Banaji, Mahzarin R. & Anthony G. Greenwald. Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. Brilliance. ISBN 9781491528730. Read by Eric Martin.
Banaji and Greenwald explore the hidden biases we all carry from a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, and nationality. The authors question the extent to which our perceptions of social groups—without our awareness or conscious control—shape our likes and dislikes and our judgments about people’s character, abilities, and potential. The book’s “good people” are those of us who strive to align our behavior with our intentions, and the authors aim to explain the science in plain enough language to help well-intentioned people achieve that alignment. 

Bondar, Carin. Wild Sex: The Science Behind Mating in the Animal Kingdom. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504727600. Read by Erin Bennett.
The animal kingdom is a wild place—and it’s got mating habits to match. The sex lives of our animal cousins are fiendishly difficult, infinitely varied, often incredibly violent—and absolutely fascinating. Bondar takes listeners on an enthralling tour of the animal kingdom as she explores the diverse world of sex in the wild. She looks at the evolution of sexual organs (and how they’ve shaped social hierarchies), tactics of seduction, and the mechanics of sex. She investigates a wide range of topics, from whether animals experience pleasure from sex to what happens when females hold the reproductive power. 

Cooper, Andrew Scott. The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504723497. Read by Assaf Cohen.
Cooper traces Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s life from childhood through his ascension to the throne in 1941, highlighting the turbulence of the postwar era, during which the shah survived assassination attempts and coup plots to build a modern, pro-Western state and launch Iran onto the world stage as one of the world’s top five powers. Listeners get the story of the shah’s political career alongside the story of his courtship and marriage to Farah Diba, who became a power in her own right; the beloved family they created; and an exclusive look at life inside the palace during the Iranian Revolution. Cooper’s investigative account ultimately delivers the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty through the eyes of those who were there: leading Iranian revolutionaries, President Jimmy Carter and White House officials, U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan and his staff in the American embassy in Tehran, American families caught up in the drama, and Empress Farah herself.

Crowley, Roger. 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478914372. Reader TBA.
Constantinople had survived a siege every 40 years for a millennium—until the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, 21 years old and hungry for glory, rode up to the walls in April 1453 with a huge army, ”numberless as the stars.” This is the taut, vivid story of this final struggle for the city told largely through the accounts of eyewitnesses. For 55 days a tiny group of defenders defied the huge Ottoman army in a seesawing contest fought on land, at sea, and underground. During the course of events, the largest cannon ever built was directed against the world’s most formidable defensive system, Ottoman ships were hauled overland into the Golden Horn, and the morale of defenders was crucially undermined by unnerving portents. At the center is the contest between two inspirational leaders, Mehmed II and Constantine XI, fighting for empire and religious faith, and an astonishing finale in a few short hours on May 29, 1453 — a defining moment for medieval history.

Gilbert, Christine. Mother Tongue: My Family’s Globe-Trotting Quest to Dream in Mandarin, Laugh in Arabic, and Sing in Spanish. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501905582. Read by Angela Dawe.
Gilbert takes listeners along on her quest to learn Mandarin in Beijing, Arabic in Beirut, and Spanish in Mexico, with her young family along for the ride, showing us what it’s like to make a life in an unfamiliar world—and in an unfamiliar tongue. Gilbert was a young mother when she  uprooted her family to move around the world with her toddler son and all-American husband along for the ride. Their story takes us from Beijing to Beirut, from Cyprus to Chiang Mai—and also explores recent breakthroughs in bilingual brain mapping and the controversial debates happening in linguistics right now. 

McGinty, Brian. The Rest I Will Kill: William Tillman and the Unforgettable Story of How a Free Black Man Refused To Become a Slave. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681682303. Read by Sean Crisden.
On July 4, 1861, the schooner S.J. Waring set sail from New York on a routine voyage to South America. Seventeen days later, it limped back into New York’s harbor with the ship’s black cook and steward at the helm. While the story of that ill-fated voyage is one of the most harrowing tales of captivity and survival on the high seas, it has been tragically lost to history. Now reclaiming William Tillman as the American hero he deserves to be, historian McGinty takes readers on a courageous journey that recounts how a free black man was able to recapture his commandeered ship from Confederate privateers, defy their efforts to make him a slave, and become an unlikely glimmer of hope for a disheartened Union army in the war-battered North.

Pyne, Lydia. Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World’s Most Famous Human Fossils. Tantor. ISBN 9781515956020. Read by Randye Kaye.
Over the last century, the search for human ancestors has spanned four continents and resulted in the discovery of hundreds of fossils. While most of these discoveries live quietly in museums, there are a few that have become world-renowned celebrity personas. Drawing from archives, museums, and interviews, Pyne builds a cultural history for each celebrity fossil. These seven include the three-foot tall “hobbit” from Flores, the Neanderthal of La Chapelle, the Taung Child, the Piltdown Man hoax, Peking Man, Australopithecus sediba, and Lucy—all vivid examples of how discoveries of our ancestors have been received, remembered, and immortalized. Pyne brings to life each fossil: how it is described, put on display, and shared among scientific communities and the broader public. 

Reece, Erik. Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea. Tantor. ISBN 9781515957935. Read by James Patrick Cronin.
Reece was newly married, gainfully employed, and living in a creekside cabin in his beloved Kentucky woods, but he was still haunted by a sense that the world—or, more specifically, his country—could be better. Reece turned to those who had dared to imagine radically different futures for America. What followed was a giant road trip and research adventure through the sites of America’s utopian communities, both historical and contemporary, known and unknown, successful and catastrophic. What he uncovered was not just a series of lost histories and broken visionaries but also a continuing and vital but hidden idealistic tradition in American intellectual history. 

Schuman, Michael. Confucius: And the World He Created. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520020235. Read by Steven Menasche.
Confucius’s teachings shape the daily lives of more than 1.6 billion people. Throughout East Asia, Confucius’s influence can be seen in everything from business practices and family relationships to educational standards and government policies. Even as western ideas from Christianity to Communism have bombarded the region, Confucius’s doctrine has endured as the foundation of East Asian culture. It is impossible to understand East Asia,Schuman argues, without first engaging with Confucius and his vast legacy.

Smith, Mychal Denzel. Invisible Man Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501925375. Read by Kevin R. Free.
How do you learn to be a black man in America? For young black men today, it means coming of age during the presidency of Barack Obama. It means witnessing the deaths of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, and too many more. It means celebrating powerful moments of black self-determination for LeBron James, Dave Chappelle, and Frank Ocean. Here Smith chronicles his own personal and political education during these tumultuous years, describing his efforts to come into his own in a world that denied his humanity. 

Spiegelman, Nadja. I’m Supposed To Protect You from All This. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735205598. Read by the author.
For a long time, Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers—art director Françoise Mouly—exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. After college, her mother suddenly opened up to her. Françoise recounted her turbulent adolescence caught between a volatile mother and a playboy father, one of the first plastic surgeons in France. It had taken an ocean to allow Françoise the distance to become her own person. At about the same age, Nadja made the journey in reverse, moving to Paris determined to get to know the woman her mother had fled. Her grandmother’s memories contradicted her mother’s at nearly every turn, but beneath them lay a difficult history of her own. 

Summerscale, Kate. The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501919978. Reader TBA.
Early in the morning of July 8, 1895, 13-year-old Robert Coombes and his 12-year-old brother Nattie set out from their small, yellow-brick terraced house in East London to watch a cricket match. Their father had gone to sea the previous Friday, the boys told their neighbors, and their mother was visiting her family in Liverpool. Over the next ten days Robert and Nattie spent extravagantly, pawning their parents’ valuables to fund trips to the theater and the seaside. But as the sun beat down on the Coombes house, a strange smell began to emanate from the building. When the police were finally called to investigate, the discovery they made sent the press into a frenzy of horror and alarm, and Robert and Nattie were swept up in a criminal trial that echoed the outrageous plots of the ‘penny dreadful’ novels that Robert loved to read.

Toobin, Jeffrey. American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780449807521. Read by Paul Michael.
On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The already sensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3, when the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had adopted the nom de guerre “Tania.” The weird turns of the tale are truly astonishing—the Hearst family trying to secure Patty’s release by feeding all the people of Oakland and San Francisco for free; the bank security cameras capturing “Tania” wielding a machine gun during a robbery; a cast of characters including everyone from Bill Walton to the Black Panthers to Ronald Reagan to F. Lee Bailey; the largest police shoot-out in American history; the first breaking news event to be broadcast live on television stations across the country; Patty’s year on the lam, running from authorities; and her circuslike trial, filled with theatrical courtroom confrontations and a dramatic last-minute reversal, after which the term “Stockholm syndrome” entered the lexicon. 

Wolfe, Tom. The Kingdom of Speech. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478953166. Reader TBA.
Wolfe here makes the argument that speech—not evolution—is responsible for humanity’s complex societies and achievements. From Alfred Russel Wallace, the Englishman who beat Darwin to the theory of natural selection but later renounced it, and through the controversial work of modern-day anthropologist Daniel Everett, who defies the current wisdom that language is hard-wired in humans, Wolfe examines the solemn, long-faced, laugh-out-loud zig-zags of Darwinism, and finds it irrelevant.

Yong, Ed. I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grader View of Life. HarperAudio. ISBN 9781504734486. Reader TBA.
Every animal, whether human, squid, or wasp, is home to millions of bacteria and other microbes. Many people think of microbes as germs to be eradicated, but those that live with us—the microbiome—build our bodies, protect our health, shape our identities, and grant us incredible abilities. Yong takes listeners on a grand tour through our microbial partners, and introduces us to the scientists on the front lines of discovery.

Aldersey-Williams, Hugh. The Tide: The Science and Stories Behind the Greatest Force on Earth. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681682785. Read by Derek Perkins.
Humans have spent centuries trying to understand the tide—from Aristotle, who was said to have drowned himself when he failed to figure out the Greek tides, to the pioneering investigations into the role of the moon by Galileo and Newton, to supercomputing in our own time. Aldersey-Williams whisks listeners along his travels to Nova Scotia, where the tides are the strongest in the world; to arctic Norway, home of the raging tidal whirlpool known as the maelstrom; and to Venice, to explore efforts to defend against the famed acqua alta. Along the way, he reveals the tidal truths behind the legends of Scylla and Charybdis, the story of Moses parting the Red Sea, the conquests of Julius Caesar, the Boston Tea Party, and the D-Day landings in Normandy.

Arce, Julissa. My (Underground) American Dream: My True Story as an Undocumented Immigrant Who Became a Wall Street Executive. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478942023. Reader TBA.
Arce left Mexico when she was 11 years old and came to the United States on a tourist visa to be reunited with her parents, who dreamed the journey would secure her a better life. When her visa expired at the age of 15, she became an undocumented immigrant. Thus began her underground existence, which involved decades of tremendous family sacrifice and fear of exposure. After the Texas Dream Act made a college degree possible, her top grades and leadership positions landed her an internship at Goldman Sachs, which led to a full-time position—one of the most coveted jobs on Wall Street. Soon she was a vice president, yet still guarding her “underground” secret. 

Ault, Charles R. Do Elephants Have Knees?: Serious Whimsy in Darwinian Stories of Origins. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504740630. Reader TBA.
What makes a penguin a bird? Is a camel more closely related to a horse than to a giraffe? Why is a whale not a fish? Similar puzzles preoccupied Charles Darwin throughout his life. Whimsy, in the playfulness of stories for children, is a way to appreciate Darwinian histories. Ault uses the fanciful imagery of story to explain Darwinian thought. At the same time, he launches careful consideration of Darwin’s humanity, the origins of his curiosity, and the reach of his ideas.

Booth, Michael. Super Sushi Ramen Express: One Family’s Journey Through the Belly of Japan. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681683089. Read by Ralph Lister.
Food and travel writer Booth takes the culinary pulse of contemporary Japan, learning fascinating tips and recipes. Accompanied by two fussy eaters under the age of six, he and his wife travel the length of the country, from bear-infested, beer-loving Hokkaido to snake-infested, seaweed-loving Okinawa. Along the way, they dine with—and score a surprising victory over—sumo wrestlers; share a seaside lunch with free-diving female abalone hunters; and meet the greatest chefs working in Japan today. Less happily, they witness a mass fugu slaughter, are traumatized by an encounter with giant crabs, and attempt a calamitous cooking demonstration for the lunching ladies of Kyoto.

Brotton, Jerry. The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681682600. Read by Ralph Lister.
When Queen Elizabeth was excommunicated by the pope in 1570, she found herself in an awkward predicament. Now England’s key markets would be closed to her Protestant merchants. Complicating matters, the staunchly Catholic king of Spain was determined to destroy her, bolstered by the gold pouring in from the New World. In a bold decision with far-reaching consequences, Elizabeth sent an emissary to the shah of Iran, wooed the king of Morocco, trading gunpowder for sugar, and entered into an unprecedented alliance with the powerful Ottoman Sultan Murad III. This marked the beginning of an extraordinary alignment with Muslim powers and of economic and political exchanges with the Islamic world of a depth not again experienced until the modern age.

Burnett, Bill & Dave Evans. Designing Your Life: How To Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781101923108. Read by the authors.
Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve. Burnett and Evans demonstrate how design thinking can create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. 

Burnett, Carol. In Such Good Company: Eleven Years of Laughter, Mayhem, and Fun in the Sandbox. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735284869. Read by the author.
Burnett delves into little-known stories of the guests, sketches and antics that made her show legendary, as well as some favorite tales too good not to relive again. She discusses how the show almost didn’t air due to the misgivings of certain CBS vice presidents; how she discovered and hired Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, Lyle Waggoner, and Tim Conway; anecdotes about guest stars, including Lucille Ball, Roddy Mcdowell, Jim Nabors, Bernadette Peters, Betty Grable, Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gorme, Gloria Swanson, Rita Hayworth, and Betty White; the people behind the scenes from Bob Mackie, her costume designer and partner in crime, to the wickedly funny cameraman who became a fixture during the show’s opening Q&A; and her takes on her favorite sketches and the unpredictable moments that took both the cast and viewers by surprise.

Dowd, Maureen. The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478915072. Reader TBA.
In this perilous and shocking campaign season, the New York Times columnist traces the psychologies and pathologies in one of the nastiest and most significant battles of the sexes ever. Dowd has covered Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton since the 1990s. She was with the real estate mogul when he approached his first presidential rope line in 1999, and she won a Pulitzer prize that same year for her columns on the Clinton impeachment follies. 

Guthrie, Julian. How To Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735288218. Reader TBA.
From the time Peter Diamandis was eight years old, staying up late to watch Apollo 11 land on the moon, he had one goal: getting to space. But when he realized NASA was winding down manned space flight, Diamandis set out on one of the great entrepreneurial adventure stories of our time. If the government wouldn’t send him to space, he would create a private spaceflight industry and get there himself. In May 1996, Diamandis announced the $10 million XPrize for the first privately funded team to build and fly a rocket into space twice within two weeks. The deadline to win: December 31, 2004. On a brilliant morning in the Mojave Desert, with little time to spare in the fall of 2004, a small bullet-shaped rocket called SpaceShipOne launched into space, returning safely to earth to grab the prize and make history.

Heaney, Elizabeth. The Honor Was Mine: A Look Inside the Struggles of Military Veterans. Brilliance. ISBN 9781531835057. Reader TBA.
When therapist Heaney left her private practice to counsel military service members and their families, she came face to face with struggles and fears. Emotions run deeply—and often silently—in the hearts of combat veterans in this portrait of the complex, nuanced lives of service personnel, who return from battling the enemy and grapple with readjusting to civilian life. Presenting the soldiers’ stories—told in their own words—as well as her own story of change, Heaney offers an intimate perspective, not of war itself but of its emotional aftermath. 

Keller, Timothy. Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735288744. Reader TBA.
Pastor Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic,this work shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.

Kidder, Tracy. A Truck Full of Money: One Man’s Quest To Recover from Great Success. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735210363. Read by Paul Michael.
Growing up in working-class Boston, Paul English discovered a medium for his talents the first time he saw a computer. As a young man, despite suffering from what would eventually be diagnosed as bipolar disorder, he began a journey through the brave new world of computers and discovered that his gift for building creative teams of people. His innovative management style, success, and innate sense of fair play inspired intense loyalty. Early on, one colleague observed, “Someday this boy’s going to get hit by a truck full of money, and I’m going to be standing beside him.” Yet when English made a fortune as co-founder of the travel website Kayak.com, the first thing he thought about was how to give it away.

Levitin, Daniel J. A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524702540. Read by Dan Piraro.
We are bombarded with more information each day than our brains can process—especially in election season. How do we distinguish misinformation, pseudo-facts, distortions, and outright lies from reliable information? Levitin groups his field guide into two categories—statistical information and faulty arguments—ultimately showing how science is the bedrock of critical thinking. We need to think critically about the words and numbers we encounter if we want to be successful at work, at play, and in making the most of our lives. This means checking the plausibility and reasoning—not passively accepting information, repeating it, and making decisions based on it. 

MacMahon, Bernard & Allison McGourty. American Epic: When Music Gave America Her Voice. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681682945. Read by Mike Chamberlain.
The companion book to the groundbreaking PBS and BBC documentary series celebrates the pioneers and artists of American roots music—blues, gospel, folk, Cajun, Appalachian, Hawaiian, Native American—without which there would be no jazz, rock, country R&B, or hip hop today. In the 1920s and 1930s, as radio took over the pop music business, record companies were forced to leave their studios in major cities in search of new styles and markets. In the mountains, prairies, rural villages, and urban areas of America, they discovered a wealth of unexpected talent—people playing styles that blended the intertwining strands of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Fortunately, thanks to the continuing efforts of cultural detectives and record devotees, the stories of America’s earliest musicians can finally be told.

Monson, Marianne. Frontier Grit: The Unlikely True Stories of Daring Pioneer Women. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504741965. Reader TBA.
These 12 women heard the call to go west and came from all points of the globe to begin their journey. As a slave Clara watched helplessly as her husband and children were sold, only to be reunited with her youngest daughter, as a free woman, six decades later. Charlotte hid her gender to escape a life of poverty and became the greatest stagecoach driver that ever lived. Native American Gertrude fought to give her people a voice and to educate leaders about the ways and importance of America’s native people. These are gripping miniature dramas of good-hearted women, selfless providers, courageous immigrants and migrants, and women with skills too innumerable to list. 

Phillips, Patrick. Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524722517. Read by the author.
Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the 20th century was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. But then in September of 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One man was dragged from a jail cell and lynched on the town square, two teenagers were hung after a one-day trial, and soon bands of white “night riders” launched a coordinated campaign of arson and terror, driving all 1,098 black citizens out of the county. In the wake of the expulsions, whites harvested the crops and took over the livestock of their former neighbors, and quietly laid claim to “abandoned” land. The charred ruins of homes and churches disappeared into the weeds, until the people and places of black Forsyth were forgotten. Phillips tells Forsyth’s tragic story in vivid detail, recalling his own childhood in the 1970s and ’80s and shedding light on the communal crimes of his hometown and the violent means by which locals kept Forsyth “all white” well into the 1990s.

Pinfield, Matt & Mitchell Cohen. All These Things That I’ve Done: My Insane, Improbable Rock Life. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681682822. Reader TBA.
Pinfield is the guy who knows every song, artist, and musical riff ever recorded, down to the most obscure band’s B-side single on its vinyl-only EP import. Here he traces his lifelong obsession—from the heavy metal of his teenage years, to his first encounters with legends like Lou Reed and The Ramones and how, through his post-MTV years, he played a major role in bringing nineties alt rock mainstream. Pinfield has interviewed everyone from Paul McCartney to Nirvana to Jay-Z and now he shares his five decades of stories from the front lines of rock and roll.

Price, S.L. Playing Through the Whistle: Steel, Football, and an American Town. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504760188. Reader TBA.
Aliquippa, PA, is famous for two things: the Jones and Laughlin Steel mill, an industrial behemoth that helped win World War II; and football, with a high school team that has produced numerous NFL stars. But the mill, once the fourth largest producer in America, closed for good in 2000. Here sports writer Price tells the story of this place, its people, its players, and through it, a wider story of American history from the turn of the twentieth century. Aliquippa has been many things—a rigidly controlled company town, a booming racial and ethnic melting pot, and for a brief time, a workers’ paradise.

Rinaldi, Tom. The Red Bandanna: Welles Crowther, 9/11, and the Path to Purpose. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735289420. Reader TBA.
When Welles Crowther was a young boy in Nyack, NY, his father gave him a red handkerchief to keep in his back pocket, in case he ever needed it. Fresh from college, he came to New York City for a job on Wall Street. His office was on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center. When the World Trade Center fell, Welles’s parents, like the families of so many who were lost in the attacks, had no idea what happened to him. Eight months after the attacks, however, Welles’s mother read a news account that would change the family’s lives. A survivor from the attacks said she and others had been led to safety by a stranger, carrying a woman on his back, down nearly twenty flights of stairs. When they emerged from the stairwell, firefighters took them the rest of the way out. But the young man turned around and went back up the stairs. He would make the trip up and down again and again, taking a group with him each time. The survivor never asked the man’s name and couldn’t see his face. But she remembered one detail clearly: he was wearing a red bandanna. 

Smith, Kathryn. The Gatekeeper: Missy LeHand, FDR, and the Untold Story of the Partnership That Defined a Presidency. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504767262. Reader TBA.
Widely considered the first female presidential chief of staff, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand was the right-hand woman to Franklin Delano Roosevelt—both personally and professionally—for more than 20 years. Although her official title as personal secretary was relatively humble, her power and influence were unparalleled. Everyone in the White House knew one truth: if you wanted access to FDR, you had to get through Missy. She was one of his most trusted advisors, affording her a unique perspective on the president that no one else could claim, and she was deeply admired and respected by Eleanor and the Roosevelt children. 

Tepperman, Jonathan. The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735286467. Reader TBA.
The heady promise of the Arab Spring has given way to repression, civil war, and an epic refugee crisis. Economic growth is sputtering. Income inequality is rising around the world. And the threat of ISIS and other extremist groups keeps spreading. We are living in an age of unprecedented, irreversible decline—or so we’re constantly being told. Tepperman presents a very different picture. The book reveals the often-overlooked success stories, offering a provocative, unconventional take on the answers hiding in plain sight. It identifies ten pervasive and seemingly impossible challenges—including immigration reform, economic stagnation, political gridlock, corruption, and Islamist extremism—and shows that, contrary to the general consensus, each has a solution, and not merely a hypothetical one. 

Westhoff, Ben. Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478942061. Reader TBA.
Amid rising gang violence, the crack epidemic, and police brutality, a group of unlikely voices cut through the chaos of late 1980s Los Angeles: NWA, led by a drug dealer, a glammed-up producer, and a high school kid, gave voice to disenfranchised African Americans across the country. And they quickly redefined pop culture across the world. Westhoff explores how hip-hop burst into mainstream America at a time of immense social change, and became the most dominant musical movement of the last thirty years. 

Abramovic, Marina. Walk Through Walls: Becoming Marina Abramovic. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735284821. Read by the author.
The child of Communist war-hero parents under Tito’s regime in postwar Yugoslavia,  Abramovic was raised with a relentless work ethic. Even as she was beginning to build an international artistic career, she lived at home under her mother’s abusive control, strictly obeying a 10 p.m. curfew. But nothing could quell her insatiable curiosity, her desire to connect with people, or her distinctly Balkan sense of humor—all of which informs her art and her life. 

Ackroyd, Peter. Alfred Hitchcock. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735285163. Reader TBD.
Alfred Hitchcock was a strange child. Fat, lonely, burning with fear and ambition, and afraid to leave his bedroom, he would plan great voyages, using railway timetables to plot an exact imaginary route across Europe. So how did this fearful figure become the one of the most respected film directors of the 20th century? As an adult, Hitchcock rigorously controlled the press’s portrait of him, drawing certain carefully selected childhood anecdotes into full focus and blurring all others out. Here Ackroyd reveals something more: a lugubriously jolly man fond of practical jokes, who smashes a once-used tea cup every morning to remind himself of the frailty of life. 

Anbinder, Tyler. City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501932649. Reader TBA.
With more than three million foreign-born residents today, New York has been America’s defining port of entry for nearly four centuries, a magnet for transplants from all over the globe. These migrants have brought their hundreds of languages and distinct cultures to the city, and from there to the entire country. More immigrants have come to New York than all other entry points combined. Anbinder’s story is one of innovators and artists, revolutionaries and rioters, staggering deprivation and soaring triumphs, all playing out against the powerful backdrop of New York City, at once ever-changing and profoundly, permanently itself.

Balcombe, Jonathan. What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins. Recorded Books. ISBN 978150192404. Read by Graham Winton.
Balcombe takes us under the sea and to the other side of the aquarium glass to reveal what fishes can do, how they do it, and why. Introducing the latest revelations in animal behavior and biology, Balcombe upends our assumptions about fish, exposing them not as unfeeling, dead-eyed creatures but as sentient, aware, social—even Machiavellian. They conduct elaborate courtship rituals and develop lifelong bonds with shoal-mates. They also plan, hunt cooperatively, use tools, punish wrongdoers, curry favor, and deceive one another. 

Clancy, Tara. The Clancys of Queens. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524703080. Read by the author.
Fifth-generation New Yorker Clancy was raised in three wildly divergent homes: a converted boat shed in working-class Queens, a geriatric commune of feisty, Brooklyn-born Italians, and the sprawling Hamptons estate she visited every other weekend. From scheming and gambling with her force-of-nature grandmother, to brawling with 11-year-old girls on the concrete recess battle yard of MS 172, to hours lounging on Adirondack chairs beside an immaculate croquet lawn, to holding court beside Joey O’Dirt, Goiter Eddy, and Roger the Dodger at her dad’s local bar, Clancy leapfrogs across these varied spheres, delivering stories from each world with originality, grit, and outrageous humor.

Collins, Phil. Not Dead Yet. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735208988. Read by the author.
Collins pulls no punches—about himself, his life, or the ecstasy and heartbreak that’s inspired his music. He tells the story of his epic career, with an auspicious debut at age 11 in a crowd shot from the Beatles’ legendary film A Hard Day’s Night. A drummer since almost before he could walk, Collins received on-the-job training in the seedy, thrilling bars and clubs of 1960s London before finally landing the drum seat in Genesis. Soon, he would step into the spotlight on vocals after the departure of Peter Gabriel and begin to stockpile the songs that would rocket him to international fame with the release of Face Value and “In the Air Tonight.” 

Cozzens, Peter. The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681682464. Read by John Pruden.
With the end of the Civil War, the nation recommenced its expansion onto traditional Indian tribal lands, setting off a wide-ranging conflict that would last more than three decades. In an exploration of the wars and negotiations that destroyed tribal ways of life even as they made possible the emergence of the modern United States, Cozzens illuminates the encroachment experienced by the tribes and the tribal conflicts over whether to fight or make peace, and explores the squalid lives of soldiers posted to the frontier and the ethical quandaries faced by generals who often sympathized with their native enemies.

Cranston, Bryan. A Life in Parts. S. & S. Audio. ISBN 9781508226314. Read by the author.
Cranston traces his zigzag journey from his chaotic childhood to mega-stardom and a cult-like following, vividly revisiting the many parts he’s played, on camera (astronaut, dentist, detective, candy bar spokesperson, president of the United States, etc.) and off (paperboy, farmhand, security guard, dating consultant, murder suspect, dock loader, son, brother, lover, husband, father). He chronicles his unlikely rise from a soap opera regular, trying to learn the ropes and the politics of show business on the fly, to a recurring spot as Tim Whatley on Seinfeld. He recalls his run as the well-meaning goofball, Hal, on Malcolm in the Middle, and he gives a bracing account of his run on Broadway as President Lyndon Johnson. Of course, Cranston dives deep into the grittiest, most fascinating details of his greatest role, explaining how he searched inward for the personal darkness that would help him create one of the most riveting performances ever captured on screen: Walter White, chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin.

