part of the Amazon, it took Good 20 years to embrace his identity, reunite with the mother who left him when he was six, and claim his heritage. Moving from the wilds of the Amazonian jungle to the paved confines of suburban New Jersey and back, it is the story of his parents, his American scientist-father, and his mother who could not fully adapt to the Western lifestyle. Good writes sympathetically about his mother’s abandonment and the deleterious effect it had on his young self; of his rebellious teenage years marked by depression and drinking; and the near-fatal car accident that transformed him and gave him purpose to find a way back to his mother.

Hilton, Lisa. Elizabeth: Renaissance Prince. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504673129. Read by Kelly Birch.
This new biographical portrait casts the queen as she saw herself—not as an exceptional woman, but as an exceptional ruler. Queen Elizabeth I was all too happy to play on courtly conventions of gender when it suited her “weak and feeble woman’s body” to do so for political gain. But Hilton offers ample evidence of why those famous words should not be taken at face value. With new research from France, Italy, Russia, and Turkey, Hilton’s interpretation is of a monarch who saw herself primarily as a Renaissance prince and used Machiavellian statecraft to secure that position, depicting a queen who was much less constrained by her femininity than most treatments claim.

Honnold, Alex with David Roberts. Alone on the Wall. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504643955. Reader TBA.
Only a few years ago, Honnold was little known beyond a small circle of hardcore climbers. Today, at age 30, he is probably the most famous adventure athlete in the world. Free soloing, Honnold’s specialty, is a type of climbing performed without a rope, a partner, or hardware for aid or protection. The results of climbing this way are breathtaking, but the stakes are ultimate: if you fall, you die. Here Honnold recounts the seven most astonishing climbing achievements so far in his meteoric and still-evolving career. Veteran climber Roberts writes part of each chapter in his own voice, and he calls on other climbers and the sport’s storied past to put Alex’s tremendous accomplishments in perspective.

Kaplan, Matt. Science of the Magical: From the Holy Grail to Love Potions to Superpowers. Tantor. ISBN 9781494564612. Read by Eric Michael Summerer.
Can migrations of birds foretell our future? Do phases of the moon hold sway over our lives? Are there sacred springs that cure the ill? What is the best way to brew a love potion? In this friendly armchair guide to the world of the supernatural, Kaplan plumbs the rich, lively, and surprising history of the magical objects, places, and rituals that infuse ancient and contemporary myth. From the strengthening powers of Viking mead to the super soldiers in movies like Captain America, Kaplan ranges across cultures and time periods to point out that there is often much more to these enduring magical narratives than mere fantasy. 

Kaufman, Sarah L. The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life. HighBridge. ISBN 9781622319763. Read by Christina Delaine.
Kaufman celebrates grace in the way bodies move, exploring how to stand, walk, and dress well. She deplores the rarity of grace among public figures and glories in it where found (Beyoncé at a fashion show). She singles out grace in sports and in the arts, from tennis and football to sculpture, pop music, and, of course, dance, and in the everyday ways people interact, from the grace of a good host to the unexpected kindness of strangers. 

51ClPeG_V7L._SX322_BO1,204,203,200___1441903703_21582Klein, Stefan. We Are All Stardust: Scientists Who Shaped Our World Talk about Their Work, Their Lives, and What They Still Want to Know. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504663793. read by Gildart Jackson, Simon Vance, Kate Reading, & Sean Runnette.
In this collection of intimate conversations with 19 of the world’s best-known scientists, today’s leading minds reveal what they still hope to discover—and how their paradigm-changing work entwines with their lives outside the lab. From the sports car that physicist Steven Weinberg says helped him on his quest for “the theory of everything” to the jazz musicians who gave psychologist Alison Gopnik new insight into raising children, these scientists explain how they find inspiration everywhere. 

Nye, Bill. Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427271730. Reader TBA.
With a scientist’s thirst for knowledge and an engineer’s vision of what can be, Nye sees today’s environmental issues not as insurmountable, depressing problems but as chances for our society to rise to the challenge and create a cleaner, healthier, smarter world. We need not accept that transportation consumes half our energy, and that two-thirds of the energy you put into your car is immediately thrown away through the tailpipe. We need not accept that dangerous emissions are the price we must pay for a vibrant economy and a comfortable life. Above all, we need not accept that we will leave our children a planet that is dirty, overheated, and depleted of resources. As Nye shares his vision, he debunks some of the most persistent myths and misunderstandings about global warming. 

Sethi, Simran. Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love. HarperAudio. ISBN 9780062190604. Read by Therese Plummer.
Sethi reveals how the foods we enjoy are endangered by genetic erosion—a slow and steady loss of diversity in what we grow and eat. In America today, food often looks and tastes the same, whether at a San Francisco farmers’ market or at a Midwestern potluck. Though supermarkets seem to be stocked with endless options, the differences between products are superficial, primarily in flavor and brand. Sethi draws on interviews with scientists, farmers, chefs, vintners, beer brewers, coffee roasters, and others with firsthand knowledge of our food to reveal the multiple and interconnected reasons for this loss, and its consequences for our health, traditions, and culture. 

Simon, Carly. Boys in the Trees. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427271952. Reader TBA.
Simon’s memoir reveals her remarkable life, beginning with her storied childhood, her musical debut as half of The Simon Sisters performing folk songs with her sister Lucy in Greenwich Village, and her meteoric solo career. The memoir recalls a childhood enriched by music and culture, but also one shrouded in secrets that would eventually tear her family apart. The author brilliantly captures moments of creative inspiration, the sparks of songs, and the stories behind writing “Anticipation” and “We Have No Secrets,” among many others. In addition, Simon recounts the romantic entanglements that fueled her confessional lyrics and describes the unraveling of her storybook marriage to James Taylor.

Stevens, Christopher. Written in Stone: A Journey Through the Stone Age and the Origins of Modern Language. Tantor. ISBN 9781494565589. Read by Michael Healy.
Half the world’s population speaks a language that has evolved from a single, prehistoric mother tongue. First spoken in Stone Age times, on the steppes of central Eurasia 6,500 years ago, this mother tongue spread from the shores of the Black Sea across almost all of Europe and much of Asia. Stevens combines mythology, ancient history, archaeology, technology and warfare, and linguistics to explore that original mother tongue, in the process uncovering the most influential and important words used by our Neolithic ancestors and demonstrating how they are used today.

41uJpJxEWYL._SX327_BO1,204,203,200___1441903764_28150Tattersall, Ian & Rob DeSalle. A Natural History of Wine. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781490686554. Reader TBA.
Tattersall, a palaeoanthropologist, and DeSalle, a molecular biologist, explore the many intersections between science and wine, embracing almost every imaginable area of the sciences, from microbiology and ecology (to understand what creates this complex beverage) to physiology and neurobiology (for insight into the effects of wine on the mind and body). The authors draw on physics, chemistry, biochemistry, evolution, and climatology, and they expand the discussion to include insights from anthropology, primatology, entomology, Neolithic archaeology, and Classical history.

Timbaland & Veronica Chambers. The Emperor of Sound. HarperAudio. ISBN 9781504645829. Read by William Harper.
Producer Timbaland has been a fixture on the pop charts, with more top-ten hits than Elvis or the Beatles. Though he works with such artists as Mariah Carey, Missy Elliott, Nelly Furtado, Madonna, and his childhood friend Pharrell Williams, Timbaland shuns parties, stays out of gossip columns, and rarely gives interviews. Here he offers fans an unprecedented look into his life and work, taking them backstage with 50 Cent and live on-stage with Justin Timberlake. He reveals the magic behind the music, sharing the creative impulses that arise while he’s producing, and the layering of sounds that have created dozens of number-one hits. 

Utley, Robert M. Wanted: The Outlaw Lives of Billy the Kid and Ned Kelly. Tantor. ISBN 9781494565190. Read by Tom Perkins.
The oft-told exploits of Billy the Kid and Ned Kelly survive vividly in the public imaginations of their respective countries, the United States and Australia. But the outlaws’ reputations are so weighted with legend and myth that the truth of their lives has become obscure. In this double biography, Utley reveals the true stories and parallel courses of the two notorious contemporaries who lived by the gun, were executed while still in their twenties, and remain compelling figures in the folklore of their homelands.

Vinciguerra, Thomas. Cast of Characters: Wolcott Gibbs, E. B. White, James Thurber, and the Golden Age of the New Yorker. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504658751. Read by Tony Pasqualini.
At the heart of this narrative is the largely forgotten life of Wolcott Gibbs, the New Yorker’s theater critic and all-around wit, author of an infamous 1936 parody of Time magazine. Around him swirled a legendary roster of writers, editors, and illustrators, including E.B. and Katharine White, James Thurber, Charles Addams, Peter Arno, and John O’Hara. Their stories are told here, along with those of equally colorful but overlooked figures such as managing editor St. Clair McKelway, head factchecker Frederick Packard, and the flamboyant film reviewer John Chapin Mosher.

White, Andrew St. Pierre & Gwynn White. Torn Trousers: A True Story of Courage and Adventure: How A Couple Sacrificed Everything To Escape to Paradise. Tantor. ISBN 9781494567552. Read by Charlotte Anne Dore & James Langton.
Thirtysomethings Andrew and Gwynn White sold everything they owned and escaped their humdrum nine-to-five existence for life in paradise—a tiny island accessible only by boat or air in one of the remotest spots on Earth: the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Woefully inexperienced, they took control of a luxury game lodge where the rich and famous went to sip gin and tonics with lions and elephants. Trouble soon followed. The couple’s lives were threatened daily by snakes, elephants, baboons, and a hyena with a plastic fetish—not to mention the endless, and often insurmountable, challenge of keeping their five-star guests fed in a world where the closest supermarket was an air flight away. 

519dgf+O4UL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200___1441903834_28936Wilson, Rainn. The Bassoon King: My Life in Art, Faith, and Idiocy. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780553544695. Read by the author.
For nine seasons Wilson played Dwight Schrute, work nemesis and beet farmer, on The Office. Here he explains how he grew up “bone-numbingly nerdy before there was even a modicum of cool attached to the word” and chronicles his journey from nerd to drama geek, his years of mild debauchery and struggles as a young actor in New York, his many adventures around and insights about The Office, and finally, achieving success and satisfaction, both in his career and spiritually, as he reconnects with the values of the Bahá’í faith he grew up in.

Ziegler, Dominic. Black Dragon River: A Journey Down the Amur River at the Borderlands of Empires. Brilliance. ISBN 9781501299407. Read by Steve West.
The world’s ninth largest river, the Amur serves as a large part of the border between Russia and China. Ziegler follows a journey from the river’s top to bottom, discussing history, ecology, and peoples to portray a region obsessed with the past—and to show how this region holds a key to the complex and critical relationship between Russia and China today. 

Volcanoes, Dame Maggie Smith, & Life in the Andes | Audio in Advance December 2015 | Nonfiction

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Barr, Niall. Eisenhower’s Armies: The American-British Alliance During World War II. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781682620687. Reader TBA.
The Anglo-American relationship from 1941-1945 proved to be the most effective military alliance in history. Yet there were also constant tensions and disagreements that threatened to pull the alliance apart. This book highlights why the unprecedented level of cooperation between the very different American and British forces eventually led to victory but also emphasizes the tensions and controversies that inevitably arose. Based on archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, this work considers the breadth and depth of the relationship from high-level strategic decisions, the rivalries and personalities of the commanders, and the ordinary British and American soldiers who fought alongside one another. 

514roi2NU1L._SX327_BO1,204,203,200___1444252043_13241Coveney, Michael. Maggie Smith: A Biography. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427271525. Read by Sian Thomas.
No one does glamour, severity, girlish charm or tight-lipped witticism better than Dame Maggie Smith. Coveny’s biography shines a light on the life and career of a truly remarkable performer, one whose stage and screen career spans six decades. From her days as a West End star of comedy and revue, Dame Maggie’s path would cross with those of the greatest actors, playwrights and directors of the era. Paradoxically she remains an enigmatic figure, rarely appearing in public. This biography, written with the actress’s blessing and drawing on personal archives, as well as interviews with immediate family and close friends, is a portrait of one of the greatest actors of our time.

Cuddy, Amy. Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478930150. Reader TBA.
We often approach challenging situations—job interviews, difficult conversations, speaking up for ourselves—with anxiety and leave them with regret. Moments that require us to be genuine and powerful instead cause us to feel phony and powerless, preventing us from being our best selves. Harvard professor Cuddy shows that we need to stop worrying about the impression we’re making on others, and instead change the impression we’re making on ourselves. Cutting-edge science reveals that if we adopt behaviors reflecting power and strength, we liberate ourselves from the fears and doubts that obstruct us. By redirecting our thoughts, actions, and even physiology, we free ourselves to be our best.

Downs, Paul. Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781490698250. Reader TBA.
In 1986, fresh out of college, Paul Downs opened his first and last business, a small company that builds custom furniture. As his business began to grow, he had to learn about management, cash flow, taxes, and so much more. Furthermore, globalization and the arrival of the internet made a big impact on the economy, causing him to have to re-evaluate, restructure, and reinvent. Downs writes about hiring employees, providing motivation to get the best job out of them and incentive to maintain their loyalty and respect, and the difficult decisions he’s made to let some of them go. Downs also looks outward to his dealings with vendors, clients old and new, negotiating contracts, and providing each client with exemplary customer service along each step of the way, from first sales pitch to final delivery.

51IkfxX7wvL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200___1444252107_20626Dvorak, John. The Last Volcano: A Man, a Romance, and the Quest to Understand Nature’s Most Magnificant Fury. Tantor. ISBN 9781494567156. Read by Tom Perkins.
Volcanoes have fascinated—and terrified—people for ages. They have destroyed cities and ended civilizations.Here Dvorak 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 city of St. Pierre and killed its entire population in two minutes. 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.

Hodes, Martha. Mourning Lincoln. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681680729. Reader TBA.
The news of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on April 15, 1865, just days after Confederate surrender, astounded the war-weary nation. Public responses to the assassination have been well chronicled, but this book is the first to delve into the personal and intimate responses of everyday people—northerners and southerners, soldiers and civilians, black people and white, men and women, rich and poor. Through deep and thoughtful exploration of diaries, letters, and other personal writings penned during the spring and summer of 1865, Hodes captures the full range of reactions to the president’s death. 

Lambert, Craig. Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs that Fill Your Day. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501904868. Read by James Jenner.
Shadow work includes all the unpaid tasks we do on behalf of businesses and organizations. It has slipped into our routines stealthily; most of us do not realize how much of it we are already doing, even as we pump our own gas, scan and bag our own groceries, execute our own stock trades, and build our own unassembled furniture. But its presence is unmistakable, and its effects far-reaching. Fueled by the twin forces of technology and skyrocketing personnel costs, shadow work has taken a foothold in our society. Lambert examines its sources in the invasion of robotics, the democratization of expertise, and new demands on individuals at all levels of society.

MacQuarrie, Kim. Life and Death in the Andes: On the Trail of Bandits, Heroes, and Revolutionaries. Tantor. ISBN 9781494563851. Read by Jonathan Yen.
The Andes Mountains are the world’s longest mountain chain, linking most of the countries in South America. MacQuarrie takes listeners on a historical journey through the region, bringing fresh insight and contemporary connections to such fabled characters as Charles Darwin, Pablo Escobar, and Che Guevara. He introduces us to a Patagonian woman who is the last living speaker of her language, as he explores the disappearance and sometimes surprising resiliency of indigenous cultures throughout the Andes. He meets a man whose grandfather witnessed Butch Cassidy’s last days in Bolivia, tracks down the ballet dancer who once hid the leader of the brutal Shining Path in her home, and hears a harrowing story from the school teacher who gave Che Guevara his final meal. 

