Asgedom, Mawi. Of Beetles and Angels: A Boy’s Remarkable Journey from a Refugee Camp to Harvard. Blackstone. ISBN 9781478967910. Read by the author.
This memoir tells the unforgettable story of a young boy’s journey from a refugee camp in Sudan to Chicago. Asgedom followed his father’s advice to “treat people…as though they were angels sent from heaven,” and realized his dream of a full-tuition scholarship to Harvard University.
Beevor, Antony & Artemis Cooper. Paris: After the Liberation 1944–1949. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501905506. Read by John Curless.
Beevor and Cooper present a vivid and compelling portrayal of the City of Lights after its liberation as Paris became the diplomatic battleground in the opening stages of the Cold War. Against this volatile political backdrop, every aspect of life is portrayed: scores were settled in a rough and uneven justice, black marketers grew rich on the misery of the population, and a growing number of intellectual luminaries and artists including Hemingway, Beckett, Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Cocteau, and Picasso contributed new ideas and a renewed vitality to this extraordinary moment in time.
Berger, Jonah. Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior. S. & S. Audio. ISBN 9781508211419. Reader TBA.
Without our realizing it, other people’s behavior has a huge influence on everything we do at every moment of our lives, from the mundane to the momentous occasion. In some cases we conform, or imitate others around us. But in other cases we diverge, or avoid particular choices or behaviors because other people are doing them. Here Berger integrates research and thinking from business, psychology, and social science to focus on the subtle, invisible influences behind our choices as individuals. By understanding how social influence works, we can decide when to resist and when to embrace it—and how we can use this knowledge to make better-informed decisions and exercise more control over our own behavior.
Boessenecker, John. Texas Ranger: The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, the Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501916762. Read by Graham Winton.
To most Americans, Frank Hamer is known only as the “villain” of the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. Boessenecker sets out to restore Hamer’s good name and prove that he was, in fact, a classic American hero. From the horseback days of the Old West through the gangster days of the 1930s, Hamer stood on the front lines of some of the most important and exciting periods in American history. He participated in the Bandit War of 1915, survived the climactic gunfight in the last blood feud of the Old West, battled the Mexican Revolution’s spillover across the border, protected African Americans from lynch mobs and the Ku Klux Klan, and ran down gangsters, bootleggers, and Communists. When at last his career came to an end, it was only when he ran up against another legendary Texan: Lyndon B. Johnson.
Cenziper, Debbie & Jim Obergefell. Love Wins: The Lovers and Lawyers Who Fought the Landmark Case for Marriage Equality. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504734899. Reader TBA.
In June 2015, the Supreme Court made same-sex marriage the law in all 50 states in a decision as groundbreaking as Roe v Wade and Brown v Board of Education. Through insider accounts and access to key players, this definitive account reveals the events behind Obergefell v Hodges and the lives at its center.
Daughan, George C. Revolution on the Hudson: New York City and the Hudson River Valley in the American War of Independence. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681681924. Read by Jonathan Yen.
No part of the country was more contested during the American Revolution than the Hudson River. In 1776, King George III sent the largest amphibious force ever assembled to seize Manhattan and use it as a base from which to push up the Hudson River Valley for a rendezvous at Albany with an impressive army driving down from Canada. George Washington and other patriot leaders shared the king’s fixation with the Hudson. Until now, no one has argued that this plan of action was lunacy from the start. Daughan makes the argument that Britain’s attempt to cut off New England never would have worked, and ultimately cost the crown her colonies.
Ehrenreich, Ben. The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735208520. Read by the author.
Over the past three years, American writer Ehrenreich has been traveling to and living in the West Bank, staying with Palestinian families in its largest cities and its smallest villages.By placing readers in the footsteps of ordinary Palestinians and telling their stories with literary power and grace, Ehrenreich makes it impossible to turn away.
Frazier, Ian. Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427272720. Reader TBA.
Frazier travels down South to examine feral hogs, and learns that their presence in any county is a strong indicator that it votes Republican. He introduces us to a man who, when his house is hit by a supposed meteorite, hopes to “leverage” the space object into opportunity for his family, and a New York City police detective who is fascinated with rap-music-related crimes. Alongside Frazier’s delight in the absurdities of contemporary life is his sense of social responsibility: there’s an echo of the great reform-minded writers in his pieces on a soup kitchen, overdose deaths on Staten Island, and the rise in homelessness under Bloomberg.