Creighton, Margaret. The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 World’s Fair. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681682488. Read by Callie Beaulieu.
In 1901, Buffalo, NY, the eighth biggest city in America, wanted to launch the new century with the Pan American Exposition. It would showcase the Western hemisphere and bring millions of people to western New York. With Niagara Falls as a drawing card and with stunning colors and electric lights, promoters believed it would be bigger, better, and―literally―more brilliant than Chicago’s White City of 1893. Weaving together narratives of both notorious and forgotten figures, Creighton unveils the fair’s big tragedy and its lesser-known scandals. From a deranged laborer who stalked and shot President William McKinley to a 60-year-old woman who rode a barrel over Niagara Falls, to two astonishing acts―a little person and an elephant―who turned the tables on their duplicitous manager, Creighton reveals the myriad power struggles that would personify modern America.

Gaines, Chip & Joanne Gaines. The Magnolia Story. Thomas Nelson on Brilliance. ISBN 9781531833886. Read by the authors.
Are you ready to see your fixer upper? These famous words are now synonymous with the dynamic husband-and-wife team Chip and Joanna Gaines, stars of HGTV’s Fixer Upper. As this question fills the airwaves with anticipation, their legions of fans continue to multiply and ask a different series of questions, like—Who are these people and what’s the secret to their success? The first book from Chip and Joanna offers their fans a detailed look at their life together—from the very first renovation project they ever tackled together, to the project that nearly cost them everything; from the childhood memories that shaped them, to the twists and turns that led them to the life they share on the farm today.

Ginsburg, Ruth Bader with Mary Hartnett & Wendy W. Williams. My Own Words. S. & S. Audio. ISBN 9781508226284. Reader TBA.
My Own Words is a selection of writings and speeches by Justice Ginsburg on wide-ranging topics, including gender equality, the workways of the Supreme Court, on being Jewish, on law and lawyers in opera, and on the value of looking beyond U.S. shores when interpreting the U.S. Constitution. Throughout her life Justice Ginsburg has been (and continues to be) a prolific writer and public speaker. This book contains a sampling, selected by Justice Ginsburg and her authorized biographers Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams. 

Howell, Georgina. Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations. Tantor. ISBN 9781515911852. Read by Corrie James.
Gertrude Bell was at one time the most powerful woman in the British Empire: the driving force behind the creation of modern-day Iraq. Born in 1868 into a world of privilege, Bell turned her back on Victorian society, choosing to read history at Oxford and going on to become an archaeologist, spy, Arabist, linguist, author, poet, photographer, and legendary mountaineer. Her passion was the desert, and her vast knowledge of the region made her indispensable to the Cairo Intelligence Office of the British government during World War I. She advised the Viceroy of India; then, as an army major, she traveled to the front lines in Mesopotamia. There, she supported the creation of an autonomous Arab nation for Iraq, promoting and manipulating the election of King Faisal to the throne. 

Johnson, Albert “Prodigy” & Kathy Iandoli. Commissary Kitchen: My Infamous Prison Cookbook. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504746885. Reader TBA.
Meals are perhaps the most important aspect of prison life. They keep inmates alive, both physically and emotionally, as mess halls and common areas provide a level of social interaction in an otherwise lonely situation. Johnson served three and a half years in prison, and during that time his focus was on his health—an almost impossible feat behind bars, where many inmates often enter the prison system healthy but leave with diabetes and hypertension. Meal prep in prison is very limited, so while this work appeals to anyone who has served time or is curious about prison life, it also speaks to those who prepare food with limited access to various cooking luxuries.

Macintyre, Ben. Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain’s Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735288119. Read by the author.
Britain’s Special Air Service—or SAS—was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young, gadabout aristocrat whose aimlessness in early life belied a remarkable strategic mind. Where most of his colleagues looked at a battlefield map of World War II’s African theater and saw a protracted struggle with Rommel’s desert forces, Stirling saw an opportunity: given a small number of elite, well-trained men, he could parachute behind enemy lines and sabotage their airplanes and war material. Paired with his constitutional opposite, the disciplined martinet Jock Lewes, Stirling assembled a revolutionary fighting force that would upend not just the balance of the war, but the nature of combat itself. He faced no little resistance from those who found his tactics ungentlemanly or beyond the pale, but in the SAS’s remarkable exploits facing the Nazis in the Africa and then on the Continent can be found the seeds of nearly all special forces units that would follow.

Macy, Beth. Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother’s Quest; A True Story of the Jim Crow South. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478942528. Reader TBA.
Truevine, Virginia, 1899. Captured into the circus, George and Willie Muse performed for royalty at Buckingham Palace and headlined more than a dozen sold-out shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden. They were global superstars in a pre-broadcast era. But the very root of their success was in the color of their skin and in the outrageous caricatures they were forced to assume. Back home, their mother never accepted that they were gone and spent 28 years trying to get them back.

Mitchell, Greg. The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735285866. Read by John Lee.
In the summer of 1962, one year after East German Communists built the Berlin Wall, a group of daring young West Germans came up with a plan. They would risk prison, Stasi torture, even death to liberate friends, lovers, and strangers in East Berlin by digging tunnels under the Wall. Among the tunnelers and escape helpers were a legendary cyclist, an American student from Stanford, and an engineer who would later help build the tunnel under the English Channel. Then two U.S. television networks, NBC and CBS, heard about the secret projects, and raced to be first to air a spectacular “inside tunnel” special on the human will for freedom. The networks funded two separate tunnels in return for exclusive rights to film the escapes. In response, President John F. Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, wary of anything that might raise tensions and force a military confrontation with the Soviets, maneuvered to quash both documentaries.  

Morrison, Simon. Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet–From the Rule of the Tsars to Today. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681683126. Read by J. Paul Boehmer.
On January 17, 2013, a hooded assailant hurled acid into the face of the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, making international headlines. A lead soloist, enraged by institutional power struggles, later confessed to masterminding the crime. The scandal, though shocking, is not an anomaly in the turbulent and tormented yet magnificent history of the Bolshoi. Morrison reveals the ballet as a crucible of art and politics, beginning with the disreputable inception of the theater in 1776 and proceeding through the era of imperial rule, the chaos of revolution, the oppressive Soviet years, and the recent $680 million renovation project. 

Offerman, Nick. Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Woodshop. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780451485014. Read by the author.
Captained by actor, comedian, and writer Nick Offerman, Offerman Woodshop produces not only fine handcrafted furniture, but also fun stuff—kazoos, baseball bats, ukuleles, even mustache combs. Now Nick and his ragtag crew of champions want to share their experiences of working at the Woodshop, tell you all about their passion for the discipline of woodworking, and teach you how to make a handful of their most popular projects along the way. Listeners will also find humorous essays, odes to Offerman’s own woodworking heroes, insights into the ethos of woodworking in modern America, and other assorted tomfoolery.  

Palmer, Arnold. A Life Well Played: My Stories. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427278616. Reader TBA.
While other golfers have won more tournaments than Arnold Palmer has, no one has won more fans around the world and no player has had a bigger impact on the sport. In fact, Palmer is considered by many to be the most important golfer in history. As a follow-up to his 1999 autobiography, Palmer takes stock of the many experiences of his life, bringing new details and insights to some familiar stories and sharing new ones.

Prud’homme, Alex. The French Chef in America: Julia Child’s Second Act. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780399564840. Read by the author.
Julia Child is synonymous with French cooking, but her legacy runs much deeper. Now, her great-nephew and My Life in France coauthor vividly recounts the myriad ways in which she profoundly shaped how we eat today. He shows us Child in the aftermath of the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, suddenly finding herself America’s first lady of French food and under considerable pressure to embrace her new mantle. We see her dealing with difficult colleagues and the challenges of fame, ultimately using her newfound celebrity to create what would become a totally new type of food television.

Reynolds, Simon. Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504735506. 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. Reynolds explores how artists like Lou Reed, New York Dolls, and Queen broke with the hippie generation, celebrating illusion and artifice over truth and authenticity. 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 21-century idols of outrage such as Lady Gaga.

Skal, David J. Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681682525. Read by James Patrick Cronin.
Skal exhumes the inner world and strange genius of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon. Stoker was inexplicably paralyzed as a boy, and his story unfolds against a backdrop of Victorian medical mysteries and horrors: cholera and famine fever, childhood opium abuse, frantic bloodletting, mesmeric quack cures, and the gnawing obsession with “bad blood” that informs every page of Dracula. Stoker’s ambiguous sexuality is explored through his lifelong acquaintance and romantic rival, Oscar Wilde, who emerges as Stoker’s repressed shadow side―a doppelgänger worthy of a gothic novel. The psychosexual dimensions of Stoker’s passionate youthful correspondence with Walt Whitman, his punishing work ethic, and his slavish adoration of the actor Sir Henry Irving are examined in splendidly gothic detail.

Stewart, Alison. Junk: Digging Through America’s Love Affair with Stuff. Brilliance. ISBN 9781536610093. Reader TBA.
Junk details Stewart’s three-year investigation into America’s stuff. She rides along with junk removal teams like Trash Daddy, Annie Haul, and Junk Vets. She goes backstage at Antiques Roadshow and learns what makes for compelling junk-based television with the executive producer of Pawn Stars. And she even investigates the growing problem of space junk—23,000 pieces of man-made debris orbiting the planet at 17,500 miles per hour, threatening both satellites and human space exploration. But it’s not all dire. Listeners will also learn that there are creative solutions to America’s crushing consumer culture. 

Tolinski, Brad & Alad di Perna. Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735285514. Reader TBA.
The authors use 12 landmark guitars to illustrate the conflict and passion the instruments have inspired. Some of the most significant social movements of the 20th century are indebted to the guitar: It was an essential element in the fight for racial equality in the entertainment industry; a mirror to the rise of the teenager as social force; a linchpin of punk’s sound and ethos. And today the guitar has come full circle, with contemporary titans such as Jack White of The White Stripes, Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent), and Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys bringing some of the earliest electric guitar forms back to the limelight.

Urasek, Lauren. Popular: The Ups and Downs of Online Dating from the Most Popular Girl in New York City. Brilliance. ISBN 9781536610314. Reader TBA.
With more than 15,000 four- and five-star ratings, an average of 35 messages per day, and hundreds of thousands of profile views from interested suitors, Urasek was dubbed the most sought-after woman in the city by New York magazine. She then started a popular Tumblr detailing her experiences with Prince Charmings (and Not-So-Charmings) and now tells all in a series of frank, funny essays about the ups and downs of dating in the city that never sleeps.

Weiner, Jennifer. Hungry Heart: Adventures in Life, Love, and Writing. S. & S. Audio. ISBN 9781442361454. Read by the author.
No matter what was happening in Weiner’s life—whether good, bad, or very, very ugly—her mother, Fran, would say the same thing: it’s all material. Jennifer grew up as an outsider in her picturesque Connecticut hometown (“a Lane Bryant outtake in an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue”) and at her Ivy League college, but finally found her people in newsrooms in central Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, and her voice as a novelist and New York Times columnist. In her first essay collection, no subject is off-limits: sex, weight, envy, money, the reality of life with a newborn, her mom’s newfound lesbianism, and her estranged father’s death.

Wilson, Frances. Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504797818. Reader TBA.
Thomas De Quincey—opium eater, celebrity journalist, and professional doppelgänger—modeled his character on Coleridge and his sensibility on Wordsworth; De Quincey took over the latter’s cottage in Grasmere and turned it into an opium den. There, increasingly detached from the world, he nurtured his growing hatred of his former idols and his obsession with murder as one of the fine arts. Though De Quincey may never have felt the equal of the giants of romantic literature, the writing style he pioneered—scripted and sculptured emotional memoir—would inspire generations of writers, including Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Virginia Woolf. James Joyce knew whole pages of his work by heart.

Younge, Gary. Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504741415. Read by Mirron Willis.
Here Younge tells the stories of the lives lost during the course of a single day in the United States. It could have been any day, but Younge has chosen November 23, 2013. From Jaiden Dixon (9), shot point-blank by his mother’s ex-boyfriend on his doorstep in Ohio, to Pedro Dado Cortez (16), shot by an enemy gang on a street corner in California, the narrative crisscrosses the country over a period of 24 hours to reveal the powerful human stories behind the statistics. Far from a dry account of gun policy in the United States or a polemic about the dangers of gun violence, the book is a gripping chronicle of an ordinary but deadly day in American life, and a series of character portraits of young people taken from us far too soon and those they left behind. 

Allen, Frederick. Secret Formula: The Inside Story of How Coca-Cola Became the Best-Known Brand in the World. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520038131. Read by Kevin Stillwell.
Allen begins with Asa Candler, a 19th-century pharmacist in Atlanta who secured the rights to the original Coca-Cola formula and then struggled to get the cocaine out of the recipe. After many tweaks, he finally succeeded in turning a backroom belly-wash into a thriving enterprise. Written with unprecedented access to Coca-Cola’s archives, as well as the inner circle and private papers of Woodruff, Allen’s business biography is the account of what it took to build one of the world’s greatest business success stories.

Athill, Diana. Stet: An Editor’s Life. Brilliance. ISBN 9781522637738. Read by Jan Cramer.
For nearly five decades Diana Athill edited (nursed, coerced, coaxed) some of the most celebrated writers in the English language—among them V.S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Mordecai Richler, and Norman Mailer. Athill takes listeners on a guided tour through the corridors of literary London, offering an insider’s portrait of the glories and pitfalls of making books in a work that’s spiced with candid insights about the type of people who make brilliant writers and ingenious publishers and the idiosyncrasies of both. 

Bennetts, Leslie. Last Girl Before Freeway: The Life, Loves, Losses, and Liberation of Joan Rivers. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478987635. Reader TBA.
Joan Rivers was more than a legendary comedian; she was an icon and a role model to millions, a pioneer who left a legacy of expanded opportunity when she died in 2014. Her life was a dramatic roller-coaster of triumphant highs and devastating lows: the suicide of her husband, her feud with Johnny Carson, her estrangement from her daughter, her many plastic surgeries, her ferocious ambition and her massive insecurities. But Rivers’s career was also hugely significant in American cultural history, breaking down barriers for her gender and pushing the boundaries of truth-telling for women in public life.

Cole, Teju. Known and Strange Things. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501925368. Read by Peter Fernandez.
The 40-plus essays span art, literature, and politics, with topics from Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin to President Obama and Boko Haram. The collection includes new and pre-published essays that have gone viral, such as “The White Industrial Savior Complex,” first published in The Atlantic.

Diamond, Jason. Searching for John Hughes: Or, Everything I Thought I Needed to Know about Life I Learned from Watching ’80s Movies. Blackstone. ISBN 9781441728715. Reader TBA.
For as long as Diamond can remember, he’s been infatuated with John Hughes’ movies. Here he tells how a Jewish kid from a broken home in a Chicago suburb—sometimes homeless, always restless—found comfort and connection in the likewise broken lives in the suburban Chicago of John Hughes’ oeuvre. 

Douglas, John & Mark Olshaker. The Cases That Haunt Us: From Jack the Ripper to JonBenet Ramsey, the FBI’s Legendary Mindhunter Sheds Light on the Mysteries That Won’t Go Away. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504766517. Read by Malcolm Hillgartner.
Did Lizzie Borden murder her own father and stepmother? Was Jack the Ripper actually the Duke of Clarence? Who killed JonBenet Ramsey? America’s foremost expert on criminal profiling and 25-year FBI veteran John Douglas, along with author and filmmaker Mark Olshaker, explores those tantalizing questions and more. The authors reexamine and reinterpret the accepted facts, evidence, and victimology of the most notorious murder cases in the history of crime, including the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the Zodiac Killer, and the Whitechapel murders. Utilizing techniques developed by Douglas himself, they give detailed profiles and reveal chief suspects in pursuit of what really happened in each case.

Duneier, Mitchell. Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504767620. Reader TBA.
On March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in il geto―a closed quarter named for the copper foundry that once occupied the area. Here Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the sixteenth century and its revival by the Nazis to the present.

Graham, Lauren. Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls (and Everything in Between). Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524708955. Read by the author.
In her first work of nonfiction, Graham recounts her experiences on Gilmore Girls—the first and second time—and shares stories about life, love, and working in Hollywood, including tales of living on a houseboat, meeting guys at awards shows, and that time she was asked to be a butt model.

Herstand, Ari. How To Make It in the New Music Business. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681683348. Read by Derek Sivers & the author.
In the last decade, no industry has been through as much upheaval and turmoil as the music industry. Giving today’s aspiring musicians the practical tools they need to build and maintain a lifelong career, Herstand compiles a tutorial on how to accomplish specific tasks―routing a tour, negotiating contracts, getting paid for Spotify and Pandora plays, or even licensing music to commercials, film, and television―but also a manifesto that encourages musicians to pave their own path.

Johnson, Steven. Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735288317. Reader TBA.
This lushly illustrated history of popular entertainment takes a long-zoom approach, contending that the pursuit of novelty and wonder is a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change. Johnson argues that, throughout history, the cutting edge of innovation lies wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused. Johnson’s storytelling is full of surprising stops along the journey from simple concepts to complex modern systems. He introduces us to the colorful innovators of leisure: the explorers, proprietors, showmen, and artists who changed the trajectory of history with their luxurious wares, exotic meals, taverns, gambling tables, and magic shows.  

Jones, Cleve. When We Rise: Coming of Age in San Francisco, AIDS, and My Life in the Movement. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478942757. Reader TBA.
Jones brings to life the magnetic spell cast by 1970s San Francisco, the drama and heartbreak of the AIDS crisis and the vibrant generation of gay men lost to it, and his activist work on labor, immigration, and gay rights, which continues today. As did thousands of young gay people, Jones moved to San Francisco in the early ‘70s, nearly penniless, finding a city electrified by progressive politics and sexual liberation. Jones dove into politics and activism, taking an internship in the office of San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk. With the advent of the AIDS crisis in the early ’80s, Jones emerged as one of the gay community’s most outspoken leaders.

Kendrick, Anna. Scrappy Little Nobody. S. & S. Audio. ISBN 9781508213543. Read by the author.
Kendrick’s autobiographical collection of essays recounts memorable moments throughout her life, from her middle class upbringing in New England to the blockbuster movies that have made her one of Hollywood’s most popular actresses today. Expanding upon the witty and ironic dispatches for which she is known, Kendrick’s essays offer commentary on the absurdities she’s experienced on her way to and from the heart of pop culture.

King, Martin Luther. The Radical King. Brilliance. ISBN 9781511392815. Reader TBA.
Every year, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is celebrated as one of the greatest orators in U.S. history, an ambassador for nonviolence who became perhaps the most recognizable leader of the civil rights movement. But after more than 40 years, few people appreciate how truly radical he was. Arranged thematically in four parts, this work includes 23 selections, curated and introduced by Dr. Cornel West, that illustrate King’s revolutionary vision, underscoring his identification with the poor, his unapologetic opposition to the Vietnam War, and his crusade against global imperialism.

Kinsman, Kat. Hi, Anxiety: Life with a Bad Case of Nerves. Blackstone. ISBN 9781441724687. Read by the author.
Kinsman expands on the pieces she wrote for CNN.com about depression, and its wicked cousin, anxiety. Diagnosed with depression at 14, Kinsman speaks with pathos and humor about her “nervousness” that made her the recipient of many a harsh taunt. With her mother also gripped by depression and health issues throughout her life, Kinsman came to live in a constant state of unease. Now, as a successful media personality, Kinsman still battles anxiety every day. That anxiety manifests in strange, and deeply personal ways. But as she found when she started to write about her struggles, she is not alone. And though periodic medication, counseling, a successful career and a happy marriage have brought her relief, the illness—because that is what anxiety is—remains.

Lowery, Wesley. They Can’t Kill Us All: The Story of #blacklivesmatter. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478943211. Reader TBA.
From the killings of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown to the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Lowery takes readers to the front lines of history as it unfolds. The repercussions of police violence have sent citizens into the streets proclaiming that Black Lives Matter and politicians scrambling. Lowery examines the economic, political, and personal histories that inform this movement, and place what it has accomplished—and what remains to be done—in the context of the last fifty years of American history.

Myers, Marc. Anatomy of a Song: The Oral History of 45 Iconic Hits That Changed Rock, R&B, and Pop. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681683140. Reader TBA.
Covering the history of rock, R&B, country, disco, soul, reggae, and pop, this is a love letter to the songs that have defined generations of listeners from the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” to Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” to R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.” After being discharged from the army in 1968, John Fogerty does a handstand and revises Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to come up with “Proud Mary.” Joni Mitchell remembers living in a cave on Crete with the “mean old daddy” who inspired her 1971 hit “Carey.” Elvis Costello talks about writing “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” in ten minutes on the train to Liverpool. Mick Jagger, Jimmy Cliff, Roger Waters, Jimmy Page, Stevie Wonder, Bonnie Raitt, and many other leading artists reveal for the first time the emotions, inspirations, and techniques behind their influential works. 

Oshinsky, David. Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735285200. Reader TBA.
New York City’s Bellevue Hospital occupies a colorful and horrifying place in the public imagination: a den of mangled crime victims, vicious psychopaths, assorted derelicts, lunatics, and exotic-disease sufferers. In its two and a half centuries of service, there was hardly an epidemic or social catastrophe—or groundbreaking scientific advance—that did not touch Bellevue. Oshinsky chronicles the history of America’s oldest hospital and in so doing also charts the rise of New York to the nation’s preeminent city, the path of American medicine from butchery and quackery to a professional and scientific endeavor, and the growth of a civic institution.

Pomfret, John. The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681682686. Read by Tom Perkins.
Pomfret here lluminates every major event, relationship, and ongoing development that has affected diplomacy between these two booming, influential nations. Pomfret takes the myriad historical milestones of two of the world’s most powerful nations and turns them into one story, leaving listeners with a nuanced understanding of where these two nations stand in relation to one another, and the rest of the world.

Ribowsky, Mark. Hank: The Short Life and Long Country Road of Hank Williams. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681683300. Reader TBA.
After he died in the backseat of a Cadillac at the age of 29, Williams―a frail, flawed man who had become country music’s first real star―instantly morphed into its first tragic martyr. Having hit the heights with simple songs of despair, depression, and tainted love, he would become in death a template for the rock generation to follow. Examining his music while also re-creating days and nights choked in booze and desperation, Ribowsky traces the miraculous rise of this music legend―from the dirt roads of rural Alabama to the now-immortal stage of the Grand Ole Opry, and finally to a sad, lonely end on New Year’s Day, 1953.

Robertson, Robbie. Testimony. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780804166034. Reader TBA.
With songs like “The Weight,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and “Up on Cripple Creek,” Robertson and his partners in The Band fashioned a music that has endured for decades, influencing countless musicians. In this memoir, Robertson weaves together the journey that led him to some of the most pivotal events in music history. He recounts the adventures of his half-Jewish, half-Mohawk upbringing on the Six Nations Indian Reserve and on the gritty streets of Toronto; his odyssey at 16 to the Mississippi Delta, the fountainhead of American music; the wild early years on the road with rockabilly legend Ronnie Hawkins and The Hawks; his unexpected ties to the Cosa Nostra underworld; the gripping trial-by-fire “going electric” with Bob Dylan on his 1966 world tour, and their ensuing celebrated collaborations; the formation of the Band and the forging of their unique sound.

Rosen, Fred. Blood Crimes: The Pennsylvania Skinhead Murders. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520037875. Read by Neil Hellegers.
Raised as Jehovah’s Witnesses and frustrated with their parents’ repressive rules, Bryan and David Freeman rebelled as teenagers. Encouraged by an acquaintance he met while institutionalized at a reform school, Bryan became a neo-Nazi. Bryan then indoctrinated David, and their flare for defiance took a dark turn. After callously murdering their father, mother, and younger brother, the skinhead brothers took flight across America, with police from three states in pursuit. During the trial, Rosen uncovered evidence that one of the brothers might not have been as culpable as authorities claimed, and divulged the history of a family torn apart by stringent religious beliefs.

Rubery, Matthew. The Untold Story of the Talking Book. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504743884. Reader TBA.
Histories of the book often move straight from the codex to the digital screen. Left out of that familiar account is nearly 150 years of audio recordings. Recounting the fascinating history of recorded literature, Rubery traces the path of innovation from Edison’s recitation of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” for his tinfoil phonograph in 1877, to the first novel-length talking books made for blinded World War I veterans, to today’s billion-dollar audiobook industry. He focuses on the social impact of audiobooks, not just the technological history, in telling a story of surprising and impassioned conflicts: from controversies over which books the Library of Congress selected to become talking books to debates about what defines a reader. Delving into the vexed relationship between spoken and printed texts, Rubery argues that storytelling can be just as engaging with the ears as with the eyes, and that audiobooks deserve to be taken seriously. 

Shriver, Mark K. Pilgrimage: My Search for the Real Pope Francis. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524722395. Read by Jim Frangione.
Early on the evening of March 13, 2013, the newly elected Pope Francis stepped out onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica. Before he imparted his blessing to the crowd, he asked the crowd to bless him, then bowed low to receive this grace. In the days that followed, Mark K. Shriver—along with the rest of the world—was astonished to see a pope who paid his own hotel bill, eschewed limousines, and made his home in a suite of austere rooms in a Vatican guesthouse rather than the grand papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace. Here Shriver retraces Francis’s personal journey, revealing the origins of his open, unpretentious style and explaining how it revitalized Shriver’s own faith and renewed his commitment to the Church. 

Smith, Chris. The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478936558. Reader TBA.
For 16 years (1999-2015), The Daily Show was a game-changer in television, blurring the line between opinionated news reportage and comedy. It launched careers, lampooned legions of public figures and garnered 18 Emmys. Starting with the inception of the show and Craig Kilborn’s turn as host, this history covers the groundbreaking election coverage, Jon’s famous monologue in the wake of 9/11, confrontations with John McCain and Hillary Clinton, The O’Reilly Factor, the war with CNN and every satirical moment in between, including legendary cast members Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert, Lewis Black, Jon Hodgman, Steve Carell, Larry Wilmore, John Oliver, and a foreword from Jon Stewart.

Wagner, Robert. I Loved Her in the Movies: Memories of Hollywood’s Legendary Actresses. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524703356. Read by the author.
In a career that has spanned more than 60 years Wagner has witnessed the twilight of the Golden Age of Hollywood and the rise of television. During that time he became acquainted, both professionally and socially, with the remarkable women who were the greatest screen personalities of their day. Among Wagner’s subjects are Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe, Gloria Swanson, Norma Shearer, Loretta Young, Joan Blondell, Irene Dunne, Rosalind Russell, Dorothy Lamour, Debra Paget, Jean Peters, Linda Darnell, Betty Hutton, Raquel Welch, Glenn Close, and the two actresses whom he ultimately married, Natalie Wood and Jill St. John. 

Ward, Jesmyn. The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501941023. Read by Cherise Boothe, Michael Early, Kevin R. Free, Korey Jackson, & Susan Spain.
Ward takes James Baldwin’s 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point for this collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time. Contributors include Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Garnette Cadogan, Edwidge Danticat, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Mitchell S. Jackson, Honoree Jeffers, Kima Jones, Kiese Laymon, Daniel Jose Older, Emily Raboteau, Claudia Rankine, Clint Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Wendy S. Walters, Isabel Wilkerson, and Kevin Young.

Wiltz, Christine. The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520051307. Reader TBA.
1916: Norma Wallace, age 15, arrived in New Orleans. Sexy and shrewd, she quickly went from streetwalker to madam and by 1920 had opened what became a legendary house of prostitution. There she entertained a steady stream of governors, gangsters, and movie stars until she was arrested at last in 1962. Shortly before she died in 1974, she tape-recorded her memories—the scandalous stories of a powerful woman with the city’s politicians in her pocket and whose lovers included the 25-year-old boy next door, whom she married at age 64. Wiltz chronicles Norma’s rise and fall with the social history of New Orleans and resurrects a vanished secret world.