Mesler, Bill & H. James Cleaves II. A Brief History of Creation: Science and the Search for the Origin of Life. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504657587. Read by Sean Runnette. 
In this history of Western science, tracing the trials and triumphs of the iconoclastic scientists who have sought to uncover the mystery of how life first came to be, Mesler and Cleaves examine historical discoveries in the context of philosophical debates, political change, and our evolving understanding of the complexity of biology. The story they tell is rooted in metaphysical arguments, in a changing understanding of the age of the earth, and even in the politics of the Cold War. It has involved exploration into the inner recesses of our cells and scientific journeys to the farthest reaches of outer space. 

51n3y5JLpEL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200___1444252165_41693Starita, Joe. I Am a Man: Chief Standing Bear’s Journey for Justice. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504651783. Read by Armando Durán.
In 1877, Chief Standing Bear’s Ponca Indian tribe was forcibly removed from their Nebraska homeland and marched to Oklahoma in what became the tribe’s own Trail of Tears. This work chronicles what happened when Standing Bear set off on a 600-mile walk to return the body of his only son to their traditional burial grounds. Along the way, it examines the complex relationship between the United States government and the small, peaceful tribe and the legal consequences of land swaps and broken treaties.

Zuckoff, Mitchell. Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504653190. Read by the author.
On May 13, 1945, 24 American servicemen and WACs boarded a transport plane for a sightseeing trip over “Shangri-La,” a beautiful and mysterious valley deep within the jungle-covered mountains of Dutch New Guinea. But the pleasure tour became an unforgettable battle for survival when the plane crashed. Miraculously, three passengers pulled through. Emotionally devastated, badly injured, and vulnerable to the hidden dangers of the jungle, the trio faced certain death unless they left the crash site. Drawn from interviews, declassified U.S. Army documents, personal photos and mementos, a survivor’s diary, a rescuer’s journal, and original film footage, this work recounts the incredible true-life adventure. 

Memoirs of Traveling Light, Escaping from a Cult, & Growing Up with Rosa Parks | Audio in Advance January 2016 | Nonfiction

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Bensen, Clara. No Baggage: A Minimalist Tale of Love and Wandering. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504662185. Reader TBA.
When Clara Bensen arranged to meet Jeff Wilson on the steps of the Texas State Capitol after just a few email exchanges, it felt like something big was going to happen. Clara, a sensitive and reclusive personality, was immediately drawn to Jeff’s freewheeling, push-the-envelope nature. Within a few days of knowing one another, they embarked on a 21-day travel adventure from Istanbul to London with zero luggage, zero reservations, and zero plans. They wanted to test a simple question: what happens when you welcome the unknown instead of attempting to control it? Along the way, Clara ruminates on the challenges of traveling unencumbered, while realizing that when it comes to falling in love, you can never really leave your baggage behind.

Bryson, Bill. The Road to Little Dribbling. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780147526892. Read by Nathan Osgood.
In 1995 Bryson got into his car and took a weeks-long farewell motoring trip about England before moving his family back to the United States. The book about that trip, Notes from a Small Island, is one of the most acute and affectionate portrayals of England in all its glorious eccentricity ever written. Two decades later, he set out again to rediscover that country, and the result is The Road to Little Dribbling

51pCMzuWbqL._SX327_BO1,204,203,200___1447358551_52429Cowan, Geoffrey. Let the People Rule: Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Presidential Primary. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681680002. Reader TBA.
Between February 24, 1912, when Roosevelt came out of political retirement to challenge William Howard Taft for the Republican Party’s nomination for president, and June 23 of that year, Roosevelt and his supporters created and benefited from 13 new presidential primaries, the first in the nation’s history. Stressing the importance of primaries, Roosevelt’s campaign theme became “the right of the people to rule.” Cowan explains that although Roosevelt won about 70 percent of the delegates selected by public vote, it was not enough to overcome the power of party bosses and entrenched interests. He walked out of the convention to create the Bull Moose Party but then shocked many of his strongest supporters by excluding all black delegates from the Deep South. 

Donvan, John & Caren Zucker. In a Different Key: The Story of Autism. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780553397437. Read by Kaleo Griffith.
Donvan and Zucker tell the extraordinary story of an often misunderstood condition, and of the civil rights battles waged by the families of those who have it. Unfolding over decades, it is a beautifully rendered history of ordinary people determined to secure a place in the world for those with autism—by liberating children from dank institutions, campaigning for their right to go to school, challenging expert opinion on what it means to have autism, and persuading society to accept those who are different.This is also a story of fierce controversies—from the question of whether there is truly an autism “epidemic,” and whether vaccines played a part in it; to scandals involving “facilitated communication,” one of many treatments that have proved to be blind alleys; to stark disagreements about whether scientists should pursue a cure for autism. 

Grant, Adam. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780147524423. Reader TBA.
Grant addresses the challenge of improving the world from the perspective of becoming original: choosing to champion novel ideas and values that go against the grain, battle conformity, and buck outdated traditions. Using surprising studies and stories spanning business, politics, sports, and entertainment, Grant explores how to recognize a good idea, speak up without getting silenced, build a coalition of allies, choose the right time to act, and manage fear and doubt; how parents and teachers can nurture originality in children; and how leaders can fight groupthink to build cultures that welcome dissent. 

Janken, Kenneth Robert. The Wilmington Ten: Violence, Injustice, and the Rise of Black Politics in the 1970s. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504664035. Read by Ron Butler.
In February 1971 racial tension surrounding school desegregation in Wilmington, NC, culminated in four days of violence and skirmishes between white vigilantes and black residents. Despite glaring irregularities in the subsequent trial, ten young people were convicted of arson and conspiracy and then sentenced to a total of 282 years in prison. They became known internationally as the Wilmington Ten. A powerful movement arose within North Carolina and beyond to demand their freedom, and after several witnesses admitted to perjury, a federal appeals court, also citing prosecutorial misconduct, overturned the convictions in 1980. Janken tells the dramatic story of the Ten, connecting their story to a larger arc of Black Power and the transformation of post–civil rights–era political organizing. Grounded in extensive interviews, newly declassified government documents, and archival research, this book examines the events of 1971 and the subsequent movement for justice.

41qUNGZZyML._SX336_BO1,204,203,200___1447358608_66789Kalanithi, Paul. When Breath Becomes Air. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780399566189. Read by Sunil Malhotra & Cassandra Campbell.
At the age of 36, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. This work chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. 

Kennedy. Pagan. Inventology: How We Dream Up Things That Change the World. Tantor. ISBN 9781515950318. Read by Randye Kaye.
A father cleans up after his toddler and imagines a cup that won’t spill. An engineer watches people using walkie-talkies and has an idea. A doctor figures out how to deliver patients to the operating room before they die. By studying inventions like these—the sippy cup, the cell phone, and an ingenious hospital bed—we can learn how people imagine their way around “impossible” problems to discover groundbreaking answers. Kennedy reports on how these methods can be adapted to the 21st century, as millions of people deploy tools like crowdfunding, big data, and 3D printing to find hidden opportunities. Inventology uses the stories of inventors and surprising research to reveal the steps that produce innovation, making the argument that recent advances in technology and communication make it more possible than ever to transform ideas into reality.

Keys, Sheila McCauley. Our Auntie Rosa: The Family of Rosa Parks Remembers Her Life and Lessons. Ideal on Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520001074. Read by Robin Eller.
The family of Rosa Parks share their remembrances of the woman who was not only the mother of the civil rights movement, but a nurturing mother figure to them as well. Her brave act on a bus in Montgomery, AL, on December 1, 1955, was just one moment in a life lived with great humility and decency. After her husband and brother died, Rosa’s nieces and nephews became her only family and the closest that she would ever experience to having biological sons and daughters. In this book, they share with readers what she shared with them about her experiences growing up in a racist South, her deep dedication to truth and justice, and the personal values she held closest to her heart.

Miller, Kelsey. Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478910244. Reader TBA.
At 29, Miller had tried crash diets, healthy diets, and nutritionist-prescribed “eating plans.” She’d been fighting her un-thin body since early childhood, and after a lifetime of failure, finally realized that no diet could transform her body or her life. With the help of an Intuitive Eating coach and fitness professionals, she learned how to eat based on her body’s instincts and exercise sustainably, without obsessing over calories burned. But, with each step toward a healthy future, she had to contend with the painful truths of her past. 

Pope Francis. The Name of God Is Mercy. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735209749. Reader TBA.
Drawing on his own experience as a priest for this book, Pope Francis discusses mercy, a subject of central importance in his teaching and testimony, and sums up other ideas—reconciliation, the closeness of God—that comprise the heart of his papacy. Written in conversation with Vatican expert and La Stampa journalist Andrea Tornielli, the book is directed at listeners inside and outside of the Catholic Church who are seeking meaning in life, a road to peace and reconciliation, or the healing of physical or spiritual wounds.

Reid, Michael. Brazil: The Troubled Rise of a Global Power. Tantor. ISBN 9781494518202. Read by Michael Healy.
According to Reid, Brazil, the world’s fifth largest country and its seventh largest economy, faces important challenges before it becomes a nation of substantial global significance. After decades of military rule, the fourth most populous democracy enjoyed effective reformist leadership that tamed inflation, opened the country up to trade, and addressed poverty and other social issues, enabling Brazil to become more of an essential participant in global affairs. But as it prepares to host the 2016 Olympics, the country has been rocked by mass protest. This volume considers the nation’s still abundant problems—an inefficient state, widespread corruption, dysfunctional politics, and violent crime in its cities—alongside its achievements to provide a fully rounded portrait of a vibrant nation about to take a commanding position on the world stage.

51gmAaHV_sL._SX328_BO1,204,203,200___1447358695_19949Sakamoto, Pamela Rotner. Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds. Tantor. ISBN 9781494569457. Read by Emily Woo Zeller.
After their father’s death, Harry, Frank, and Pierce Fukuhara—all born and raised in the Pacific Northwest—moved to Hiroshima, their mother’s ancestral home. Eager to go back to his own land—America—Harry returned in the late 1930s. Then came Pearl Harbor. Despite being sent to an internment camp, Harry dutifully volunteered to serve his country. Back in Hiroshima, his brothers Frank and Pierce became soldiers in the Japanese Imperial Army. As the war raged on, Harry, one of the finest bilingual interpreters in the United States Army, island-hopped across the Pacific, moving ever closer to the enemy and to his younger brothers. But before the Fukuharas would have to face each other in battle, the United States detonated the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, gravely injuring tens of thousands of civilians, including members of their family. 

Secor, Laura. Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780399566875. Reader TBA.
In 1979, seemingly overnight, Iran became the first revolutionary theocracy in modern times. Since then, the country has been largely a black box to the West, a sinister presence looming over the horizon. But inside Iran, a breathtaking drama has unfolded since then, as religious thinkers, political operatives, poets, journalists, and activists have imagined and reimagined what Iran should be. With more than a decade of experience reporting on, researching, and writing about Iran, Secor explores this unprecedented history as a story of individuals caught up in the slipstream of their time, seizing and wielding ideas powerful enough to shift its course as they wrestle with their country’s apparatus of violent repression as well as its rich and often tragic history. 

Seeger, Pete. The Storm King Volume 2. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478964612. Read by the author.
The second volume of stories and songs from the late Seeger.

51B3xOJfy0L._SX327_BO1,204,203,200___1447358742_29637Wariner, Ruth. The Sound of Gravel. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427268143. Reader TBA.
 Wariner was the 39th of her father’s 41 children in a polygamist Doomsday cult. When she was only a few months old, Ruth’s father—the man who had been the founding prophet of the community—was brutally murdered by his brother in a bid for church power. Ruth’s mother remarried, becoming the second wife of another faithful congregant, and gave birth to six more children. In need of government assistance and supplemental income, Ruth and her siblings were carted back and forth between Mexico and the United States, where her mother collected welfare and her stepfather worked a variety of odd jobs. Ruth came to love the time she spent in California and Texas, but as she entered adolescence, her stepfather began molesting her. Try as she might, Ruth could not persuade her mother or church elders to question her stepfather. Finally, and only after devastating tragedy, Ruth found an opportunity to escape.

Webb, Caroline. How To Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101924846. Read by the author.
Webb, an economist and former partner at consulting firm McKinsey, shows listeners how to use recent findings from behavioral economics, psychology, and neuroscience to transform their approach to everyday working life. The book is arranged around seven practices that are central to having a good day: setting the right priorities, making productive use of time, having effective conversations, doing one’s very best work, achieving great personal impact, being resilient to setbacks, and sustaining one’s energy. Throughout, Webb teaches listeners how to be at their best even under pressure, and how to handle common challenges such as co-worker conflicts and difficult deadlines. 

Martin Luther, the Silk Roads, & the Inner Lives of Teenage Girls | Audio in Advance February 2016 | Nonfiction

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Booker, Cory. United. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101926666. Reader TBA.
United States Senator Booker sounds a stirring call to reorient our civic discourse around the principles of empathy and solidarity. Telling candid, inspiring stories from his life and career, and imparting lessons learned from people who motivated him to serve, he speaks of rising above discord, tending to our shared resources, and embracing our common destiny.

Burns, Eric. The Golden Lad: The Haunting Story of Quentin and Theodore Roosevelt. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504673457. Read by Traber Burns.
More than a century has passed since Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House, but he still continues to fascinate. He became a war hero, reformed the NYPD, busted the largest railroad and oil trusts, passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, created national parks and forests, won the Nobel Peace Prize, and built the Panama Canal. Yet it was the cause he championed the hardest—America’s entry into World War I—that would ultimately divide and destroy him when his youngest son, Quentin, his favorite, died in an air fight. 

Carlsen, William. Jungle of Stone: The Extraordinary Journey of John L. Stephens and Frederick Catherwood. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504695343. Reader TBA.
In 1839, John Lloyd Stephens, a dashing U.S. special ambassador to Central America, and Frederick Catherwood, an acclaimed British architect and draftsman, set out into the unexplored jungles of the Yucatan. Deep in the jungles, they stumbled upon the wondrous ruins of the Mayan civilization—an astonishing find that would change western understanding of human history. Here Carlsen uncovers the rich history of the ruins as he follows Stephens and Catherwood’s journey through present-day Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. 

25622838__1449768152_99972Carlson, Brady. Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation’s Leaders. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681680446. Read by Tom Zingarelli.
NPR host Brady Carlson takes listeners to presidential gravesites, monuments, and memorials to tell the death stories of our greatest leaders. Mixing biography and travelog, Carlson explores whether William Henry Harrison really died of a cold, why Zachary Taylor’s remains were exhumed 140 years after his death, and how what killed James A. Garfield wasn’t an assassin’s bullet. He tells the surprising stories of the Washington Monument, Mount Rushmore, and Grant’s Tomb. And he explains why “Hooverball” is still played in Iowa, why Millard Fillmore’s final resting place is beside that of funk legend Rick James, and why Ohio and Alaska continue to battle over the name of Mt. McKinley. 

Damour, Lisa. Untangled. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780147522481. Read by the author.
Damour, director of the Laurel School’s Center for Research on Girls, pulls back the curtain on the teenage years and shows why your daughter’s erratic and confusing behavior is actually healthy, necessary, and natural. Untangled explains what’s going on, prepares parents for what’s to come, and lets them know when it’s time to worry. Damour draws on decades of experience and the latest research to reveal the seven distinct—and absolutely normal—developmental transitions that turn girls into grown-ups, including Parting with Childhood, Contending with Adult Authority, Entering the Romantic World, and Caring for Herself.

Fisher, Carrie. The Princess Diarist. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504683258. Reader TBA.
Fisher again explores her life as the child of Tinseltown royalty, her adventures as Princess Leia, and her misadventures as Bi-Polar Woman of the Year—with another series of hilarious, jaw-dropping, and interconnected autobiographical essays.

