Audiobooks narrated by John H. Mayer

Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?

In a barracks on an abandoned military base, miles from the nearest road, Thomas watches as the man he has brought wakes up. Kev, a NASA astronaut, doesn't recognize his captor, though Thomas remembers him. Kev cries for help. He pulls at the chain. Thomas didn't want to have to resort to this. But they really needed to have a conversation, and Kev didn't answer his messages. And now, Thomas has a few questions.

Dave Eggers (Author), Bruce Turk, John H. Mayer, Kate Mcgregor-Stewart, Marc Cashman, Mark Deakins, Michelle Gonzalez, Multiple Narrators, Rebecca Lowman (Narrator)

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Who Was Frederick Douglass?

Born into slavery in Maryland in 1818, Frederick Douglass was determined to gain freedom--and once he realized that knowledge was power, he secretly learned to read and write to give himself an advantage. After escaping to the North in 1838, as a free man he gave powerful speeches about his experience as a slave. He was so impressive that he became a friend of President Abraham Lincoln, as well as one of the most famous abolitionists of the nineteenth century.

April Jones Prince (Author), John H. Mayer (Narrator)

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Upstream: Searching for Wild Salmon, from River to Table

From the award-winning author of The Mushroom Hunters comes the story of an iconic fish, perhaps the last great wild food: salmon. For some, a salmon evokes the distant wild, thrashing in the jaws of a hungry grizzly bear on TV. For others, it’s the catch of the day on a restaurant menu, or a deep red fillet at the market. For others still, it’s the jolt of adrenaline on a successful fishing trip. Our fascination with these superlative fish is as old as humanity itself. Long a source of sustenance among native peoples, salmon is now more popular than ever. Fish hatcheries and farms serve modern appetites with a domesticated “product”—while wild runs of salmon dwindle across the globe. How has this once-abundant resource reached this point, and what can we do to safeguard wild populations for future generations? Langdon Cook goes in search of the salmon in Upstream, his timely and in-depth look at how these beloved fish have nourished humankind through the ages and why their destiny is so closely tied to our own. Cook journeys up and down salmon country, from the glacial rivers of Alaska to the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest to California’s drought-stricken Central Valley and a wealth of places in between. Reporting from remote coastlines and busy city streets, he follows today’s commercial pipeline from fisherman’s net to corporate seafood vendor to boutique marketplace. At stake is nothing less than an ancient livelihood. But salmon are more than food. They are game fish, wildlife spectacle, sacred totem, and inspiration—and their fate is largely in our hands. Cook introduces us to tribal fishermen handing down an age-old tradition, sport anglers seeking adventure and a renewed connection to the wild, and scientists and activists working tirelessly to restore salmon runs. In sharing their stories, Cook covers all sides of the debate: the legacy of overfishing and industrial development; the conflicts between fishermen, environmentalists, and Native Americans; the modern proliferation of fish hatcheries and farms; and the longstanding battle lines of science versus politics, wilderness versus civilization. This firsthand account—reminiscent of the work of John McPhee and Mark Kurlansky—is filled with the keen insights and observations of the best narrative writing. Cook offers an absorbing portrait of a remarkable fish and the many obstacles it faces, while taking readers on a fast-paced fishing trip through salmon country. Upstream is an essential look at the intersection of man, food, and nature. Advance praise for Upstream “Langdon Cook delivers a beautifully written portrait of the iconic salmon that blends history, biology, contentious politics, and the joy of fishing into a captivating and thought-provoking tale.”—Eric Jay Dolin, author of Brilliant Beacons “Salmon are the essence of the Pacific Northwest, and as Langdon Cook shows so powerfully, they are the key to its future. From the wild flats of Alaska’s Copper River to the straitjacketed creeks of California, Upstream captures the myriad ways people and salmon are deeply intertwined.”—Rowan Jacobsen, author of The Essential Oyster “In this fresh tale of an ancient wonder, Langdon Cook takes us on an inspired journey of discovery through the heart and soul of salmon country.”—David R. Montgomery, author of King of Fish and Growing a Revolution “Cook takes the reader on a thrilling adventure through the mountains, rivers, farmlands, and kitchens where progress, against all odds, is being made.”—Zeb Hogan, biologist and host of Nat Geo Wild’s Monster Fish