Vance, Erik. Suggestible You: Placebos, False Memories, Hypnosis, and the Power of Your Astonishing Brain. Blackstone. ISBN 9781441731494. Reader TBA.
Vance takes listeners from Harvard’s research labs to a witch doctor’s office in Mexico to an alternative medicine school near Beijing to show how expectations, beliefs, and self-deception can actively change our bodies and minds. Vance builds a case for our “internal pharmacy”—the very real chemical reactions our brains produce when we think we are experiencing pain or healing, actual or perceived. Supporting this idea is centuries of placebo research in a range of forms, from sugar pills to shock waves; studies of alternative medicine techniques heralded and condemned in different parts of the world (think crystals and chakras); and most recently, major advances in brain mapping technology. 

Zapruder, Alexandra. Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478924166. Reader TBA.
Abraham Zapruder didn’t know when he began filming President Kennedy’s motorcade on November 22, 1963 that his home movie would change not only his family’s life but American culture and history. Now his granddaughter tells the whole story of the Zapruder film for the first time. With the help of personal family records, previously sealed archival sources, and interviews, she traces the film’s complex journey through history, considering its impact on her family and the public realms of the media, courts, federal government, and the arts community. 

Bach, Sebastian. 18 and Life on Skid Row. HarperAudio. ISBN 9781504697095. Reader TBA.
The former front man for Skid Row tells the story of how a choir boy became a mega-successful hair-metal god, rode the wave of fame in heavy metal’s heyday, and came out alive on the other side when glam rock went the way of the cassette tape and the Walkman. Bach then went on to become the first rock star 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. 

Bogost, Ian. Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501936166. Read by Jonathan Yen.
Game designer and philosopher Bogost argues that games appeal to us not because they are fun, but because they set limitations. Such rules seem needless, arbitrary, and difficult. Yet it is the limitations that make games enjoyable, just like it’s the hard things in life that give it meaning. Play is what happens when we accept these limitations, narrow our focus, and, consequently, have fun. Which is also how to live a good life. Manipulating a soccer ball into a goal is no different than treating ordinary circumstances—like grocery shopping, lawn mowing, and making PowerPoints-as sources for meaning and joy. We can “play anything” by filling our days with attention and discipline, devotion and love for the world as it really is, beyond our desires and fears.

Bozella, Dewey. Stand Tall: Fighting for My Life, Inside and Outside the Ring. Blackstone. ISBN 9781441730008. Read by Sean Crisden.
In the late 1970s, Bozella was wrongfully accused of murdering Emma Crapser, a 92-year-old resident of Poughkeepsie, NY. Sentenced to 20 years to life in prison, Bozella fiercely maintained his innocence throughout his ordeal at Sing Sing, and even refused the prosecutor’s offer of instant freedom in exchange for admission of guilt. But in 2009, more than a quarter century later, Bozella would reclaim his identity and his humanity when his conviction was vacated. In this powerful memoir, Bozella tells his harrowing and amazing story—interweaving his time in prison with stories of a childhood marked by violence and pain. 

Byars, Clay. Will & I. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501924101. Read by Paul Woodson.
What would you have left if you awoke and were told you would be paralyzed from the eyes down for the rest of your life? After an almost fatal car crash and a botched surgery to repair nerve damage, that was Byars’s reality at 18 years old. Clay discovered a life far different from that of his identical twin brother, Will. As Clay’s life changed in an unimaginable way, Will’s continued as a typical college freshmen with the world at his feet, providing not only a foil to Clay’s inability to live a normal life but a sense of familiarity and connection to himself. As Will went on to graduate, marry, and start a family, Clay carved out a unique existence, doing the seemingly impossible by living on his own on a remote farm in Alabama.

Cauffiel, Lowell. Masquerade: A True Story of Seduction, Compulsion, and Murder. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520051840. Reader TBA.
In the exclusive suburb of Grosse Pointe, Alan Canty was a respected psychologist, with clients drawn from wealthy families across Detroit. But at night, he ventured into the city’s seedy south side, where, under the name Dr. Al Miller, he met with prostitutes. One girl in particular caught Dr. Al’s eye: a skinny teenage drug addict named Dawn, an ex-honor student who had fallen under the spell of a pimp named Lucky. Canty became their sugar daddy, spending thousands to buy them clothes, cars, and gifts. But when the money ran out, Canty’s luck went with it—and he was soon found hacked to pieces, his body scattered across Michigan.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520030456. Reader TBA.
Originally published in 1903, DuBois’s work contains many essays on race and equality, but it is also a piece of seminal history laying the groundwork for the field of sociology. When writing, Du Bois drew from his personal experiences as an African American to highlight the issues of prejudice in the 20th century.

Everitt, Anthony. The Rise of Athens: The Story of the World’s Greatest Civilization. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681684154. Read by Michael Page.
Everitt constructs his history with unforgettable portraits of the talented, tricky, ambitious, and unscrupulous Athenians who fueled the city’s rise, combining erudite, thoughtful historical analysis with stirring narrative set pieces that capture the colorful, dramatic, and exciting world of ancient Greece. Although the history of Athens is less well known than that of other world empires, the city-state’s allure would inspire Alexander the Great, the Romans, and America’s own Founding Fathers. 

Fortey, Richard. The Wood for the Trees: One Man’s Long View of Nature. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681683935. Read by Michael Page.
Fortey purchased four acres of woodland in the Chiltern Hills of Oxfordshire, England; this work is the joyful, lyrical portrait of what he found there. With one chapter for each month, listeners move through the seasons: tree felling in January, moth hunting in June, finding golden mushrooms in September. Fortey, along with the occasional expert friend, investigates the forest top to bottom, discovering a new species and explaining the myriad connections that tie us to nature and nature to itself. But he doesn’t stop at mere observation, using the forest as a springboard back through time, full of rich and unexpected tales of the people, plants, and animals that once called the land home.

Gabaldon, Diana. “I Give You My Body”: How I Write Sex Scenes. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501948107. Reader TBA.
For writers looking to make sure their next physical interlude on the page inspires readers to share the moment rather than to laugh at it, Gabaldon divulges the secrets behind the sex scenes in her wildly popular Outlander novels. Gabaldon shares her invaluable lessons for creating an immersive reading experience, from evoking a mood to using the power of emotions to communicate physical intimacy. You’ll learn the difference between gratuitous sex and genuine encounters that move the story forward, and how to handle less-than-savory acts that nevertheless serve a narrative purpose. 

Hamblin, James. If Our Bodies Could Talk. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524735203. Read by the author.
Hamblin explores the human stories behind health questions that never seem to go away—and which tend to be mischaracterized and oversimplified by marketing and news media. He covers topics such as sleep, aging, diet, and much more. In considering these questions, Hamblin draws from his own medical training as well from hundreds of interviews with distinguished scientists and medical practitioners. He translates the (traditionally boring) textbook of human anatomy and physiology into accessible, engaging, socially contextualized, up-to-the-moment answers. They offer clarity, examine the limits of our certainty, and ultimately help readers worry less about things that don’t really matter.

Herman, Arthur. How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501931260. Read by Robert Ian Mackenzie.
Who formed the first literate society? Who invented our modern ideas of democracy and free market capitalism? The Scots. As Herman reveals, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Scotland made crucial contributions to science, philosophy, literature, education, medicine, commerce, and politics—contributions that have formed and nurtured the modern West ever since.

Jones, Brian Jay. George Lucas: A Life. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478968450. Reader TBA.
On May 25, 1977, a problem-plagued, budget-straining, independent science-fiction film opened in a mere 32 American movie theaters. Conceived, written, and directed by a little-known filmmaker named George Lucas, Star Wars reinvented the cinematic landscape, ushering in a new way for movies to be made, marketed, and merchandised. Lucas went on to create another blockbuster series with Indiana Jones, and completely revolutionized the world of special effects, not to mention sound systems. 

Ndibe, Okey. Never Look an American in the Eye: A Memoir of Flying Turtles, Colonial Ghosts, and the Making of a Nigerian. Recorded Books. Read by Peter Jay Fernandez.
Ndibe’s memoir tells of his move from Nigeria to America, where he came to edit the influential—but forever teetering on the verge of insolvency—African Commentary magazine. It recounts stories of Ndibe’s relationships with Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and other literary figures; examines the differences between Nigerian and American etiquette and politics; recalls an incident of racial profiling just 13 days after he arrived in the United States, in which he was mistaken for a bank robber; considers American stereotypes about Africa (and vice versa); and juxtaposes African folk tales with Wall Street trickery. 

Noah, Trevor. Born a Crime. Brilliance. ISBN 9781531865030. Reader TBA.
In his first book, Noah tells his coming-of-age story with his larger-than-life mother during the last gasps of apartheid-era South Africa and the turbulent years that followed. Noah was born the son of a white Dutch father and a black Xhosa mother, who had to pretend to be his nanny or his father’s servant in the brief moments when the family came together. His brilliantly eccentric mother loomed over his life—a zealous Christian (they went to church six days a week and three times on Sunday), a savvy hustler who kept food on their table during rough times, and an aggressively involved, if often seriously misguided, parent who set Noah on his bumpy path to stardom. Noah writes of subsisting on caterpillars during months of extreme poverty, making comically pitiful attempts at teenage romance, being thrown into jail for a crime he didn’t commit, and being thrown by his mother from a speeding car driven by murderous gangsters.

Smith, Michael D. & Rahul Telang. Streaming, Sharing, Stealing: Big Data and the Future of Entertainment. Brilliance. ISBN 9781531868161. Read by Timothy Andrés Pabon.
Traditional network television programming has always followed the same script: executives approve a pilot, order a trial number of episodes, and broadcast them, expecting viewers to watch a given show on their television sets at the same time every week. But then came Netflix’s House of Cards. Netflix gauged the show’s potential from data it had gathered about subscribers’ preferences, ordered two seasons without seeing a pilot, and uploaded the first 13 episodes all at once for viewers to watch whenever they wanted on the devices of their choice. In this book, Smith and Telang, experts on entertainment analytics, show how the success of House of Cards upended the film and TV industries and how companies like Amazon and Apple are changing the rules in other entertainment industries, notably publishing and music.

Sobel, Dava. The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735288669. Read by Cassandra Campbell.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or “human computers,” to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned from computation to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates. The “glass universe” of half a million plates that Harvard amassed over the ensuing decades enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what stars were made of, divided the stars into meaningful categories for further research, and found a way to measure distances across space by starlight.

Taubes, Gary. The Case Against Sugar. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524709075. Read by Mike Chamberlain.
Taubes delves into Americans’ history with sugar: its uses as a preservative, as an additive in cigarettes, the contemporary overuse of high-fructose corn syrup. He explains what research has shown about our addiction to sweets. He clarifies the arguments against sugar, corrects misconceptions about the relationship between sugar and weight loss, and provides the perspective necessary to make informed decisions about sugar as individuals and as a society.

Vranich, Belisa. Breathe: The Simple, Revolutionary 14-Day Program To Improve Your Mental and Physical Health. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427279910. Reader TBA.
Contemporary science confirms what generations of healers have observed through centuries of practice: Breath awareness can turn on the body’s natural abilities to prevent and cure illness. The mental and physical stresses of modern life, such as sexual dysfunction, high blood pressure, digestive woes, and immune dysfunction can all be addressed through conscious control of your breath. In addition, it can increase energy, accelerate healing, improve cognitive skills, and enhance mental balance. Vranich shows listeners how to turn back the tide of stress and illness, and improve the overall quality of their life through a daily breathing workout. 

Winton, Tim. The Boy Behind the Curtain. Brilliance. ISBN 9781489358325. Reader TBA.
Winton reflects on the accidents, traumatic and serendipitous, that have influenced his view of life and fueled his distinctive artistic vision. He discusses the unexpected links between car crashes and religious faith, between surfing and writing, and how going to the wrong movie at the age of eight opened him up to a life of the imagination. And in essays on class, fundamentalism, asylum seekers, guns, and the natural world he reveals not only the incidents and concerns that have made him the much-loved writer he is, but some of what unites the life and the work.

Dando-Collins, Stephen. The Big Break: The Greatest American WWII POW Escape Story Never Told. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501946899. Reader TBA.
The true, previously untold story of the the most successful mass Allied escape of World War II opens in the stinking latrines of the Schubin camp as an American and a Canadian lead the digging of a tunnel which enabled a break involving 36 prisoners of war. The Germans then converted the camp to Oflag 64, to exclusively hold U.S. Army officers, with more than 1500 Americans ultimately housed there. Then, with the Red Army advancing closer every day, camp commandant Colonel Fritz Schneider received orders from Berlin to march his prisoners west. Over the next few days, 250 U.S. Army officers would succeed in escaping east to link up with the Russians—although they would prove almost as dangerous as the Nazis—only to be ordered once they arrived back in the United States not to talk about their adventures. 

Gary, Amy. In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown. Blackstone. ISBN 9781441783349. Read by Bernadette Dunne.
For decades children and their parents around the world have cuddled together to read Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny. While these stories have formed nighttime rituals for millions, few know that these classic works were part of a publishing revolution led by Margaret Wise Brown, who was renowned not only for her prolific writing and creative genius, but also for her stunning beauty and thirst for adventure. In 1990 author Gary discovered unpublished manuscripts, songs, personal letters, and diaries from Brown and used them to chronicles the author’s rise in the literary world. Clever, quirky, and wildly imaginative, Margaret embraced life with passion, threw wild parties, attended rabbit hunts, and lived extravagantly off of her royalties. She carried on long and troubled love affairs with both men and women, including the ex-wife of John Barrymore, and was engaged to a younger man, who was the son of a Carnegie and a Rockefeller, when she died unexpectedly at the age of 42.

King, Coretta Scott. My Life, My Love, My Legacy. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781250122629. Reader TBA.
Born in 1927 and one of the first black scholarship students recruited to Antioch College, a committed pacifist, and a civil rights activist, Coretta Scott was an avowed feminist—a graduate student determined to pursue her own career—when she met Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister insistent that his wife stay home with the children. But in love and devoted to shared Christian beliefs and racial justice goals, she married King, and events promptly thrust her into a maelstrom of history throughout which she was a strategic partner, a standard bearer, a marcher, a negotiator and a crucial fundraiser in support of world-changing achievements. As a widow and single mother of four, while butting heads with the all-male African American leadership of the times, she championed gay rights and AIDS awareness, founded the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, lobbied for 15 years to help pass a bill establishing the U.S. national holiday in honor of her slain husband, and was a powerful international presence, serving as a U.N. ambassador and playing a key role in Nelson Mandela’s election.

Kohler, Sheila. Once We Were Sisters. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504743617. Reader TBA.
When Kohler was 37, she received the heart-stopping news that her sister Maxine, only two years older, was killed when her husband drove them off a deserted road in Johannesburg. Stunned by the news, she immediately flew back to the country where she was born, determined to find answers and forced to reckon with his history of violence and the lingering effects of their most unusual childhood—one marked by death and the misguided love of their mother.

Krawcheck, Sallie. Own It: The Power of Women at Work. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735207233. Reader TBA.
So much career advice for women addresses how to succeed in the static business world of yesterday and today. But that world, says former Wall Street powerhouse-turned entrepreneur Sallie Krawcheck, is changing—and fast. In fact, we are on the brink of what Krawcheck calls the Fourth Wave of feminism, one that will usher in unprecedented opportunities for women in business. This all is being driven by the fact that the business world is evolving in ways that play to women’s strengths. Because in the increasingly complex and connected world of tomorrow—one in which communication and collaboration rule the day—the skills and qualities needed for success are ones that women inherently possess. And by owning and investing in those qualities women have more power than ever.  

Loechner, Erin. Chasing Slow: Courage to Journey Off the Beaten Path. Brilliance. ISBN 9781531834333. Read by Hayley Cresswell.
You’re here, but you want to be there. So you spend your life narrowing this divide, and you call this your race, your journey, your path. You live your days tightening your boot straps, wiping the sweat from your brow, chasing undiscovered happiness just around the bend. And on and on you run. Loechner knows about the chase. Before turning 30, she’d built a fan base of one million women worldwide and earned the title “The Nicest Girl Online” as she was praised for her authentic voice and effortless style. The New York Times applauded her, her friends and church admired her, and her husband and baby adored her. She had arrived at the ultimate destination. So why did she feel so lost? Here Loechner turns away from fast and fame and frenzy, blazing the trail toward a new-fashioned lifestyle—one that will refresh your perspective, renew your priorities and shift your focus to the journey that matters most. Through a series of steep climbs—her husband’s brain tumor, bankruptcy, family loss, and public criticism—Loechner learns just how much strength it takes to surrender it all, and to veer right into grace.

Madden, Thomas F. Istanbul: City of Majestry at the Crossroads of the World. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501932526. Reader TBA.
For more than two millennia Istanbul has stood at the crossroads of the world, perched at the very tip of Europe, gazing across Asia. The history of this city—known as Byzantium, then Constantinople, now Istanbul—is at once glorious, outsized, and astounding. Founded by the Greeks, its location blessed it as a center for trade but also made it a target of every empire in history, from Alexander the Great and his Macedonian Empire to the Romans and later the Ottomans. Emperor Constantine I re-founded the city as New Rome, the capital of the eastern Roman Empire, and dramatically expanded the city, filling it with artistic treasures, and adorning the streets with opulent palaces. Around it all Constantine built new walls, truly impregnable, that preserved power, wealth, and withstood any aggressor—walls that still stand for tourists to visit. From its ancient past to the present, listeners meet the city through its ordinary citizens—the Jews, Muslims, Italians, Greeks, and Russians who used the famous baths and walked the bazaars—and the rulers who built it up and then destroyed it, including Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the man who christened the city “Istanbul” in 1930. 

Preston, Douglas. The Lost City of the Monkey God. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478964520. Read by Bill Mumy.
Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God—but then committed suicide without revealing its location. In 2012 Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest, their rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization. Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. But it wasn’t until they returned that tragedy struck: Preston and others found they had contracted in the ruins a horrifying, sometimes lethal—and incurable—disease. 

Rowe, Claudia. The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder. Blackstone. ISBN 9781470855963. Read by Cassandra Campbell.
In September 1998, young reporter Claudia Rowe was working as a stringer for the New York Times in Poughkeepsie, NY, when local police discovered the bodies of eight women stashed in the attic and basement of the small colonial home that Kendall Francois, a painfully polite 27-year-old community college student, shared with his parents and sister. Rowe soon became obsessed with the story and with Francois. She was consumed with the desire to understand just how a man could abduct and strangle eight women—and how a family could live for two years, seemingly unaware, in a house with the victims’ rotting corpses. She also hoped to uncover what humanity, if any, a murderer could maintain in the wake of such monstrous evil. Reaching out after Francois was arrested, Rowe and the serial killer began a dizzying four-year conversation about cruelty, compassion, and control; an unusual and provocative relationship that would eventually lead her to the abyss.

Stone, Brad. The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478941118. Reader TBA.
In 2007, the crash had Wall Street and Silicon Valley reeling. The original renegades like Steve Jobs were now the establishment, and tech had become a way of life for suburban moms as much as for visionaries. The Valley was ready for a new revolution. Enter the upstarts: genius entrepreneurs with no lack of self-confidence created companies that turned our expectations on their heads. Travis Kalanick of Uber and Brian Chesky of Airbnb are just two of the disrupters Stone examines in this look at the intersection of tech, business, and culture. 

Waldman, Ayelet. A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501941474. Reader TBA.
When a small vial arrives in her mailbox from “Lewis Carroll,” Waldman is at a low point. Her mood storms have become intolerably severe; she has tried nearly every medication possible; her husband and children are suffering with her. So she opens the vial, places two drops on her tongue, and joins the ranks of an underground but increasingly vocal group of scientists and civilians successfully using therapeutic microdoses of LSD. As Waldman charts her experience over the course of a month—bursts of productivity, sleepless nights, a newfound sense of equanimity—she also explores the history and mythology of LSD, the cutting-edge research into the drug, and the byzantine policies that control it. 

Wiking, Meik. The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living. HarperAudio. ISBN 9781470827076. Reader TBA.
Why are Danes the happiest people in the world? The answer, says Wiking, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, is hygge. Loosely translated, hygge—pronounced hoo-ga—is a sense of comfort, togetherness, and well-being. Hygge is the sensation you get when you’re cuddled up on a sofa, in cozy socks under a soft throw, during a storm. It’s that feeling when you’re sharing comfort food and easy conversation with loved ones at a candlelit table. Wiking introduces listeners to this cornerstone of Danish life, and offers advice and ideas on incorporating it into their own lives, such as: get comfy, take a break, be here now, turn off the phones, turn down the lights, bring out the candles, build relationships, and spend time with your tribe.  

Wohlsen, Marcus. Biopunk: Soliving Biotech’s Biggest Problems in Kitchens and Garages. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504796491. Read by Paul Michael Garcia.
Champions of synthetic biology believe that turning genetic code into Lego-like blocks to build never-before-seen organisms could solve the thorniest challenges in medicine, energy, and environmental protection. Wohlsen chronicles a growing community of DIY scientists working outside the walls of corporations and universities who are committed to democratizing DNA the way the Internet did information. The “biohacking” movement aims to unleash an outbreak of genetically modified innovation by making the tools and techniques of biotechnology accessible to everyone. Along with the potential of citizen science to bring about disruptive change, Wohlsen explores the risks of DIY bioterrorism, the possibility of genetic engineering experiments gone awry, and whether the ability to design life from scratch on a laptop might come sooner than we think.

Balleisen, Edward J. Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681682969. Read by Tom Perkins.
The United States has always proved an inviting home for boosters, sharp dealers, and outright swindlers. Worship of entrepreneurial freedom has complicated the task of distinguishing aggressive salesmanship from unacceptable deceit, especially on the frontiers of innovation. At the same time, competitive pressures have often nudged respectable firms to embrace deception. As a result, fraud has been a key feature of American business since its beginnings. Balleisen traces the history of fraud in America—and the evolving efforts to combat it—from the age of P.T. Barnum through the eras of Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff. Starting with an early 19th-century American legal world of “buyer beware,” this account describes the slow, piecemeal construction of modern regulatory institutions to protect consumers and investors, from the Gilded Age through the New Deal and the Great Society. It concludes with the more recent era of deregulation, which has brought with it a spate of costly frauds.

Clavin, Tom. Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427283061. Reader TBA.
Dodge City, KS, is a place of legend. The town that started as a small military site exploded with the coming of the railroad, cattle drives, eager miners, settlers, and various entrepreneurs passing through to populate the expanding West. Before long, Dodge City’s streets were lined with saloons and brothels and its populace was thick with gunmen, horse thieves, and desperadoes of every sort. By the 1870s, Dodge City was known as the most violent and turbulent town in the West. Enter Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp. Young and largely self-trained men, the lawmen led the effort that established frontier justice and the rule of law in the American West, and did it in the wickedest place in the United States. When Bat left Dodge and Earp moved on to Tombstone, a tamed Dodge was left in the hands of Jim Masterson. But before long Wyatt and Bat, each having had a lawman brother killed, returned to that threatened western Kansas town to team up to restore order again in what became known as the Dodge City War before riding off into the sunset.

Donovan, Frank R. The Vikings. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681685458. Read by Chris Sorenson.
At the height of their power in the ninth and tenth centuries, the Vikings seemed invincible— conquering well-armed warriors whose ships were the ultimate in seafaring technology. From island bases near the deltas of major rivers, they used the waterways to scour the countryside, looting and burning towns, plundering merchant shipments, and stripping churches and monasteries of their gold, silver, and jeweled treasures. The Norsemen eventually penetrated all of England and Scotland, founded cities in Ireland, gained a powerful province in France, controlled Frisia and the modern Netherlands, and raided lands around Spain, passing into the Mediterranean to attack Italy and North Africa. They established the first Russian kingdom, challenged Constantinople, and provided a personal guard for the Byzantine emperor. They settled Iceland, where they developed Europe’s first republic, founded two colonies on Greenland, and explored parts of North America five centuries before Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas. Then,their adventures ceased.

Ekirch, A. Roger. American Sanctuary: Mutiny, Martyrdom, and National Identity in the Age of Revolution. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681684277. Read by Tom Zingarelli.
The extraordinary story of the mutiny aboard the frigate HMS Hermione in 1797 (eight years after the mutiny on the Bounty)—the bloodiest mutiny ever suffered by the Royal Navy, that led to the extradition from America, and the hanging by the British, of the martyred sailor Jonathan Robbins. This event plunged the two-decade-old American Republic into a constitutional crisis, and powerfully contributed to the outcome of the U.S. presidential election of 1800. It propelled to the fore the fundamental issue of political asylum and extradition, still being debated today—more than 200 years later.

Ignoffo, Mary Jo. Captive of the Labyrinth: Sarah L. Winchester, Heiress to the Rifle Fortune. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524779184. Read by Nan McNamara.
Since her death in 1922, Sarah Winchester has been perceived as a mysterious, haunted figure. After inheriting a vast fortune upon the death of her husband in 1881, Sarah purchased a simple farmhouse in San José, CA. She began building additions to the house and continued construction on it for the next 20 years. A hostile press cast Sarah as the conscience of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company—a widow shouldering responsibility for the many deaths caused by the rifle that brought her riches. She was accused of being a ghost-obsessed spiritualist, and to this day it is largely believed that the extensive construction she executed on her San José house was done to appease the ghouls around her. But was she really as guilt-ridden and superstitious as history remembers her? When Winchester’s home was purchased after her death, it was transformed into a tourist attraction. The bizarre, sprawling mansion and the enigmatic nature of Winchester’s life were exaggerated by the new owners to generate publicity for their business. But as the mansion has become more widely known, the person of Winchester has receded from reality, and she is only remembered for squandering her riches to ward off disturbed spirits.

Jamison, Kay Redfield. Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524755874. Reader TBA.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry, Robert Lowell (1917-1977) put his manic-depressive illness into the public domain. Now Jamison brings her expertise to bear on his story, illuminating the relationship between bipolar illness and creativity, and examining how Lowell’s illness and the treatment he received came to bear on his work. His New England roots, early breakdowns, marriages to three eminent writers, friendships with other poets, vivid presence as a teacher and writer refusing to give up in the face of mental illness–Jamison gives us Lowell’s life through a lens that focuses our understanding of the poet’s intense discipline, courage, and commitment to his art. Jamison had unprecedented access to Lowell’s medical records, as well as to previously unpublished drafts and fragments of poems, and was the first biographer to speak to his daughter. 

Kushner, David. Alligator Candy. Blackstone. ISBN 9781518930409. Read by Bronson Pinchot.
Kushner grew up in the early 1970s in the Florida suburbs. It was when kids still ran free, riding bikes and disappearing into the nearby woods for hours at a time. One morning in 1973, however, everything changed. David’s older brother Jon biked through the forest to the convenience store for candy, and never returned. Every life has a defining moment, a single act that charts the course we take and determines who we become. For Kushner, it was Jon’s disappearance—a tragedy that shocked his family and the community at large. Decades later, now a grown man with kids of his own, Kushner found himself unsatisfied with his own memories and decided to revisit the episode a different way: through the eyes of a reporter. 

Lee, Christine Hyung-Oak. Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember: The Stroke That Changed My Life. Blackstone. ISBN 9781470856175. Read by Emily Woo Zeller.
Lee woke up with a headache on New Year’s Eve 2006. By that afternoon, she saw the world—quite literally—upside down. By New Year’s Day, she was unable to form a coherent sentence. And after hours in the ER, days in the hospital, and multiple questions and tests, she learned that she had had a stroke. For months, Lee outsourced her memories to her notebook. It is from these memories that she has constructed this frank and compelling memoir. In a precise and captivating narrative, Lee navigates fearlessly between chronologies, weaving her childhood humiliations and joys together with the story of the early days of her marriage; and then later, in painstaking, painful, and unflinching detail, her stroke and every upset, temporary or permanent, that it causes.