Fitzpatrick, Ellen. The Highest Glass Ceiling. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520000213.Reader TBA.
Since Victoria Woodhull launched her symbolic bid for the presidency in 1872, dozens of women have sought the presidency over the past 150 years. Their quest began long before women won the vote and it unfolded over decades when a woman’s pursuit of any higher political office was met with prejudice, mockery, and hostility. Even after women started voting in 1920, they remained shut out of rooms where presidential candidacies were often born. Whether a woman will break through the glass ceiling during the current election cycle is uncertain, Fitzpatrick acknowledges. But it will happen sooner or later.

Frankopan, Peter. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681680521. Read by Laurence Kennedy.
From the rise and fall of empires in China, Persia, and Rome itself to the spread of Buddhism and advent of Christianity and Islam, right up to Western imperialism and the great wars of the 20th century, this work illuminates how the Silk Roads—the crossroads of the world, the meeting place of East and West—perhaps more than anything else, shaped global history over the past two millennia. It was on the Silk Roads that East and West first encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas, cultures, and religions, and it was the appetites for foreign goods that drove economies and the growth of nations. From the first cities in Mesopotamia to the emergence of Greece and Rome to the depredations by the Mongols, the transmission of the Black Death, the struggles of the Great Game, and the fall of Communism, the fate of the West has always been inextricably linked to the East. 

Glenny, Misha. Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio. Dreamscape. ISBN .97-1520000299. Reader TBA.
Nemesis is the story of an ordinary man who became the king of the largest slum in Rio, the head of a drug cartel, and perhaps Brazil’s most wanted criminal, a tale of gold hunters and evangelical pastors, bent police and rich-kid addicts, quixotic politicians and drug lords with math degrees. Traversing through rain forests and high-security prisons, filthy slums and glittering shopping malls, this is also the story of how change came to Brazil, of a country’s journey into the global spotlight, and the battle for the city of Rio, as it struggles to break free from a tangled web of corruption, violence, drugs, and poverty.

51C_ebdkXpL._SX327_BO1,204,203,200___1449768099_23912Goodman, Ruth. How To Be a Tudor: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Tudor Life. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681681467. Reader TBA.
On the heels of her How To Be a Victorian, Goodman travels even further back in English history to the era closest to her heart, the dramatic period from the crowning of Henry VII to the death of Elizabeth I. Drawing on her own adventures living in re-created Tudor conditions, Goodman serves as listeners’ intrepid guide to 16th-century living. Proceeding from daybreak to bedtime, this work celebrates the ordinary lives of those who labored through the era. From sounding the “hue and cry” to alert a village to danger to malting grain for homemade ale, from the gruesome sport of bear-baiting to cuckolding and cross-dressing, the madcap habits and revealing intimacies of life in the time of Shakespeare are vividly rendered.

McMeekin, Sean. The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781490698212. Read by Richard Poe.
This retelling of 20th-century history from the Ottoman perspective delivers new insights into World War I and the contemporary Middle East. Between 1911 and 1922, a series of wars would engulf the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, in which the central conflict, of course, is World War I. McMeekin brings to light the entire strategic narrative that led to an unstable new order in postwar Middle East-much of which is still felt today and makes new the epic stories from the Ottoman front, from Gallipoli to the exploits of Lawrence in Arabia, and introduces a vast range of new stories to Western readers. The book chronicles the emergence of modern Turkey and the carve-up of the rest of the Ottoman Empire, offering a new perspective on such issues as the ethno-religious bloodletting and forced population transfers which attended the breakup of empire, the Balfour Declaration, the toppling of the caliphate, and the partition of Iraq and Syria, bringing the contemporary consequences into clear focus. 

Pettegree, Andrew. Brand Luther : How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europeand Started the Protestant Reformation. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781490698199. Read by Paul Hecht.
When an obscure monk named Martin Luther tacked his “theses” on the door of the Wittenberg church in 1517, protesting corrupt practices, he was virtually unknown. Within months, his ideas spread across Germany, then all of Europe; within years, their author was not just famous, but infamous, responsible for catalyzing the violent wave of religious reform that would come to be known as the Protestant Reformation and engulfing Europe in decades of bloody war. Pettegree illustrates Luther’s great gift not simply as a theologian, but as a communicator, indeed, as the world’s first mass-media figure, its first brand. He recognized in printing the power of pamphlets, written in the colloquial German of everyday people, to win the battle of ideas. Publishing in advance of the Reformation’s 500th anniversary, Brand Luther fuses the history of religion, of printing, and of capitalism.

Power, Carla. If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504700597. Read by Kate Reading.
Journalist Carla Power and her longtime friend Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi found a way to confront ugly stereotypes and persistent misperceptions that were cleaving their communities. Frustrated and bewildered by the battles being fought in their names, both knew that a close look at the Quran would reveal a faith that preached peace and not mass murder; respect for women and not oppression. And so they embarked on a yearlong journey through the controversial text. Their story takes them to madrasas in India and pilgrimage sites in Mecca, as they encounter politicians and jihadis, feminist activists and conservative scholars. Armed with a new understanding of each other’s worldviews, Power and Akram offer eye-opening perspectives, destroy long-held myths, and reveal startling connections between worlds that have seemed hopelessly divided for far too long.

Rehm, Diane. On My Own. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780399566134. Read by the author.
The beloved NPR radio host speaks out about the long drawn-out death (from Parkinson’s) of her husband of 54 years, and of her struggle to reconstruct her life without him. With John gone, Diane was indeed on her own, coping with the inevitable practical issues as well as profoundly emotional ones. Her focus is on her own roller-coaster experiences, but she has also solicited the moving stories of such recently widowed friends as Roger Mudd and Susan Stamberg, which work to expose the reader to a remarkable range of reactions to the death of a spouse. John’s unnecessarily extended death spurred Diane into becoming a kind of poster person for the “right to die” movement.

Shatner, William with David Fisher. Leonard: My Fifty-Year Friendship with a Remarkable Man. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427273239. Read by the author.
Shatner and Leonard Nimoy first met as journeymen actors on the set of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Little did they know that their next roles, in a new sci-fi television series, would shape their lives in ways no one could have anticipated. In 79 television episodes and six feature films, they grew to know each other better than most friends could ever imagine. Over the course of nearly half a century, Shatner and Nimoy saw each other through personal and professional highs and lows. In this powerfully emotional audiobook, Shatner tells the story of a man who was his friend for more than 50 years, recounting anecdotes and untold stories of their lives on and off set, as well as gathering stories from Nimoy’s close friends and family to present a full picture of a rich life..

9780812998405__1449768207_58682Stein, Jean. West of Eden. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780451481924. Reader TBA.
Stein’s oral history illuminate the bold aspirations of five larger-than-life individuals and their families. At the center of each family is a dreamer who finds fortune and strife in Southern California: Edward Doheny, the Wisconsin-born oil tycoon whose corruption destroyed the reputation of a U.S. president and led to his own son’s violent death; Jack Warner, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants, who founded one of the world’s most iconic film studios; Jane Garland, the troubled daughter of an aspiring actress who could never escape her mother’s schemes; Jennifer Jones, an actress from Oklahoma who won the Academy Award at 25 but struggled with despair amid her fame and glamour. Finally, Stein chronicles the ascent of her own father, Jules Stein, an eye doctor born in Indiana who transformed Hollywood with the creation of an unrivaled agency and studio. In each chapter, Stein paints a portrait of an outsider who pins his or her hopes on the nascent power and promise of Los Angeles. 

Webb, Caroline. How To Have a Good Day. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101924846. Read by the author.
Economist and former McKinsey partner Webb shows listeners how to use recent findings from behavioral economics, psychology, and neuroscience to transform their approach to everyday working life. Advances in these behavioral sciences are giving us ever better understanding of how our brains work, why we make the choices we do, and what it takes for us to be at our best. But it has not always been easy to see how to apply these insights in the real world. Webb explains exactly how to apply this science to our daily tasks and routines. She translates three big scientific ideas into step-by-step guidance that shows us how to set better priorities, make our time go further, ace every interaction, be our smartest selves, strengthen our personal impact, be resilient to setbacks, and boost our energy and enjoyment.

White, Marco Pierre. The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef. Brilliance. ISBN 9781511366519. Read by Tim Bentinck.
The first British chef (and the youngest chef anywhere) to win three Michelin stars—and the only chef ever to give them all back—is a chain-smoking, pot-throwing multiply married culinary genius whose fierce devotion to food and restaurants has been the only constant in a life of tabloid-ready turmoil. Here White tells the story behind his ascent from working-class roots to culinary greatness, relaying raucous and revealing tales featuring some of the biggest names in the food world and beyond, including Mario Batali, Gordon Ramsay, Michael Caine, Damien Hirst, and Prince Charles. 


Cyberwar, Chicken Farms, & the Social History of LSD | Audio in Advance March 2016 | Nonfiction

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51H_33HsL5L._SX329_BO1,204,203,200___1452186301_14546Amundsen, Lucie B. Locally Laid: How We Built a Plucky, Industry-Changing Egg Farm—From Scratch. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504685825. Reader TBA.
When the Amundsens decided to start a commercial-scale pasture-raised egg farm, their entire agricultural experience consisted of raising five backyard hens, none of whom had yet laid a single egg. But with a heavy dose of humor, they learned to negotiate the no-man’s-land known as middle agriculture. Amundsen sees firsthand—and here shares with readers—how these mid-sized farms, situated between small-scale operations and mammoth factory farms, are vital to rebuilding America’s local food systems. 

Anner, Zach. If at Birth You Don’t Succeed: My Adventures with Disaster and Destiny. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427268037. Read by the author.
Comedian Anner opens with an admission: he botched his own birth. Two months early, underweight and underprepared for life, he entered the world with cerebral palsy and an uncertain future. So how did he blossom into an online sensation who’s hosted two travel shows, impressed Oprah, driven the Mars Rover, and inspired a John Mayer song? Whether recounting a valiant childhood attempt to woo Cindy Crawford, encounters with zealous faith healers, or the time he crapped his pants mere feet from Dr. Phil, Anner shares his fumbles with honesty and charm.

Burroughs, Augusten. Lust & Wonder. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427270689. Read by the author.
In chronicling the development and demise of the different relationships he’s had while living in New York, Burroughs examines what it means to be in love, what it means to be in lust, and what it means to be figuring it all out.

Cohen, Adam. Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780399565953. Read by Dan Woren.
Cohen here tells the story of one of the darkest moments in the American legal tradition: the Supreme Court’s decision to champion eugenic sterilization. In 1927, the justices allowed Virginia to sterilize Carrie Buck, a perfectly normal young woman, for being an “imbecile.” It is a story with many villains, but the most troubling actors of all were the eight Supreme Court justices who were in the majority, including former president William Howard Taft, legendary progressive Louis Brandeis, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., America’s most esteemed justice, who wrote the decision urging the nation to embark on a program of mass eugenic sterilization, which led to the sterilization of 70,000 Americans.

Duhigg, Charles. Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780449806500. Read by Mike Chamberlain.
Productivity relies on making certain choices—the way we frame our daily decisions; the big ambitions we embrace and the easy goals we ignore; the cultures we establish as leaders to drive innovation; the way we interact with data: These are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive. Here the author of The Power of Habit establishes eight key concepts—from motivation and goal setting to focus and decision making—that explain why some people and companies get so much done. Drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics—as well as the experiences of CEOs, educational reformers, four-star generals, FBI agents, airplane pilots, and Broadway songwriters—this work explains that the most productive people, companies, and organizations don’t merely act differently: they view the world, and their choices, in profoundly different ways. 

51FfdXUcM1L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200___1452186371_86246Egan, Timothy. The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero. Brilliance. ISBN 9781480562745. Read by Gerard Doyle.
A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later, he was in New York. Meagher’s rebirth in America included his leading the newly formed Irish Brigade from New York in many of the fiercest battles of the Civil War—Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg. Twice shot from his horse while leading charges, left for dead in the Virginia mud, Meagher’s dream was that Irish American troops, seasoned by war, would return to Ireland and liberate their homeland from British rule. The hero’s last chapter, as territorial governor of Montana, was a romantic quest for a true home in the far frontier. 

Feinstein, John. The Legends Club: Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski, Jim Valvano, and an Epic College Basketball Rivalry. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780399565670. Read by the author.
The inside story of college basketball’s fiercest rivalry among three coaching legends—University of North Carolina’s Dean Smith, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, and North Carolina State’s Jim Valvano—an era in American sports and culture, documenting a decade of incredible competition. Feinstein pulls back the curtain on the recruiting wars, the intensely personal competition that wasn’t always friendly, the enormous pressure and national stakes, and the battle for the very soul of college basketball allegiance in a hotbed area. 

Garrels, Anne. Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681680682. Reader TBA.
More than 20 years ago, NPR correspondent Garrels began to visit the region of Chelyabinsk, an aging military-industrial center 1,000 miles east of Moscow that is home to the Russian nuclear program. Her goal was to chart the social and political aftershocks of the USSR’s collapse. On her trips to an area once closed to the West, Garrels discovered a populace for whom the new democratic freedoms were as traumatic as they were delightful. The region suffered a severe economic crisis in the early 1990s, and the next 20 years would only bring more turmoil as well as a growing identity crisis and antagonism toward foreigners. The city of Chelyabinsk became richer and more cosmopolitan, even as corruption and intolerance grew more entrenched. Here Garrels crafts a necessary portrait of the nation’s heartland, explaining why Vladimir Putin commands the loyalty of so many Russians, even those who decry the abuses of power they encounter from day to day. 

Hagerty, Barbara Hadley. Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780399566714. Read by the author.
New scientific research explodes the fable that midlife is a time when things start to go downhill for everybody. In fact, midlife can be a great new adventure, when you can embrace fresh possibilities, purposes, and pleasures. Hagerty explains that midlife is about renewal: It’s the time to renegotiate your purpose, refocus your relationships, and transform the way you think about the world and yourself. Drawing from emerging information in neurology, psychology, biology, genetics, and sociology—as well as her own story of midlife transformation—Hagerty redraws the map for people in midlife and plots a new course forward in understanding our health, our relationships, even our futures.

Heaney, Katie. Never Have I Ever: My Life (So Far) Without a Date. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478911104. Reader TBA.
By age 25, equipped with a college degree, plenty of friends, and a happy family life, Heaney still has never had a boyfriend—and she’s barely even been on a second date. In this work, listeners will meet her loyal group of girlfriends, including the outgoing Rylee, the wild child to Heaney’s shrinking violet, as well as a whole roster of Heaney’s ill-fated crushes. And they will get to know the author herself—a smart, modern heroine for anyone who has ever struggled to find love.

dark_territory_9781476763255_hr__1452186442_15711Kaplan, Fred. Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504694285. Read by Malcolm Hillgartner.
Kaplan probes the inner corridors of the National Security Agency, the beyond-top-secret cyber units in the Pentagon, the “information warfare” squads of the military services, and the national security debates in the White House to tell this never-before-told story of the officers, policymakers, scientists, and spies who devised this new form of warfare and who have been planning—and, more often than people know, fighting—these wars for decades. From the 1991 Gulf War to conflicts in Haiti, Serbia, Syria, the former Soviet republics, Iraq, and Iran, where cyber warfare played a significant role, Dark Territory chronicles a little-known past that shines an unsettling light on our future.

Lee, Martin A. & Bruce Shlain. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD—The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond. Brilliance. ISBN 9781511383547. Read by Oliver Wyman.
Few events have had a more profound impact on the social and cultural upheavals of the Sixties than the psychedelic revolution spawned by the spread of LSD. This audiobook tells the full story—part of it hidden till now in secret government files—of the role the mind-altering drug played in our recent turbulent history and the continuing influence it has on our time. Armed with new information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the authors reveal how the CIA became obsessed with LSD during the Cold War, fearing the Soviets had designs on it as well. What follows is one of the more bizarre episodes in the covert history of US intelligence.