Gardner, Daniel. The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Should Not—and Put Ourselves in Great Danger. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520019949. Read by Scott Peterson.
Gardner demonstrates that irrational fear springs from how humans miscalculate risks. Our hunter-gatherer brains evolved during the old Stone Age and struggle to make sense of a world utterly unlike the one that made them. Real-world examples, interviews with experts, and fast-paced, lean storytelling make The Science of Fear an entertaining and enlightening tour.
Gay, Roxane. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504734417. Reader TBA.
In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. She understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. Here she explores her own past, including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life, and addresses the question of what it means to learn to take care of yourself.
Huckelbridge, Dane. The United States of Beer: A Regional History of the All-American Drink. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504736183. Reader TBA.
Huckelbridge charts the surprisingly fascinating history of Americans’ relationship with their most popular alcoholic beverage, showing how beer has evolved along with the country—from a local and regional product (once upon a time every American city has its own brewery and iconic beer brand) to the rise of global mega-brands like Budweiser and Miller that are synonymous with U.S. capitalism. Throughout, Huckelbridge draws connections between seemingly remote fragments of the American past and shares his reports from the front lines of today’s craft-brewing revolution.
Jacoby, Karl. The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire. Tantor. ISBN 9781515954279. Read by JD Jackson.
To his contemporaries in Gilded Age Manhattan, Guillermo Eliseo was a fantastically wealthy Mexican man, the proud owner of a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park, a busy Wall Street office, and scores of mines and haciendas in Mexico. But Eliseo was also the possessor of a devastating secret: he had begun life as a slave named William Ellis, born on a cotton plantation in Texas. After emancipation, Ellis, capitalizing on the Spanish he learned during his childhood along the Mexican border, engaged in a virtuoso act of reinvention. He crafted an alter ego, the Mexican Guillermo Eliseo, who was able to access many of the privileges denied to African Americans at the time.
Klosterman, Chuck. But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780451484895. Read by Fiona Hardingham.
Here Klosterman visualizes the contemporary world as it will appear to those who’ll perceive it as the distant past. He asks questions—How certain are we about our understanding of time? What will be the defining memory of rock music, five hundred years from today? How seriously should we view the content of our dreams? How seriously should we view the content of television? Are all sports destined for extinction?And perhaps most disturbing, is it possible that we’ve reached the end of knowledge?—and interviews creative thinkers such as David Byrne, Kathryn Schulz, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Junot Díaz, and Richard Linklater.
Laing, Olivia. The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504738880. Reader TBA.
You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavor to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by thousands of strangers. Laing’s new work is a roving cultural history of urban loneliness, centered on Manhattan, that asks questions such as, What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live if we’re not intimately involved with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if our sexuality or physical body is considered deviant or damaged? Does technology draw us closer together or trap us behind screens?
Leamer, Laurence. The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle that Brought down the Klan. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504735971. Reader TBA.
On a Friday night in March 1981, Henry Hays and James Knowles, members of Klavern 900 of the United Klans of America, found 19-year-old Michael Donald walking home alone. Hays and Knowles abducted him, beat him, cut his throat, and left his body hanging from a tree branch. Arrested, charged, and convicted, Hays was sentenced to death—the first time in more than half a century that the state of Alabama sentenced a white man to death for killing a black man. On behalf of Michael’s grieving mother, Morris Dees, the legendary civil rights lawyer and cofounder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, filed a civil suit against the members of the local Klan unit involved and the UKA, the largest Klan organization. Charging them with conspiracy, Dees put the Klan on trial, resulting in a verdict that would level a deadly blow to its organization.
Martinez, Antonio Garcia. Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504733786. Reader TBA.
Imagine a chimpanzee rampaging through a data center powering everything from Google to Facebook. Infrastructure engineers use a software version of this “chaos monkey” to test online services’ robustness—their ability to survive random failure and correct mistakes before they actually occur. Tech entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, disruptors testing and transforming every aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and lodging (AirBnB) to television (Netflix) and dating (Tinder). One of Silicon Valley’s most audacious chaos monkeys, Martínez weighs in on everything from startups and credit derivatives to Big Brother and data tracking, social media monetization and digital “privacy,” laying bare the hijinks, trade secrets, and power plays of the visionaries, grunts, sociopaths, opportunists, accidental tourists, and money cowboys who are revolutionizing our world.