Lemonick, Michael D. The Perpetual Now: A Story of Amnesia, Memory, and Love. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524750473. Read by Kaleo Griffith.
Lonni Sue Johnson was a renowned artist who regularly produced covers for The New Yorker, a gifted musician, a skilled amateur pilot, and a joyful presence to all who knew her. But in late 2007, she contracted encephalitis. The disease burned through her hippocampus like wildfire, leaving her severely amnesic, living in a present that rarely progresses beyond 10-15 minutes. Remarkably, she still retains much of the intellect and artistic skills from her previous life, but it’s not at all clear how closely her consciousness resembles yours or mine. As such, Johnson’s story has become part of a much larger scientific narrative—one that is currently challenging traditional wisdom about how human memory and awareness are stored in the brain.

Mack, Doug. The Not-Quite States of America: Dispatches from the Territories and Other Far-Flung Outposts of the USA. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681684352. Read by Jonathan Yen.
Everyone knows that the USA is made up of 50 states and, uh . . . some other stuff. The territories of American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands are often neglected, but they are filled with American flags and national parks and U.S. post offices and some four million people, many of whom are as proudly red-white-and-blue as any Daughter of the American Revolution. Mack ventures 31,000 miles across the globe and deep into American history to reveal the fascinating and forgotten story of how these places became part of the United States, what they’re like today, and how they helped create the nation as we know it. Along the way, Mack meets members of millennia-old indigenous groups, far-flung U.S. government workers, ardent separatists, and tropical-paradise dropouts and dreamers in a quixotic and winning quest to find America where it is least expected.

Miller, Adrian. The President’s Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, from the Washingtons to the Obamas. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504794992. Reader TBA.
Every U.S. president, from Washington to Obama, has had African Americans cooking in their kitchen—many serving as head chef. But these cooks were not only culinary artists. They also served presidents as personal confidantes, informal policy advisers, civil rights advocates, and family friends. These chefs had a unique perspective, but one that has been largely ignored until now. Through fascinating research gleaned from cookbooks, historical documents, oral histories, magazines and newspapers, and contemporary interviews from former White House chefs and staffers, as well as photographs of the White House kitchens and dining spaces, Miller tells this complex aspect of American history for the first time.

O’Connell, Mark. To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524751692. Read by James Garnon.
Once relegated to the fringes of society, transhumanism (the use of technology to enhance human intellectual and physical capability) is now poised to enter our cultural mainstream. It has found adherents in Silicon Valley billionaires Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis. Google has entered the picture, establishing a bio-tech subsidiary aimed at solving the problem of aging. O’Connell takes a headlong dive into this burgeoning movement. He travels to the laboratories, conferences, and basements of today’s foremost transhumanists, where he’s presented with the staggering possibilities and moral quandaries of new technologies like mind uploading, artificial superintelligence, cryonics, and device implants.

O’Shea, Stephen. The Alps: A Human History from Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681684673. Read by Robert Fass.
For centuries the Alps have seen the march of armies, the flow of pilgrims and Crusaders, the feats of mountaineers and the dreams of engineers―and some 14 million people live among their peaks today. O’Shea takes listeners up and down these majestic mountains, journeying through their 500-mile arc across France, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria, and Slovenia. Along the way, he explores the reality behind Hannibal and his elephants’ famous crossing in 218 BCE; he reveals how the Alps have profoundly influenced culture from Frankenstein to Heidi to The Sound of Music; and he visits the spot where Arthur Conan Doyle staged Sherlock Holmes’s death scene, the bloody site of the Italians’ retreat in World War I, and Hitler’s notorious vacation house, the Eagle’s Nest. Throughout, O’Shea records his adventures with the watch makers, salt miners, cable-car operators, and yodelers who define the Alps today.

Petrushevskaya, Ludmilla & Anna Summers. The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524755584. Reader TBA.
Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up in a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who were reduced in the wake of the Russian Revolution to waiting in bread lines. Here she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation—of wandering the streets like a young Edith Piaf, singing for alms, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing—of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the dining tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food—we see the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged.

Pryor, Elizabeth Brown. Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524752347. Read by Kimberly Farr & Beverly Brown.
An awkward first meeting with U.S. Army officers, on the eve of the Civil War. A conversation on the White House portico with a young cavalry sergeant who was a fiercely dedicated abolitionist. A tense exchange on a navy ship with a Confederate editor and businessman. Pryor examines six intriguing, mostly unknown encounters that Abraham Lincoln had with his constituents. Taken together, they reveal his character and opinions in unexpected ways, illustrating his difficulties in managing a republic and creating a presidency. 

Rydell, Anders & Henning Koch. The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524752019. Read by Kaleo Griffith.
When the Nazi soldiers ransacked Europe’s libraries and bookshops, large and small, the books they stole were not burned. Instead, the Nazis began to compile a library of their own that they could use to wage an intellectual war on literature and history. In this secret war, the libraries of Jews, Communists, liberal politicians, LGBT activists, Catholics, Freemasons, and many other opposition groups were appropriated for Nazi research, and used as an intellectual weapon against their owners. But when the war was over, most of the books were never returned. Instead many found their way into the public library system, where they remain to this day. Now, Rydell finds himself entrusted with one of these stolen volumes, setting out to return it to its rightful owner. It was passed to him by the small team of heroic librarians who have begun the monumental task of combing through Berlin’s public libraries to identify the looted books and reunite them with the families of their original owners. 

Schutt, Bill. Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681681962. Read by Tom Perkins.
Eating one’s own kind is a completely natural behavior in thousands of species, including humans. Throughout history we have engaged in cannibalism for reasons related to famine, burial rites, and medicine. Cannibalism has also been used as a form of terrorism and as the ultimate expression of filial piety. With unexpected wit and a wealth of knowledge, Schutt investigates questions such as why so many fish eat their offspring and some amphibians consume their mother’s skin; why sexual cannibalism is an evolutionary advantage for certain spiders; why, until the end of the 18th century, British royalty regularly ate human body parts; and how cannibalism might be linked to the extinction of Neanderthals. Today, the subject of humans consuming one another has been relegated to the realm of horror movies, fiction, and the occasional psychopath. But as climate change progresses and humans see more famine, disease, and overcrowding, biological and cultural constraints may well disappear. These are the very factors that lead to outbreaks of cannibalism—in other species and our own.

Thompson, Derek. Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524735104. Read by the author.
Nothing “goes viral.” If you think a popular movie, song, or app came out of nowhere to become a word-of-mouth success in today’s crowded media environment, you’re missing the real story. Each blockbuster has a secret history—of power, influence, dark broadcasters, and passionate cults that turn some new products into cultural phenomena. Even the most brilliant ideas wither in obscurity if they fail to connect with the right network, and the consumers that matter most aren’t the early adopters, but rather their friends, followers, and imitators—the audience of your audience. Thompson uncovers the hidden psychology of why we like what we like and reveals the economics of cultural markets that invisibly shape our lives. Shattering the sentimental myths of hit-making that dominate pop culture and business, Thompson shows quality is insufficient for success, nobody has “good taste,” and some of the most popular products in history were one bad break away from utter failure. 

Tyson, Timothy B. The Blood of Emmett Till. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520065007. Reader TBA.
Mississippi, 1955: Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was murdered by a white mob after making flirtatious remarks to a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. Till’s attackers were never convicted, but his lynching became one of the most notorious hate crimes in American history. It launched protests across the country, helped the NAACP gain thousands of members, and inspired famous activists like Rosa Parks to stand up and fight for equal rights for the first time. Part detective story, part political history, Tyson revises the history of the Till case, using a wide range of new sources, including the only interview ever given by Carolyn Bryant.

Williams, Florence. The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681683973. Read by Emily Woo Zeller.
For centuries, poets and philosophers extolled the benefits of a walk in the woods: Beethoven drew inspiration from rocks and trees; Wordsworth composed while tromping over the heath; Nikola Tesla conceived the electric motor while visiting a park. Intrigued by our storied renewal in the natural world, Florence Williams sets out to uncover the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain. From forest trails in Korea to islands in Finland to groves of eucalyptus in California, Williams investigates the science at the confluence of environment, mood, health, and creativity. 

Wright, Jennifer. Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504798990. Reader TBA.
In 1518, in a small town in France, Frau Troffea began dancing and didn’t stop. She danced herself to her death six days later, and soon 34 more villagers joined her. Then more. In a month, more than 400 people had died from the mysterious dancing plague. In late 19th-century England, an eccentric gentleman founded the No Nose Club—a social club for those who had lost their noses, and other body parts, to the plague of syphilis for which there was then no cure. And in turn-of-the-century New York, an Irish cook caused two lethal outbreaks of typhoid fever in a case that earned her the moniker “Typhoid Mary” and eventually led to historic medical breakthroughs. Throughout history, humans have been terrified and fascinated by the plagues they’ve suffered. Wright delivers the gruesome, morbid details of some of the worst plagues in human history, as well as the stories of those heroic figures who fought to ease the suffering of the afflicted.

Wyner, Gabriel. Fluent Forever: How To Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520065120. Reader TBA.
Memory is the greatest challenge to learning a foreign language; there are just too many words and too many rules. Starting with pronunciation, you’ll learn how to rewire your ears and turn foreign sounds into familiar sounds. And with the help of sophisticated spaced-repetition techniques, you’ll be able to memorize hundreds of words a month in minutes every day. This is brain hacking at its most exciting, taking what we know about neuroscience and linguistics and using it to create the most efficient and enjoyable way to learn a foreign language.

Bacon, John U. and John Sanders. Playing Hurt: My Journey from Despair to Hope. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478948902. Reader TBA.
The late ESPN broadcaster John Saunders, welcomes listeners into the heart of his desperate struggle through insights into the root causes of depression and explanations of modern medical and homeopathic treatments. His story unfolds among family, friends, and colleagues, but it also peers into places we don’t often discuss openly—psych wards and hospitals. Here is the honest story of a public figure facing his own mental illness head-on and emerging far better off for his effort.

Baldwin, Alec. Nevertheless: A Memoir. HarperAudio. ISBN 9780062657374. Reader TBA.
digital download.
Baldwin transcends his public persona, making public facets of his life he has long kept private. He introduces us to the Long Island child who felt burdened by his family’s financial strains and his parents’ unhappy marriage; the Washington, D.C., college student gearing up for a career in politics; the self-named “Love Taxi” who helped friends solve their romantic problems while neglecting his own; the young soap actor learning from giants of the theatre; the addict drawn to drugs and alcohol who struggles with sobriety; the husband and father who acknowledges his failings and battles to overcome them; and the consummate professional for whom the work is everything.

Bar-Joseph, Uri. The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel. Tantor Media. ISBN  9781515968443. Read by Neil Shah. digital download.
The sensational life and mysterious death of Ashraf Marwan—an Egyptian senior official who spied for Israel—offering new insight into the turbulent modern history of the Middle East.

Bauer, Wolfgang. Stolen Girls: Survivors of Boko Haram Tell Their Story. Translated by Eric Frederick Trump. High Bridge Audio. ISBN 9781681685892. Read by Bahni Turpin.
One night in April 2014, members of the terrorist organization Boko Haram raided the small town of Chibok in northeast Nigeria and abducted 276 young girls from the local boarding school. In Stolen Girls, Wolfgang Bauer gives voice to these girls, allowing them to speak for themselves—about their lives before the abduction, about the horrors during their captivity, and their dreams of a better future.

Bloomberg, Michael R. and Carol Pope. Climate of Hope: How Cities, Businesses, and Citizens Can Save the Planet. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427288479. Reader TBA. digital download.
To environmental activist and New York City’s former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Sierra Club Executive Director, Carl Pope, it’s clear that to treat climate change as either a lost cause or a non-issue is the wrong approach. Global leaders are stymied by the enormity of the doom-and-gloom scenarios. So what happens when you tell leaders that they can definitely—right now, this year—reduce the number of children who have asthma attacks, save thousands of Americans from dying of respiratory disease, cut energy bills, increase the security of our energy supply, make it easier for everyone to get around town, and increase the number of jobs in their community—all while increasing the long-term stability of the global climate?

Brody, Lauren Smith. The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom’s Guide to Style, Sanity, and Big Success After Baby. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524750619. Read by Allyson Ryan.  
Whether you’re in the final stages of pregnancy or hitting the panic button on your last day of leave, The Fifth Trimester offers honest and comforting tips, to-do lists, and take-charge strategies you’ll need to embrace your new identity as a working parent and set yourself up for success.

Callahan, Tom. Arnie: The Life of Arnold Palmer. Harper Audio. ISBN 9780062682321
Read by Danny Campbell. 
Arnold Palmer changed golf—and sports—forever. The winner of more than 90 tournaments, including four Masters, the numbers on his resume don’t do justice to the greatness of his achievements. Because Palmer wasn’t just a golfer in the golden age of the sport, knocking heads with other greats like Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player, he also was one of the first sportsmen to understand the marketing possibilities of his, and all, sports. Forging an alliance with sports agent Mark McCormick, Palmer parlayed his brilliance on the course into deals and paydays previously unheard of, and paved the way for the multi-million dollar promotional contracts that are standard across all sports today.

Cannell, Michael. Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber, and the Invention of Criminal Profiling. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427285959. Reader TBA.
Long before the specter of terrorism haunted the public imagination, for nearly two decades, a serial bomber stalked the streets of 1950’s New York. From Grand Central, Penn Station, and Radio City Music Hall, the race to catch him would give birth to a new science called criminal profiling.

Chernow, Ron. The Death of the Banker: The Decline and Fall of the Great Financial Dynasties and the Triumph of the Small Investor. High Bridge Audio. ISBN 9781681686332. Read by Michael Kramer. digital download.
Bestselling author of the biography behind the Broadway smash hit, Hamilton, Ron Chernow, examines the forces that made dynasties like the Morgans, the Warburgs, and the Rothschilds the financial arbiters of the early twentieth century and then rendered them virtually obsolete by the century’s end.

Chopra, Dr. Sanjiv and David Fisher. The Big Five: Five Simple Things You Can Do to Live a Longer, Healthier Life.  Dreamscape Media. ISBN 9781520072050.
The underlying promise of every exciting medical discovery, diet, and exercise program is the same: do this, buy this, or eat this, and you will look better, live longer, and be healthier. But these authors argue that if you adopt five simple, virtually free behaviors, you could live a longer and healthier life.

De Bellaigue, Christopher. The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times. Dreamscape Media. ISBN 9781520074337. Reader TBA.
Beginning his account in 1798, de Bellaigue demonstrates how the Middle East has long welcomed modern ideals and practices, including the adoption of modern medicine, the emergence of women from seclusion, and the development of democracy. De Bellaigue further shows how the violence of an infinitesimally small minority is, in fact, the tragic blowback from that modernization.

De Rosnay, Tatiana. Translated by Sam Taylor.  Manderley Forever. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427282330. Read by Kate Reading.
De Rosnay pays homage to the writer who deeply influenced her, following Rebecca author Du Maurier as a shy seven-year-old, a rebellious 16-year-old, a 20-something newlywed, and finally a cantankerous old lady. Manderley Forever is a portrait and celebration of an intriguing, popular, and underrated writer.

Edwards, Anne. Matriarch: Queen Mary and the House of Windsor.  Tantor Media. ISBN 9781541451087. Narrated by Corrie James. digital download.
Bestselling biographer Anne Edwards(Royal Sisters; Vivian Leigh; Wallis) tells the fascinating story of Queen Mary, formerly Princess Mary of Teck.  Born into a family of impoverished nobility, she was chosen by Queen Victoria as the bride for her eldest grandson, the scandalous Duke of Clarence, heir to the throne, who died mysteriously before their marriage. Despite this setback, she became queen, mother of two kings, grandmother of the current queen, and a lasting symbol of the British throne.

Engelin, Renee, PhD. Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Woman. HarperAudio. ISBN 9780062669988. Read by Teri Schnaubelt.
Dr. Renee Engelin, whose TEDx talk on beauty sickness has received more than 250,000 views, reveals the shocking consequences of our obsession with girls’ appearance on their emotional and physical health and their wallets and ambitions, including depression, eating disorders, disruptions in cognitive processing, and lost money and time. She combines scientific studies with the voices of real women of all ages.

Ennico, Cliff. The Crowdfunding Handbook: Raise Money for Your Small Business or Start-Up with Equity Funding Portals. Dreamscape Media. ISBN 9781520072098. Reader TBA.
In April 2012, President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act into law. This groundbreaking legislation empowers privately owned companies to raise capital from investors without going through the rigorous IPO and private-placement processes. In this book, small-business and legal expert Cliff Ennico explains the JOBS Act and translates the regulations into a set of do’s and don’ts, delivering targeted answers to issues such as whether or not crowdfunding is your best bet, how to pick the right legal entity, how to select types of securities to offer, how to reach the most promising investors, how to keep crowds under control, and more, helping entrepreneurs and small-business owners.

Evans, Harold. Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters. Blackstone. ISBN 97814789-68733. Reader TBA.
Evans has edited everything from the urgent files of battlefield reporters to the complex thought processes of Henry Kissinger. He’s even been knighted for his services to journalism. In Do I Make Myself Clear?, he brings his insight to us all in his definite guide to writing well. He provides practical examples of how editing and rewriting can make for better communication, even in the digital age.

Fronczak, Paul Joseph with Alex Tresniowski. The Foundling: The True Story of a Kidnapping, a Family Secret, and My Search for the Real Me. Simon & Schuster. Digital ISBN 9781508229254. Reader TBA.
The Foundling tells the true story of Paul Fronczak, a man who recently discovered via a DNA test that he was not who he thought he was—and set out to solve two 50-year-old mysteries at once. Along the way, he upturned the genealogy industry, unearthed his family’s deepest secrets, and broke open the second longest cold-case in US history, all in a desperate bid to find out who he really was.

Gandhi, Arun. The Gift of Anger And Other Lessons from My Grandfather Mahatma Gandhi. Simon & Schuster Audio. ISBN 9781508233855. Reader TBA. digital download.
The Gift of Anger takes listeners along with Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandi, his journey of self-discovery, as he learns to overcome his own struggle to express his emotions and harness the power of anger to bring about good. He shares ten life lessons about self-discovery, identity, dealing with anger, depression, loneliness, friendship, and family.

Henry, Ed. 42 Faith: The Rest of the Jackie Robinson Story. Blackstone. ISBN 9781536615517. Reader TBA.
Journalist and baseball lover Ed Henry reveals for the first time the backstory of faith that guided Jackie Robinson into not only the baseball record books but the annals of civil rights advancement as well. Through recently discovered sermons, interviews with Robinson’s family and friends, and even an unpublished book by the player himself, Henry details a side of Robinson’s humanity that few have taken the time to see.

Lamott, Anne. Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524734923. Reader TBA.
Bestselling author Lamott (Help, Thanks, Wow; Stitches) once again ventures forth to explore where we should look to find meaning in life. We should begin, she suggests, by “facing a great big mess, especially the great big mess of ourselves.” It’s up to each of us to recognize the presence and importance of mercy everywhere—“within us and outside us, all around us”—and to use it to forge a deeper understanding of ourselves and more honest connections with each other. While it can be difficult to do, it’s crucial.

Law, Keith. Smart Baseball: The Story Behind the Old Stats that are Ruining the Game, the New Ones that are Running it, and the Right Way to Think About Baseball. HarperAudio. ISBN 9780062660947. Read by Mike Chamberlain.
The renowned ESPN analyst and senior baseball writer demolishes a century’s worth of accepted wisdom, making the definitive case against the long-established view of the usefulness of baseball stats. Armed with concrete examples from different eras of baseball history, logic, a little math, and lively commentary, he shows how the allegiance to these numbers—dating back to the beginning of the professional game—is firmly rooted not in accuracy or success, but in baseball’s irrational adherence to tradition.

Leite, David. Notes on a Banana: A Memoir of Food, Love, and Manic Depression.
Blackstone. ISBN 9781538412237. Read by David Leite. digital download.
Born into a family of Azorean immigrants, David Leite grew up in the 1960s in a devoutly Catholic, blue-collar, food-crazed Portuguese home in Fall River, Massachusetts. “Banana” as his mother endearingly called him, obsessed over proper hair care, yearned to live in a middle-class house with a swinging kitchen door like the ones on television, and fell in love with everything French, thanks to his Portuguese and French Canadian godmother. But David also struggled with the emotional devastation of bipolar disorder. Until he was diagnosed in his mid-thirties, David found relief from his wild mood swings in cooking, Julia Child, and a Viking stove he named “Thor.”

Lowestein, Thomas. The Trials of Walter Ogrod: The Shocking Murder, So-Called Confessions, and Notorious Snitch That Sent a Man to Death Row. ISBN 978147081420. Reader TBA. digital download.
This exposé and investigation into the tragic 1988 murder of four-year-old Barbara Jean Horne and its aftermath leads readers through the facts of the case. Award-winning journalist Thomas Lowenstein attempts to make a case for the wrongful conviction of Walter Ogrod, a man with autism spectrum disorder who lived across the street from the girl’s family and who has been on death row since 1996.

Novarro, Joe. Three Minutes to Doomsday: An Agent, a Traitor, and the Worst Espionage Breach in U.S. History. Simon & Schuster Audio. ISBN 9781508237099. Reader TBA.
In 1988 Joe Navarro, one of the youngest agents ever hired by the FBI, was on a routine assignment to interview a “person of interest”—a former American soldier named Rod Ramsay—when he noticed his interviewee’s hand trembling slightly when he was asked about another soldier who had recently been arrested in Germany on suspicion of espionage. That thin lead was enough for the FBI agent to insist to his bosses that an investigation be opened. What followed is a two-year-long battle of wits between an FBI agent who couldn’t overtly tip to his brilliant target that he suspected him of wrongdoing, and a traitor whose weakness was the enjoyment he derived from sparring with his inquisitor.

Paxton, Robert O. The Anatomy of Fascism. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538414262. Read by Arthur Morey. digital download.
What is fascism? By focusing on the concrete (what the fascists did rather than what they said), esteemed historian Robert O. Paxton answers this question for the first time. From the first violent uniformed bands beating up “enemies of the state,” through Mussolini’s rise to power, to Germany’s fascist radicalization in World War II, Paxton shows why fascists came to power in some countries and not others, and he explores whether fascism could exist outside the early 20th-century European setting in which it emerged.

Salinas, Joel, M.D. Mirror Touch: Notes from a Doctor Who Can Feel Your Pain. HarperAudio. ISBN 9780062660886. Read by Adam Verner.
Dr. Joel Salinas is a Harvard-trained researcher and neurologist with extraordinary gifts that provide him unique access to his patients and enable him to experience life in an extraordinary way. He has mirror-touch synesthesia, a neurological trait that allows him to feel others’ emotions and physical sensations. Susceptible to the pain and discomfort of his patients—most of whom suffer from strokes, spinal cord injuries, multiple sclerosis, and a host of other painful disorders and extreme injuries—Salinas uses his heightened emphatic ability to help understand and better treat their conditions.

Sheffield, Rob. Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World.
HarperAudio. ISBN 9780062472038. Read by Rob Sheffield.
Rob Sheffield, the Rolling Stone columnist and bestselling author of Love Is a Mix Tape, looks at the most popular band in history, the Beatles, and explores what they mean today and why they still matter to a generation that has never known a world without them.

Simon, Scott. My Cubs: A Love Story. Blackstone. ISBN 9780525497103. Reader TBA.
NPR’s Scott Simon’s personal, heartfelt reflections on his beloved Chicago Cubs, replete with club lore, anecdotes, frenetic fandom and wise and adoring intimacy that have made the world champion Cubbies baseball’s most tortured—and now triumphant—franchise.

Bass, Jonathan, S. He Calls Me By Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty. Tantor Audio. ISBN 9781515965565. Read by Mirron Willis. digital download.
Caliph Washington’s life was never supposed to matter. As a black teenager from the vice-ridden city of Bessemer, Alabama, Washington was wrongfully convicted of killing an Alabama policeman in 1957. Sentenced to death, he came within minutes of the electric chair—nearly a dozen times. A Kafka-esque legal odyssey in which Washington’s original conviction was overturned three times before he was finally released in 1972, his story is the kind that pervades the history of American justice.

Bell, W. Kamau. The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell: Tales of a 6′ 4″, African American, Heterosexual, Cisgender, Left-Leaning, Asthmatic, Black and Proud Blerd, Mama’s Boy, Dad, and Stand-Up Comedian. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524733780. Read by Kamau Bell. digital download.
Tackling a wide range of such issues as race relations; fatherhood; the state of law enforcement today; comedians and superheroes; right-wing politics; failure; his interracial marriage; his upbringing by very strong-willed, race-conscious, yet ideologically opposite parents; his early days struggling to find his comedic voice, then his later days struggling to find his comedic voice; why he never seemed to fit in with the Black comedy scene… or the white comedy scene, W. Kamau Bell discusses how he was a Black nerd way before that became a thing and how it took his wife and an East Bay lesbian to teach him that racism and sexism often walk hand in hand…and much, much more.

Butler, Paul. Chokehold: Policing Black Men. Brilliance Audio. ISBN 9781531836672. Read by JD Jackson. digital download.
Cops, politicians, and civilians are afraid of black men. The result is the chokehold: laws and practices that treat every African American man like a thug. In this explosive new book, an African American former federal prosecutor shows that the system is working exactly the way it’s supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread—all with the support of judges and politicians. Butler, whose scholarship has been featured on 60 Minutes, uses new data to demonstrate that white men actually commit the majority of violent crime in the United States. He also also discusses the problem of black-on-black violence and how to keep communities safer—without relying solely on the police.

Cabot, Heather and Samantha Walravens. Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427291998. Reader TBA.
Meet the women who haven’t asked for permission from Silicon Valley to chase their dreams. They are going for it—building the next generation of tech start-ups, investing in each other’s ventures, crushing male hacker stereotypes and rallying women and girls everywhere to join the digital revolution. Geek Girl Rising isn’t about the famous tech trailblazers you already know, like Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer. Instead, veteran journalists Heather Cabot and Samantha Walravens introduce readers to the fearless female entrepreneurs and technologists fighting at the grassroots level for an ownership stake in the revolution that’s changing the way we live, work and connect to one another.

De Grasse Tyson, Neil. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538408018 Read by Neil De Grasse Tyson. digital download.
Today, few of us have time to contemplate the cosmos. So astrophysicist and TV commentator Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in digestible chapters that are consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day. While waiting for your morning coffee to brew, or while waiting for the bus, the train, or the plane to arrive, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry will reveal just what you need to be fluent and ready for the next cosmic headlines: from the Big Bang to black holes, from quarks to quantum mechanics, and from the search for planets to the search for life in the universe, listeners will get an earful.

English, Charlie. The Storied City: The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its Past. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524754952. Read by Enn Reitel. digital download.
To Westerners, the name “Timbuktu” long conjured a tantalizing paradise, an African El Dorado where even the slaves wore gold. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a series of explorers, gripped by the fever of“discovery,” tried repeatedly to reach the fabled city.  But one expedition after another went disastrously awry, succumbing to attack, the climate, and disease. Timbuktu was rich in another way too. A medieval center of learning, it was home to tens of thousands—according to some, hundreds of thousands—of ancient manuscripts, on subjects ranging from religion to poetry, law to history, pharmacology, and astronomy. When al-Qaeda–linked jihadists surged across Mali in 2012, threatening the existence of these precious documents, a remarkable thing happened: a team of librarians and archivists joined forces to spirit the manuscripts into hiding.