MacLeod, D. Peter. Northern Armageddon: The Battle of the Plains of Abraham and the Making of the American Revolution. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681680507. Reader TBA.
The Battle of the Plains of Abraham, the clash between British general James Wolfe and French general Louis-Joseph de Montcalm on September 13, 1759, led to the British victory in the Seven Years’ War in North America, which in turn led to the creation of Canada and the United States as we know them today. Northern Armageddon immerses listeners in the campaign, battle, and siege through the eyes of dozens of participants, such as British sailor William Hunter, four Quebec residents enduring the bombing of their city, and a teenage Huron warrior. 

Malcolm, Ellen & Craig Unger. When Women Win: EMILY’s List and the Rise of Women in American Politics. Brilliance. ISBN 9781511375306. Read by Cassandra Campbell.
In 1985, aware of the near-total absence of women in Congress, Malcolm launched EMILY’s List, a powerhouse political organization that seeks to ignite change by getting women elected to office. The rest is riveting history: Between 1986—when there were only 12 Democratic women in the House and none in the Senate—and now, EMILY’s List has helped elect 19 women senators, 11 governors, and 110 Democratic women to the House. When Women Win delivers stories of some of the toughest political contests of the past three decades, and includes Malcolm’s own story.

51cvHMm9jcL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200___1452186495_29559Miller, Jen A. Running: A Love Story: 10 Years, 5 Marathons, and 1 Life-Changing Sport. HighBridge. ISBN 9781622318995. Reader TBA.
Growing up, Miller hated running. It was never going to be done by choice and it was never going to be fun. Fast forward 15 years, though, and you can’t drag her off the road. As the 2008 recession hit, Miller quickly found herself with a newly purchased home, a fading freelance business, and an alcoholic boyfriend. To avoid slipping into an even deeper depression, she took to the streets. What started as a silly assignment (running and reporting on a 5k) soon became an obsession (running 50–plus miles a week training for marathons). Over the course of a few short years and hundreds of miles, Miller fell in love with running, and in doing so, found a way to fall out of love with the wrong kind of men and back in love with herself.

Olson, Steve. Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681680187. Reader TBA.
For months in early 1980, scientists, journalists, and ordinary people listened anxiously to rumblings in the long-dormant volcano Mount St. Helens. Still, when a massive explosion took the top off the mountain, no one was prepared. Fifty-seven people died, including newlywed logger John Killian (for years afterward, his father searched for him in the ash), scientist Dave Johnston, and celebrated local curmudgeon Harry Truman. The lives of many others were forever changed. Olson interweaves history, science, and vivid personal stories of the volcano’s victims and survivors to portray the disaster as a multifaceted turning point. Powerful economic, political, and historical forces influenced who died when the volcano erupted, and their deaths marked the end of an era in the Pacific Northwest. 

Pearl, David. Will There Be Donuts?: Start a Business Revolution One Meeting at a Time. Brilliance. ISBN 9781511383578. Reader TBA.
Today, the very word “meeting” conjures up images of time wasted in badly lit, airless offices, people sitting around tables unsure why they are there and wishing they were somewhere else. In Pearl’s first book, he draws on his two decades of consulting experience to re-educate listeners on how to hold meetings and, crucially, how to make them great. 

Randall, David K. The King and Queen of Malibu: The True Story of the Battle for Paradise. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681680200. Reader TBA.
Over a half-century, Malibu went from an untamed ranch in the middle of nowhere to a paradise seeded with movie stars. Behind its transformation is the love story of Frederick and May Rindge. He was a Harvard-trained confidant of presidents and she grew up on a hardscrabble Midwestern farm, yet their unlikely bond would shape history. The Rindges settled in Los Angeles, quickly amassing a fortune and ushering the frontier city into its modern form. After Frederick’s sudden death, May spent her life clashing with some of the most powerful men in the country to preserve Malibu as she saw fit. Her struggle culminated in a landmark Supreme Court decision that created the iconic Pacific Coast Highway. 

Robison, John Elder. Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101888872. Read by the author.
Robison’s memoir Look Me in the Eye is one of the most widely read accounts of life with autism. Here he shares the second part of his journey, pushing the boundaries of scientific discovery as he undergoes an experimental brain therapy known as TMS, or transcranial magnetic stimulation. TMS drastically changes Robison’s life. After 40 years of feeling like a social misfit—either misreading other people’s emotions or missing them completely, and accepting this as his fate—Robison can suddenly sense a powerful range of emotion in others as a result of the treatments.The ability to connect emotionally with others for the first time brings him a kind of joy he has never known. And yet, Robison’s newfound insight has very real downsides. As the emotional ground shifts beneath his feet, he must find a way to move forward without losing sight of who he is, what he values, and all he has worked so hard for. 

51SCCk7fxAL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200___1452186220_17531Russell, Helen. The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country. Brilliance. ISBN 9781511383592. Read by Lucy Price-Lewis.
When she was suddenly given the opportunity of a new life in rural Jutland, journalist and archetypal Londoner Russell discovered a startling statistic: the happiest place on earth isn’t Disneyland but Denmark, a land often thought of by foreigners as consisting entirely of long, dark winters, cured herring, Lego, and pastries. Are happy Danes born or made? Russell decides there is only one way to find out: she will give herself a year to try to uncover the formula for Danish happiness. From child care, education, food and interior design to SAD, taxes, sexism, and an unfortunate predilection for burning witches, Russell shows listeners where the Danes get it right, where they get it wrong, and how we might just benefit from living a little more Danishly ourselves.

Seddiqui, Daniel. 50 Jobs in 50 States: One Man’s Journey of Discovery Across America. Brilliance. ISBN 9781511383356. Read by L.J. Ganser.
Like lots of college grads, Seddiqui was having a hard time finding a job. But despite more than 40 rejections, he knew opportunities had to exist. So he set out on an extraordinary quest: 50 jobs in 50 states in 50 weeks. And not just any jobs; he chose professions that reflected the culture and economy of each state. Working as a cheesemaker in Wisconsin, a border patrol agent in Arizona, a meatpacker in Kansas,  a lobsterman in Maine, a surfing instructor in Hawaii, and a football coach in Alabama, Seddiqui chronicles how he adapted to wildly differing people, cultures, and environments. Tackling challenge after challenge—overcoming anxiety about working four miles underground in a West Virginia coal mine, learning to walk on six–foot stilts (in a full Egyptian costume) at a Florida amusement park, racing the clock as a pit-crew member at an Indiana racetrack—Daniel completed his journey a changed man. 

Sedgwick, John. War of Two: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Duel that Stunned the Nation. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781490698151. Read by P.J. Ochlan.
Sedgwick explores the longstanding conflict between founding father Alexander Hamilton and Vice President Aaron Burr. A study in contrasts from birth, they had been compatriots, colleagues, and even friends. But above all they were rivals. Matching each other’s ambition and skill as lawyers in New York, they later battled for power along political fault lines that would not only decide the future of the United States, but define it. A series of letters between Burr and Hamilton suggest the duel was fought over an unflattering comment made at a dinner party. But another letter, written by Hamilton the night before the event, provides critical insight into his true motivation. It was addressed to former Speaker of the House Theodore Sedgwick, a trusted friend of both men, and the author’s own ancestor. John Sedgwick suggests that Hamilton saw Burr not merely as a personal rival but as a threat to the nation. Burr would prove that fear justified after Hamilton’s death when, haunted by the legacy of his longtime adversary, he embarked on an imperial scheme to break the Union apart.

Tattersall, Ian & Rob DeSalle. A Natural History of Wine. Brilliance. ISBN 9781490686554. Read by Kevin R. Free.
An excellent bottle of wine can be the spark that inspires a brainstorming session. Such was the case for Tattersall and DeSalle, scientists who frequently collaborate on book and museum exhibition projects. When the conversation turned to wine one evening, it almost inevitably led the two—one a palaeoanthropologist, the other a molecular biologist—to begin exploring the many intersections between science and wine. This book presents their fascinating, freewheeling answers to the question, What can science tell us about wine? The book embraces almost every imaginable area of the sciences, from microbiology and ecology (for an understanding of what creates this complex beverage) to physiology and neurobiology (for insight into the effects of wine on the mind and body), drawing on physics, chemistry, biochemistry, evolution, and climatology, and the authors expand the discussion to include insights from anthropology, primatology, entomology, Neolithic archaeology, and classical history. 

SmartestPlacesOnEarth_20150916181807_r_h1200_q75_m1442443009__1452186550_54854van Agtmael, Antoine & Fred Bakker. The Smartest Places on Earth: Why Rustbelts Are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation. Brilliance. ISBN 9781511394512. Read by Christopher Lane.
van Agtmael and Bakker present a hopeful and inspiring investigation into the emerging sources of a new era of competitiveness for America and Europe that are coming from unlikely places—those cities and areas once known as “rustbelts” that have, from an economic perspective, been written off. Take, Akron, OH, with an economy that for decades was dependent on industries such as tire manufacturing, a product now made cheaply elsewhere. In Akron and other such communities, a combination of forces—including visionary thinkers, government initiatives, start-ups making real products, and even big corporations—have succeeded in creating what the authors call a “brainbelt.” They are producing products and technologies transforming industries such as vehicles and transportation, farming and food production, medical devices and health care.

Wood, Levison. Walking the Himalayas. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478911029. Reader TBA.
Over the course of six months, Wood and his trusted guides trekked 1,700 grueling miles across the roof of the world. The author recounts the beauty and danger he found along the Silk Road route of Afghanistan, the Line of Control between Pakistan and India, the disputed territories of Kashmir, and the earthquake-ravaged lands of Nepal. Packed with action and emotion, this is the story of one man’s travels in a world poised on the edge of tremendous change.

Zahra, Tara. Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681680163. Reader TBA.
With a combination of historical analysis and careful attention to individual stories, Zahra deconstructs the myths surrounding emigration, escape, and deportation from Eastern Europe since the late 19th century. The Great Departure shows mass emigration from all sides, including individual stories of poverty and maltreatment, but also the positive changes emigration brought to women. This book is equally relevant for Americans, showing why and how many of their ancestors left their countries, and for Europeans, confronted with an unprecedented wave of immigrants today. 

James McBride’s Quest for the Real James Brown | Audio in Advance April 2016 | Nonfiction

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41kikD2UyUL._SX327_BO1,204,203,200___1455229409_90249Ackerman, Jennifer. The Genius of Birds. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681681283. Reader TBA.
Traveling around the world to the most cutting-edge frontiers of research―the distant laboratories of Barbados and New Caledonia, the bowerbird habitats of Australia, the ravaged mid-Atlantic coast after Hurricane Sandy and the warming mountains of central Virginia and the western states―Ackerman not only tells the story of the recently uncovered genius of birds but also delves deeply into the latest findings about the bird brain itself that are revolutionizing our view of what it means to be intelligent. Consider, as Ackerman does, the Clark’s nutcracker, a bird that can hide as many as 30,000 seeds over dozens of square miles and remember where it put them several months later; the mockingbirds and thrashers, species that can store 200 to 2,000 different songs in a brain a thousand times smaller than ours; and the New Caledonian crow, an impressive bird that makes its own tools. 

Aldrin, Buzz. No Dream Is Too High: Life Lessons from a Man Who Walked on the Moon. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504686969. Reader TBA.
Buzz Aldrin, the best known of a generation of astronauts whose achievements surged in just a few years from first man in space to first men on the moon, pauses to reflect and share what he has learned. Still a nonstop traveler and impassioned advocate for space exploration, Aldrin whittles down his event-filled life into a short list of the principles he values, each illustrated by anecdotes and memories. Aldrin discusses how he learned to be proud of being the second man on the moon, the fact that he was rejected the first time he applied to be an astronau, and that for his 80th birthday, he went diving in the Galapagos and hitched a ride on a whale shark.

Alvarez, Elizabeth Hayes. The Valiant Woman: The Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504685900. Read by Tamara Marston.
Nineteenth-century America was rife with Protestant-fueled anti-Catholicism. Alvarez reveals how Protestants nevertheless became surprisingly and deeply fascinated with the Virgin Mary, even as her role as a devotional figure who united Catholics grew. Documenting the vivid Marian imagery that suffused popular visual and literary culture, Alvarez argues that Mary became a potent, shared exemplar of Christian womanhood around which Christians of all stripes rallied during an era filled with anxiety about the emerging market economy and shifting gender roles.

Bach, Sebastian. 18 and Life on Skid Row. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504697088. Reader TBA.
Throughout his career, Bach has sold more than 20 million records both as the lead singer of Skid Row and as a solo artist. Bach then went on to grace the Broadway stage, with starring roles in Jekyll & Hyde, Jesus Christ Superstar, and The Rocky Horror Show. He also appeared for seven seasons on the hit television show The Gilmore Girls. In his memoir, Bach recounts lurid tales of excess and debauchery as he toured the world with Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Mötley Crüe, Soundgarden, Pantera, Nine Inch Nails, and Guns ’N’ Roses and his life after Skid Row.

Blum, Howard. The Last Goodnight: A World War II Story of Espionage, Adventure, and Betrayal. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504697200. Reader TBA.
Betty Pack was charming, beautiful, and intelligent—and she knew it. As an agent for Britain’s MI-6 and then America’s OSS during World War II, these qualities proved crucial to her success. This is the remarkable story of the woman Time called “Mata Hari from Minnesota” and the passions that ruled her tempestuous life. For decades, much of Pack’s career working for MI-6 and the OSS remained classified. Through access to recently unclassified files, Blum discovers the truth about the attractive blond, codenamed “Cynthia,” who seduced diplomats and military attachés across the globe in exchange for ciphers and secrets; cracked embassy safes to steal codes; and obtained the Polish notebooks that proved key to Alan Turing’s success with Operation Ultra. Beneath Betty’s cool, professional determination, Blum reveals a troubled woman conflicted by the very traits that made her successful: her lack of deep emotional connections and her readiness to risk everything.

Boilen, Bob. Your Song Changed My Life: From Jimmy Page to St. Vincent, Smokey Robinson to Hozier, Thirty-Five Beloved Artists on Their Journey and the Music That Inspired It. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504697262. Reader TBA.
Is there a unforgettable song that changed your life? NPR’s Boilen posed this question to some musical legends and rising stars such as Jimmy Page, St. Vincent, Bryan Ferry, Smokey Robinson, Cat Power, David Byrne, and Dave Grohl. For Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, it was discovering his sister’s 45 of The Byrds’ “Turn, Turn, Turn.” A young St. Vincent’s life changed the day a box of CDs literally fell off a delivery truck in front of her house. Cat Stevens was transformed when he heard John Lennon cover “Twist and Shout.” A diverse collection of personal experiences, both ordinary and extraordinary, this work illustrates the ways in which music is revived, restored, and revolutionized. 

x145Brower, Kate Andersen. First Women: The Grace and Power of America’s First Ladies. HarperAudio. ISBN 9781504697033. Reader TBA.
The First Lady of the United States must be many things: an inspiring leader with a forward-thinking agenda of her own; a savvy politician, skilled at navigating the treacherous rapids of Washington; a wife and mother operating under constant scrutiny; and an able CEO responsible for the smooth operation of countless services and special events at the White House. Former White House correspondent Brower draws on a wide array of untapped, candid sources—from residence staff and social secretaries to friends and political advisers—to tell the stories of the ten remarkable women who have defined that role since 1960. Brower offers new insights into this privileged group of remarkable women, including Jacqueline Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, Patricia Nixon, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, and Michelle Obama.

Christian, Brian & Tom Griffiths. Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions. Brilliance. ISBN 9781480560345. Reader TBA.
All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades. And the solutions they’ve found have much to teach us. In this interdisciplinary work, author Christian and cognitive scientist Griffiths show how the simple, precise algorithms used by computers can also untangle very human questions. 

