Category: Audio Books

Free Download Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind: In Pursuit of Remarkable Mushrooms (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0D5J4QYDM | 2024 | 10 hours and 43 minutes | M4B@64 kbps | 306 MB
Author: Richard Fortey
Narrator: Richard Attlee
The secret world of fungi is another kingdom. They do things differently there. Diverse beyond our wildest imaginations, fungi don’t obey rules. They pop up unbidden and often dressed in curious reds and greens. They do not seem of this world, yet fungi underpin all the life around us: the ‘wood wide web’ links the trees by a subterranean telegraph; fungi eat the fallen trunks and leaves to recycle the nutrients that keep the wood alive; they feed a host of beetles and flies, which in turn feed birds and bats. Fungi produce the most expensive foods in the world but also offer the prospect of cheap protein for all; they cure disease, and they both cause disease and kill; they are the specialists to surpass all others; their diversity thrills and bewilders. Amongst these and many other ‘close encounters’ of a fungal kind, the book attempts to answer the questions: what are fungi? Why did their means of reproduction escape discovery for so long? What role do they play in the development of life? The vast kingdom of fungi is more diverse and species rich than plants or animals. Their glorious profusion has the starring role in this magical, deeply informed book which takes us from familiar places into strange worlds.

Free Download Classical Archaeology of Ancient Greece and Rome [TTC Audio]
English | July 08, 2013 | ASIN: B00DTNWBG6 | M4B@64 kbps | 18h 41m | 510 MB
Lecturer: John R. Hale
Over the years, Classical archaeology has evolved from a pastime of collectors and antiquarians to a mature science. Today, the field is a multidisciplinary effort that involves not only traditional diggers, but also geologists, geographers, anthropologists, and linguists.These 36 lectures introduce you to this fascinating field of study. Professor Hale guides you through dozens of ancient sites with the skill of a born storyteller.
The riveting narrative unfolds like a series of detective stories and provides a new perspective from which to view the world of the Greeks and Romans, resurrecting them in all their glory and affording us a better grasp of cultures that have greatly influenced our own.

Free Download Chernobyl Roulette: A War Story War in the Nuclear Disaster Zone (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0D1CYT44L | 2024 | 7 hours and 14 minutes | M4B@128 kbps | 396 MB
Author: Serhii Plokhy
Narrator: Leighton Pugh
On 24 February 2022, the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, armoured vehicles approached the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine. It was the most direct way for them to reach the capital – and an extraordinarily reckless plan after the disaster that had taken place there three decades earlier. Russian occupation of the plant had begun. It would last thirty-five days. Closely reported and narrated from multiple perspectives, this is the story of the Ukrainians who were held hostage and worked shifts for weeks instead of days to spare the world a new nuclear accident. We meet Valentyn Heiko, the foreman who had also been there for the clean-up of the Chernobyl accident in 1986 and turned sixty during the occupation; plant workers who found a way to celebrate International Women’s Day despite all odds; Russian officers who had no knowledge of nuclear reactors; and four stalkers who were caught in the middle and stood in for the overworked cook. Gripping and unforgettable, Chernobyl Roulette sounds the alarm about the dangers of nuclear sites in an unprecedented time, when plant workers are left to fight on their own while the world holds its breath. In a book that reads like a thriller, Serhii Plokhy tells a remarkable story about human nature, uncertainty and courage.

Free Download Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0CXB7DKWP | 2024 | 15 hours and 19 minutes | M4B@64 kbps | 449 MB
Author: Kate Conger, Ryan Mac
Narrator: Edoardo Ballerini
The definitive account of how the world’s richest man, in a fit of unbridled vanity and arrogance, took over and destroyed our digital town square. Rising star New York Times technology reporters, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, tell for the first time the full and shocking inside story of Elon Musk’s unprecedented takeover of Twitter and the forty-four-billion-dollar deal’s seismic political, social, and financial fallout. The billionaire entrepreneur and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has become inextricable from the social media platform that until 2023 was known as Twitter. Started in the mid-2000s as a playful microblogging platform, Twitter quickly became a vital nexus of global politics, culture, and media-where the retweet button could instantly catapult any idea to hundreds of millions of screens around the world, unleashing raw collective emotion like nothing else before. While its founder had idealistically dreamed of building a "digital town square," he detested Wall Street and never focused on building a profitable business.

Free Download Change Your Questions, Change Your Future: Overcome Challenges and Create a New Vision for Your Life Using the Principles of Solution Focused Brief Therapy (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0D5MY7L92 | 2024 | 8 hours and 23 minutes | M4B@64 kbps | 246 MB
Author: Elliott E. Connie, Adam S. Froerer
Narrator: Elliott E. Connie, Adam S. Froerer
A practical and hopeful guide that teaches you how to ask yourself the right questions in order to create a new vision for your future. The questions we ask ourselves are powerful tools that can change the trajectory of our lives. In this practical and hopeful guide, psychotherapist Elliot Connie and Adam Froerer, teach that getting honest and asking yourself the right questions enables you to create a new vision for your future that is hopeful and full of previously unimagined possibility. Your actions and beliefs will then align with your new vision as you employ the tips, strategies, and practices that can be turned to time and time again in a variety of situations. Using case studies, success stories, and the latest research in the field of SFBT, listeners are given the tools, knowledge, and confidence to apply SFBT principles that will shift their perspective, retrain their brain, and change their relationship to their future.