Eurich, Tasha. Insight: Why We’re Not as Self-Aware as We Think, and How Seeing Ourselves Clearly Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524702342. Read by Tasha Eurich. digital download.
Integrating hundreds of studies with her own research and work in the Fortune 500 world, organizational psychologist Eurich shatters conventional assumptions about what it takes to truly know ourselves—like why introspection isn’t a bullet train to insight, how experience is the enemy of self-knowledge, and just how far others will go to avoid telling us the truth about ourselves. Through stories of people who’ve made dramatic gains in self-awareness, she offers surprising secrets, techniques and strategies to help readers do the same—and therefore improve their work performance, career satisfaction, leadership potential, relationships, and more.

Franken, Al. Al Franken, Giant of the Senate. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478912569. Reader TBA.
Franken’s first campaign for the senate was an unlikely one, with an even more improbable ending: the closest outcome in history and an unprecedented eight-month recount saga. Here is a book about what happens when the nation’s foremost progressive satirist gets a chance to serve in the United States Senate and, defying the low expectations of the pundit class, actually turns out to be good at it. It’s an aduiobook about our deeply polarized, frequently depressing, occasionally inspiring political culture, written from inside the belly of the beast. In this candid personal memoir, the honorable gentleman from Minnesota takes his army of loyal fans along with him—from Saturday Night Live to the campaign trail, inside the halls of Congress, and behind the scenes of some of the most dramatic and/or hilarious moments of his new career in politics.

Graham, Ashley. A New Model: What Confidence, Beauty, and Power Really Look Like. HarperAudio. ISBN 9780062682666. Reader TBA.
In this collection of insightful, provocative essays plus-sized model, Graham shares her perspective on how ideas around body image are evolving—and how we still have work to do; the fun—and stress—of a career in the fashion world; her life before modeling; and her path to accepting her size without limiting her dreams—defying rigid industry standards and naysayers who told her it couldn’t be done. As she talks about her successes and setbacks, Graham offers support for every woman coming to terms with who she is, bolsters her self-confidence, and motivates her to be her strongest, healthiest, and most beautiful self.

Halson, Penrose. The Marriage Bureau: The True Story of How Two Matchmakers Arranged Love in Wartime London. HarperAudio. ISBN 9780062674302. Read by Jane Copland.
In the spring of 1939, with the Second World War looming, two determined twenty-four-year-olds, Heather Jenner and Mary Oliver, decided to open a marriage bureau. They found a tiny office on London’s Bond Street and set about the delicate business of matchmaking. From shop girls to debutantes, widowers to war veterans, clients came in search of security, acceptance, or simply love. And thanks to the meticulous organization and astute intuition of the bureau’s matchmakers, most found what they were looking for.

Ham, Paul. Passchendaele: Requiem for Doomed Youth. Brilliance Audio. ISBN  9781489390738. Read by Robert Meldrum. digital download.
This is the true World War I story of the ordinary men on both sides who were forced to endure a constant state of siege, with a very real awareness that they were being gradually, deliberately, wiped out. Yet the men never broke: they went over the top, when ordered, again and again and again. And if they fell dead or wounded, they were casualties in the ‘normal wastage’, as the commanders described them, of attritional war. Only the soldier’s friends at the front knew him as a man, with thoughts and feelings. His family back home knew him as a son, husband or brother, before he had enlisted. By the end of 1917 he was a different creature: his experiences on the Western Front were simply beyond their powers of comprehension.

Kakalios, James. The Physics of Everyday Things: The Extraordinary Science Behind an Ordinary Day. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524780173. Reader TBA. digital download.
Breaking down the world of things into sections that outline a single day, Kakalios satisfies our curiosity about how our refrigerators keep our food cool, how a plane manages to remain airborne, and how our wrist fitness monitors keep track of our steps. Each explanation is coupled with a story showing the astonishing science at work and revealing the interplay of the invisible forces that surround us. Through this “narrative physics,” The Physics of Everyday Things demonstrates that—far from the abstractions conjured by phrases like the Higgs Boson, black holes, and gravity waves—sophisticated science is also quite practical.

Katz, Jon. Talking to Animals: How You Can Understand Animals and They Can Understand You. Simon & Schuster Audio. ISBN 9781508237334. digital download.
Devoting each chapter to an animal from his life, Katz a big city guy who left it all for a farm, tells funny and illuminating stories about his profound experiences with them, showing us how healthy engagement with animals falls into five key areas: Food, Movement, Visualization, Language, and Instincts. Along the way, we meet Simon the donkey who arrives at Katz’s farm near death and now serves as his Tai Chi partner. We meet Red the dog who started out antisocial and untrained and is now a therapy dog working with veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. And we meet Winston, the dignified and brave rooster who was injured defending his hens from a hawk and who has better interpersonal skills than most humans.

Kasparov, Gary with Mig Greengard. Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begin. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478920335.
In May 1997, the world watched as Garry Kasparov, the greatest chess player in the world, was defeated for the first time by the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue. It was a watershed moment in the history of technology: machine intelligence had arrived at the point where it could best human intellect. Here, Kasparov tells his side of the story for the first time—what it was like to strategize against an implacable, untiring opponent—the mistakes he made and the reasons the odds were against him. But more than that, he tells his story of AI more generally, and how he’s evolved to embrace it, taking part in an urgent debate with philosophers worried about human values, programmers creating self-learning neural networks, and engineers of cutting edge robotics. He surveys the serious questions facing a world that is becoming increasingly reliant on AI, creating a guide for the business readers and educators he speaks to every year.

Koul, Scaachi. On Day We’ll Be Dead and None of This Will Matter. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427291417. Read by Scaachi Koul.
In these essays, Koul shares all the fears, outrages, and mortifying moments of her life. She learned from an early age what made her miserable, and for Scaachi anything can be cause for despair. Whether it’s a shopping trip gone awry; enduring awkward conversations with her bikini waxer; overcoming her fear of flying while vacationing halfway around the world; dealing with Internet trolls, or navigating the fears and anxieties of her parents. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of color: where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision, or outright scorn; where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, leaving little room for a woman not solely focused on marriage and children to have a career (and a life) for herself.

McDermott, Terry. Off-Speed: Baseball, Pitching, and the Art of Deception. Highbridge Audio. ISBN 9781681685182. Read by Joe Barrett. digital download.
Tracing the evolution of pitching and the pitcher’s art of deception, McDermott tells the story of baseball’s 150-year hunt for the perfect pitch. Using the framework of a single game (nine chapters, nine innings, nine pitches), he explores the history of every type of pitch, combining the folk wisdom of the players with the enormous wealth of new data brought to the sport by the growing legion of statisticians who are transforming many of the sport’s once sacred beliefs.

Moss, Tara. Speaking Out: A  21^st-Century Handbook for Women. Brilliance Audio. ISBN 9781489390790. Read by Tara Moss. digital download.
Drawing on 20 years of wide experience in the public sphere, Moss responds to the question: “How can I speak out?” in the most practical way. In this handbook she gives advice on preparation, speaking out, and negotiating public spaces—sometimes in the face of downright savage trolling. With a focus particularly on social media and online safety, she offers tips on how to research, form arguments, deliver confidently, find support, and handle criticism. A guide for women young and old that not only helps them find their voice, but argues for why it matters.

Nevins, Sheila. You Don’t Look Your Age: And Other Fairy Tales. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427286659. Read by an all-star cast.
Famed documentary producer (as President of HBO Documentary Films for over 30 years), Nevins steps out from behind the camera and takes her place front and center. This audiobook presents the real-life challenges of being a woman in a man’s world, what it means to be a working mother, what it’s like to be an older woman in a youth-obsessed culture, the sometimes changing, often sweet truth about marriages, what being a feminist really means, and that you are in good company if your adult children don’t return your phone calls.

Oswalt, Patton, Dave Anthony, and Gareth Reynolds. The United States of Absurdity: Untold Stories from American History. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524755294. Read by Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds. digital download.
Short and informative stories of the most outlandish (but true) people, events, and more from our country’s little-known history. Comedians Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds cover the weird stories you didn’t learn in high school, such as 10-Cent Beer Night, the Jackson Cheese, and the Kentucky Meat Shower.

Poundstone, Paula. The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness.  Highbridge Audio. ISBN 9781681684031. Read by Paula Poundstone. digital download.
Is there a secret to happiness? Comedian Paula Poundstone conducts a series of “thoroughly scientific” experiments to find out, offering herself up as a guinea pig and recording her data for the benefit of all humankind. Armed with her self-deprecating wit and the scientific method, in each chapter Paula tries out a different get-happy hypothesis. She gets in shape with taekwondo. She drives fast behind the wheel of a Lamborghini. She communes with nature while camping with her daughter. Swing dancing? Meditation? Volunteering? Does any of it bring her happiness? And more important, can the happiness last when she returns to the daily demands of her chaotic life?

Poundstone, William. Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street. Tantor Audio. ISBN  9781541453722. Read by Kyle McCarley. digital download.
In 1956 two Bell Labs scientists discovered the scientific formula for getting rich. One was mathematician Claude Shannon, neurotic father of our digital age, whose genius is ranked with Einstein’s. The other was John L. Kelly, Jr., a Texas-born, gun-toting physicist. Together they applied the science of information theory—the basis of computers and the Internet—to the problem of making as much money as possible, as fast as possible.

Rosen, William. Miracle Cure: The Creation of Antibiotics and the Birth of Modern Medicine. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524755836. Read by Rob Shapiro. digital download.
As late as the 1930s, virtually no drug intended for sickness did any good; doctors could set bones, deliver babies, and offer palliative care. That all changed in less than a generation with the discovery and development of a new category of medicine known as antibiotics. By 1955, the age-old evolutionary relationship between humans and microbes had been transformed, trivializing once-deadly infections. Rosen captures this revolution with all its false starts, lucky surprises, and eccentric characters. He explains why, given the complex nature of bacteria—and their ability to rapidly evolve into new forms—the only way to locate and test potential antibiotic strains was by large-scale, systematic, trial-and-error experimentation. Organizing that research needed large, well-funded organizations and businesses, and so our entire scientific-industrial complex, built around the pharmaceutical company, was born.

Smith, Stephen Kennedy and Douglas Brinkley. JFK: A Vision for America. HarperAudio. ISBN 9780062671707. Reader TBA.
Published in commemoration of the centennial of President John F. Kennedy’s birth, here is the definitive compendium of JFK’s most important and brilliant speeches, accompanied by commentary and reflections by leading American and international figures—including Senator Elizabeth Warren, David McCullough, Kofi Annan, and the Dalai Lama—edited by JFK’s nephew Stephen Kennedy Smith and renowned historian Douglas Brinkley, listeners can hear  about JFK’s life, presidency, and his compelling vision for America.

Steigerwald, Bill.  30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story that Exposed the Jim Crow South. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538431931. Reader TBA. digital download.
In 1948 most white people in the North had no idea how unjust and unequal daily life was for the ten million African Americans living in the South. But that changed after Ray Sprigle, a famous white journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and lived as a black man in the Jim Crow South. Escorted through the South’s parallel black society by John Wesley Dobbs, a historic black civil rights pioneer from Atlanta, Sprigle met with sharecroppers, local black leaders, and families of lynching victims. He visited ramshackle black schools and slept at the homes of prosperous black farmers and doctors. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter’s series was syndicated coast to coast in white newspapers and carried into the South only by the Pittsburgh Courier, the country’s leading black paper. His vivid descriptions and undisguised outrage at “the iniquitous Jim Crow system” shocked the North, enraged the South, and ignited the first national debate in the media about ending America’s system of apartheid.

Tannen, Deborah. You’re the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525493044. Read by Deborah Tannen. digital download.
Bestselling author Tannen deconstructs the ways women friends talk and how those ways can bring friends closer or pull them apart. From casual chatting to intimate confiding, from talking about problems to telling what you had for dinner, Tannen uncovers the patterns of communication and miscommunication that affect friendships at different points in our lives. She shows how even the best of friends—with the best intentions—can say the wrong thing, and how words can repair the damage done by words. Listeners will hear about themselves and their friendships on every page.

Weil, Andrew MD. Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better—and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478962922. Reader TBA.
Bestselling author Weil alerts readers to the problem of over-medication, and outlines when medicine is necessary, and when it is not. Dr. Weil examines how we came to be so drastically over-medicated, presents science that proves that drugs aren’t always the best option, and provides reliable integrative medicine approaches to treating common ailments like high blood pressure, allergies, depression, and even the common cold. Includes case histories, healthy alternative treatments, and input from other leading physicians.

Berg, Elizabeth. Make Someone Happy: Favorite Postings. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501954559. Read by the author.
This is a collection of Berg’s most-loved Facebook posts. She was asked by many to put these short essays into book form, to create, as one reader said, something to “take to the beach, or bed, or on an airplane.” 

Bergman, Ofer & Steve Whittaker. The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501958342. Read by Walter Dixon.
Each of us has an ever-growing collection of personal digital data: documents, photographs, PowerPoint presentations, videos, music, emails and texts sent and received. To access any of this, we have to find it. The ease (or difficulty) of finding something depends on how we organize our digital stuff. Personal information management experts Bergman and Whittaker explain why we organize our personal digital data the way we do and how the design of new systems can help us manage our collections more efficiently. 

Coupland, Douglas. Bit Rot: Stories and Essays. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501940385. read by Graham Rowat.
“Bit rot” is a term used in digital archiving to describe the way digital files can spontaneously and quickly decompose. As Coupland writes, “Bit rot also describes the way my brain has been feeling since 2000, as I shed older and weaker neurons and connections and enhance new and unexpected ones.” Bit Rot the book is a fascinating meditation on the ways in which humanity tries to make sense of our shifting consciousness. Coupland, just like the Internet, mixes forms to achieve his ends. Short fiction is interspersed with essays on all aspects of modern life. 

Mann, Don & Lance Burton. Navy SEALs: The Combat History of the Deadliest Warriors on the Planet. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681685991. Read by John Pruden.
From their birth in World War II as combat swimmers clearing the beaches of Normandy to their evolution into fighting men who could operate anywhere in the world by sea, air, or land, the intrepid story of the United States Navy SEALs is one that echoes other great military units of history—the Spartans, the Roman legions, or the samurai. 

Mulcahy, Diane. The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501958311. Read by Marguerite Gavin.
From Uber to the presidential debates, the gig economy has been dominating the headlines—and for good reason. Today, more than a third of Americans are working in the gig economy—mixing together short-term jobs, contract work, and freelance assignments. The Gig Economy is your guide to this uncertain but ultimately rewarding world. Succeeding in it starts with shifting gears to recognize that only you control your future. Next is leveraging your skills, knowledge, and network to create your own career trajectory, one immune to the whims of an employer. 

Rhodes, Robert Hunt. All For the Union: The Civil War Diary and Letters of Elisha Hunt Rhodes. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781490675404. Read by Norman Dietz.
The astonishing and eloquent diary of Elisha Hunt Rhodes, the Union soldier featured in Ken Burns’s PBS television documentary The Civil War. Enlisting as a private in the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry, Rhodes fought in every major campaign waged by the Army of the Potomac, from Bull Run to Appomattox. Here, in his own powerfully moving words, Rhodes reveals why he was willing to die to preserve his beloved Union.

Romolini, Jennifer. Weird in a World That’s Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures. HarperAudio. ISBN 9781538420065. Read by Em Eldridge.
Romolini asserts that being outside the norm and achieving real, high-level success are not mutually exclusive, even if the perception of the business world often seems otherwise, even if it seems like only office-politicking extroverts are set up for reward. Part career memoir, part real-world guide, Weird in a World That’s Not offers relatable advice on how to achieve your dreams, even when the odds seem stacked against you.

Sastry, Anjali & Kara Penn. Fail Better: Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501941672. Read by Callie Beaulieu.
Whether you’re rolling out a new product from a city-view office or rolling up your sleeves to deliver a social service in the field, learning why and how to embrace failure can help you do better, faster. Smart leaders, entrepreneurs, and change agents design their innovation projects with a key idea in mind: ensure that every failure is maximally useful.

Taylor, Charles. Opening Wednesday at a Theater Or Drive-In Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American ’70s. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681685120. Read by A.T. Chandler.
When we think of ’70s cinema, we think of classics like The Godfather, Taxi Driver, and The Wild Bunch, but the riches found in the overlooked B movies of the time, rolled out wherever they might find an audience, unexpectedly tell an eye-opening story about post-Watergate, post-Vietnam America. Taylor pays homage to the trucker vigilantes, meat magnate pimps, blaxploitation “angel avengers,” and taciturn factory workers ofl B films such as Prime Cut, Foxy Brown, and Eyes of Laura Mars. He creates a compelling argument for what matters in moviemaking and brings a pivotal American era vividly to life.

Weigel, David. The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681686059. Read by Rudy Sanda.
The behind-the-scenes story of the extraordinary rise and fall of progressive (“prog”) rock, epitomized by such classic, chart-topping bands as Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, and Emerson Lake & Palmer, and their successors Rush, Styx, and Asia.

Alexander, Stephon. The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520078144. Reader TBA.
More than 50 years ago, John Coltrane drew the 12 musical notes in a circle and connected them by straight lines, forming a five-pointed star. Inspired by Einstein, Coltrane put physics and geometry at the core of his music. Now, physicist and jazz musician Alexander follows suit, using jazz to investigate physics. Following in the tradition of the great minds that first drew links between music and physics—Pythagoras, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, and Rakim—this work visits both the ancient realm where music, physics, and the cosmos were one and Alexander’s own life. For, in Alexander’s attempts to reconcile and balance his own passion for music and physics, he uncovered a connection between the fundamental waves that make up sound and the fundamental waves that make up everything else-a connection which reveals that, when the ancient poetic idea of the “music of the spheres” is taken seriously, it can clarify some of physics’ most vexing questions.

Bozzo, Donna. What the Fun?: 427 Simple Ways To Have Fantastic Family Fun. Blackstone. ISBN 9781469066042. Read by the author.
Creating more fun in your days will make you a joy to be around and you’ll be a great example to your children. They will learn how to find their own happiness. What more could you want for your kids? Bozzo has shared her prescription for folding tons of fantastic fun into your days with millions of people on television and in magazines.Here she gives listeners 427 easy ideas to help you put more fun in your family’s life any and every day, including five-minute fun fixes; zany ways to shake up the ole (yawn) daily routine; clever bedtime, homework, and chore time struggle stoppers; quick ways to create family memories; and other ways to make each and every day a special occasion.

Crystal, David. Making Sense: The Glamorous Story of the English Language. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501959585. Reader TBA.
Crystal confronts the foe of many: grammar. Once taught relentlessly to all students in the English-speaking world, grammar disappeared from most school curricula, so that terms such as “preposition” and “conjunction” now often confound children and adults alike. Explaining the nuts and bolts of grammar presents a special challenge, because—far more than is the case with spelling and punctuation—the subject is burdened with a centuries-old history of educational practice that many will recall as anything but glamorous. One of the world’s foremost authorities on the English language, Crystal sets out to rid grammar of its undeserved reputation as a dry and intimidating subject, pointing out how essential grammar is to clear and effective speech and writing. He moves briskly through the stages by which children acquire grammar, along the way demystifying grammar’s rules and irregularities and showing us how to navigate its snares and pitfalls.

Danticat, Edwidge. The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story. ISBN 9781501954078. Reader TBA.
At once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work. “Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses,” Danticat notes in her introduction. “I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing.” The book moves outward from the shock of her mother’s diagnosis and sifts through Danticat’s writing life and personal history, all the while shifting fluidly from examples that range from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude to Toni Morrison’s Sula. The narrative, which continually circles the many incarnations of death from individual to large-scale catastrophes, culminates in a beautiful, heartrending prayer in the voice of Danticat’s mother.

Davis, Angela J., ed. Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538420652. Read by Robin Miles & Kevin Kenerly..
A comprehensive analysis of the key issues of the Black Lives Matter movement, this thought-provoking and compelling anthology features essays by some of the nation’s most influential and respected criminal justice experts and legal scholars. Contributing authors include Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Institute, NYU Law professor, and author of the New York Times bestseller Just Mercy; Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund; Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice; and many others. Essays range from an explication of the historical roots of racism in the criminal justice system to an examination of modern-day police killings of unarmed black men. The coauthors discuss and explain racial profiling, the power and discretion of police and prosecutors, the role of implicit bias, the racial impact of police and prosecutorial decisions, the disproportionate imprisonment of black men, the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, and the Supreme Court’s failure to provide meaningful remedies for the injustices in the criminal justice system.

Eggerichs, Emerson. Before You Hit Send: Preventing Headache and Heartache. Brilliance. ISBN 978-1536693119. Read by the author.
Our methods of communication today allow for something to potentially be broadcast to everyone from Pekin, IL, to Peking, China. But it’s not only Twitter fanatics who can find themselves in trouble. Every single one of us is capable of falling prey to this growing plague. Every day we have the potential of both verbal and written blunders. It makes no difference if we are talking to a stranger over a meat counter, chatting on a cell phone with our mother, or sending an e-mail to a coworker; we can and do miscommunicate and people can and do get the wrong idea. When we don’t pause long enough to think before speaking or writing, it commonly yields a misunderstanding and leads to a clash. This book is about preventing that misunderstanding and allowing for understanding.

Flair, Ric & Charlotte. Second Nature: The Legacy of Ric Flair and the Rise of Charlotte. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427288943. Reader TBA.
For the first time ever, WWE’s illustrious father-daughter duo “Nature Boy” Ric Flair and Charlotte come together to tell their legendary story. Ric Flair is a 16-time World Champion and two-time WWE Hall of Fame Inductee. Despite his effortless brilliance in front of the cameras, his life away from the cameras includes personal struggles, controversy and family tragedy. Charlotte grew up in the shadow of her famous father, “the dirtiest player in the game,” but now she is poised to take the Flair name to new heights. As the inaugural WWE Women’s Champion, Charlotte has had an impressive career, and she’s just getting started.

Hesse, Monica. American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520075846. Reader TBA.
Shocked by a five-month arson spree that left rural Virginia reeling, Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse drove down to Accomack County to cover the trial of Charlie Smith, who pled guilty to 67 counts of arson. But Charlie wasn’t lighting fires alone: he had an accomplice, his girlfriend Tonya Bundick. Through her depiction of the dangerous shift that happened in their passionate relationship, Hesse brilliantly brings to life the once-thriving coastal community and its distressed inhabitants, who had already been decimated by a punishing economy before they were terrified by a string of fires they could not explain.

Kean, Sam. Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478950523. Reader TBA.
With every breath, you literally inhale the history of the world. On the ides of March, 44 BC, Julius Caesar died of stab wounds on the Senate floor, but the story of his last breath is still unfolding; in fact, you’re probably inhaling some of it now. Of the sextillions of molecules entering or leaving your lungs at this moment, some might well bear traces of Cleopatra’s perfumes, German mustard gas, particles exhaled by dinosaurs or emitted by atomic bombs, even remnants of stardust from the universe’s creation. Tracing the origins and ingredients of our atmosphere, Kean reveals how the alchemy of air reshaped our continents, steered human progress, powered revolutions, and continues to influence everything we do. Along the way, we’ll swim with radioactive pigs, witness the most important chemical reactions humans have discovered, and join the crowd at the Moulin Rouge for some of the crudest performance art of all time.

McMeekin, Sean. The Russian Revolution. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478994794. Reader TBA.
McMeekin traces the origins and events of the Russian Revolution, which ended Romanov rule, ushered the Bolsheviks into power, and changed the course of world history. Between 1900 and 1920, Russia underwent a complete and irreversible transformation: by the end of these two decades, a new regime was in place, the economy had collapsed, and over 20 million Russians had died during the revolution and what followed. Still, Bolshevik power remained intact due to a remarkable combination of military prowess, violent terror tactics, and the failures of their opposition. And as McMeekin shows, Russia’s revolutionaries were aided at nearly every step by countries like Germany and Sweden who sought to benefit—politically and economically—from the chaotic changes overtaking the country.

Nye, Bill. Everything All at Once: How to Unleash Your Inner Nerd, Tap into Radical Curiosity and Solve Any Problem. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501948992. Read by the author.
Nye believes we’ll never be able to tackle our society’s biggest, most complex problems if we don’t even know how to solve the small ones. Step by step, he shows his readers the key tools behind his everything-all-at-once approach: radical curiosity, a deep desire for a better future, and a willingness to take the actions needed to make it a reality. Problem solving is a skill that anyone can harness to create change, and Bill Nye is here to teach us how. Each chapter describes a principle of problem solving that Nye himself uses—methodical, fact-based approaches to life that aspires to leave no stone unturned. He explains how the nerd mindset leads to a richer and more meaningful life; far more than that, it can help address hunger, crime, poverty, pollution, and even assist the democratic process.

Roosevelt, Curtis. Upstairs at the Roosevelts’: Growing Up with Franklin and Eleanor. Blackstone. ISBN 9781470852511. Read by Robertson Dean.
Curtis Roosevelt knew what it was like to live with a president. His grandfather was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From the time Curtis, with his sister Eleanor and recently divorced mother, Anna Roosevelt Dall, moved into his grandparents’ new home—the White House—Curtis played, learned, slept, ate, and lived in one of the most famous buildings in the world with one of its most famous residents. Writing about his childhood from that perspective, Curtis Roosevelt offers anecdotes and revelations about the lives of the president and First Lady and the many colorful personalities in this presidential family. From Eleanor’s shocking role in the remarriage of Curtis’s mother to visits from naughty cousins and trips to the “Home Farm,” this work provides an intimate perspective on the dynamics of one of America’s most famous families.

Roy, Arundhati & John Cusack. Things That Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538411360. Read by the authors.
In this rich dialogue on surveillance, empire, and power, Roy and Cusack describe meeting with National Security Agency whistleblower Ed Snowden. In late 2014, Roy, Cusack, and Daniel Ellsberg traveled to Moscow to meet with Snowden. In these discussions, Roy and Cusack discuss the nature of the state, empire, and surveillance in an era of perpetual war, the meaning of flags and patriotism, the role of foundations and NGOs in limiting dissent, and the ways in which capital but not people can freely cross borders.

Scottoline, Lisa & Francesca Serritella. I Need a Lifeguard Everywhere but the Pool. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427285904. Read by the authors.
Lisa and Francesca are back with another collection of warm and witty stories that will strike a chord with every woman.

Smith, Gary. Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics. Blackstone. ISBN 9781469066189. Read by Timothy Andres Pabon.
Did you know that baseball players whose names begin with the letter “D” are more likely to die young? Or that Asian Americans are most susceptible to heart attacks on the fourth day of the month? Or that drinking a full pot of coffee every morning will add years to your life, but one cup a day increases the risk of pancreatic cancer? All of these “facts” have been argued with a straight face by credentialed researchers and backed up with reams of data and convincing statistics. Lying with statistics is a time-honored con. Here Smith walks us through the various tricks and traps that people use to back up their own crackpot theories. Sometimes, the unscrupulous deliberately try to mislead us. Other times, the well-intentioned are blissfully unaware of the mischief they are committing. Today, data is so plentiful that researchers spend precious little time distinguishing between good, meaningful indicators and total rubbish. Not only do others use data to fool us, we fool ourselves.

Baldwin, James. The Devil Finds Work. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538425442. Read by Dion Graham.
Baldwin’s personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also a probing appraisal of American racial politics. Offering an incisive look at racism in American movies and a vision of America’s self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and The Exorcist. Here are our loves and hates, biases and cruelties, fears and ignorance reflected by the films that have entertained us and shaped our consciousness. And here too is the stunning prose of a writer whose passion never diminished his struggle for equality, justice, and social change.

Chapman, Bob & Raj Sisodia. Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520078182. Read by Steven Menasche.
In 1997, Bob Chapman pioneered a dramatically different approach to leadership that creates off-the-charts morale, loyalty, creativity, and business performance. They utterly rejected the idea that employees are simply functions, to be moved around, “managed” with carrots and sticks, or discarded at will. Instead, the company, Barry-Wehmiller, manifested the reality that every single person matters, just like in a family-and that understanding of how employees should be thought of and treated has remained the bedrock of their company’s success. Chapman and Sisodia show how any organization can enact this type of leadership, providing clear steps to transform your own workplace, whether you lead two people or two hundred thousand.