Clark, Duncan. Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504697040. Reader TBA.
In just a decade and half, Jack Ma, who started out as an English teacher, founded and built Alibaba into one of the world’s largest companies, an e-commerce empire on which hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers depend. Alibaba’s $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the largest global IPO ever. A Rockefeller of his age who is courted by CEOs and presidents around the world, Jack is an icon for China’s booming private sector and the gatekeeper to hundreds of millions of middle-class consumers. Granted unprecedented access to a wealth of new material including exclusive interviews, Clark draws on his own experience as an early advisor to Alibaba and two decades in China chronicling the Internet’s impact on the country to create an authoritative, compelling narrative account of Alibaba’s rise.

Coolidge, Rita with Michael Walker. Delta Lady. HarperAudio. ISBN 9781504716901. Reader TBA.
The two-time Grammy Award–winning singer and songwriter bares her heart and soul in this story of music, stardom, love, family, heritage, and resilience. She inspired songs—Leon Russell wrote “A Song for You” and “Delta Lady” for her; Stephen Stills wrote “Cherokee.” She sang backup for Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker, and Stills before finding fame as a solo artist with such hits as “We’re All Alone” and “(Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher and Higher.” A muse to some of the twentieth century’s most influential rock musicians, she broke hearts, and broke up bands. Her relationship with drummer Jim Gordon took a violent turn during the legendary 1970 Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour; David Crosby maintained that her triangle with Stills and Graham Nash was the last straw for the group. Her volatile six-year marriage to Kris Kristofferson yielded two Grammys, a daughter, and one of the Baby Boom generation’s epic love stories

Cox, Caroline. Boy Soldiers of the American Revolution. Blackstone. ISBN 978-1-5046-9115-4. Read by Traber Burns.
Between 1819 and 1845, as veterans of the Revolutionary War were filing applications to receive pensions for their service, the government was surprised to learn that many of the soldiers were not men but boys, many of whom were under the age of 16 and some even as young as nine. Cox reconstructs the lives and stories of this young subset of early American soldiers, focusing on how these boys came to join the army and what they actually did in service. Cox traces the evolution of youth in American culture in the late 18th century, as the accepted age for children to participate meaningfully in society—not only in the military—was rising dramatically. Drawing on sources such as diaries, letters, and memoirs, Cox tells the story of a generation of soldiers caught between old and new notions of boyhood.

y450_293__1455229535_21564Crush: Writers Reflect on Love, Longing, and the Lasting Power of Their First Celebrity Crush. Blackstone. Edited by Cathy Alter & Dave Singleton. ISBN 9781504696821. Reader TBA.
Contributors including James Franco, Carrie Fisher, Stephen King, Roxane Gay, Emily Gould, and Hanna Rosin here share intimate memories of that first intense taste of love. The collection includes funny, whimsical, sometimes cringe-worthy tales of falling for River Phoenix, Mary Tyler Moore, Howard Cosell, Jared Leto, and a host of other pop culture icons. A few contributors channeled their devotion into obsessively writing embarrassing fan letters. Some taped pics in school lockers. Others decorated their bedroom walls with posters. For tweenaged Karin Tanabe, it was discovering bad boy Andy Garcia—playing the gun-loving mobster Vincent Corleone in The Godfather III. Barbara Graham unsuccessfully staked out an apartment on Park Avenue for a glimpse of Paul Newman. There was only one puppy for six-year-old Jodi Picoult—Donny Osmond—while Jamie Brisick’s pre-teen addiction was Speed Racer.

de Waal, Frans. Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? Blackstone. ISBN 978-1-5047-1219-4. Read by Sean Runnette.
What separates your mind from an animal’s? Maybe you think it’s your ability to design tools, your sense of self, or your grasp of past and future―all traits that have helped us define ourselves as the planet’s preeminent species. But in recent decades, these claims have been eroded—or even disproved outright—by a revolution in the study of animal cognition. Octopuses use coconut shells as tools; elephants classify humans by age, gender, and language; and Ayumu, the young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University, has a flash memory puts that of humans to shame. Based on research involving crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, whales, and of course chimpanzees and bonobos, de Waal explores both the scope and the depth of animal intelligence. 

Dolin, Eric Jay. Brilliant Beacons: A History of the American Lighthouse. Tantor. ISBN 9781515951353. Read by Tom Perkins.
Dolin presents the most comprehensive history of American lighthouses ever written, telling the story of America through the prism of its beloved coastal sentinels. Set against the backdrop of an expanding nation, the work traces the evolution of America’s lighthouse system, highlighting the political, military, and technological battles fought to illuminate the nation’s hardscrabble coastlines. Dolin treats listeners to a memorable cast of characters, including the penny-pinching Treasury official Stephen Pleasonton, who hamstrung the country’s efforts to adopt the revolutionary “Fresnel Lens,” and presents tales both humorous and harrowing of soldiers, saboteurs, ruthless egg collectors, and the light-keepers themselves.

Druett, Joan. Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World. Tantor. ISBN 9781515952572. Reader TBA.
Auckland Island is a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean, 285 miles south of New Zealand. With year-round freezing rain and howling winds, it is one of the most forbidding places in the world. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death.In 1864 Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wrecked on the southern end of the island. Utterly alone in a dense coastal forest, plagued by stinging blowflies and relentless rain, Captain Musgrave inspired his men to take action. With barely more than their bare hands, they built a cabin and, remarkably, a forge, where they manufactured their tools. Incredibly, at the same time on the opposite end of the island, the Invercauld wrecked during a horrible storm. Nineteen men staggered ashore. Unlike Captain Musgrave, the captain of the Invercauld falls apart given the same dismal circumstances. His men fight and split up; some die of starvation, others turn to cannibalism. Only three survive. Musgrave and all of his men not only endure for nearly two years, they also plan their own astonishing escape, setting off on one of the most courageous sea voyages in history.

Fair, Eric. Consequence. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427268051. Reader TBA.
In 2004, as an interrogator for a government contractor, Fair participated in or witnessed a variety of aggressive interrogation techniques to solicit the cooperation of Iraqi detainees. They included sleep deprivation, stress positions, diet manipulation, exposure, and isolation. Years after his time in Iraq, he is still haunted by what he took part in there. But as his health and his marriage deteriorate, Fair decides to speak out about his experiences. Told in spare and haunting prose devoid of justification,Fair’s memoir is an unrelenting confession of an interrogator and admitted torturer,that questions the very depths of who he, and we as a country, have become.

Galfard, Christophe. The Universe in Your Hand: A Journey through Space, Time, and Beyond. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504684347. Read by Ray Chase.
Quantum physics, black holes, string theory, the big bang, dark matter, dark energy, parallel universes: even if we are interested in these fundamental concepts of our world, their language is the language of math.Stephen Hawking’s protégé Galfard’s mission in life is to spread modern scientific ideas to the general public in entertaining ways. Here he employs simple, direct language to illustrate the theories that underpin everything we know about our universe. Employing everyday similes and metaphors, addressing the listener directly, and writing stories rather than equations renders these astoundingly complex ideas in an immediate and visceral way.

51WOR73U8fL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200___1455229584_23675Geroux, William. The Mathews Men: Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler’s U-Boats. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780399567124. Read by Arthur Morey.
Mathews County, VA, is a remote outpost on the Chesapeake Bay that sent an unusually large concentration of sea captains to fight in World War II. Geroux tells that story through the experiences of one family whose seven sons (and their neighbors), U.S. merchant mariners all, suddenly found themselves squarely in the cross-hairs of the U-boats bearing down on the coastal United States in 1942. As the war progressed, men from Mathews sailed the North and South Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and even the icy Barents Sea in the Arctic Circle, where they braved the dreaded Murmansk Run. Through their experiences we have eyewitnesses to every danger zone, in every kind of ship. Some died horrific deaths. Others fought to survive torpedo explosions, flaming oil slicks, storms, shark attacks, mine blasts, and harrowing lifeboat odysseys—only to ship out again on the next boat as soon as they’d returned to safety.

Haag, Pamela. The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504710831. Read by Bernadette Dunne.
Before he founded the Winchester Company in 1866, Oliver Winchester, like most Americans at the time, had never owned a gun, or even shot one. But his factory in New Haven, CT, was churning out firearms at an astounding rate. If he wanted it to be profitable, he would have to create a robust civilian market for guns. He succeeded: 150 years later, his company has sold more than eight million firearms. Drawing on the company’s voluminous archives, Haag reveals that America has not always been a gun-loving nation, but rather was sold the idea (and the guns that went with it) by gun manufacturers and shrewd marketers. Tracing our current gun culture to its unexpected roots, Haag sheds light on one of American society’s most contentious debates.

Hammer, Joshua. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681681429. Reader TBA.
To save precious centuries-old Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians in Timbuktu pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean’s Eleven. It’s the story of an archivist in the historic city in Mali who smuggled more than 350,000 volumes across the country to prevent them being destroyed. It’s at once a biography of the archivist, Abdel Kader Haidara, a history of the region, and an investigative treasure hunt.

Ilgunas, Ken. Trespassing across America: One Man’s Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504690911. Read by Andrew Eiden.
It started as a far-fetched idea—to hike the entire length of the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline. But in the months that followed, it grew into something more for Ilgunas. It became an irresistible adventure—an opportunity to not only draw attention to global warming but to explore his personal limits. His 1,700-mile trek to from the Alberta tar sands to the XL’s endpoint on the Gulf Coast of Texas was completed entirely on foot, almost exclusively walking across private property. Both a travel memoir and a reflection on climate change, the work is filled with colorful characters, harrowing physical trials, and strange encounters with the weather, terrain, and animals of America’s plains. 

Keshavarz, Fatemah. Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran. Brilliance. ISBN 9781511384292. Reader TBA.
Scholar, teacher, and poet Keshavarz challenges popular perceptions of Iran as a society bereft of vitality and joy. Keshavarz introduces listeners to two modern Iranian women writers whose strong and articulate voices belie the stereotypical perception of Iranian women as voiceless victims in a country of villains. She follows with a lively critique of the recent bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which epitomizes what Keshavarz calls the “New Orientalist narrative,” a view marred by stereotype and prejudice more often tied to current geopolitical conflicts than to an understanding of Iran. Blending in firsthand glimpses of her own life from childhood memories in 1960s Shiraz to her present life as a professor in America, Keshavarz paints a portrait of Iran depicting both cultural depth and intellectual complexity.

41CDPsFNvRL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200___1455229647_22082Lorr, Benjamin. Hell-Bent : Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga. Brilliance. ISBN 9781511384230. Reader TBA.
Lorr was studying Bikram yoga (or “hot yoga”) when a run-in with a master and competitive yoga champion led him into an obsessive subculture—a group of yogis for whom eight hours of practice a day in 110-degree heat was just the beginning. Populated by athletic prodigies, wide-eyed celebrities, legitimate medical miracles, and predatory hucksters, it’s a nation-spanning trip from jam-packed studios in New York to the athletic performance labs of the University of Oregon to the stage at the National Yoga Asana Championship, where Lorr competes for glory. This account is a look at the science behind a controversial practice, a story of greed, narcissism, and corruption, and a tale of personal transformation.

Mabey, Richard. The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination. Tantor. ISBN 9781515954095. Read by Ralph Lister.
Going back to the beginnings of human history, Mabey shows how flowers, trees, and plants have been central to human experience not just as sources of food and medicine but as objects of worship, actors in creation myths, and symbols of war and peace, life and death. Mabey takes listeners from the Himalayas to Madagascar to the Amazon to our own backyards. He ranges through the work of writers, artists, and scientists and across nearly 40,000 years of human history: Ice Age images of plant life in ancient cave art, Newton’s apple and gravity, Wordsworth’s daffodils, and the ways the sturdy oak became the symbol of British nationhood and the giant sequoia came to epitomize the spirit of America.

McBride, James. Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780147522788. Read by Dominic Hoffman.
James Brown was long a figure of fascination for McBride, a noted professional musician as well as a writer. When he received a tip that promised to uncover the man behind the myth, McBride set off to follow a trail to better understand the personal, musical, and societal influences that created the immensely troubled, misunderstood, and complicated soul genius. McBride’s travels take him to forgotten corners of Brown’s never-before-revealed history: the country town where Brown’s family and thousands of others were displaced by America’s largest nuclear power bomb-making facility; a South Carolina field where a long-forgotten cousin recounts a fuller history of Brown’s sharecropping childhood. McBride seeks out the American expatriate in England who co-created the James Brown sound, visits the trusted right-hand manager who worked with Brown for 41 years, and lays bare the Dickensian legal contest over James Brown’s estate, a fight that has prevented any money from reaching the poor schoolchildren in Georgia and South Carolina, as instructed in his will; cost Brown’s estate millions in legal fees; and left James Brown’s body to lie for more than eight years in a gilded coffin in his daughter’s yard in South Carolina.

McHugh, Erin. Political Suicide: Missteps, Peccadilloes, Bad Calls, Backroom Hijinx, Sordid Pasts, Rotten Breaks, and Just Plain Dumb Mistakes in the Annals of American Politics. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504692250. Read by Lisa Flanagan.
Just in time for the presidential election of 2016 comes a history of the best and most interesting missteps, peccadilloes, bad calls, backroom hijinks, sordid pasts, rotten breaks, and just plain dumb mistakes in the annals of American politics. They have tweeted their private parts to women they’re trying to impress. They have gotten caught on tape doing and saying things they really shouldn’t have. They have denied knowing about the underhanded doings of underlings—only to have a paper trail lead straight back to them. Nowadays, it seems like half of what we hear about politicians isn’t about laws or governing but is instead coverage focused on shenanigans, questionable morals, and scandals too numerous to count. And while we shake our heads in disbelief, we still can’t resist poring over the details of these notorious incidents.

51d6TDmH1wL._SX330_BO1,204,203,200___1455229926_77045Mendelsohn, Daniel. The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504701778. Read by Bronson Pinchot.
Mendelsohn grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust—an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Mendelsohn set out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives’ fates. That quest eventually takes him to a dozen countries on four continents and forces him to confront the wrenching discrepancies between the histories we live and the stories we tell. And it leads him, finally, back to the small Ukrainian town where his family’s story began and where the solution to a decades-old mystery awaits him.

Miranda, Lin-Manuel, Jeremy McCarter, & Jeffrey Seller. Hamilton: The Revolution. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478939351. Reader TBA.
Hamilton has it all—romance, drama, violence, patriotism, and adventure—combined with the foundational story of our nation. Audience members leave the Broadway show wanting more—more details about the many dramatic episodes in Alexander Hamilton’s life and further analysis of the musical’s lyrics and their meaning. This audiobook will include a PDF disc of behind-the-scenes photos of the show that evokes the spirit of the musical, giving listeners the same mix of history, personality, and inspiration that Miranda has achieved on stage.

Plakis, Anastacia Cole. The Farm on the Roof: What Brooklyn Grange Taught Us About Entrepreneurship, Community, and Growing a Sustainable Business. Tantor. ISBN 9781494568498. Read by the author.
In their effort to build the world’s first and largest commercial green rooftop farm, the founders of Brooklyn Grange learned a lot about building and sustaining a business while never losing sight of their mission—to serve their community by providing delicious organic food and changing the way people think about what they eat. But their story is about more than just farming. It serves as an inspirational and instructional guide for anyone looking to start a business that is successful while making a positive impact. The team share valuable lessons about finding the right partners, seeking funding, expanding, and identifying potential sources of revenue without compromising your core values—lessons any socially conscious entrepreneur can apply toward his or her own venture.