McDonough, James Lee. William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country—A Life. Tantor. ISBN 9781515954682. Read by David Drummond.
General Sherman’s 1864 burning of Atlanta solidified his legacy as a ruthless leader. Yet Sherman proved far more complex than his legendary military tactics reveal. McDonough offers fresh insight into a man tormented by the fear that history would pass him by, who was plagued by personal debts, and who lived much of his life separated from his family. As a soldier, Sherman evolved from a spirited student at West Point into a general who steered the Civil War’s most decisive campaigns, rendered here in graphic detail. Lamenting casualties, Sherman sought the war’s swift end by devastating Southern resources in the Carolinas and on his famous March to the Sea. This meticulously researched biography explores Sherman’s warm friendship with Ulysses S. Grant, his strained relationship with his wife, Ellen, and his grief over the death of his young son, Willy.
Notaro, Tig. I’m Just a Person. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504734509. Reader TBA.
In the span of four months in 2012, Notaro was hospitalized for a debilitating intestinal disease called C. diff, her mother unexpectedly died, she went through a breakup, and she was diagnosed with bilateral breast cancer. Hit with this devastating barrage, Notaro took her grief onstage. Days after receiving her cancer diagnosis, she broke new comedic ground, opening an unvarnished set with the words: “Good evening. Hello. I have cancer. How are you? Hi, how are you? Is everybody having a good time? I have cancer.” Now, the wildly popular star takes stock of that no good, very bad year—a difficult yet astonishing period in which tragedy turned into absurdity and despair transformed into joy.
Reynolds, Simon. Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504735490. Reader TBA.
Spearheaded by David Bowie, Alice Cooper, T. Rex, and Roxy Music, glam rock reveled in artifice and spectacle. Reacting against the hairy, denim-clad rock bands of the late sixties, glam was the first true teenage rampage of the new decade. Here Reynolds takes readers on a wild cultural tour through the early seventies, a period packed with glitzy costumes and alien make-up, thrilling music, and larger-than-life personas. Probing the genre’s major themes—stardom, androgyny, image, decadence, fandom, apocalypse—Reynolds tracks glam’s legacy as it unfolded in subsequent decades, from eighties art-pop icons like Kate Bush through to 21st-century idols of outrage such as Lady Gaga.
Rid, Thomas. Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681681900. Read by Robertson Dean.
Telling the story of cybernetics, a control theory of man and machine, Rid delivers a portrait of our technology-enraptured era. Springing from mathematician Norbert Wiener amid the devastation of World War II, the cybernetic vision underpinned a host of myths about the future of machines. This vision radically transformed the postwar world, ushering in sweeping cultural change. Cybernetics triggered cults, the Whole Earth Catalog, and feminist manifestos, just as it fueled martial gizmos and the air force’s foray into virtual space. As Rid shows, cybernetics proved a powerful tool for two competing factions—those who sought to make a better world and those who sought to control the one at hand.
Roach, Mary. Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War. Brilliance. ISBN 9781511367912. Read by Abby Elvidge.
Roach tackles the science behind some of a soldier’s most challenging adversaries—panic, exhaustion, heat, noise—and introduces readers to the scientists who seek to conquer them. The author dodges hostile fire with the U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team as part of a study on hearing loss and survivability in combat. She visits the fashion design studio of U.S. Army Natick Labs and learns why a zipper is a problem for a sniper. She visits a repurposed movie studio where amputee actors help prepare Marine Corps medics for the shock and gore of combat wounds. At Camp Lemmonier, Djibouti, in east Africa, she learns how diarrhea can be a threat to national security. Roach samples caffeinated meat, sniffs an archival sample of a World War II stink bomb, and stays up all night with the crew tending the missiles on the nuclear submarine USS Tennessee. Take a tour of duty with Roach, and you’ll never see our nation’s defenders in the same way again.
Selby, Scott Andrew & Greg Campbell. Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520019864. Read by Don Hagen.