Fagone, Jason. The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies. HarperAudio. ISBN 9781538420249. Reader TBA.
In 1912, at the height of World War I, brilliant Shakespeare expert Elizebeth Smith went to work for an eccentric tycoon on his estate outside Chicago. The tycoon had close ties to the U.S. government, and he soon asked Elizebeth to apply her language skills to an exciting new venture: code-breaking. There she met the man who would become her husband, groundbreaking cryptologist William Friedman. Though she and Friedman are in many ways the “Adam and Eve” of the NSA, Elizebeth’s story, incredibly, has never been told. Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman, who played an integral role in our nation’s history for forty years. After World War I, Smith used her talents to catch gangsters and smugglers during Prohibition, then accepted a covert mission to discover and expose Nazi spy rings that were spreading like wildfire across South America, advancing ever closer to the United States. As World War II raged, Elizabeth fought a highly classified battle of wits against Hitler’s Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German spies. Meanwhile, inside an Army vault in Washington, William worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigma—and eventually succeeded, at a terrible cost to his personal life.

Fountain, Henry. The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524774189. Read by Robert Fass.
At 5:36 p.m. on March 27, 1964, a magnitude 9.2. earthquake—the second most powerful in world history—struck the young state of Alaska. The violent shaking, followed by massive tsunamis, devastated the southern half of the state and killed more than 130 people. A day later, George Plafker, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, arrived to investigate. His fascinating scientific detective work in the months that followed helped confirm the then-controversial theory of plate tectonics.

Harford, Tim. Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524776916. Reader TBA.
Harford paints an epic picture of change in an intimate way by telling the stories of the tools, people, and ideas that had far-reaching consequences for all of us. From the plow to artificial intelligence, from Gillette’s disposable razor to IKEA’s Billy bookcase, Harford recounts each invention’s own curious, surprising, and memorable story. Invention by invention, Harford reflects on how we got here and where we might go next. He lays bare often unexpected connections: how the bar code undermined family corner stores and why the gramophone widened inequality. In the process, he introduces characters who developed some of these inventions, profited from them, and were ruined by them, as he traces the principles that helped explain their transformative effects.

Hatmaker, Jen. Of Mess and Moxie: Wrangling Delight Out of This Wild and Glorious Life. Thomas Nelson Audio. ISBN 9781536693539. Read by the author.
Hatmaker believes backbone is the birthright of every woman. Women have been demonstrating resiliency and resolve since forever. They have incredibly strong shoulders to bear loss, hope, grief, and vision. But somehow women have gotten the message that pain and failure mean they must be doing things wrong, that they messed up the rules or tricks for a seamless life. As it turns out, every last woman faces confusion and loss, missteps and catastrophic malfunctions, no matter how much she is doing “right.” Struggle doesn’t mean the’re weak; it means they’re alive. Hatmaker offers another round of hilarious tales, frank honesty, and hope for the woman who has forgotten her moxie, parlaying her own triumphs and tragedies into a sigh of relief for all normal, fierce women everywhere.

Horn, Miriam. Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman: Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520076898. Read by Chris Ciulla.
Many of the men and women doing today’s most consequential environmental work—restoring America’s grasslands, wildlife, soil, rivers, wetlands, and oceans—would not call themselves environmentalists: they would be too uneasy with the connotations of that word. What drives them is their deep love of the land—the iconic terrain where explorers and cowboys, pioneers and riverboat captains forged the American identity. They feel a moral responsibility to preserve this heritage and natural wealth. Horn tells the stories of five representatives of this stewardship movement: a Montana rancher, a Kansas farmer, a Mississippi riverman, a Louisiana shrimper, and a Gulf fisherman.

Losos, Jonathan B. Improbably Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524778569. Read by Marc Cashman.
Losos reveals what the latest breakthroughs in evolutionary biology can tell us about one of the greatest ongoing debates in science. He takes us around the globe to meet the researchers who are solving the deepest mysteries of life on Earth through their work in experimental evolutionary science. Losos himself is one of the leaders in this exciting new field, and he illustrates how experiments with guppies, fruit flies, bacteria, foxes, and field mice, along with his own work with anole lizards on Caribbean islands, are rewinding the tape of life to reveal just how rapid and predictable evolution can be.

Merchant, Nilofer. The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough To Dent the World. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524777739. Read by the author.
Merchant reveals that we have now reached an unprecedented moment of opportunity for your ideas to “make a dent” on the world. Now that the Internet has liberated ideas to spread through networks instead of hierarchies, power is no longer determined by your status, but by “onlyness”—that spot in the world only you stand in, a function of your distinct history and experiences, visions and hopes. If you build upon your signature ingredient of purpose and connect with those who are equally passionate, you have a lever by which to move the world. This new ability is already within your grasp, but to command it, you need to know how to meaningfully mobilize others around your ideas. Through inspirational and instructive stories, Merchant reveals proven strategies to unleash the centrifugal force of a new idea, no matter how weird or wild it may seem.

Miles, Kathryn. Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524776794. Reader TBA.
Earthquakes. You need to worry about them only if you’re in San Francisco, right? Wrong. We have been making enormous changes to subterranean America, and Mother Earth, as always, has been making some of her own.The consequences for our real estate, our civil engineering, and our communities will be huge because they will include earthquakes most of us do not expect and cannot imagine. Miles descends into mines in the Northwest, visits the South to see what the Army Corps of Engineers in Memphis is learning about the next major U.S. quake, uncovers the horrific risks of an earthquake in the Northeast, and interviews the people around the country who are addressing this ground-shaking threat.

Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520078168. Read by Don Hagen.
Nozick challenges the most commonly held political and social positions of our age—liberal, socialist, and conservative. “Individuals have rights,” Nozick writes in his opening sentence, “and there are things no person or group may do to them without violating their rights.” The work that follows that sentence is a sophisticated and passionate defense of those rights. Arguing that the state is justified only when it is severely limited to the narrow function of protection against force, theft, and fraud and of the enforcement of contracts, Nozick demonstrates that any more extensive activities undertaken by the state will inevitably violate individual rights. In addition to that passionate defense, Nozick also presents a theory of distributive justice, a model of utopia, and an integration of ethics, legal philosophy, and economic theory that will be discussed for years to come.

O’Reilly, Finbarr & Thomas J. Brennan. Shooting Ghosts: A U.S. Marine, a Combat Photographer, and Their Journey Back from War. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524777654. Read by Mike Chamberlain & David H. Lawrence XVII
Through the unpredictability of war and its aftermath, a decorated Marine sergeant and a world-trotting war photographer became friends, their bond forged as they patrolled together through the dusty alleyways of Helmand province and camped side by side in the desert. It deepened after Sergeant Brennan was injured during a Taliban ambush, and both returned home. Brennan began to suffer from the effects of his injury and from the fallout of his tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. But war correspondents experience similar rates of posttraumatic stress as combat veterans. The causes can be different, but guilt plays a prominent role in both. As we enter the fifteenth year of continuous war, it is increasingly urgent not just to document the experiences of the battlefield but also to probe the reverberations that last long after combatants and civilians have returned home, and to understand the many faces trauma takes.

Patterson, Daniel & Mandy Aftel. The Art of Flavor: Practices and Principles for Creating Delicious Food. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538433669. Read by John Lescault.
In a world awash in cooking shows, food blogs, and recipes, the art of flavor has been surprisingly neglected. The multibillion-dollar flavor industry practices its dark arts by manipulating synthetic ingredients, and home cooks are taught to wield the same blunt instruments: salt, acid, sugar, heat. But foods in their natural state are infinitely more nuanced than the laboratory can replicate—and offer far greater possibilities for deliciousness. Chef Patterson and natural perfumer Aftel are experts at orchestrating ingredients, and here they teach listeners how to make the most of nature’s palette via mind-opening and palate-expanding tools and principles: the four basic rules for creating flavor; a flavor “compass” that points the way to transformative combinations of aromatic ingredients; learning to deploy cooking methods for maximum effect; and mastering the seven “dials” that let you fine-tune a dish.

Roscher, Ellie. Play Like a Girl: How a Soccer School in Kenya’s Slums Started a Revolution. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520076515. Read by Katherine Fenton.
Growing up and living in Kibera, Kenya, Abdul Kassim was well aware of the disproportionate number of challenges faced by women due to the extreme gender inequalities that persist in the slums. After being raised by his aunts, his mother, and his grandmother and having a daughter himself, he felt that he needed to make a difference. In 2002, Kassim started a soccer team for girls called Girls Soccer in Kibera (GSK), with the hope of fostering a supportive community and providing emotional and mental support for the young women in the town. The soccer program was a success, but the looming dangers of slum life persisted, and the young women continued to fall victim to the worst kinds of human atrocities. Indeed, it was the unyielding injustice of these conditions that led Kassim to the conclusion that soccer alone was not enough to create the systemic changes needed. In 2006, the Kibera Girls Soccer Academy (KGSA) was established to begin to help create those changes, and it continues its work today.

Sancton, Tom. The Bettencourt Affair: The World’s Richest Woman and the Scandal That Rocked Paris. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524776831. Read by Amanda Carlin.
Liliane Bettencourt is the world’s richest woman and the eleventh wealthiest person on the planet, as of 2016. But at 94, she’s embroiled in an incredible controversy that has dominated the headlines and ensnared a former president of France in the controversy. Why? Thanks to an artist and photographer named François-Marie Banier, who was given hundreds of millions of dollars by Liliane. Liliane’s daughter, Françoise, considers Banier a con man and filed a lawsuit against him, but Banier has a far different story to tell. It’s all become Europe’s biggest scandal in years, uncovering a shadowy corporate history, buried World War II secrets, illicit political payoffs, and much more.

Watson, James D., Andrew Berry, & Kevin Davies. DNA: The Story of the Genetic Revolution. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524757120. Reader TBA.
Having shown that the secret of life is chemical, modern genetics has set mankind off on a journey unimaginable just a few decades ago. Watson provides the general reader with clear explanations of molecular processes and emerging technologies. He shows us how DNA continues to alter our understanding of human origins, and of our identities as groups and as individuals. And with the insight of one who has remained close to every advance in research since the double helix, he reveals how genetics has unleashed a wealth of possibilities to alter the human condition—from genetically modified foods to genetically modified babies—and transformed itself from a domain of pure research into one of big business as well. It is a sometimes topsy-turvy world full of great minds and great egos, driven by ambitions to improve the human condition as well as to improve investment portfolios.

Acuff, Jon. Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525499312. Read by the author.
Acuff shows chronic starters how to actually finish their goals in an age of bottomless distractions and endless opportunities. Acuff knows the reason why many writers’ novels go unfinished—it’s the same reason why gyms are filled in the first week of January, and empty by the end of the month, and why people stop learning a new language once they get past the easy parts. It’s not just that people lose momentum or get distracted. People give up on projects when they fail to live up to their own high expectations and decide that if they can’t do something perfectly they won’t do it at all. If you’re going to finish, you have to kill perfectionism.

Andersen, Kurt. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525528159. Read by the author.
Over the course of five centuries—from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials—our peculiar love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we’ve never fully acknowledged.From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies—every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. Little by little, and then more quickly in the last several decades, the American invent-your-own-reality legacy of the Enlightenment superseded its more sober, rational, and empirical parts.

Beck, Joseph Madison. My Father and Atticus Finch. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501948589. Read by Tom Stechschulte.
The story of Foster Beck, the author’s late father, whose defense of a black man accused of rape in 1930s Alabama foreshadowed the trial at the heart of To Kill a Mockingbird. As a child, Joseph Beck heard the stories—when other lawyers came up with excuses, his father courageously defended a black man charged with raping a white woman. Now a lawyer himself, Beck reconstructs his father’s role in State of Alabama v. Charles White, Alias, a trial that was much publicized when Harper Lee was 12 years old.

Blum, Ben. Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family, and an Inexplicable Crime. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780804166072. Read by Johnathan McClain.
Alex Blum was a good kid with one goal in life: to become a U.S. Army Ranger. In the first hours of his final leave before deployment to Iraq, Alex was supposed to fly home to see his family and beloved girlfriend. Instead, he got into his car with two fellow soldiers and two strangers, drove to a local bank in Tacoma, and committed armed robbery. At first, Alex insisted he thought the robbery was just another exercise in the famously daunting Ranger program. His attorney presented a case based on the theory that the Ranger indoctrination mirrored that of a cult. In the midst of his own personal crisis, and in the hopes of helping both Alex and his splintering family cope, Blum, Alex’s first cousin, delved into these mysteries, growing closer to Alex in the process.

Bouffard, Suzanne. The Most Important Year: Pre-Kindergarten and the Future of Our Children. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525498292. Read by Therese Plummer.
Bouffard takes us inside some of the country’s best pre-K classrooms to reveal the sometimes surprising ingredients that make them work—and to understand why some programs are doing the opposite of what is best for children. It also chronicles the stories of families and teachers from many backgrounds as they struggle to give their children a good start in school.

Brown, Brene. Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage To Stand Alone. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525494904. Reader TBA.
Brown argues that we’re experiencing a spiritual crisis of disconnection, and introduces four practices of true belonging that challenge everything we believe about ourselves and each other.

Dean, Josh. The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525499725. Read by Neil Hellegers.
A true tale of espionage and engineering set at the height of the Cold War—a mix between The Hunt for Red October and Argo—about how the CIA, the U.S. Navy, and America’s most eccentric mogul spent six years and nearly a billion dollars to steal the nuclear-armed Soviet submarine K-129 after it had sunk to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean; all while the Russians were watching.

Guillebeau, Chris. Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525498896. Read by the author.
What if we could quickly and easily create an additional stream of income without giving up the security of a full-time job? Enter the side hustle. Chris Guillebeau is no stranger to this world, having launched more than a dozen side hustles over his career. Here, he offers a step-by-step guide that takes you from idea to income in just 27 days. Designed for the busy and impatient, this detailed roadmap will show you how to select, launch, refine, and make money from your side hustle in under a month.

Hanson, Jason. Survive Like a Spy: Real CIA Operatives Reveal How They Stay Safe in a Dangerous World and How You Can Too. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525500667. Read by the author.
High-stakes techniques and survival secrets from real intelligence officers in life-or-death situations around the world. Everyone loves a good spy story, but most of the ones we hear are fictional. That’s because the most dangerous and important spycraft is done in secret, often hidden in plain sight. In this powerful new book, bestselling author and former CIA officer Hanson takes the reader deep inside the world of espionage, revealing true stories and expert tactics from real agents engaged in life-threatening missions around the world.

Headlee, Celeste. We Need To Talk: How To Have Conversations That Matter. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538454503. Reader TBA.
Today most of us communicate from behind electronic screens, and studies show that Americans feel less connected and more divided than ever before. The blame for some of this disconnect can be attributed to our political landscape, but the erosion of our conversational skills as a society lies with us as individuals. And the only way forward, says Headlee, is to start talking to each other. She outlines strategies that have made her a better conversationalist—and offers simple tools that can improve anyone’s communication.

Kiernan, Denise. The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation’s Largest Home. Brilliance. ISBN 9781501238253. Reader TBA.
Orphaned at a young age, Edith Stuyvesant Dresser claimed lineage from one of New York’s best known families. She grew up in Newport and Paris, and her engagement and marriage to George Vanderbilt was one of the most watched events of Gilded Age society. But none of this prepared her to be mistress of Biltmore House. Before their marriage, the wealthy and bookish Vanderbilt had dedicated his life to creating a spectacular European-style estate on 125,000 acres of North Carolina wilderness. Newlywed Edith was now mistress of an estate nearly three times the size of Washington, DC and benefactress of the village and surrounding rural area. The story of Biltmore spans World Wars, the Jazz Age, the Depression, and features a captivating cast of real-life characters including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Teddy Roosevelt, John Singer Sargent, James Whistler, Henry James, and Edith Wharton.

Markham, Lauren. The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525495765. Read by Cassandra Campbell.
Growing up in rural El Salvador in the wake of the civil war, Ernesto Flores had always had a fascination with the United States, the distant land of skyscrapers and Nikes, while his identical twin, Raul, never felt that northbound tug. But when Ernesto ends up on the wrong side of the region’s brutal gangs he is forced to flee the country, and Raul, because he looks just like his brother, follows close behind. Journalist Markham follows the 17-year-old Flores twins as they make their harrowing journey across the Rio Grande and the Texas desert, into the hands of immigration authorities, and from there to their estranged older brother’s custody in Oakland, CA. Soon these unaccompanied minors are navigating a new school in a new language, working to pay down their mounting coyote debt, and facing their day in immigration court, while also encountering the triumphs and pitfalls of life as American teenagers—girls, grades, Facebook—with only each other for support.

Markova, Dawna & Angie McArthur. Reconcilable Differences: Connecting in a Disconnected World. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525525417. Read by Ellen Archer.
You know what it feels like to be “at odds” with someone. Sometimes it seems like you are speaking completely different languages. Cognitive neuroscientist Markova and communication expert McArthur have spent years developing and implementing tools to help people find common ground. Here they provide the strategies you need to bridge the gap at the heart of your differences with others.

McGovern, Marion. Thriving in the Gig Economy. Blackstone. ISBN 9781536689334. Read by Teri Schnaubelt.
The new “gig economy” seems to constantly be in the news. But most of the media focus is on the low end of the skill spectrum; little attention is being paid to the best-in-class professionals who have chosen an independent path. New digital talent platforms are developing at a rapid clip with a wide variety of business models, many catering to very precise, high-value skill sets. This actionable guidebook outlines ways to maneuver in this new world to create a path that optimizes success.

McPhee, John. Draft No. 4. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501962554. Read by the author.
McPhee shares insights he’s gathered over his career and refined during his long-running course at Princeton University, where he has launched some of the most esteemed writers of several generations. He offers a definitive guide to the crucial decisions regarding structure, diction, and tone that shape nonfiction pieces, and presents extracts from some of his best-loved work, subjecting them to wry scrutiny.

Mendelsohn, Daniel. An Odyssey: A Father, a Song, and an Epic. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525500285. Read by Bronson Pinchot.
When81-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enroll in the undergraduate Odyssey seminar his son teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist, this return to the classroom is his “one last chance” to learn the great literature he’d neglected in his youth—and, even more, a final opportunity to more fully understand his son, a writer and classicist. But through the sometimes uncomfortable months that the two men explore Homer’s great work together—first in the classroom, where Jay persistently challenges his son’s interpretations, and then during a surprise-filled Mediterranean journey retracing Odysseus’s famous voyages—it becomes clear that Daniel has much to learn, too: Jay’s responses to both the text and the travels gradually uncover long-buried secrets that allow the son to understand his difficult father at last.

Rubin, Gretchen. The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People’s Lives Better, Too). Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525496281. Read by the author.
During her multibook investigation into understand human nature, Rubin realized that by asking the seemingly dry question “How do I respond to expectations?” we gain explosive self-knowledge. She discovered that based on their answer, people fit into Four Tendencies: Upholders, Questioners, Obligers, and Rebels. Our Tendency shapes every aspect of our behavior, so using this framework allows us to make better decisions, meet deadlines, suffer less stress, and engage more effectively.

Rydahl, Malene. Happy as a Dane: 10 Secrets of the Happiest People in the World. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501972485. Read by Hillary Huber.
For decades Denmark has ranked at the top of the world’s happiness surveys. How is it that these 5.6 million Danes are so content when they live in a country that is dark and cold nine months of the year and where income taxes are at almost 60 percent? At a time when talk across the Western world is focused on unemployment woes, government overreach, and anti-taxation lobbies, our Danish counterparts seem to breathe a healthier and fresher air. Interweaving anecdotes and research, Rydahl explores how the values of trust, education, and a healthy work-life balance with purpose contribute to a happy population.

Schreier, Jason. Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538453933. Read by Ray Chase.
Developing video games—hero’s journey or fool’s errand? The creative and technical logistics that go into building today’s hottest games can be more harrowing and complex than the games themselves, often seeming like an endless maze or a bottomless abyss. Schreier takes listeners on a fascinating odyssey behind the scenes of video game development, where the creator may be a team of 600 overworked underdogs or a solitary geek genius. Exploring the artistic challenges, technical impossibilities, marketplace demands, and monkey wrenches thrown into the works by corporate, the work reveals how bringing any game to completion is more than Sisyphean—it’s nothing short of miraculous.

Sokolove, Michael. Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525589600. Read by Mark Deakins.
Why would the multimillionaire producer of Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, and Miss Saigon take his limo from Manhattan to the struggling former steel town of Levittown, PA, to see a high school production of Les Misérables? To see the show performed by the astoundingly successful theater company at Harry S Truman High School, run by its legendary director, Lou Volpe. Volpe’s students go on to become Emmy-winning producers, entertainment executives, newscasters, and community-theater founders.Sokolove, a Levittown native and former student of Volpe’s, chronicles the drama director’s last school years and follows a group of student actors as they work through riveting dramas both on and off the stage.

Thomas, Rosanne J. Excuse Me: The Survival Guide to Modern Business Etiquette. Blackstone. ISBN 9781536663280. Read by Teri Schnaubelt.
Blending different generations, genders, and cultures brings energy and fresh perspectives to the workplace. But the flip side is an environment ripe for confusion and social blunders. Mix in increasingly open-plan workplaces and constant connectivity, and the chance that we’ll unintentionally annoy or offend others increases exponentially. Exactly what are the rules these days? Merging classic rules of behavior with new realities of modern business, Thomas spotlights dozens of puzzling situations, with suggestions for bridging divides.

Zomorodi, Manoush. Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427287427. Read by the author.
Has your smartphone become your BFF? Do you feel bored when you’re not checking Facebook or Instagram? Do you feel that the constant ping of social networks is sapping your creativity and ability to think? In 2015, Note To Self podcast host Zomorodi led thousands of her listeners with the same problems through a week of experiments designed to help them rethink their technology habits, unplug for part of each week and jumpstart their creativity. Here she explains the connection between boredom and being unplugged and how that state of mind can ignite original thinking. Through interviews with scientists, famous artists, and regular people, Zomorodi explores why putting greater emphasis on “doing nothing” is vital in an age of constant notifications and digital distractions. She speaks with scientists who have researched the links between boredom and creativity. She also explores how we can harness boredom’s hidden benefits to become our most productive selves.

Arntfeld, Michael. Mad City: The True Story of the Campus Murders that America Forgot. Brilliance. ISBN 9781536666342. Read by Jonathan Davis.
In fall 1967, friends Linda Tomaszewski and Christine Rothschild are freshmen at the University of Wisconsin. The students in the hippie college town of Madison are letting down their hair—and their guards. But amid the peace rallies lurks a killer. When Christine’s body is found, her murder sends shockwaves across college campuses, and the Age of Aquarius gives way to a decade of terror. Linda knows the killer, but when police ignore her pleas, he slips away. For the next 40 years, Linda embarks on a cross-country quest to find him. When she discovers a book written by the murderer’s mother, she learns Christine was not his first victim—or his last. The slayings continue, and a single perpetrator emerges: the Capital City Killer. As police focus on this new lead, Linda receives a disturbing note from the madman himself. Can she stop him before he kills again?

Blakeslee, Nate. American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525493297. Read by Mark Bramhall.
Once abundant in North America, wolves were hunted to near extinction in the lower 48 states by the 1920s. But in recent decades, conservationists have brought wolves back to the Rockies, igniting a battle over the very soul of the West. Blakeslee tells the story of one of these wolves, O-Six, a charismatic alpha female named for the year of her birth. Uncommonly powerful, with gray fur and faint black ovals around each eye, O-Six is a kind and merciful leader, a fiercely intelligent fighter, and a doting mother. She is beloved by wolf watchers, and becomes something of a social media star, with followers around the world. But as she raises her pups and protects her pack, O-Six is challenged on all fronts: by hunters, who compete with wolves for the elk they both prize; by cattle ranchers who are losing livestock and have the ear of politicians; and by other Yellowstone wolves who are vying for control of the park’s stunningly beautiful Lamar Valley.

Brantmark, Niki. Lagom: Not Too Little, Not Too Much: The Swedish Art of Living a Balanced, Happy Life. HarperAudio. ISBN 9781538479629. Reader TBA.
Derived from the Swedish phrase Lagom är bäst, meaning “the right amount is best; in moderation, in balance,” lagom is a deeply held philosophy closely tied to the Swedish cultural and social ideology of fairness and equality. Deeply ingrained in the Swedish psyche, lagom is about enjoying balance in every aspect of life—from work and leisure to family and food and everything in between.

Chernow, Ron. Grant. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525529224. Read by Mark Bramhall.
Ulysses S. Grant’s life has typically been misunderstood. All too often he is caricatured as a chronic loser and an inept businessman, or as the triumphant but brutal Union general of the Civil War. But these stereotypes don’t come close to capturing him, as Chernow shows in this biography, the first to provide a complete understanding of the general and president whose fortunes rose and fell with dizzying speed and frequency.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525494829. Reader TBA.
“We were eight years in power” was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. Now Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s “first white president.” But the story of these present-day eight years is not just about presidential politics. This book also examines the new voices, ideas, and movements for justice that emerged over this period—and the effects of the persistent, haunting shadow of our nation’s old and unreconciled history. Coates powerfully examines the events of the Obama era from his intimate and revealing perspective—the point of view of a young writer who begins the journey in an unemployment office in Harlem and ends it in the Oval Office, interviewing a president.

Dauber, Jeremy. Jewish Comedy: A Serious History. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538432143. Read by the author.
Dauber traces the origins of Jewish comedy and its development from Biblical times to the age of Twitter. Organizing his book thematically into what he calls the seven strands of Jewish comedy—including the satirical, the witty, and the vulgar—Dauber explores the ways Jewish comedy has dealt with persecution, assimilation, and diaspora through the ages. He explains the rise and fall of popular comic archetypes such as the Jewish mother, the JAP, and the schlemiel and schlimazel. And he explores an enormous range of comic masterpieces, from Talmudic rabbi jokes, Yiddish satires, Borscht Belt skits, Seinfeld, and Curb Your Enthusiasm to the work of such masters as Sholem Aleichem, Franz Kafka, the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, Philip Roth, Sarah Silverman, and Jon Stewart.

Doughty, Caitlin. From Here to Eternity. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501973932. Read by the author.
Fascinated by our pervasive terror of dead bodies, mortician Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for their dead. In rural Indonesia, she observes a man clean and dress his grandfather’s mummified body.She meets Bolivian natitas (cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls), and introduces us to a Japanese kotsuage, in which relatives use chopsticks to pluck their loved ones’ bones from cremation ashes. With curiosity and morbid humor, Doughty encounters vividly decomposed bodies and participates in compelling, powerful death practices almost entirely unknown in America.

Duncan, Mike. The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781549167775. Read by the author.
The creator of the podcast series The History of Rome brings to life the story of the tumultuous years that set the stage for the fall of the Roman Republic. The Roman Republic was one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of civilization. After its founding in 509 BCE, it grew from an unremarkable Italian city-state to the dominant superpower of the Mediterranean world. Through it all, the Romans never allowed a single man to seize control of the state. But then Rome exploded out of Italy and began to conquer a world filled with petty tyrants, barbarian chieftains, and despotic kings, and the very success of the Republic proved to be its undoing.

Elnoury, Tamer & Kevin Maurer. American Radical: Inside the World of an Undercover Muslim FBI Agent. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525589518. Read by Peter Ganim.
A longtime undercover agent, Tamer Elnoury joined an elite counterterrorism unit after September 11. Its express purpose is to gain the trust of terrorists whose goals are to take out as many Americans in as public and as devastating a way possible. It’s a furious race against the clock for Tamer and his unit to stop them before they can implement their plans. Yet as new as this war still is, the techniques are as old as time: listen, record, and prove terrorist intent. Because of his ongoing work for the FBI, Elnoury writes under a pseudonym.