Richman, Joe. Contenders: America’s Most Original Presidential Candidates. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681681382. Read by the author.
The arduous, often unpredictable journey to the U.S. presidency has attracted some of the most unusual characters in history. Here Richman shines a spotlight on individuals who were inspired to offer their uncommon perspectives and special talents to lead the nation. From heartbreaking near-misses (Stevenson, Bryan) and historic firsts (Woodhull, Chisolm, Smith), to campaigns that never stood a chance (Allen), the work provides insight into the American political process. The book features Victoria Woodhull, Williams Jennings Bryan, Adlai Stevenson, Margaret Chase Smith, Shirley Chisolm, Gracie Allen, and Alben Barkley.

Stolzenburg, William. Heart of a Lion: A Lone Cat’s Walk Across America. Brilliance. ISBN 9781480532083. Read by Mike DelGaudio.
Late one June night in 2011, a large animal collided with an SUV cruising down a Connecticut parkway. Beside the road lay a 140-pound mountain lion. The lion was three years old, with a DNA trail that showed he embarked from South Dakota on a cross-country odyssey eventually passing within thirty miles of New York City. It was the farthest landbound trek ever recorded for a wild animal in America, by a barely weaned teenager venturing solo through hostile terrain. Stolzenburg retraces his two-year journey—from his embattled birthplace in the Black Hills, across the Great Plains and the Mississippi River, through Midwest metropolises and remote northern forests, to his tragic finale on Connecticut’s Gold Coast. Along the way, the lion traverses lands with people gunning for his kind, as well as those championing his cause.

41bVxKwnTYL._SX327_BO1,204,203,200___1455230015_35783Thomas, Louisa. Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780147524805. Read by Kirsten Potter.
Born in London to an American father and a British mother on the eve of the Revolutionary War, Louisa Catherine Johnson was raised in circumstances very different from the New England upbringing of the future president John Quincy Adams, whose life had been dedicated to public service from the earliest age. And yet John Quincy fell in love with her, almost despite himself. Their often tempestuous but deeply close marriage lasted half a century. They lived in Prussia, Massachusetts, Washington, Russia, and England, at royal courts, on farms, in cities, and in the White House. Louisa saw more of Europe and America than nearly any other woman of her time. The story of Louisa Catherine Adams is one of a woman who forged a sense of self and found her voice as the country her husband led found its place in the world.

Wilson, Katherine. Only in Naples. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780147524324. Read by the author.
Fresh out of college, Katherine arrived in Naples to intern at the United States Consulate. She met handsome, studious Salvatore and found herself immediately enveloped by his elegant mother, Raffaella, and the rest of the Avallone family. Immersed in Neapolitan culture, traditions, and cuisine, slowly and unexpectedly falling for Salvatore, and longing for Raffaella’s company and guidance, Katherine discovers how to prepare meals that sing, from hearty, thick ragù to comforting rigatoni alla Genovese to pasta al forno, a casserole chock-full of bacon, béchamel, and no fewer than four kinds of cheeses. While Katherine was used to large American kitchens with islands and barstools, she understands the beauty of small, tight Italian ones, where it’s easy to offer a taste from a wooden spoon. Through courtship, culture clashes, Sunday services, marriage, and motherhood Katherine comes to appreciate carnale, the quintessentially Neapolitan sense of comfort and confidence in one’s own skin.

Wright, Alex. Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. Brilliance. ISBN 9781511383967. Read by John Lee.
Beginning in the late 19th century, Paul Otlet, a librarian by training, worked at expanding the potential of the catalog card, the world’s first information chip. Forty years before the first personal computer and 50 years before the first browser, Otlet envisioned a network of “electric telescopes” that would allow people everywhere to search through books, newspapers, photographs, and recordings, all linked together in what he termed, in 1934, a reseau mondial, essentially, a worldwide web. Otlet’s life achievement was the construction of the Mundaneum, a mechanical collective brain that would house and disseminate everything ever committed to paper. Filled with analog machines such as telegraphs and sorters, the Mundaneum, what some have called a “Steampunk version of hypertext” was the embodiment of Otlet’s ambitions. It was also shortlived. By the time the Nazis, who were pilfering libraries across Europe to collect information they thought useful, carted away Otlet’s collection in 1940, the dream had ended. Broken, Otlet died in 1944. Wright gives Otlet his due, restoring him to his proper place in the long continuum of visionaries and pioneers who have struggled to classify knowledge.

Zacks, Richard. Chasing the Last Laugh. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780553551174. Reader TBA.
In 1895, at age 60, Mark Twain was dead broke and miserable—his recent novels had been critical and commercial failures, and he was bankrupted by his inexplicable decision to run a publishing company. His wife made him promise to pay every debt back in full, so Twain embarked on an around-the-world comedy lecture tour that would take him from the dusty small towns of the American West to the faraway lands of India, South Africa, and Australia. Zacks’s narrative provides a portrait of Twain as a complicated, vibrant individual, and showcases the biting wit and skeptical observation that made him one of the greatest of all American writers. Twain remained abroad for five years, a time of struggle and wild experiences—and ultimately redemption, as he rediscovered his voice as a writer and humorist, and returned, wiser and celebrated. Weaving together a trove of sources, including newspaper accounts, correspondence, and unpublished material from Berkeley’s ongoing Twain Project, Zacks chronicles  a chapter of Twain’s life as complex as the author himself, full of foolishness and bad choices, but also humor, self-discovery, and triumph.

Eddie Huang, Lindy West, & Russell Banks | May 2016 Audio in Advance | Nonfiction

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y450_293__1457540863_86478Banks, Russell. Voyager: Travel Writings. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504736398. Reader TBA.
Now in his 70s, Banks has indulged his wanderlust for more than half a century. Here he shares highlights from his travels: interviewing Fidel Castro in Cuba; motoring to a hippie reunion with college friends in Chapel Hill, NC; eloping to Edinburgh with his fourth wife, Chase; driving a sunset orange metallic Hummer down Alaska’s Seward Highway. In each essay, Banks considers his life and the world. Recalling his trips to the Caribbean in the title essay, “Voyager,” Banks dissects his relationships with the four women who would become his wives. In the Himalayas, he embarks on a different quest of self-discovery. “One climbs a mountain not to conquer it, but to be lifted like this away from the earth up into the sky,” he writes.

Bhat, Nilima & Raj Sisodia. Shakti Leadership: Embracing Feminine and Masculine Power in Business. Dreamscape. ISBN Reader TBA.
Too many leaders, men and women alike, have bought into a notion of militaristic, win-at-all-costs leadership that exclusively emphasizes traditionally “masculine” qualities. The result has been corruption, environmental degradation, and a host of other serious problems. But there is another way. Reaching into ancient spiritual and mythical teachings, Bhat and Sisodia revive a feminine archetype of leadership: cooperative, creative, empathetic. While these qualities are often thought of as “feminine,” we all have them; however, for people in leadership positions, they tend to be undervalued and underdeveloped. Using exercises and inspirational examples, Bhat and Sisodia guide listeners through their own heroic journey to begin to lead with their whole selves.

Boyles, Denis. Everything Explained That Is Explainable!: The Creation of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Celebrated Eleventh Edition 1910-1911. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681681702. Read by Corrie James.
Boyles tells the story of the American tycoon Horace Everett Hooper, the brash natural-born salesman who found an outdated set of reference books gathering dust in a warehouse, bought them for almost nothing, repackaged them, and sold them on credit as “one-shelf libraries” to farmers. The author writes how Hooper and his partner, Henry Haxton, found the Encyclopædia Britannica, went to the then-struggling London Times in search of new ways to increase its readership, and produced and sold the Encyclopædia Britannica through the then unheard-of notion of the Times Book Club. In a frenzy of effort and fanatical conviction, the eleventh edition was put together with contributions by the most admired writers, thinkers, and scientists of the day, including John Muir, Lord Macaulay, G. K. Chesterton, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, and W. M. Rossetti.

Cohen, Rich. The Sun & the Moon & The Rolling Stones. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780451482242. Read by the author.
The story begins at the beginning—the fateful meeting of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on a train platform in 1961—and goes on to span decades, with a focus on the time between the albums Beggars Banquet (1968) and Exile on Main Street (1972) when the Stones were prolific and innovative and at the height of their powers. Cohen is equally as good on the low points as the highs, and he puts his finger on the moments that not only defined the Stones as gifted musicians schooled in the blues and arguably the most innovative songwriters of their generation, but as the avatars of much in modern culture.

Dickey, Bronwen. Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon. ISBN 9781494568641. Read by Randye Kaye.
When Dickey brought her new dog home, she saw no traces of the infamous viciousness in her affectionate, timid pit bull. Which made her wonder: how had a breed beloved by Teddy Roosevelt, Helen Keller, and TV’s “Little Rascals” come to be known as a brutal fighter? Her search for answers takes her from 19th-century New York City dogfighting pits—the cruelty of which drew the attention of the recently formed ASPCA—to early 20th-century movie sets where pit bulls cavorted with Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton; from the battlefields of Gettysburg and the Marne, where pit bulls earned presidential recognition, to desolate urban neighborhoods where the dogs were loved, prized, and brutalized.

Fenster, Julie M. Jefferson’s America: The President, the Purchase, and the Explorers Who Transformed a Nation. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681681269. Read by John Pruden.
Almost everyone who has taken a U.S. history course is familiar with Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase and the travels of Lewis and Clark, but Jefferson sent four other expeditions West as well. Zebulon Pike was dispatched on two missions: first, to the headwaters of the Mississippi, and second, toward what is now Colorado. William Dunbar and Dr. George Hunter explored northern Louisiana and Arkansas. Peter Custis and Thomas Freeman (with military officer Richard Sparks) followed the Red River of North Texas and Oklahoma. The stakes for American expansion were enormously high—at a time when Britain, France, and Spain were also all vying for control of the vast expanse of land west of the Mississippi River, the geopolitics of discovery were paramount. Jefferson, a true student of the Enlightenment, sought out men of science to undertake these urgent missions into the frontier. But they weren’t always well-matched—with each other, or even with the task of exploring itself.

Gaiman, Neil. The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction. HarperAudio. ISBN 9780062417190. Reader TBA.
This collection brings together for the first time ever more than 60 pieces of Gaiman’s nonfiction on a broad range of topics, including (but not limited to): authors past and present, music, storytelling, comics, bookshops, travel, fairy tales, America, inspiration, libraries, ghosts, and the title piece, which recounts the author’s experiences at the 2010 Academy Awards.

41b14I7CgaL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200___1457540768_38134Heinrich, Bernd. One Wild Bird at a Time: Portraits of Individual Lives. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520006147. Reader TBA.
Heinrich returns to his great love: close, day-to-day observations of individual wild birds. Heinrich’s observations lead to fascinating questions—and sometimes startling discoveries. A great crested flycatcher bringing food to the young acts surreptitiously and is attacked by the mate. A pair of Northern flickers hammering their nest-hole into the side of Heinrich’s cabin delivers the opportunity to observe the feeding competition between siblings, and to make a related discovery about nest-cleaning. One of a clutch of redstart warbler babies fledges out of the nest from 20 feet above the ground, and lands on the grass below. It can’t fly. What will happen next?

Huang, Eddie. Double Cup Love: On the Trail of Family, Good, and Broken Hearts in China. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780147523532. Read by the author.
In the follow-up to his coming-of-age memoir Fresh Off the Boat, Huang tells a powerful story about love and family. After growing up in a first-generation immigrant family in the comically hostile world of suburban America, Huang begins to wonder just how authentic his Chinese identity really is. So he enlists his brothers Emery and Evan and returns to the country his ancestors abandoned. His immediate goal is to sample China’s best food and see if his cooking measures up to local tastes—but his deeper goals are to reconnect with his homeland, repair his frayed family relationships, decide whether to marry his all-American girlfriend, and figure out just where to find meaning in his life.

Hurley, Kameron. Geek Feminist Revolution: Essays on Subversion, Tactical Profanity, and the Power of the Media. HighBridge. ISBN 9781622319824. Read by C.S.E. Cooney.
Hurley’s powerful collection of essays addresses topics such as overcoming misogyny in geek culture, the persistence required to succeed as a woman writing science fiction, and imagining a better world and a better future through the stories we write.

Kurlansky, Mark. Paper: Paging Through History. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501921971. Reader TBA.
Paper is one of the simplest and most essential pieces of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce, and art; it has formed the foundation of civilizations, promoting revolutions and restoring stability. Now, amid discussion of “going paperless” and as speculation about the effects of a digitally dependent society grows rampant we’ve come to a world-historic juncture. Thousands of years ago, Socrates and Plato warned that written language would be the end of “true knowledge,” replacing the need to excise memory and think through complex questions. Similar arguments were made about the switch from handwritten to printed books, and today about the role of computer technology. By tracing paper’s evolution from antiquity to the present, with an emphasis on the contributions made in Asia and the Middle East, Kurlansky challenges common assumptions about technology’s influence, affirming that paper is here to stay.

McLynn, Frank. Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy. Blackstone. ISBN 9781469096087. Read by Timothy Andres Pabon.
Mongol leader Genghis Khan’s empire stretched from the Pacific Ocean to central Europe, including all of China, the Middle East, and Russia. So how did an illiterate nomad rise to such colossal power and subdue most of the known world, eclipsing Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon? Credited by some with paving the way for the Renaissance, condemned by others for being the most heinous murderer in history, Genghis Khan’s actual name was Temujin, and the story of his success is that of the Mongol people: a loose collection of fractious tribes who tended livestock, considered bathing taboo, and possessed an unparalleled genius for horseback warfare. United under Genghis, a strategist of astonishing cunning and versatility, they could dominate any sedentary society they chose.

Meier, Barry. Missing Man: The American Spy Who Vanished in Iran. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681681641. Read by Ray Porter.
In late 2013, Americans were shocked to learn that a former FBI agent turned private investigator who disappeared in Iran in 2007 was there on a mission for the CIA. The missing man, Robert Levinson, pleaded in a video for help from the United States. Meier, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, draws on years of interviews and never-before-disclosed CIA files to weave together a riveting narrative of the ex-agent’s journey to Iran and the hunt to rescue him, venturing into the shadowy spaces between crime, business, espionage, and the law Its colorful cast includes CIA operatives, Russian oligarchs, White House officials, gangsters, FBI agents, journalists, and a fugitive American terrorist and assassin.

Ripert, Eric & Veronica Chambers. 32 Yolks. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780147522740. Read by Peter Ganim.
Before he earned three Michelin stars at Le Bernardin, won the James Beard Foundation Award for Outstanding Chef, or became a regular guest judge on Bravo’s Top Chef, and even before he knew how to make a proper omelet, Ripert was a young boy in the South of France who felt most at home in the kitchen. His desire to not only cook, but to become the best would lead him into some of the most celebrated and demanding restaurants in Paris, serving under such legendary chefs as Joël Robuchon and Dominique Bouchet, and trying to survive the brutal, exacting environment of their kitchens.

9780307958242__1457540587_70106Vanderbilt, Tom. You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780399567681. Read by Jeffrey Kafer.
From the tangled underpinnings of our food taste to our unsettling insecurity before unfamiliar works of art to the complex dynamics of our playlists and the pop charts, our preferences and opinions are constantly being shaped by countless forces. And in the digital age, a nonstop procession of “thumbs up” and “likes” and “stars” is helping dictate our choices. Taste has moved online—there are more ways than ever for us, and companies, to see what and how we are consuming. If you’ve ever wondered how Netflix recommends movies, how to spot a fake Yelp review, or why books often see a sudden decline in Amazon ratings after they win a major prize, Vanderbilt has answers to these questions and many more.