On February 15, 2003, a group of thieves broke into an allegedly airtight vault in the international diamond capital of Antwerp, Belgium, and made off with more than $108 million worth of diamonds and other valuables. They did so without tripping an alarm or injuring a single guard in the process. The police zeroed in on a band of professional thieves fronted by Leonardo Notarbartolo. The “who” of the crime had been answered, but the “how” remained largely a mystery. The authors sorted through an array of conflicting details, divergent opinions and incongruous theories to put together the puzzle.
Smiley, Tavis & David Ritz. Before You Judge Me: The Triumph and Tragedy of Michael Jackson’s Last Days. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478903093. Read by Leo Coltrane.
Michael Jackson’s final months were like the rest of his short and legendary life: filled with deep lows and soaring highs, a constant hunt for privacy, and the pressure and fame that made him socially fragile. Listeners will witness Jackson’s campaign to recharge his career—hiring and firing managers and advisors, turning to and away from family members, fighting depression and drug dependency—while his one goal remained: to mount the most spectacular series of shows the world had ever seen.
Smith, Jordan Fisher. Engineering Eden: The True Story of a Violent Death, a Trial, and the Fight over Controlling Nature. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504722933. Reader TBA.
When 25-year-old Harry Walker was killed by a bear in Yellowstone Park in 1972, the civil trial prompted by his death became a proxy for bigger questions about American wilderness management that had been boiling for a century. At immediate issue was whether the Park Service should have done more to keep bears away from humans, but what was revealed as the trial unfolded was just how fruitless our efforts to regulate nature in the parks had always been. In this remarkable excavation of American environmental history, nature writer and former park ranger Smith uses the story of one man’s tragic death to tell the larger narrative of the futile, sometimes fatal, attempts to remake wilderness in the name of preserving it.
Tan, Amy. The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781490657691. Reader TBA.
Tan has touched millions of readers with haunting and sympathetic novels of cultural complexity and profound empathy. With the same spirit and humor that characterize her acclaimed novels, she now shares her insight into her own life and how she escaped the curses of her past to make a future of her own. She takes listeners on a journey from her childhood of tragedy and comedy to the present day and her arrival as one of the world’s best-loved novelists. Whether recalling arguments with her mother in suburban California or introducing us to the ghosts that inhabit her computer, she offers vivid portraits of choices, attitudes, charms, and luck in action—a refreshing antidote to the world-weariness and uncertainties we all face today.
Warnick, Melody. This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504740975. Reader TBA.
Warnick’s journey to find out what makes us love our towns and cities, and why it matters, is at the heart of this work. She dives into the body of research around place attachment—the deep sense of connection that residents sometimes feel with their towns—and travels to towns across America to see it in action. She finds out what draws highly mobile Americans to the places we live and what makes them stay. Her best ideas are imported to her adopted hometown of Blacksburg for a series of Love Where You Live experiments designed to make her feel more locally connected: dining with the neighbors, taking a hike, meeting the mayor, marching in the town Christmas parade, and more. What Melody learns is good news for anyone who’s ever felt stuck in a not-so-perfect place: You don’t have to be in your dream city to have a great life. You just have to love the place you’re in to be healthier, happier, more socially connected, and more resilient.
Whitefield-Madrano, Autumn. Face Value: The Hidden Ways Beauty Shapes Women’s Lives. Brilliance. ISBN 9781480545250. Reader TBA.
Whitefield-Madrano examines the relationship between appearance and science, social media, sex, friendship, language, and advertising to show how beauty actually affects us day to day. Through meticulous research and interviews with dozens of women across all walks of life, she reveals surprising findings—that wearing makeup can actually relax you, that you can convince people you’re better looking just by tweaking your personality, and the ways beauty can be a powerful tool of connection among women.
Wilson, A.N. The Book of the People: How To Read the Bible. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504719612. Reader TBA.
Charting his own relationship with the Bible over a lifetime of writing, Wilson argues that it remains relevant even in a largely secular society, as a philosophical work, a work of literature, and a cultural touchstone that the western world has answered to for nearly 2,000 years: Martin Luther King was “reading the Bible” when he started the Civil Rights movement, as was Michelangelo when he painted the fresco cycles in the Sistine Chapel. Wilson challenges the way fundamentalists—whether believers or nonbelievers—have misused the Bible, either by neglecting and failing to recognize its cultural significance or by using it as a weapon against those with whom they disagree.