Farzad, Roben. Hotel Scarface: Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525498674. Read by Jonathan Davis.
In the seventies, coke hit Miami with the full force of a hurricane, and no place attracted dealers and dopers like Coconut Grove’s Mutiny at Sailboat Bay. Hollywood royalty, rock stars, and models flocked to the hotel’s club to order bottle after bottle of champagne and to snort lines alongside narcos, hit men, and gunrunners, all while marathon orgies burned upstairs in elaborate fantasy suites. Amid the boatloads of powder and cash reigned the new kings of Miami: three waves of Cuban immigrants vying to dominate the trafficking of one of the most lucrative commodities ever known to man. But as the kilos—and bodies—began to pile up, the Mutiny became target number one for law enforcement.

Feldman, Noah. The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525526025. Reader TBA.
Over the course of his life, James Madison changed the United States three times: First, he designed the Constitution, led the struggle for its adoption and ratification, then drafted the Bill of Rights. As an older, cannier politician he co-founded the original Republican party, setting the course of American political partisanship. Finally, having pioneered a foreign policy based on economic sanctions, he took the United States into a high-risk conflict, becoming the first wartime president and, despite the odds, winning.

Gaines, Chip. Capital Gaines. Brilliance. ISBN 9781543637328. Reader TBA.
Long before the world took notice, Gaines was a serial entrepreneur who was always ready for the next challenge, even if it didn’t quite work out as planned. Whether it was buying a neighborhood laundromat or talking a bank into a loan for some equipment to start a lawn-mowing service, Chip always knew that the most important thing was to take that first step. Here he relives some of his craziest antics and the lessons learned along the way.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr. 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro. Books on Tape. ISBN 9781524755331. Read by the author.
The first edition of Joel Augustus Rogers’s now legendary 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof, published in 1957, was billed as “A Negro ‘Believe It or Not.’” Rogers’s little book was priceless because he was delivering enlightenment and pride, steeped in historical research, to a people too long starved on the lie that they were worth nothing. But Rogers was not always shy about embellishing the “facts” and minimizing ambiguity. Here Gates gives us a corrective yet loving homage to Roger’s work. Relying on the latest scholarship, Gates leads us on a romp through African, diasporic, and African American history in question-and-answer format. Among the one hundred questions: Who were Africa’s first ambassadors to Europe? Why did free black people living in the South before the end of the Civil War stay there? Who was the first black head of state in modern Western history?

Gessen, Masha. The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525497950. Read by the author.
Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own—as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today’s terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state.

Giovanni, Nikki. A Good Cry: What We Learn from Tears and Laughter. HarperAudio. ISBN 9781538455524. Reader TBA.
Giovanni describes the joy and peril of aging and recalls the violence that permeated her parents’ marriage and her early life. She pays homage to the people who have given her life meaning and joy: her grandparents, who took her in and saved her life; the poets and thinkers who have influenced her; and the students who have surrounded her. Nikki also celebrates her good friend, Maya Angelou, and the many years of friendship, poetry, and kitchen-table laughter they shared before Angelou’s death in 2014.

Gubser, Steven S. & Frans Pretorius. The Little Book of Black Holes. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501976636. Reader TBA.
After introducing the basics of the special and general theories of relativity, this book describes black holes both as astrophysical objects and theoretical “laboratories” in which physicists can test their understanding of gravitational, quantum, and thermal physics. From Schwarzschild black holes to rotating and colliding black holes, and from gravitational radiation to Hawking radiation and information loss, Gubser and Pretorius use creative thought experiments and analogies to explain their subject accessibly. They also describe the decades-long quest to observe the universe in gravitational waves, which recently resulted in the LIGO observatories’ detection of the distinctive gravitational wave “chirp” of two colliding black holes—the first direct observation of black holes’ existence.

Hadeed, Kristen. Permission to Screw Up: How I Learned to Lead by Doing (Almost) Everything Wrong. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525499374. Read by the author.
Hadeed unintentionally launched Student Maid, a cleaning company that hires students, while attending the University of Florida in 2007. Since then, Student Maid has employed hundreds of people and is widely recognized for its industry-leading retention rate and its culture of trust, accountability, and compassion. But Kristen and her company were no overnight sensa­tion. In fact, they were almost nothing at all. A few months into her new venture, disaster struck when 75 percent of her cleaning team quit on the same day. The mistakes leading to that mass walkout weren’t her first, and definitely wouldn’t be her last. But that hu­miliating experience sparked her obsession with learn­ing how to be a better leader and inspired her to make Student Maid a place her people couldn’t imagine leaving.

Haramis, Nick, ed. Courage Is Contagious: And Other Reasons To Be Grateful for Michelle Obama. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525527961. Reader TBA.
Haramis has assembled 19 essays from prizewinning writers, Hollywood stars, and political leaders—all of whom have been moved and influenced by Mrs. Obama’s extraordinary example of grace in power. Here are original testimonials from Gloria Steinem, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alice Waters, and Charlamagne tha God, among others. Presidential biographer Jon Meacham supplies historical perspective. Actress Tracee Ellis Ross suggests that Mrs. Obama “provided an antidote to all the false representations of black women that have inundated us for centuries.” Anna Wintour and designer Jason Wu celebrate the former first lady’s impact as an international fashion icon. Two eighth-grade girls—one in training to be a boxer—talk about how Mrs. Obama has emboldened them to be themselves.

Harden, Blaine. King of Spies: The Dark Reign of America’s Spymaster in Korea. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525500063. Read by Mark Bramhall.
In 1946, master sergeant Donald Nichols was repairing jeeps on the sleepy island of Guam when he caught the eye of recruiters from the army’s Counter Intelligence Corps. Though he lacked the pedigree of most U.S. spies—Nichols was a 7th grade dropout—he quickly metamorphosed from army mechanic to black ops phenomenon. He insinuated himself into the affections of America’s chosen puppet in South Korea, President Syngman Rhee, and became a pivotal player in the Korean War. But Nichols’s triumphs had a dark side. Immersed in a world of torture and beheadings, he became a spymaster with his own secret base, his own covert army, and his own rules. He recruited agents from refugee camps and prisons, sending many to their deaths on reckless missions. His closeness to Rhee meant that he witnessed—and did nothing to stop or even report—the slaughter of tens of thousands of South Korean civilians in anticommunist purges.

Howard, David. Chasing Phil: The Adventures of Two Undercover Agents with the World’s Most Charming Con Man. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525499213. Reader TBA.
1977, the Thunderbird Motel. J.J. Wedick and Jack Brennan—two fresh-faced, maverick FBI agents—were about to embark on one of their agency’s first wire-wearing undercover missions. Their target? Charismatic, globetrotting con man Phil Kitzer, possibly the world’s greatest swindler. But as the young agents, playing the role of proteges and co-conspirators, became further entangled in Phil’s outrageous schemes over their months on the road, they also grew to respect him—even care for him. Meanwhile, Phil began to think of Jack and J.J. as best friends, sharing hotel rooms and inside jokes with them. Plunging into the field with no undercover training, the agents battled a creaky bureaucracy on their adventures with Phil, hoping the FBI would recognize the importance of their mission. Even as they grew closer to Phil, they recognized that their endgame—the swindler’s arrest—was drawing near.

Jacobs, Alan. How To Think. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525500124. Reader TBA.
Most of us don’t want to think, Jacobs writes. Thinking is trouble. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits, and it can complicate our relationships with like-minded friends. Finally, thinking is slow, and that’s a problem when our habits of consuming information (mostly online) leave us lost in the spin cycle of social media, partisan bickering, and confirmation bias. Jacobs diagnoses the many forces that act on us to prevent thinking—forces that have only worsened in the age of Twitter, “alternative facts,” and information overload—and he also dispels the many myths we hold about what it means to think well. Jacobs digs into the nuts and bolts of the cognitive process, offering hope that each of us can reclaim our mental lives from the impediments that plague us all.

Lloyd, Jason. The Blueprint: LeBron James, Cleveland’s Deliverance, and the Making of the Modern NBA. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525499701. Reader TBA.
In 2010, LeBron James left the Cleveland Cavaliers. That same year, Lloyd began to cover the team for the Akron Beacon Journal, LeBron’s hometown newspaper. The story he uncovered started as a tragedy but ended in incredible triumph. Back in 2010, starting in the days, weeks, and months after LeBron left, the Cavs hatched a plan to get LeBron back. The plan was daring, audacious, and spectacularly successful. It incorporated several losing seasons, some highly risky draft picks, and an entirely new understanding of how championship teams are built and maintained.

Mahnke, Aaron. The World of Lore: Monstrous Creatures. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525595281. Read by the author.
They live in shadows—deep in the forest, late in the night, in the dark recesses of our minds. They’re spoken of in stories and superstitions, relics of an unenlightened age, old wives’ tales, passed down through generations. Yet no matter how wary and jaded we have become, as individuals or as a society, a part of us remains vulnerable to them: werewolves and wendigos, poltergeists and vampires, angry elves and vengeful spirits. The host of the hit podcast Lore serves as a guide on a fascinating journey through the history of these terrifying creatures, exploring not only the legends but what they tell us about ourselves.

Mandela, Nelson & Mandla Langa. Dare Not Linger. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427292353. Reader TBA.
This is the story of Mandela’s presidency, drawing heavily on the memoir he began to write as he prepared to finish his term as president, but was unable to finish. Now the acclaimed South African writer Langa has completed the task using Mandela’s unfinished draft, detailed notes that Mandela made as events were unfolding, and a wealth of previously unseen archival material.

Merriman, John. Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits: The Crime Spree That Gripped Belle Epoque Paris. Blackstone. ISBN 9781549195372. Reader TBA.
Paris, 1911. The Bonnot Gang, led by the coarse Jules Bonnot, captured the minds of a nation with their Robin Hood-esque capers. With guns blazing, the Bonnot Gang robbed banks and wealthy Parisians and killed anyone who got in their way in spectacularly cinematic fashion—all in the name of their particular brand of anarchism. Merriman describes the Bonnot Gang’s murderous tear and the Parisian police force’s botched efforts to stop them. At the heart of the book are two anarchist idealists who wanted to find an alternative to Bonnot’s crimes and the French government’s unchecked violence: Victor Kibaltchiche and Rirette Maîtrejean.

Mipham, Sakyong. The Lost Art of Good Conversation. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525496250. Reader TBA.
In a world of iPhones, social media, and email, we are all in constant connection with one another. Then why are so many people feeling burned out, distant from colleagues, and abandoned by family and friends? Mipham uses the basic principles of the Shambhala tradition—-meditation and a sincere belief in the inherent wisdom, compassion, and courage of all beings—to help readers to listen and speak more mindfully with loved ones, co-workers, strangers, and even ourselves. Mipham provides inspiring ideas and practical tips on how to be more present in your day-to-day life, helping us to communicate in ways that elevates the dignity of everyone involved.

Montillo, Roseanne. Fire on the Track: Betty Robinson and the Triumph of the Early Olympic Women. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780451482525. Read by Adenrele Ojo.
When Betty Robinson assumed the starting position at the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam, she was participating in what was only her fourth-ever organized track meet. She crossed the finish line as a gold medalist and the fastest woman in the world. But at the top of her game, her career (and life) almost came to a tragic end when a plane she and her cousin were piloting crashed. Betty, once a natural runner who always coasted to victory, soon found herself fighting to walk. While Betty was recovering, the other women of track and field were given the chance to shine in the Los Angeles Games, building on Betty’s pioneering role. Stars like Babe Didrikson and Stella Walsh showed the world what women could do. And—miraculously—through grit and countless hours of training, Betty earned her way onto the 1936 Olympic team, again locking her sights on gold as she and her American teammates went up against the German favorites in Hitler’s Berlin.

Okeowo, Alexis. A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478997023. Reader TBA.
Okeowo weaves together four narratives that form a powerful tapestry of modern Africa: a young couple, kidnap victims of Joseph Kony’s LRA; a Mauritanian waging a lonely campaign against modern-day slavery; a women’s basketball team flourishing amid war-torn Somalia; and a vigilante who takes up arms against the extremist group Boko Haram. This debut book illuminates the inner lives of ordinary people doing the extraordinary—lives that are too often hidden, underreported, or ignored by the rest of the world.

Orth, Maureen. Vulgar Favors: The Assassination of Gianni Versace. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525591986. Reader TBA.
Two months before Gianni Versace was murdered on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion by Andrew Cunanan, Orth was investigating the serial killer for Vanity Fair. Culled from interviews with more than 400 people and insights from thousands of pages of police reports, Orth tells the complete story of Cunanan, his unwitting victims, and the moneyed, hedonistic world in which they lived and died. She reveals how Cunanan met his superstar victim, why police and the FBI repeatedly failed to catch Cunanan, and why other victims’ families stonewalled the investigation, as well as the controversial findings of the Versace autopsy report.

Puchner, Martin. The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525524588. Read by Arthur Morey.
At the heart of this book are works, some long-lost and rediscovered, that have shaped civilization: the first written masterpiece, the Epic of Gilgamesh; Ezra’s Hebrew Bible, created as scripture; the teachings of Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus; and the first great novel in world literature, The Tale of Genji, written by a Japanese woman known as Murasaki. Visiting Baghdad, Puchner tells of Scheherazade and the stories of One Thousand and One Nights, and in the Americas we watch the astonishing survival of the Maya epic Popol Vuh. Cervantes, who invented the modern novel, battles pirates both real (when he is taken prisoner) and literary (when a fake sequel to Don Quixote is published). Puchner also chronicles the inventions—writing technologies, the printing press, the book itself—that have shaped religion, politics, commerce, people, and history.

Stavis, Rachel H. Sister of Darkness: The Chronicles of a Modern Exorcist. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538455708. Reader TBA.
As a secular exorcist, Stavis has cleansed thousands of tormented people. But for many years, the horror screenwriter and novelist denied her gift. As a little girl, she began to see “monsters” floating around her bedroom or attached to other children. Told it was only her imagination, Stavis learned to mute the things she saw. But a series of events in adulthood forced her to acknowledge her unique ability and embrace her power to heal. Since then, Rachel has dedicated her life to helping others dispel these forces feeding off of us. Performing her services pro bono, she quietly worked in the shadows, until she unknowingly revealed her work to a journalist, who told her story to NPR.

Taibbi, Matt. I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735288157. Read by Dominic Hoffman.
On July 17, 2014, a43-year-old black man named Eric Garner died on a Staten Island sidewalk after a police officer put him in what has been described as an illegal chokehold during an arrest for selling bootleg cigarettes. The final moments of Garner’s life were captured on video and seen by millions. His agonized last words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for the nascent Black Lives Matter protest movement. A grand jury ultimately declined to indict the officer who wrestled Garner to the pavement. Taibbi’s deeply reported retelling of these events liberates Eric Garner from the abstractions of newspaper accounts and lets us see the man in full—with all his flaws and contradictions intact.

Telfer, Tori. Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520081618. Read by Sarah Mollo-Christensen.
When you think of serial killers throughout history, the names that come to mind are likely Jack the Ripper, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy. But what about Tillie Klimek, Moulay Hassan, and Kate Bender? Although largely forgotten by history, female serial killers rival their male counterparts in cunning, cruelty, and appetite. Each chapter explores the crimes and history of a different female serial killer and then proceeds to unpack her legacy and her portrayal in the media as well as the stereotypes and sexist cliches that inevitably surround her.

Tucker, Reed. Slugfest: Inside the Epic 50-Year Battle Between Marvel and DC. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478997405. Reader TBA.
The most bruising battle in the superhero world isn’t between spandex-clad characters; it’s between the publishers themselves. For more than 50 years, Marvel and DC have been locked in an epic war, tirelessly trading punches and trying to do to each other what Batman regularly does to the Joker’s face. This is the story of the greatest corporate rivalry never told. It is also an alternate history of the superhero, told through the lens of these two publishers.

Aslan, Reza. God: A Human History. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525524663. Read by the author.
Aslan narrates the history of religion as one long and remarkably cohesive attempt to understand the divine by giving it human traits and emotions. According to Aslan, this innate desire to humanize God is hardwired in our brains, making it a central feature of nearly every religious tradition. But this projection is not without consequences. We bestow upon God not just all that is good in human nature—our compassion, our thirst for justice—but all that is bad in it: our greed, our bigotry, our penchant for violence.

Bacon, John U. The Great Halifax Explosion. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538455913. Reader TBA.
On Monday, December 3, 1917, the French freighter SS Mont-Blanc set sail from Brooklyn carrying the largest cache of explosives ever loaded onto a ship. The United States had just recently entered World War I, and the ordnance was bound for the battlefields of France. The explosives were so dangerous that Captain Aimé Le Medec took unprecedented safety measures, including banning the crew from smoking, lighting matches, or even touching a drop of liquor. Sailing north, the Mont-Blanc faced deadly danger, enduring a terrifying snowstorm off the coast of Maine and evading stealthy enemy U-boats hunting the waters of the Atlantic. But it was in Nova Scotia that an extraordinary disaster awaited. As the Mont-Blanc waited to dock in Halifax, it was struck by a Norwegian relief ship, the Imo, charging out of port. A small fire on the freighter’s deck caused by the impact ignited the explosives below, resulting in a horrific blast that, in one fifteenth of a second, leveled 325 acres of Halifax—killing more than one thousand people and wounding nine thousand more.

Berwald, Juli. Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone. ISBN 9780525498018. Read by the author.
Jellyfish are an enigma. They have no centralized brain, but they see and feel and react to their environment in complex ways. They look simple, yet their propulsion systems are so advanced that engineers are just learning how to mimic them. They produce some of the deadliest toxins on the planet and still remain undeniably alluring. As unprecedented jellyfish blooms topple ecosystems and collapse the world’s most productive fisheries, it was unclear was whether these incidents were symptoms of a changing planet or part of a natural cycle. Berwald travels the globe to meet the scientists who devote their careers to jellies; hitches rides on Japanese fishing boats to see giant jellyfish in the wild; raises jellyfish in her dining room; and throughout it all marvels at the complexity of these fascinating and ominous biological wonders.

Chown, Marcus. The Ascent of Gravity: The Quest To Understand the Force That Explains Everything. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525624370. Read by Adjoa Andoh.
Gravity is the weakest force in the everyday world yet it is the strongest force in the universe. It was the first force to be recognized and described yet it is the least understood. It is a “force,” that keeps your feet on the ground—yet no such force actually exists. Gravity, to steal the words of Winston Churchill, is “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” And penetrating that enigma promises to answer the biggest questions in science: what is space? What is time? What is the universe? And where did it all come from?

Lacy, Sarah. A Uterus Is a Feature, Not a Bug. HarperAudio. ISBN 9781538456309. Reader TBA.
Working mothers aren’t a liability. They are assets you—and every manager and executive—want in your company, in your investment portfolio, and in your corner. There is copious academic research showing the benefits of working mothers on families and the benefits to companies who give women longer and more flexible parental leave.  Yet despite this concrete proof that working mothers are a lucrative asset, they still face the “Maternal Wall”—widespread unconscious bias about their abilities, contributions, and commitment. Fortunately, this prejudice is slowly giving way to new attitudes, thanks to more women starting their own businesses, and companies like Netflix, Facebook, Apple, and Google implementing more parent-friendly policies. But the most important barrier to change isn’t about men. Women must rethink the way they see themselves after giving birth.

Levenson, Steven. Dear Evan Hansen: Through the Window. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478999522. Reader TBA.
The official behind-the-scenes book of the hit musical. A letter that was never meant to be seen, a lie that was never meant to be told, a life he never dreamed he could have. Evan Hansen is about to get the one thing he’s always wanted: a chance to finally fit in.

McPhee, John. Silk Parachute. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501962486. Read by the author.
The brief essay “Silk Parachute,” which first appeared in The New Yorker over a decade ago, has become McPhee’s most anthologized piece of writing. In the nine other pieces here, McPhee ranges with his characteristic humor and intensity through lacrosse, long-exposure view-camera photography, the weird foods he has sometimes been served in the course of his reportorial travels, a U.S. Open golf championship, and a season in Europe “on the chalk” from the downs and sea cliffs of England to the Maas valley in the Netherlands and the champagne country of northern France. 

Payne, Candace. Laugh It Up! Embrace Freedom and Experience Defiant Joy. Brilliance. ISBN 9781543638318. Reader TBA.
The world knows Payne as “Chewbacca Mom,” the wife and mother of two from Dallas who captured the hearts of nearly 200 million people around the world with a toy Chewbacca mask, a smart phone, and infectious laughter. Candace’s viral moment of simple joy became Facebook Live’s top video. But what the video doesn’t show is Candace’s storied journey of daunting obstacles on the way to the joy-filled life—extreme poverty, past trauma, and struggles with self-worth.

Perry, Michael. Montaigne in Barn Boots. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538489246. Read by the author.
“The journey began on a gurney,” writes Perry, describing the debilitating kidney stone that led him to discover the essays of Michel de Montaigne. Reading the philosopher in a manner he equates to chickens pecking at scraps—including those eye-blinking moments when the bird gobbles something too big to swallow—Perry attempts to learn what he can (good and bad) about himself as compared to a long-dead French nobleman who began speaking Latin at the age of two, went to college instead of kindergarten, worked for kings, and once had an audience with the Pope.

Preston, Diana. Paradise in Chains: The Bounty Mutiny and the Founding of Australia. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501968037. Reader TBA.
The story of the mutiny of the Bounty and William Bligh and his men’s survival on the open ocean for 48 days and 3,618 miles has become the stuff of legend. But few realize that Bligh’s escape across the seas was not the only open-boat journey in that era of British exploration and colonization. Indeed, nine convicts from the Australian penal colony, led by Mary Bryant, also traveled 3,250 miles across the open ocean and some uncharted seas to land at the same port Bligh had reached only months before.

Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501976766. Read by Adam Grupper.
In thishistory of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation—that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, he makes clear that it was de jure segregation—the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments—that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day. 

Shorto, Russell. Revolution Song. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501969478. Reader TBA.
With America’s founding principles being debated today as never before, Shorto looks back to the era in which those principles were forged. Drawing on new sources, he weaves the lives of six people into a seamless narrative that casts fresh light on the range of experience in colonial America on the cusp of revolution. While some of the protagonists—a Native American warrior, a British aristocrat, George Washington—play major roles on the field of battle, others—a woman, a slave, and a laborer—struggle no less valiantly to realize freedom for themselves.

Stevens, Norma & Steven M.L. Aronson. Avedon: Something Personal. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525494676. Read by Coleen Marlo.
Richard Avedon was arguably the world’s most famous photographer—as artistically influential as he was commercially successful. Over six decades, he created landmark advertising campaigns, iconic fashion photographs (as the star photographer for Harper’s Bazaar and then Vogue), groundbreaking books, and unforgettable portraits of everyone who was anyone. He also went on the road to find and photograph remarkable uncelebrated faces, with an eye toward constructing a grand composite picture of America. Avedon possessed a mystique so unique it was itself a kind of genius—everyone fell under his spell. But the Richard Avedon the world saw was perhaps his greatest creation.

Fadiman, Anne. The Wine Lover’s Daughter. Recorded Books. ISBN  9781501966873. Reader TBA.
Fadiman examines her relationship with her father, Clifton Fadiman, a renowned literary critic, editor, and radio host whose greatest love was wine. An appreciation of wine—along with a plummy upper-crust accent, expensive suits, and an encyclopedic knowledge of Western literature—was an essential element of Clifton Fadiman’s escape from lower-middle-class Brooklyn to swanky Manhattan. But wine was not just a class-vaulting accessory; it was an object of ardent desire. The Wine Lover’s Daughter traces the arc of a man’s infatuation from the glass of cheap Graves he drank in Paris in 1927; through the Château Lafite-Rothschild 1904 he drank to celebrate his 80th birthday, when he and the bottle were exactly the same age; to the wines that sustained him in his last years, when he was blind but still buoyed, as always, by hedonism.

Hallberg, David. A Body of Work: Dancing to the Edge and Back. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538491386. Read by Vikas Adam.
Hallberg dives deep into life as an artist as he wrestles with ego, pushes the limits of his body, and searches for ecstatic perfection and fulfillment as one of the world’s most acclaimed ballet dancers. Hallberg reflects on themes like inspiration, self-doubt, and perfectionism as he takes listeners into daily class, rigorous rehearsals, and triumphant performances, searching for new interpretations of ballet’s greatest roles. He reveals the loneliness he felt as a teenager leaving America to join the Paris Opera Ballet, the ambition he had to tame as a new member of American Ballet Theatre, and the reasons behind his headline-grabbing decision to be the first American to join the top rank of Bolshoi Ballet, tendered by the artistic director who would later be the victim of a vicious acid attack.

Jeffs, Rachel. Breaking Free: How I Escaped Polygamy, the FLDS Cult, and My Father, Warren Jeffs. HarperAudio. ISBN 9781538456712. Reader TBA.
Born into the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Rachel Jeffs was raised in a strict patriarchal culture defined by subordinate sister-wives and men they must obey. No one in this radical splinter sect of the Mormon Church was more powerful or terrifying than its leader, Warren Jeffs—Rachel’s father. Living outside mainstream Mormonism and federal law, Jeffs arranged marriages between under-age girls and middle-aged and elderly members of his congregation. In 2006, he gained international notoriety when the FBI placed him on its Ten Most Wanted List. Though he is serving a life sentence for child sexual assault, Jeffs’ iron grip on the church remains firm, and his edicts to his followers increasingly restrictive and bizarre.

Lebovitz, David. L’Appart: The Delights and Disasters of Making My Paris Home. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525496434. Read by Graham Halstead.
When Lebovitz began the project of updating his apartment in his adopted home city, he never imagined he would encounter so much inexplicable red tape while contending with the famously inconsistent European work ethic and hours. Lebovitz maintains his distinctive sense of humor with the help of his partner Romain, peppering this renovation story with recipes from his Paris kitchen. In the midst of it all, he reveals the adventure that accompanies carving out a place for yourself in a foreign country—under baffling conditions—while never losing sight of the magic that inspired him to move to the City of Light many years ago, and to truly make his home there.

Murad, Nadia. The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525493235. Read by Ilyana Kadushin.
Nadia Murad was born and raised in Kocho, a small village of farmers and shepherds in northern Iraq. A member of the Yazidi community, she and her brothers and sisters lived a quiet life. Nadia had dreams of becoming a history teacher or opening her own beauty salon. On August 15th, 2014, when Nadia was 21 years old, this life ended. Islamic State militants massacred the people of her village. Six of Nadia’s brothers were killed, and her mother soon after, their bodies swept into mass graves. Nadia was taken to Mosul and forced, along with thousands of other Yazidi girls, into the ISIS slave trade. Finally, she managed a narrow escape through the streets of Mosul, finding shelter in the home of a Sunni Muslim family whose eldest son risked his life to smuggle her to safety.

Byrne, Gary J. Secrets of the Secret Service: The History and Uncertain Future of the U.S. Secret Service. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478999928. Reader TBA.
The United States Secret Service is tasked with one of the world’s most important missions: protecting the President of the United States. Byrne, a former Secret Service officer, reveals the agency’s evolution, studying the major attacks it has thwarted and bringing to life the key players, forces and dramatic shifts that have made it what it is today—an elite but troubled protection force. Secrets of the Secret Service shares action-packed stories from the agency’s past, covering key moments of American history, including the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and John and Robert Kennedy—as well as the foiled attempts on the lives of Jackson, Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Ford, Reagan, both Presidents Bush, Clinton, Obama, and Trump.

Foner, Eric. A Short History of Reconstruction. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538510919. Reader TBA.
Foner chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. The book addresses the quest of emancipated slaves’ searching for economic autonomy and equal citizenship, and describes the remodeling of Southern society; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and one committed, for a time, to the principle of equal rights for all Americans.