Voigt, Emily. The Dragon Behind the Glass: A True Story of Power, Obsession, and the World’s Most Coveted Fish. Tantor. ISBN 9781515955658. Read by Xe Sands.
Delving into an outlandish realm of obsession, paranoia, and criminality, Voigt tells the story of a fish like none other: a powerful predator dating to the age of the dinosaurs. Treasured as a status symbol believed to bring good luck, the Asian arowana is bred on high-security farms in Southeast Asia and sold by the hundreds of thousands each year. In the United States, however, it’s protected by the Endangered Species Act and illegal to bring into the country, though it remains the object of a thriving black market. From the South Bronx to Singapore, Voigt follows the trail of the fish, ultimately embarking on a years-long quest to find the arowana in the wild, venturing deep into some of the last remaining tropical wildernesses on earth.

Watkins, D. The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478939825. Reader TBA.
The smartest kid on his block in East Baltimore, Watkins was certain he would escape the life of drugs, decadence, and violence that had surrounded him since birth. But when his brother Devin is shot—only days after Watkins receives notice that he’s been accepted into Georgetown University—the plans for his life are exploded, and he takes up the mantel of his brother’s crack empire. Watkins succeeds in cultivating the family business, but when he meets a woman unlike any he’s known before, his priorities are once more put into question. 

West, Lindy. Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478940067. Reader TBA.
West’s essays that bravely shares her life, including her transition from quiet to feminist-out-loud, coming of age in a popular culture that is hostile to women (especially fat, funny women) and how keeping quiet is not an option for any of us. Topics covered include her public war with stand-up comedians over rape jokes, flying while fat, and Internet trolls.

Weston, J. Kael. The Mirror Test: America at War in Iraq and Afghanistan. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780399567643. Read by the author.
Weston spent seven years on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan working for the U.S. State Department. The overall frame for the book, from which the title is taken, centers on soldiers who have received a grievous wound to the face. There is a moment during their recovery when they must look upon their reconstructed appearance for the first time. This is known as “the mirror test.” From an intricate tapestry of voices and stories—Iraqi, Afghan, and American—Weston delivers a larger mirror test for our nation in its global role. Listeners will meet generals, corporals and captains, senators and ambassadors, NATO allies, Iraqi truck drivers, city councils, imams and mullahs, Afghan schoolteachers, madrassa and college students, former Taliban fighters and ex-Guantánamo prison detainees, a torture victim, SEAL and Delta Force teams, and many marines.

y648__1457540675_52121Winslow, Emily. Jane Doe January: My Twenty-Year Search for Truth and Justice. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504734684. Read by Ann Marie Lee.
This memoir of the cold case prosecution of a serial rapist is told by one of his victims. Emily Winslow was a young drama student at Carnegie Mellon University when a man brutally attacked and raped her in January 1992. While the police’s search for her rapist proved futile, Emily reclaimed her life. Over the course of the next two decades, she fell in love, married, had two children, and began writing mystery novels set in her new hometown of Cambridge, England. Then, in fall 2013, she received shocking news—the police had found her rapist. Caught between past and present, and between two very different cultures, the crime novelist searches for clarity. Beginning her own investigation, she delves into the man’s family and past, reconnects with the detectives of her case, and works with prosecutors in the months leading to trial.

Yang, Kao Kalia. The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681681627. Read by the author.
In the Hmong tradition, the song poet recounts the story of his people, their history and tragedies, joys and losses; extemporizing or drawing on folk tales, he keeps the past alive, invokes the spirits and the homeland, and records courtships, births, weddings, and wishes. Yang tells the life of her father, song poet Bee Yang, a Hmong refugee in Minnesota. Bee lost his father as a young boy and keenly felt his orphanhood. He would wander from one neighbor to the next, collecting the things they said to each other, whispering the words to himself at night until, one day, a song was born. Bee sings the life of his people through the war-torn jungle and a Thai refugee camp. But the songs fall away in the cold, bitter world of a Minneapolis housing project and on the factory floor until, with the death of Bee’s mother, the songs leave him for good.

Zeisler, Andi. We Were Feminists Once, From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement. Tantor. ISBN 9781515904526. Read by Joell A. Jacob.
Feminism has gone mainstream, but true equality is never an easy sell. Drawing on almost 20 years of experience covering popular culture from the frontlines of the feminist movement, Zeisler’s cultural history includes stories of institutions and real women, feminists and otherwise, in America. She exposes how feminism has transformed into something barely warranting the name, ignoring the many for the one, shamelessly colluding with market forces and popular culture. This kind of feminism is not particularly nuanced, and it doesn’t challenge identities and hegemonies as much as it offers nips and tucks. It is no longer a collective action on behalf of all women and those traditionally marginalized, but more about self-actualization of the few.

Mary Roach, Tig Notaro, & Amy Tan | Audio in Advance June 2016 | Nonfiction

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Asgedom, Mawi. Of Beetles and Angels: A Boy’s Remarkable Journey from a Refugee Camp to Harvard. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478967910. Read by the author.
This memoir tells the unforgettable story of a young boy’s journey from a refugee camp in Sudan to Chicago. Asgedom followed his father’s advice to “treat people…as though they were angels sent from heaven,” and realized his dream of a full-tuition scholarship to Harvard University.

Beevor, Antony & Artemis Cooper. Paris: After the Liberation 1944–1949. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501905506. Read by John Curless.
Beevor and Cooper present a vivid and compelling portrayal of the City of Lights after its liberation as Paris became the diplomatic battleground in the opening stages of the Cold War. Against this volatile political backdrop, every aspect of life is portrayed: scores were settled in a rough and uneven justice, black marketers grew rich on the misery of the population, and a growing number of intellectual luminaries and artists including Hemingway, Beckett, Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Cocteau, and Picasso contributed new ideas and a renewed vitality to this extraordinary moment in time.

41h+tXJ5b0L._SX328_BO1,204,203,200___1460048986_33127Berger, Jonah. Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior. S. & S. Audio. ISBN 9781508211419. Reader TBA.
Without our realizing it, other people’s behavior has a huge influence on everything we do at every moment of our lives, from the mundane to the momentous occasion. In some cases we conform, or imitate others around us. But in other cases we diverge, or avoid particular choices or behaviors because other people are doing them. Here Berger integrates research and thinking from business, psychology, and social science to focus on the subtle, invisible influences behind our choices as individuals. By understanding how social influence works, we can decide when to resist and when to embrace it—and how we can use this knowledge to make better-informed decisions and exercise more control over our own behavior.

Boessenecker, John. Texas Ranger: The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, the Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501916762. Read by Graham Winton.
To most Americans, Frank Hamer is known only as the “villain” of the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. Boessenecker sets out to restore Hamer’s good name and prove that he was, in fact, a classic American hero. From the horseback days of the Old West through the gangster days of the 1930s, Hamer stood on the front lines of some of the most important and exciting periods in American history. He participated in the Bandit War of 1915, survived the climactic gunfight in the last blood feud of the Old West, battled the Mexican Revolution’s spillover across the border, protected African Americans from lynch mobs and the Ku Klux Klan, and ran down gangsters, bootleggers, and Communists. When at last his career came to an end, it was only when he ran up against another legendary Texan: Lyndon B. Johnson.

Cenziper, Debbie & Jim Obergefell. Love Wins: The Lovers and Lawyers Who Fought the Landmark Case for Marriage Equality. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504734899. Reader TBA.
In June 2015, the Supreme Court made same-sex marriage the law in all 50 states in a decision as groundbreaking as Roe v Wade and Brown v Board of Education. Through insider accounts and access to key players, this definitive account reveals the events behind Obergefell v Hodges and the lives at its center. 

Daughan, George C. Revolution on the Hudson: New York City and the Hudson River Valley in the American War of Independence. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681681924. Read by Jonathan Yen.
No part of the country was more contested during the American Revolution than the Hudson River. In 1776, King George III sent the largest amphibious force ever assembled to seize Manhattan and use it as a base from which to push up the Hudson River Valley for a rendezvous at Albany with an impressive army driving down from Canada. George Washington and other patriot leaders shared the king’s fixation with the Hudson. Until now, no one has argued that this plan of action was lunacy from the start. Daughan makes the argument that Britain’s attempt to cut off New England never would have worked, and ultimately cost the crown her colonies. 

Ehrenreich, Ben. The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735208520. Read by the author.
Over the past three years, American writer Ehrenreich has been traveling to and living in the West Bank, staying with Palestinian families in its largest cities and its smallest villages.By placing readers in the footsteps of ordinary Palestinians and telling their stories with literary power and grace, Ehrenreich makes it impossible to turn away.

9780374713539__1460049038_87918Frazier, Ian. Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427272720. Reader TBA.
Frazier travels down South to examine feral hogs, and learns that their presence in any county is a strong indicator that it votes Republican. He introduces us to a man who, when his house is hit by a supposed meteorite, hopes to “leverage” the space object into opportunity for his family, and a New York City police detective who is fascinated with rap-music-related crimes. Alongside Frazier’s delight in the absurdities of contemporary life is his sense of social responsibility: there’s an echo of the great reform-minded writers in his pieces on a soup kitchen, overdose deaths on Staten Island, and the rise in homelessness under Bloomberg.

Gardner, Daniel. The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Should Not—and Put Ourselves in Great Danger. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520019949. Read by Scott Peterson.
Gardner demonstrates that irrational fear springs from how humans miscalculate risks. Our hunter-gatherer brains evolved during the old Stone Age and struggle to make sense of a world utterly unlike the one that made them. Real-world examples, interviews with experts, and fast-paced, lean storytelling make The Science of Fear an entertaining and enlightening tour.

Gay, Roxane. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504734417. Reader TBA.
In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. She understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. Here she explores her own past, including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life, and addresses the question of what it means to learn to take care of yourself. 

Huckelbridge, Dane. The United States of Beer: A Regional History of the All-American Drink. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504736183. Reader TBA.
Huckelbridge charts the surprisingly fascinating history of Americans’ relationship with their most popular alcoholic beverage, showing how beer has evolved along with the country—from a local and regional product (once upon a time every American city has its own brewery and iconic beer brand) to the rise of global mega-brands like Budweiser and Miller that are synonymous with U.S. capitalism. Throughout, Huckelbridge draws connections between seemingly remote fragments of the American past and shares his reports from the front lines of today’s craft-brewing revolution.

Jacoby, Karl. The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire. Tantor. ISBN 9781515954279. Read by JD Jackson.
To his contemporaries in Gilded Age Manhattan, Guillermo Eliseo was a fantastically wealthy Mexican man, the proud owner of a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park, a busy Wall Street office, and scores of mines and haciendas in Mexico. But Eliseo was also the possessor of a devastating secret: he had begun life as a slave named William Ellis, born on a cotton plantation in Texas. After emancipation, Ellis, capitalizing on the Spanish he learned during his childhood along the Mexican border, engaged in a virtuoso act of reinvention. He crafted an alter ego, the Mexican Guillermo Eliseo, who was able to access many of the privileges denied to African Americans at the time.

Klosterman, Chuck. But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past. Books on Tape. ISBN  9780451484895. Read by Fiona Hardingham.
Here Klosterman visualizes the contemporary world as it will appear to those who’ll perceive it as the distant past. He asks questions—How certain are we about our understanding of time? What will be the defining memory of rock music, five hundred years from today? How seriously should we view the content of our dreams? How seriously should we view the content of television? Are all sports destined for extinction?And perhaps most disturbing, is it possible that we’ve reached the end of knowledge?—and interviews creative thinkers such as David Byrne, Kathryn Schulz, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Junot Díaz, and Richard Linklater.

517BJ683BIL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200___1460049113_52704Laing, Olivia. The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504738880. Reader TBA.
You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavor to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by thousands of strangers. Laing’s new work is a roving cultural history of urban loneliness, centered on Manhattan, that asks questions such as, What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live if we’re not intimately involved with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if our sexuality or physical body is considered deviant or damaged? Does technology draw us closer together or trap us behind screens? 

Leamer, Laurence. The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle that Brought down the Klan. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504735971. Reader TBA.
On a Friday night in March 1981, Henry Hays and James Knowles, members of Klavern 900 of the United Klans of America, found 19-year-old Michael Donald walking home alone. Hays and Knowles abducted him, beat him, cut his throat, and left his body hanging from a tree branch. Arrested, charged, and convicted, Hays was sentenced to death—the first time in more than half a century that the state of Alabama sentenced a white man to death for killing a black man. On behalf of Michael’s grieving mother, Morris Dees, the legendary civil rights lawyer and cofounder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, filed a civil suit against the members of the local Klan unit involved and the UKA, the largest Klan organization. Charging them with conspiracy, Dees put the Klan on trial, resulting in a verdict that would level a deadly blow to its organization.

Martinez, Antonio Garcia. Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504733786. Reader TBA.
Imagine a chimpanzee rampaging through a data center powering everything from Google to Facebook. Infrastructure engineers use a software version of this “chaos monkey” to test online services’ robustness—their ability to survive random failure and correct mistakes before they actually occur. Tech entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, disruptors testing and transforming every aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and lodging (AirBnB) to television (Netflix) and dating (Tinder). One of Silicon Valley’s most audacious chaos monkeys, Martínez weighs in on everything from startups and credit derivatives to Big Brother and data tracking, social media monetization and digital “privacy,” laying bare the hijinks, trade secrets, and power plays of the visionaries, grunts, sociopaths, opportunists, accidental tourists, and money cowboys who are revolutionizing our world. 

McDonough, James Lee. William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country—A Life. Tantor. ISBN 9781515954682. Read by David Drummond.
General Sherman’s 1864 burning of Atlanta solidified his legacy as a ruthless leader. Yet Sherman proved far more complex than his legendary military tactics reveal. McDonough offers fresh insight into a man tormented by the fear that history would pass him by, who was plagued by personal debts, and who lived much of his life separated from his family. As a soldier, Sherman evolved from a spirited student at West Point into a general who steered the Civil War’s most decisive campaigns, rendered here in graphic detail. Lamenting casualties, Sherman sought the war’s swift end by devastating Southern resources in the Carolinas and on his famous March to the Sea. This meticulously researched biography explores Sherman’s warm friendship with Ulysses S. Grant, his strained relationship with his wife, Ellen, and his grief over the death of his young son, Willy.

41lNDuE2L3L._SX328_BO1,204,203,200___1460049164_17585Notaro, Tig. I’m Just a Person. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504734509. Reader TBA.
In the span of four months in 2012, Notaro was hospitalized for a debilitating intestinal disease called C. diff, her mother unexpectedly died, she went through a breakup, and she was diagnosed with bilateral breast cancer. Hit with this devastating barrage, Notaro took her grief onstage. Days after receiving her cancer diagnosis, she broke new comedic ground, opening an unvarnished set with the words: “Good evening. Hello. I have cancer. How are you? Hi, how are you? Is everybody having a good time? I have cancer.” Now, the wildly popular star takes stock of that no good, very bad year—a difficult yet astonishing period in which tragedy turned into absurdity and despair transformed into joy. 

Reynolds, Simon. Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504735490. Reader TBA.
Spearheaded by David Bowie, Alice Cooper, T. Rex, and Roxy Music, glam rock reveled in artifice and spectacle. Reacting against the hairy, denim-clad rock bands of the late sixties, glam was the first true teenage rampage of the new decade. Here Reynolds takes readers on a wild cultural tour through the early seventies, a period packed with glitzy costumes and alien make-up, thrilling music, and larger-than-life personas. Probing the genre’s major themes—stardom, androgyny, image, decadence, fandom, apocalypse—Reynolds tracks glam’s legacy as it unfolded in subsequent decades, from eighties art-pop icons like Kate Bush through to 21st-century idols of outrage such as Lady Gaga. 