Free Download Central Banking 101 by Joseph J Wang, Bill Anciaux, Joseph Wang
English | February 15, 2023 | ISBN: B0BVTCSXKX | 4 hours and 49 minutes | M4B 128 Kbps | 263 Mb
Central banking is magic. With a few words, the Fed can lift the stock market out of desperation and catapult it towards euphoric highs. With a few keystrokes, the Fed can conjure up trillions of dollars and fund virtually unlimited Federal spending. And with a few poor decisions, the Fed can plunge the entire world into a recession. The Federal Reserve is one of the most powerful institutions in the world, and also one of the most difficult to understand.
The Fed acts through its Open Markets Desk, which sits at the heart of the global financial system as the world’s ultimate and limitless provider of dollars. On behalf of policy makers, the Desk gathers market intelligence from all the major market participants, sifts through reams of internal data, and works behind the scenes to keep the financial system intact. It is responsible for all of the Fed’s market operations, from trillions in quantitative easing to hundreds of billions in repo and FX-swap loans. The financial crises of 2008 and 2020 abated only through the emergency interventions of the Desk.
Joseph Wang spent five years studying the monetary system as a trader on the Desk. From that vantage point, Joseph saw firsthand how the Fed operates and how the financial system really works. This book is a distillation of his experience that aims to educate and demystify. After reading this book, you will understand how money is created, how the global dollar system is structured, and how it all fits into the broader financial system.

Free Download Catherine de’ Medici: The Life and Times of the Serpent Queen (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0DCHGYSY1 | 2024 | 15 hours and 23 minutes | M4B@64 kbps | 422 MB
Author: Mary Hollingsworth
Narrator: Rachel Bavidge
During an age of heightened religious conflict, Catherine de’ Medici lived her life at the center of sixteenth-century European and French politics. Daughter of Lorenzo II, the Medici ruler of Florence-and then wedded to a French prince by papal decree at the age of fourteen-Catherine first became queen consort of France and then mother to three French kings (Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III) who reigned in an era of almost continuous civil and religious strife. A lavish promoter of the arts, Catherine patronized poets, painters, and sculptors; lavished ruinous sums on the building and embellishment of monuments and palaces; and masterminded spectacular entertainments and tournaments that prefigure the splendor and ritual of the court of Versailles. Catherine maintained eighty ladies-in-waiting at court; it was rumored she used these women as bait to seduce courtiers for her political ends. Her admiration for the seer Nostradamus fueled claims of her love for the occult and the dark arts. Posterity has condemned her as the epitome of the scheming royal matriarch, her reputation tainted forever by her role in instigating the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Protestants in 1572. Catherine de’ Medici: The Life and Times of the Serpent Queen is Mary Hollingsworth’s evocative, authoritative biography of the most extraordinary woman of the sixteenth-century.

Free Download Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0CX25SVMJ | 2024 | 8 hours and 7 minutes | M4B@64 kbps | 238 MB
Author: Porter Fox
Narrator: Jeremy Arthur
Superstorms, hurricanes, typhoons, and spiraling freak weather: the fallout of global warming is a real-life natural thriller, as captured in Porter Fox’s urgent and stunning story of chasing the world’s most devastating storms. Here is the story of the largest storms on earth and how those storms are growing bigger and stronger. The tale of extreme weather doesn’t begin with floods, fires, or even the air that carries this change to our lives. It begins with the ocean. Oceans create weather, climate, floods, droughts, and most of the geophysical fallout of global warming. Exactly how, award-winning writer Porter Fox contends, depends on invisible ocean currents, planetary cycles just now being defined, and processes in the deep ocean that may well have already saved us from the worst effects of the climate crisis. In an attempt to avert a coming age of superstorms, sea level rise, and catastrophic warming, scientists followed the lead of a college drop-out-turned-maverick sailor and storm-chaser; a Romanian refugee turned BBC radio host turned circumnavigating mapmaker; and an audacious new attempt to study storms above as well as deep below the ocean depths, using drones. Throughout Category Five, Fox shadows these explorers, scientists, oceanographers, and weather forecasters in an attempt to understand, forestall, and possibly harness the awesome power of our oceans.

Free Download Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (Audiobook)
English | December 02, 2020 | ASIN: B08PC4TNDQ, B00F2OP3R4 | M4B@128 kbps | 25h 25m | 1.35 GB
Author: Max Hastings | Narrator: Simon Vance
From the acclaimed military historian, a new history of the outbreak of World War I: the dramatic stretch from the breakdown of diplomacy to the battles – the Marne, Ypres, Tannenberg – that marked the frenzied first year before the war bogged down in the trenches.
In Catastrophe 1914, Max Hastings gives us a conflict different from the familiar one of barbed wire, mud, and futility. He traces the path to war, making clear why Germany and Austria-Hungary were primarily to blame, and describes the gripping first clashes in the West, where the French army marched into action in uniforms of red and blue with flags flying and bands playing. In August, four days after the French suffered 27,000 men dead in a single day, the British fought an extraordinary holding action against oncoming Germans, one of the last of its kind in history. In October, at terrible cost the British held the allied line against massive German assaults in the first battle of Ypres. Hastings also recreates the lesser-known battles on the Eastern Front, brutal struggles in Serbia, East Prussia, and Galicia, where the Germans, Austrians, Russians, and Serbs inflicted three million casualties upon one another by Christmas.

Free Download Mel Bunce, Kate Wright, Martin Scott, Tom Campbell (Narrator), "Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America"
English | ASIN: B0DDZBV68B | 2024 | MP3@64 kbps | ~09:44:00 | 268 MB
The Voice of America (VOA) is the oldest and largest US government-funded international media organization. In 2020, Donald Trump nominated Michael Pack, a right-wing documentarian and close friend of Steve Bannon, to lead the US Agency for Global Media-the independent federal agency overseeing US-funded international media. During Pack’s seven month tenure, more than thirty whistleblowers filed complaints against him, and a judge ruled that he had infringed journalists’ constitutional right to freedom of speech.
How did such a major international public service media network become intensely politicized by government allies in such a short time, despite having its editorial independence protected by law?