Jones, Jacqueline. Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical. Blackstone. ISBN 9781549114281. Reader TBA.
Goddess of Anarchy recounts the formidable life of the militant writer, orator, and agitator Lucy Parsons. Born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851 and raised in Texas–where she met her husband, the Haymarket “martyr” Albert Parsons–Lucy was a fearless advocate of First Amendment rights, a champion of the working classes, and one of the most prominent figures of African descent of her era. And yet, her life was riddled with contradictions; she advocated violence without apology, concocted a Hispanic-Indian identity for herself, and ignored the plight of African Americans.

Julien, Maude with Adriana Hunter. The Only Girl in the World. Blackstone. ISBN 9781549114120. Reader TBA.
Julien’s parents were fanatics who believed it was their sacred duty to turn her into the ultimate survivor: raising her in isolation, tyrannizing her childhood and subjecting her to endless drills designed to “eliminate weakness.” Maude learned to hold an electric fence for minutes without flinching, and to sit perfectly still in a rat-infested cellar all night long (her mother sewed bells onto her clothes that would give her away if she moved). She endured a life without heat, hot water, adequate food, friendship, or any kind of affectionate treatment. But Maude’s parents could not rule her inner life. Befriending the animals on the lonely estate as well as the characters in the novels she read in secret, young Maude nurtured in herself the compassion and love that her parents forbid as weak. And when, after more than a decade, an outsider managed to penetrate her family’s paranoid world, Maude seized her opportunity.

Kix, Paul. The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France’s Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538456781. Read by Malcolm Hillgartner.
A scion of one of the most storied families in France, Robert de La Rochefoucald was raised in magnificent chateaux and educated in Europe’s finest schools. When the Nazis invaded and imprisoned his father, La Rochefoucald escaped to England and learned the dark arts of anarchy and combat—cracking safes and planting bombs and killing with his bare hands—from the officers of Special Operations Executive. With his newfound skills, La Rochefoucauld returned to France and organized Resistance cells, blew up fortified compounds and munitions factories, interfered with Germans’ war-time missions, and executed Nazi officers. The Saboteur recounts La Rochefoucauld’s enthralling adventures, from jumping from a moving truck on his way to his execution, to stealing Nazi limos, to dressing up in a nun’s habit.

May, Elaine Tyler. Fortress America: How We Embraced Fear and Abandoned Democracy. Blackstone. ISBN 9781549114045. Reader TBA.
For the last sixty years, fear has seeped into every area of American life: Americans own more guns than citizens of any other country, sequester themselves in gated communities, and retreat from public spaces. And yet, crime rates have plummeted, making life in America safer than ever. Why, then, are Americans so afraid–and where does this fear lead? May demonstrates how our obsession with security has made citizens fear each other and distrust the government, making America less safe and less democratic. Fortress America charts the rise of a muscular national culture, undercutting the common good. Instead of a thriving democracy of engaged citizens, we have become a paranoid, bunkered, militarized, and divided vigilante nation.

Millar, Sam. On the Brinks. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525587774. Read by John Keating.
In 1993, $7.4 million was stolen from the Brink’s Armored Car Depot in Rochester, NY, the fifth largest robbery in US history. Millar was a member of the IRA gang who carried out the robbery. He was caught, found guilty, and incarcerated, before being set free by Bill Clinton as an essential part of the Northern Ireland Peace Process. This book is Sam’s story, from his childhood in Belfast, membership in the IRA, time spent in Long Kesh internment camps, and the Brinks heist and aftermath.

Origgi, Gloria. Reputation: What Is It and Why It Matters. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501975691. Read by Stephen Holmes & Noga Arikha.
Reputation touches almost everything, guiding our behavior and choices in countless ways. But it is also shrouded in mystery. Why is it so powerful when the criteria by which people and things are defined as good or bad often appear to be arbitrary? Why do we care so much about how others see us that we may even do irrational and harmful things to try to influence their opinion? Origgi draws on philosophy, social psychology, sociology, economics, literature, and history to offer an illuminating account of an important yet oddly neglected subject. Origgi examines the influence of the Internet and social media, as well as the countless ranking systems that characterize modern society and contribute to the creation of formal and informal reputations in our social relations, in business, in politics, in academia, and even in wine.

Schwartz, David N. The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times and Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age. Blackstone. ISBN 9781549114205. Reader TBA.
In 1942, a team at the University of Chicago achieved what no one had before: a nuclear chain reaction. At the forefront of this breakthrough stood Enrico Fermi. Straddling the ages of classical physics and quantum mechanics, equally at ease with theory and experiment, Fermi truly was the last man who knew everything-at least about physics. But he was also a complex figure who was a part of both the Italian Fascist Party and the Manhattan Project, and a less-than-ideal father and husband who nevertheless remained one of history’s greatest mentors.

Baatz, Simon. The Girl on the Velvet Swing: Sex, Murder, and Madness at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. Blackstone. ISBN 9781549140211. Reader TBA.
In 1901, Evelyn Nesbit, the pin-up girl and penniless young actress, dined with Stanford White, the legendary architect, at his 24th St. apartment. Evelyn drank champagne, and lost consciousness. She woke, nearly naked, in bed next to White. White was 47 years old. Evelyn Nesbit was just sixteen. Four years later, Evelyn would marry Harry Thaw, a playboy millionaire rumored to be mentally unstable, and in whom she confided the story of her encounter with Stanford White. One night in 1906, a vengeful Thaw shot and killed White before hundreds of theater-goers during a performance at Madison Square Garden. The city—and the nation that looked to it—erupted with news of the murder and ensuing trial, then the most sensational scandal in history.

Crump, Benjamin. Open Season: The Systemic Legalization of Discrimination. HarperAudio. ISBN 9781538480137. Reader TBA.
Chronicling some of his most memorable legal battles, Crump makes clear how our system is devised for certain people to lose and others to win, and, using evidence and facts, exposes how it is legal to harm—with the intent to destroy—people of color. Crump offers a cogent analysis of legal tenets, including the Thirteenth Amendment, the 1951 Genocide Petition to the United Nations, and controversial Stand Your Ground laws. He compares how race detrimentally influences sentencing, and reveals how police unions protect officers who shoot unarmed civilians. He also makes clear how budget cuts for education, the proliferation of guns, and high unemployment rates all directly contribute to higher crime rates.

Eighmey, Rae Katherine. Stirring the Pot with Benjamin Franklin: A Founding Father’s Culinary Adventures. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538488256. Read by Pam Ward.
Eighmey presents Benjamin Franklin’s experimentation with food throughout his life. At age 16, he began dabbling in vegetarianism. In his early twenties, citing the health benefits of water over alcohol, he convinced his printing press colleagues to abandon their traditional breakfast of beer and bread for “water gruel,” a kind of porridge he enjoyed. Franklin’s curiosity and logical mind extended to the kitchen: he even conducted an electrical experiment to try to cook a turkey. He saw food as key to the developing culture of the United States, penning two essays presenting maize as the defining grain of America. Eighmey revives and re-creates recipes from each chapter in his life.

Fadiman, Anne. The Wine Lover’s Daughter. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501966873. Reader TBA.
An appreciation of wine—along with a plummy upper-crust accent, expensive suits, and an encyclopedic knowledge of Western literature—was an essential element of Clifton Fadiman’s escape from lower-middle-class Brooklyn to swanky Manhattan. But wine was not just a class-vaulting accessory; it was an object of ardent desire. This memoir traces the arc of a man’s infatuation from the glass of cheap Graves he drank in Paris in 1927; through the Château Lafite-Rothschild 1904 he drank to celebrate his eightieth birthday, when he and the bottle were exactly the same age; to the wines that sustained him in his last years, when he was blind but still buoyed, as always, by hedonism.

Haden, Jeff. The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up To Win. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525499428. Read by Ray Porter.
Motivation isn’t the special sauce that we require at the beginning of any major change. In fact, motivation is a result of process, not a cause. Understanding this will change the way you approach any obstacle or big goal. Haden shows listeners how to reframe our thinking about the relationship of motivation to success at the beginning of any big goal we have for our lives, offering practical advice that anyone can use to stop stalling and start working on those dreams.

Hulbert, Ann. Off the Charts: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525500407. Read by Kirsten Potter.
Hulbert examines the lives of children whose rare accomplishments have raised hopes about untapped human potential and questions about how best to nurture it. She probes the changing role of parents and teachers, as well as of psychologists and a curious press. Above all, she delves into the feelings of the prodigies themselves. Among the children are the math genius Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics, a Harvard graduate student at age fifteen; two girls, a poet and a novelist, whose published work stirred debate in the 1920s; the movie superstar Shirley Temple and the African American pianist and composer Philippa Schuyler; the chess champion Bobby Fischer; computer pioneers and autistic “prodigious savants”; and musical prodigies, present and past.

Jerkins, Morgan. This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America. HarperAudio. ISBN 9781538480465. Reader TBA.
Jerkins here addresses the question: What does it mean to “be”—to live as, to exist as—a black woman today? Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle, that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality. Jerkins’s varied topics include Sailor Moon, Rachel Dolezal, the stigma of therapy, her complex relationship with her own physical body, the pain of dating when men say they don’t “see color,” being a black visitor in Russia, the specter of “the fast-tailed girl” and the paradox of black female sexuality,  and disabled black women in the context of the Black Girl Magic movement.

Kauffman, Jonathan. Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat. HarperAudio. ISBN 9781538456217. Reader TBA.
Kauffman chronicles how the longhairs, revolutionaries, and back-to-the-landers rejected the square establishment of Nixon’s America and turned to a more idealistic and wholesome communal way of life and food. From the mystical rock and roll cult known as the Source Family and its legendary vegetarian restaurant in Hollywood to the Diggers’ brown bread in the Summer of Love to the rise of the co-op and the origins of the organic food craze, Kauffman reveals how today’s quotidian whole-foods staples—including sprouts, tofu, yogurt, brown rice, and whole-grain bread—were introduced and eventually became part of our diets.

Khan-Cullors, Patrisse & Asha Bandele. When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427294722. Reader TBA.
Cofounders of the Black Lives Matter movement Khan-Cullors asks listeners to remember that protest in the interest of the most vulnerable comes from love. Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have been called terrorists, a threat to America. But in truth, they are loving women whose life experiences have led them to seek justice for those victimized by the powerful.

Krakauer, Jon. A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525595953. Reader TBA.
Krakauer delves into the life and work of Christopher Alexander, who sharply criticizes the Modern school of architecture and advocates for an approach in which people reclaim control over their built environment, drawing listeners into a singular vision of human-centered design. Alexander’s work has exerted profound influence in fields from design and planning to sociology and software, and Krakauer’s profile is a personal, organic view of the man behind the work.

McGowan, Rose. Brave. HarperAudio. ISBN 9781538480373. Reader TBA.
Born and raised in the Italian chapter of the Children of God, which was led by her father, McGowan escaped through a cornfield at night, moved to the states, ran away at 13, and landed in Portland, OR, where she lived on and off the streets. At fifteen she became emancipated from her parents and moved to Los Angeles where she was “discovered” on the street and became one of Hollywood’s most desired actresses overnight. Then McGowan was sexually assaulted by a renowned Hollywood producer and threatened with professional ruin if she uttered a word. She was expected to be silent and cooperative. Instead, she was courageous. And angry, smart, fierce, unapologetic, and controversial.

Mitchell, Alanna. The Spinning Magnet: The Force That Created the Modern World—and Could Destroy It. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525527725. Read by P.J. Ochlan.
The history of one of the four fundamental physical forces in the universe: electro-magnetism. From investigations into magnetism in 13th-century feudal France and the realization six hundred years later in the Victorian era that electricity and magnetism were essentially the same, to the discovery that the earth was itself a magnet, spinning in space with two poles and that those poles aperiodically reverse, this is a utterly engrossing narrative history of ideas and science.

Noesner, Gary. Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525634423. Reader TBA.
The FBI’s chief hostage negotiator takes readers on a harrowing tour through many of the most famous hostage crises in the history of the modern FBI, including the siege at Waco, the Montana Freemen standoff, and the DC sniper attacks. Having helped develop the FBI’s nonviolent communication techniques for achieving peaceful outcomes in tense situations, Noesner offers a candid look back at his years as an innovator in the ranks of the Bureau and a pioneer on the front lines.

Oluo, Ijeoma. So You Want To Talk About Race. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538475270. Read by Bahni Turpin.
A current, constructive, and actionable exploration of today’s racial landscape, offering straightforward clarity that readers of all races need to contribute to the dismantling of the racial divide. Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the “N” word. Perfectly positioned to bridge the gap between people of color and white Americans struggling with race complexities, Oluo answers the questions readers don’t dare ask, and explains the concepts that continue to elude everyday Americans.

Person, Cea Sunrise. North of Normal: A Memoir of My Wilderness Childhood, My Unusual Family, and How I Survived Both. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538499900. Reader TBA.
In the late 1960s, Cea’s family left a comfortable existence in California to live off the land in the Canadian wilderness. Led by Cea’s grandfather Dick, they lived a pot-smoking, free-loving, clothing-optional life without running water, electricity, or heat for the bitter winters. Living out her grandparents’ dream with her teenage mother Michelle, young Cea knew little of the world beyond her forest. Despite fierce storms, food shortages, and the occasional drug-and-sex-infused party for visitors, it seemed to be a mostly happy existence. For Michelle, however, now long separated from Cea’s father, there was one crucial element missing: a man. When Cea was five, Michelle took her on the road with a new boyfriend. As the trio set upon a series of ill-fated adventures, Cea began to question both her highly unusual world and the hedonistic woman at the centre of it—questions that eventually evolved into an all-consuming search for a more normal life. Finally, in her early teens, Cea realized she would have to make a choice as drastic as the one her grandparents once had in order to save herself.

Siegel, Daniel J. & Tina Payne Bryson. The Yes Brain: How To Cultivate Courage, Curiosity, and Resilience in Your Child. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525494935. Read by the authors.
Kids can be taught to approach life with openness and curiosity. Parents can foster their children’s ability to say yes to the world and welcome all that life has to offer, even during difficult times. This is what it means to cultivate a Yes Brain. When kids work from a Yes Brain, they’re more willing to take chances and explore. They’re more curious and imaginative, less worried about making mistakes. They’re better at relationships and more flexible and resilient when it comes to handling adversity and big feelings. They work from a clear internal compass that directs their decisions, as well as the way they treat others. Guided by their Yes Brain, they become more open, creative, and resilient. Here, the authors give parents skills, scripts, ideas, and activities to bring kids of all ages into the overwhelmingly beneficial “yes” state.

Soffer, Rebecca & Gabrielle Birkner. Modern Loss: Candid Conversation About Grief—Beginners Welcome. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538480281. Reader TBA.
Let’s face it: most of us have always had a difficult time talking about death and sharing our grief. We’re awkward and uncertain; we avoid, ignore, or even deny feelings of sadness; we offer platitudes; we send sympathy bouquets whittled out of fruit. Soffer and Birkner can help us do better. Each having lost parents as young adults, they co-founded Modern Loss, responding to a need to change the dialogue around the messy experience of grief. Now they offer the insights of the Modern Loss community to help us cry, laugh, grieve, identify, and—above all—empathize.

Stern, Robin. The Gaslight Effect: How To Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use To Control Your Life. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525633365. Read by Nan Mcnamara.
Gaslighting is an insidious form of emotional abuse and manipulation that is difficult to recognize and even harder to break free from. That’s because it plays into one of our worst fears—of being abandoned—and many of our deepest needs: to be understood, appreciated, and loved. Stern shows how the Gaslight Effect works and tells you how to: know when a relationship is headed for trouble, determine whether you are enabling a gaslighter, recognize gaslighting, refuse to be gaslighted, and develop your own “Gaslight Barometer” so you can decide which relationships can be saved—and which you have to walk away from.

Abrams, Jonathan. All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525529262. Read by January LaVoy, Jonathan Abrams, Prentice Onayemi, & Arthur Bishop.
Since its final episode aired in 2008, HBO’s acclaimed crime drama The Wire has only become more popular and influential. The issues it tackled, from the failures of the drug war and criminal justice system to systemic bias in law enforcement and other social institutions, have become more urgent and central to the national conversation. The show’s actors, such as Idris Elba, Dominic West, and Michael B. Jordan, have gone on to become major stars. Its creators and writers, including David Simon and Richard Price, have developed dedicated cult followings of their own. Universities use the show to teach everything from film theory to criminal justice to sociology. Politicians and activists reference it when discussing policy. When critics compile lists of the Greatest TV Shows of All Time, The Wire routinely takes the top spot. It is arguably one of the great works of art America has produced in the 20th century. But while there has been a great deal of critical analysis of the show and its themes, until now there has never been a definitive, behind-the-scenes take on how it came to be made.

Armstrong, Ken & T. Christian Miller. A False Report: A True Story of Rape in America. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525526360. Read by Hillary Huber & the authors.
Two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists tell the riveting true story of Marie, a teenager who was charged with lying about having been raped, and the detectives who followed a winding path to arrive at the truth. Based on investigative files and extensive interviews with the principals, A False Report is a serpentine tale of doubt, lies, and a hunt for justice, unveiling the disturbing reality of how sexual assault is investigated today—and the long history of skepticism toward rape victims.

Balko, Radley & Tucker Carrington. The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478990437. Reader TBA.
This is an account of two tragedies. At the heart of the first is Dr. Steven Hayne, a doctor the State of Mississippi employed as its de facto medical examiner for two decades. Beginning in the late 1980s, he performed anywhere from 1,200 to 1,800 autopsies a year, five times more than is recommended, performed at night in the basement of a local funeral home. Autopsy reports claimed organs had been observed and weighed when, in reality, they had been surgically removed from the body years before. Hayne, the only game in town, also often brought in local dentist and self-styled “bite-mark specialist” Dr. Michael West, who would discover marks on victim’s bodies, at times invisible to the naked eye, and then match those marks—“indeed and without doubt”—to law enforcement’s lead suspect. This leads to the second tragic tale: that of Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, two black men each convicted in separate cases of the brutal rape and murder of young girls. Dr. Hayne’s autopsy and Dr. West’s bite-mark matching formed the bases for their convictions. Combined, the two men served over thirty years in Parchman Farm, Mississippi’s notorious penitentiary, before being exonerated in 2008. Brooks’ and Brewer’s wrongful convictions lie at the intersection of both the most pressing problem facing this country’s criminal justice system—structural injustice built on the historic foundation of race and class—as well as with the much more contemporary but equally egregious problem of invalid forensic science. The old problem is inextricably bound up with and exacerbates the new.

Barth, F. Diane. I Know How You Feel: The Joy and Heartbreak of Friendship in Women’s Lives. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538511459. Read by Erin Bennett.
“Do I have enough friends?” “Why did my friendship end?” and “What makes a good friendship work?” These are questions that F. Diane Barth, a psychotherapist widely recognized for her expertise in women’s relationships, fields all the time. In I Know How You Feel, she draws out engaging stories from a lively and diverse cast of women, many of whom speak about feelings they haven’t shared before. She explores how life changes affect women’s friendships in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Interweaving examples from classic women’s literature to chick flicks, she provides grounded advice on how to manage betrayal and rejection, how to deal with a narcissistic or bossy friend, what to do when your best friend and your family don’t get along, how to let go of a friendship that has stopped working, and much more.

Callow, Simon. Being Wagner: The Story of the Most Provocative Composer Who Ever Lived. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525632443. Read by the author.
Richard Wagner’s music dramas have never been more popular or more divisive. His ten masterpieces, created against the backdrop of a continent in severe political and cultural upheaval, constitute an unmatched body of work. A man who spent most of his life in abject poverty, inspiring both critical derision and hysterical hero-worship, Wagner was a walking contradiction: belligerent, flirtatious, disciplined, capricious, demanding, visionary, and poisonously anti-Semitic. Acclaimed biographer Simon Callow evokes the intellectual and artistic climate in which Wagner lived and takes us through his most iconic works, from his pivotal successes in The Flying Dutchman and Lohengrin, to the musical paradigm shift contained in Tristan and Isolde, to the apogee of his achievements in The Ring of the Nibelung and Parsifal, which debuted at Bayreuth shortly before his death. Being Wagner brings to life this towering figure, creator of the most sublime and most controversial body of work ever known.

Cantú, Francisco. The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525528302. Read by the author.
For Cantú, the border is in the blood. His mother, a second-generation Mexican American, raised him in Arizona’s desert scrublands and the national parks where she worked as a ranger, driven to protect the places she loved. Haunted by the landscape of his youth, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. Stationed at the remote crossroads of a drug route and a smuggling corridor, he learns how to track other humans under the punishing glare of the sun and through dark, frigid nights. He detains the exhausted, the parched, huddled children yearning for their families. He hauls in the bodies from where they have fallen. Plagued by nightmares, Cantú abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when a friend, a regular at the café where he now works, travels back to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantu discovers that the border and its stories have migrated with him.

Garnier, Stéphane. How To Think Like a Cat. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520098388. Read by George Newbern.
The Cat is calm, observant, charismatic, independent, proud, and joyful; he knows how to strut and is impervious to judgement; he accepts himself as he is and adapts quickly; he knows to say nothing and to avoid conflicts, and yet he knows exactly what he wants and dares to ask for it. The Cat is free. After observing his cat, Ziggy, for years, Stéphane Garnier became convinced that cats have life down to an art form, so he set out to share Ziggy’s je ne sais quoi with the world. Highlighting forty trademark cat qualities that are (almost) entirely applicable to human daily living, Garnier provides insights that are delightfully useful as well as tips for living a day in the life of a cat-and a Q&A to test your “cat quotient” to see how much work you have to do learn the subtle art of living like a feline.

Goddard, Neville. Five Lessons: A Master Class. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520092935, Read by John Chancer.
In 1948, the modern mystic Neville Goddard presented a groundbreaking series of lessons, which many consider to be his clearest, most penetrating explanation of his methods regarding mental creativity. This audiobook recording of the five-part course he gave to Los Angeles students recreates that master class, preserving his words exactly as those original students heard them. It includes the following lessons: 1. Consciousness Is the Only Reality, 2. Assumptions Harden into Fact, 3. Thinking Fourth-Dimensionally, 4. No One to Change but Self, 5. Remain Faithful to Your Idea.

Knapp, Cheston. Up Up, Down Down. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520092812. Read by the author.
Knapp tackles Big Questions through seemingly unlikely avenues: an examination of a local professional wrestling promotion becomes a meditation on pain and his relationship with his father; a profile on UFO enthusiasts ends up probing his history in the church and, more broadly, the nature and limits of faith itself; attending an adult skateboarding camp launches him into a virtuosic analysis of nostalgia; and the shocking murder of a neighbor expands into an interrogation of our culture’s prevailing ideas about community and the way we tell the stories of our lives.

Origgi, Gloria. Reputation: What It Is and Why It Matters. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501975691. Read by Andrea Gallo.
Reputation touches almost everything, guiding our behavior and choices in countless ways. But it is also shrouded in mystery. Why is it so powerful when the criteria by which people and things are defined as good or bad often appear to be arbitrary? Why do we care so much about how others see us that we may even do irrational and harmful things to try to influence their opinion? In this engaging book, Gloria Origgi draws on philosophy, social psychology, sociology, economics, literature, and history to offer an illuminating account of an important yet oddly neglected subject. Origgi examines the influence of the Internet and social media, as well as the countless ranking systems that characterize modern society and contribute to the creation of formal and informal reputations in our social relations, in business, in politics, in academia, and even in wine. She highlights the importance of reputation to the effective functioning of the economy and e-commerce. Origgi also discusses the existential significance of our obsession with reputation, concluding that an awareness of the relationship between our reputation and our actions empowers us to better understand who we are and why we do what we do.

Preston, Diana. Paradise in Chains: The Bounty Mutiny and the Founding of Australia. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501968037. Read by Davina Porter.
The story of the mutiny of the Bounty and William Bligh and his men’s survival on the open ocean for 48 days and 3,618 miles has become the stuff of legend. But few realize that Bligh’s escape across the seas was not the only open-boat journey in that era of British exploration and colonization. Indeed, 9 convicts from the Australian penal colony, led by Mary Bryant, also traveled 3,250 miles across the open ocean and some uncharted seas to land at the same port Bligh had reached only months before.

Schaefer, Kayleen. Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525527541. Read by Lauren Fortgang.
Kayleen Schaefer has experienced (and occasionally, narrowly survived) most every iteration of the modern female friendship. First there was the mean girl cliques of the ’90s; then the teenage friendships that revolved around constant discussion of romantic interests and which slowly morphed into “Sex and the City” spin-offs; the disheartening loneliness of “I’m not like other girls” friendships with only men; the discovery of a platonic soulmate; and finally, the overwhelming love of a supportive female squad (#squad). And over the course of these friendships, Schaefer made a startling discovery: girls make the best friends. And she isn’t the only one to realize this. Through interviews with friends, mothers, authors, celebrities, business women, doctors, screenwriters, and historians (a list that includes Judy Blume, Megan Abbott, The Fug Girls, and Kay Cannon), Schaefer shows a remarkable portrait of what female friendships can help modern women accomplish in their social, personal and work lives. A validation of female friendship unlike any that’s ever existed before, this book is a mix of historical research, the author’s own personal experience, and conversations about friendships across the country. Everything Schaefer uncovers leads to–and makes the case for–the eventual conclusion that these ties among women are making us (both as individuals and as society as a whole) stronger than ever before.

Smith, Patti. Devotion: Why I Write. Blackstone. ISBN 9781538539583. Reader TBA.
Patti Smith first presents an original and beautifully crafted tale of obsession—a young skater who lives for her art, a possessive collector who ruthlessly seeks his prize, a relationship forged of need both craven and exalted. She then takes us on a second journey, exploring the sources of her story. We travel through the South of France to Camus’ house, and visit the garden of the great publisher Gallimard where the ghosts of Mishima, Nabokov, and Genet mingle. Smith tracks down Simone Weil’s grave in a lonely cemetery, hours from London, and winds through the nameless Paris streets of Patrick Modiano’s novels. Whether writing in a café or a train, Smith generously opens her notebooks and lets us glimpse the alchemy of her art and craft in this arresting and original book on writing.

Smith, Zadie. Feel Free. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525528753. Read by Nikki Amuka-Bird.
Arranged into four sections–In the World, In the Audience, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free–this new collection poses questions we immediately recognize. What is The Social Network–and Facebook itself–really about? “It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.” Why do we love libraries? “Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.” What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to address global warming? “So I might say to her, look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we’d just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes–and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat.”

Stone, Daniel. The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525531159. Read by the author.
In the 19th century, American meals were about subsistence, not enjoyment. But as a new century approached, appetites broadened, and David Fairchild, a young botanist with an insatiable lust to explore and experience the world, set out in search of foods that would enrich the American farmer and enchant the American eater. Kale from Croatia, mangoes from Manila, and hops from Bavaria. Cashews from China, avocados from Chile, and pomegranates from Malta. Fairchild’s finds weren’t just limited to food: from Egypt he sent back a variety of cotton that revolutionized an industry, and via Japan he introduced the cherry blossom tree, forever brightening our nation’s capital. Along the way, he was arrested, caught diseases, and bargained with island tribes. But his culinary ambition came during a formative era, and through him, America transformed from a blank agricultural canvas to the most diverse food system ever created.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780525630920. Read by Joe Ochman.
Citing examples ranging from Hammurabi to Seneca, Antaeus the Giant to Donald Trump, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows how the willingness to accept one’s own risks is an essential attribute of heroes, saints, and flourishing people in all walks of life. Taleb challenges long-held beliefs about the values of those who spearhead military interventions, make financial investments, and propagate religious faiths. Among his insights: For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing; Ethical rules aren’t universal; Minorities, not majorities, run the world; You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot; Beware of complicated solutions (that someone was paid to find); and True religion is commitment, not just faith.