Rid, Thomas. Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681681900. Read by Robertson Dean.
Telling the story of cybernetics, a control theory of man and machine, Rid delivers a portrait of our technology-enraptured era. Springing from mathematician Norbert Wiener amid the devastation of World War II, the cybernetic vision underpinned a host of myths about the future of machines. This vision radically transformed the postwar world, ushering in sweeping cultural change. Cybernetics triggered cults, the Whole Earth Catalog, and feminist manifestos, just as it fueled martial gizmos and the air force’s foray into virtual space. As Rid shows, cybernetics proved a powerful tool for two competing factions—those who sought to make a better world and those who sought to control the one at hand. 

Roach, Mary. Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War. Brilliance. ISBN 9781511367912. Read by Abby Elvidge.
Roach tackles the science behind some of a soldier’s most challenging adversaries—panic, exhaustion, heat, noise—and introduces readers to the scientists who seek to conquer them. The author dodges hostile fire with the U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team as part of a study on hearing loss and survivability in combat. She visits the fashion design studio of U.S. Army Natick Labs and learns why a zipper is a problem for a sniper. She visits a repurposed movie studio where amputee actors help prepare Marine Corps medics for the shock and gore of combat wounds. At Camp Lemmonier, Djibouti, in east Africa, she learns how diarrhea can be a threat to national security. Roach samples caffeinated meat, sniffs an archival sample of a World War II stink bomb, and stays up all night with the crew tending the missiles on the nuclear submarine USS Tennessee. Take a tour of duty with Roach, and you’ll never see our nation’s defenders in the same way again.

Selby, Scott Andrew & Greg Campbell. Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520019864. Read by Don Hagen.
On February 15, 2003, a group of thieves broke into an allegedly airtight vault in the international diamond capital of Antwerp, Belgium, and made off with more than $108 million worth of diamonds and other valuables. They did so without tripping an alarm or injuring a single guard in the process. The police zeroed in on a band of professional thieves fronted by Leonardo Notarbartolo. The “who” of the crime had been answered, but the “how” remained largely a mystery. The authors sorted through an array of conflicting details, divergent opinions and incongruous theories to put together the puzzle.

Smiley, Tavis & David Ritz. Before You Judge Me: The Triumph and Tragedy of Michael Jackson’s Last Days. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478903093. Read by Leo Coltrane. 
Michael Jackson’s final months were like the rest of his short and legendary life: filled with deep lows and soaring highs, a constant hunt for privacy, and the pressure and fame that made him socially fragile. Listeners will witness Jackson’s campaign to recharge his career—hiring and firing managers and advisors, turning to and away from family members, fighting depression and drug dependency—while his one goal remained: to mount the most spectacular series of shows the world had ever seen. 

9780307454263__1460049213_22690Smith, Jordan Fisher. Engineering Eden: The True Story of a Violent Death, a Trial, and the Fight over Controlling Nature. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504722933. Reader TBA.
When 25-year-old Harry Walker was killed by a bear in Yellowstone Park in 1972, the civil trial prompted by his death became a proxy for bigger questions about American wilderness management that had been boiling for a century. At immediate issue was whether the Park Service should have done more to keep bears away from humans, but what was revealed as the trial unfolded was just how fruitless our efforts to regulate nature in the parks had always been. In this remarkable excavation of American environmental history, nature writer and former park ranger Smith uses the story of one man’s tragic death to tell the larger narrative of the futile, sometimes fatal, attempts to remake wilderness in the name of preserving it. 

Tan, Amy. The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781490657691. Reader TBA.
Tan has touched millions of readers with haunting and sympathetic novels of cultural complexity and profound empathy. With the same spirit and humor that characterize her acclaimed novels, she now shares her insight into her own life and how she escaped the curses of her past to make a future of her own. She takes listeners on a journey from her childhood of tragedy and comedy to the present day and her arrival as one of the world’s best-loved novelists. Whether recalling arguments with her mother in suburban California or introducing us to the ghosts that inhabit her computer, she offers vivid portraits of choices, attitudes, charms, and luck in action—a refreshing antidote to the world-weariness and uncertainties we all face today.

Warnick, Melody. This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504740975. Reader TBA.
Warnick’s journey to find out what makes us love our towns and cities, and why it matters, is at the heart of this work. She dives into the body of research around place attachment—the deep sense of connection that residents sometimes feel with their towns—and travels to towns across America to see it in action. She finds out what draws highly mobile Americans to the places we live and what makes them stay. Her best ideas are imported to her adopted hometown of Blacksburg for a series of Love Where You Live experiments designed to make her feel more locally connected: dining with the neighbors, taking a hike, meeting the mayor, marching in the town Christmas parade, and more. What Melody learns is good news for anyone who’s ever felt stuck in a not-so-perfect place: You don’t have to be in your dream city to have a great life. You just have to love the place you’re in to be healthier, happier, more socially connected, and more resilient.

Whitefield-Madrano, Autumn. Face Value: The Hidden Ways Beauty Shapes Women’s Lives. Brilliance. ISBN 9781480545250. Reader TBA.
Whitefield-Madrano examines the relationship between appearance and science, social media, sex, friendship, language, and advertising to show how beauty actually affects us day to day. Through meticulous research and interviews with dozens of women across all walks of life, she reveals surprising findings—that wearing makeup can actually relax you, that you can convince people you’re better looking just by tweaking your personality, and the ways beauty can be a powerful tool of connection among women. 

Wilson, A.N. The Book of the People: How To Read the Bible. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504719612. Reader TBA.
Charting his own relationship with the Bible over a lifetime of writing, Wilson argues that it remains relevant even in a largely secular society, as a philosophical work, a work of literature, and a cultural touchstone that the western world has answered to for nearly 2,000 years: Martin Luther King was “reading the Bible” when he started the Civil Rights movement, as was Michelangelo when he painted the fresco cycles in the Sistine Chapel. Wilson challenges the way fundamentalists—whether believers or nonbelievers—have misused the Bible, either by neglecting and failing to recognize its cultural significance or by using it as a weapon against those with whom they disagree.

Cynthia Ozick & Marcella Hazan | Audio in Advance July 2016 | Nonfiction

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seinfeldia__1462805541_40979Armstrong, Jennifer Keishin. Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything. Tantor. ISBN 9781515953982. Read by Christina Delaine.
Comedians Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld never thought anyone would watch their silly little sitcom about a New York comedian sitting around talking to his friends. But against all odds, viewers began to watch, first a few and then many, until nine years later nearly 40 million Americans were tuning in weekly. Here Armstrong celebrates the creators and fans of this television phenomenon. She brings listeners behind the scenes of the show while it was on the air and into the world of devotees for whom it never stopped being relevant.

Delpit, Lisa. Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. Tantor. ISBN 9781515907916. Read by Lisa Rene Pitts.
Delpit develops ideas about ways teachers can be better “cultural transmitters” in the classroom, where prejudice, stereotypes, and cultural assumptions breed ineffective education. Delpit suggests that many academic problems attributed to children of color are actually the result of miscommunication, as primarily white teachers and “other people’s children” struggle with the imbalance of power and the dynamics plaguing our system. This edition features a new introduction by Delpit as well as new framing essays by Herbert Kohl and Charles Payne.

Fitz, Caitlin. Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions. Tantor. ISBN 9781515955894. Read by Emily Durante.
In the early 19th century, the United States turned its idealistic gaze southward, imagining a legacy of revolution and republicanism it hoped would dominate the American hemisphere and hailing Latin America’s independence movements as glorious tropical reprises of 1776. Even as Latin Americans were gradually ending slavery, U.S. observers remained energized by the belief that their founding ideals were triumphing over European tyranny. But as slavery became a violently divisive issue at home, goodwill toward antislavery revolutionaries waned. By the nation’s fiftieth anniversary, republican efforts abroad had become a scaffold upon which many in the United States erected an ideology of white U.S. exceptionalism that would haunt the geopolitical landscape for generations.

Foster, Nick. The Jolly Roger Social Club: A True Story of a Killer in Paradise. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504730402. Reader TBA.
In the remote Bocas del Toro, Panama, William Dathan Holbert awaits trial for the murder of five fellow American expatriates, including the Brown family, who lived on a remote island in the area’s Darklands. There, Holbert turned their home into the “Jolly Roger Social Club,” using drink- and drug-fueled parties to get to know other expats. Here Foster addresses not just what Holbert did or the complex financial and real estate motives behind the killings, he looks at why Bocas del Toro turned out to be his perfect hunting ground, and why the community tolerated—even accepted him—for a time.

Gross, Michael. Focus: The Secret, Sexy, Sometimes Sordid World of Fashion Photographers. Tantor. ISBN 9781515908043. Read by Kirby Heybourne.
From the postwar covers of Vogue until the triumph of the digital image, fashion photographers sold not only clothes but ideals of beauty and fantasies of perfect lives. Gross probes the lives, hang-ups, and artistic triumphs of more than a dozen of fashion photography’s greatest visionaries, including Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Melvin Sokolsky, Bert Stern, David Bailey, Bill King, Gilles Bensimon, Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel, Corinne Day, and Bob and Terry Richardson. From Avedon’s haute couture fantasies and telling portraits to Weber’s sensual, intimate, and heroic slices of life, and from Bob Richardson’s provocations to his son Terry’s transgressions, Gross takes listeners behind the scenes and reveals the revolutionary creative processes and fraught private passions of these visionary imagicians.

ingredienti_9781451627367_hr__1462805598_57851Hazan, Marcella & Victor Hazan. Ingredienti: Marcella’s Guide to the Market. Tantor. ISBN 9781515907879. Read by Elizabeth Wiley.
Though Marcella Hazan died in 2013, her legacy lives on through her cookbooks and recipes, and in the handwritten notebooks filled with her thoughts on how to select the best ingredients. Her husband and longtime collaborator, Victor, has translated and transcribed these vignettes on how to buy and what to do with the fresh produce used in Italian cooking, the elements of an essential pantry, and salumi. From artichokes to zucchini, anchovies to ziti, this work offers succinct and compelling advice on how to choose vegetables, pasta, olive oil, cheese, prosciutto, and all of the key elements of Marcella’s classic meals. 

Kealing, Bob. Life of the Party: The Remarkable Story of How Brownie Wise Built, and Lost, a Tupperware Party Empire. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780451483386. Read by Kimberly Farr.
Brownie Wise was a plucky businesswoman who divorced her alcoholic husband, started her own successful business, and eventually caught the eye of Tupperware inventor Earl Tupper, whose plastic containers were collecting dust on store shelves. The Tupperware Party that Wise popularized, a master class in the soft sell, drove Tupperware’s sales to soaring heights. It also gave minimally educated and economically invisible postwar women an acceptable outlet for making their own money for their families—and for being rewarded for their efforts. Wise was as popular among her many devoted followers as she was among the press, and she become the first woman to appear on the cover of BusinessWeek in 1954. Then, at the height of her success, Earl Tupper fired her under mysterious circumstances and left her with a pittance. He walked away with a fortune and she disappeared—until now.

Kelly, Jack. Heaven’s Ditch: God, Gold, and Murder on the Erie Canal. Blackstone. ISBN 978-1-5047-2937-6. Reader TBA.
The technological marvel of its age, the Erie Canal is a 360-mile waterway built entirely by hand and largely through wilderness. Heaven’s Ditch illuminates the spiritual and political upheavals along this “psychic highway,” from its opening in 1825 through 1844. “Wage slave” Sam Patch became America’s first celebrity daredevil. William Miller envisioned the apocalypse. Farm boy Joseph Smith gave birth to Mormonism, a new and distinctly American religion. Along the way, one encounters America’s very first “crime of the century,” a treasure hunt, searing acts of violence, a visionary cross-dresser, and a panoply of fanatics, mystics, and hoaxers.

Klein, Jessi. You’ll Grow Out of It. Brilliance. ISBN 9781478936619. Reader TBA.
As both a tomboy and a late bloomer, comedian Klein grew up feeling more like an outsider than a participant in the rites of modern femininity. Here she offers—through an incisive collection of real-life stories—a relentlessly funny yet poignant take on her strange journey to womanhood and beyond. These include her “transformation from Pippi Longstocking-esque tomboy to are-you-a-lesbian-or-what tom man,” attempting to find watchable porn, and identifying the difference between being called “ma’am” and “miss” (“Miss sounds like you weigh ninety-nine pounds”).

51PkkwLq_NL__1462805893_94074Montgomery, Sy. The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood. ISBN 9781515905912. Read by Xe Sands.
A naturalist who spent months at a time living on her own among wild creatures in remote jungles, Montgomery had always felt more comfortable with animals than with people. So she gladly opened her heart to a sick piglet who had been crowded away from nourishing meals by his stronger siblings. Yet Sy had no inkling that this piglet, later named Christopher Hogwood, would not only survive but flourish.The Good Good Pig celebrates Christopher Hogwood in all his glory, from his inauspicious infancy to hog heaven in rural New Hampshire. 

Ozick, Cynthia. Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681680484. Read by Donna Postel.
In a gauntlet-throwing essay, Ozick stakes the claim that, just as surely as critics require a steady supply of new fiction, novelists need great critics to build a vibrant community on the foundation of literary history. She offers models of critical analysis of writers from the mid-twentieth century to today, from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Kafka to William Gass and Martin Amis, all assembled in provocatively named groups: Fanatics, Monsters, Figures, and others. 

Russo, Charles. Striking Distance: Bruce Lee and the Dawn of Martial Arts in America. Blackstone. ISBN 978-1-5047-4829-2. Reader TBA.
In the spring of 1959, 18-year-old Bruce Lee returned to San Francisco, the city of his birth, and quickly inserted himself into the West Coast’s fledgling martial arts culture. Even though Asian fighting styles were widely unknown to mainstream America, Lee encountered a robust fight culture in an area that was populated with talented and trailblazing practitioners such as Lau Bun, Chinatown’s aging kung fu patriarch; Wally Jay, the innovative Hawaiian jujitsu master; and James Lee, the no-nonsense Oakland street fighter. Regarded by some as a brash loudmouth and by others as a dynamic visionary, Bruce spent his first few years back in America advocating a more modern approach to the martial arts and showing little regard for the damaged egos left in his wake. 

Tackett, Michael. The Baseball Whisperer: A Small-Town Coach Who Shaped Big League Dreams. HighBridge. ISBN. Read by Mickey Chamberlain.
Clarinda, IA, population 5,000, sits two hours from anything. There, between the cornfields and hog yards, is a ball field with a bronze bust of a man named Merl Eberly, a baseball whisperer who specialized in second chances and lost causes. Eberly tended his Clarinda A’s baseball team for five decades, transforming them from a town team to a collegiate summer league powerhouse. Along with Ozzie Smith, future manager Bud Black, and star player Von Hayes, Eberly developed scores of major league players (six of whom are currently playing). In the process, Eberly taught them to be men, insisting on hard work, integrity, and responsibility. 

Tye, Larry. Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735208087. Read by Marc Cashman.
History remembers Robert F. Kennedy as a progressive knight of a bygone era of American politics. But Kennedy’s enshrinement in the liberal pantheon was actually the final stage of a journey that had its beginnings in the conservative 1950s. Here Tye peels away layers of myth and misconception to paint a complete portrait of this singularly fascinating figure. To capture the full arc of his subject’s life, Tye draws on rare access granted to him by the Kennedy family, including unpublished memoirs, unreleased government files, and 58 boxes of papers that had been under lock and key for the past 40 years. 

Vanderkam, Laura. 168 Hours: You Have More Time than You Think. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520020099. Read by Elizabeth London.
It’s an unquestioned truth of modern life: we are starved for time. With the rise of two-income families, time-consuming jobs, and 24/7 connectivity, life is so frenzied many people can barely find time to breathe. We tell ourselves we’d like to read more, get to the gym regularly, try new hobbies, and accomplish all kinds of goals. But then we give up because there just aren’t enough hours to do it all. Or else, if we don’t make excuses, we make sacrifices. To get ahead at work we spend less time with our spouses. To carve out more family time, we put off getting in shape. There has to be a better way—and Vanderkam has found one.

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