Langdon Cook (Author), John H. Mayer (Narrator)

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Treasure Hunt: Inside the Mind of the New Consumer

A BMW in a Costco parking lot? A working-class family with a 50-inch plasma TV? What’s going on in the mind of the new consumer? TREASURE HUNT takes us into the homes of real people making real decisions, and into the CEO's offices of innovative companies finding new ways to accommodate them. Written with the same flair, empathy, and intelligence that made Trading Up an instant classic, this is an essential guide to the moods and habits of the constantly changing consumer.

John Butman, Michael J. Silverstein (Author), John H. Mayer (Narrator)

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Three-Ring Rascals, Books 3-4: The Circus Goes to Sea; Pop Goes the Circus!

Kate Klise (Author), Ann Marie Lee, Cassandra Campbell, Fabio Tassone, Georgette Perna, Jesse Bernstein, John H. Mayer, Kathleen Mcinerney, Kirsten Potter, Lincoln Hoppe, Robbie Daymond, Stefan Rudnicki, Tara Sands, Todd Haberkorn, Various, Various Narrators (Narrator)

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Three-Ring Rascals, Books 1-2: The Show Must Go On!; The Greatest Star on Earth

Kate Klise (Author), Cassandra Campbell, Fabio Tassone, Georgette Perna, Jesse Bernstein, John H. Mayer, Kathleen Mcinerney, Kirsten Potter, Lincoln Hoppe, Robbie Daymond, Stefan Rudnicki, Tara Sands, Todd Haberkorn, Various, Various Narrators (Narrator)

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The Wolf Tree

Look no further for the perfect book for boys and girls who love fantasy, adventure, and white-knuckle action! "Can you imagine eternal Darkness, sir?" So asks the sickly stranger who staggers into Peg Leg Nel's birthday party. Before the man dies, he tells Ray and his friends of a Darkness spreading like wildfire across Kansas, turning good people bad and poisoning anyone who tries to escape. It's clear that though the evil Gog is dead, his devilish machine has survived and is growing stronger. Now a full-fledged Rambler, Ray leads his friends on a mission into the heart of darkness. Vital to their success is tracking down the legendary Wolf Tree, rumored to be a pathway to the spirit world. Only with one of the tree's limbs can the Nine Pound Hammer be repaired and the Gog's terrible machine finally destroyed. The search for the Wolf Tree grows desperate as the Darkness spreads, threatening Ray, his friends, and all of humanity. The Wolf Tree is the second fantasy adventure book in John Claude Bemis's series The Clockwork Dark, and adds new layers of myth and magic to Bemis's original take on American tall tales in The Nine Pound Hammer.

John Claude Bemis (Author), John H. Mayer (Narrator)

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The White City

In The Nine Pound Hammer, John Bemis introduced middle-grade readers to a whole new approach to epic fantasy, founded on characters and themes from American mythology and lore, including the legend of John Henry. Now in the third and final book, the heroes come together at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago for a final confrontation with a businessman and tycoon who is in fact an ageless evil known as the Gog. With his Dark Machine, he intends to bend the world to his ruthless vision of progress and efficiency. It's man versus machine all over again, fighting for the soul of humanity in front of Ferris's Wheel. For fans of adventure fantasy like Percy Jackson and Peter and the Starcatchers.

John Claude Bemis (Author), John H. Mayer (Narrator)

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The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President

A sweeping reexamination of the Founding Father who transformed the United States in each of his political "lives"-as a revolutionary thinker, as a partisan political strategist, and as a president 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. In The Three Lives of James Madison, Noah Feldman offers an intriguing portrait of this elusive genius and the constitutional republic he created-and how both evolved to meet unforeseen challenges. Madison hoped to eradicate partisanship yet found himself giving voice to, and institutionalizing, the political divide. Madison's lifelong loyalty to Thomas Jefferson led to an irrevocable break with George Washington, hero of the American Revolution. Madison closely collaborated with Alexander Hamilton on the Federalist papers-yet their different visions for the United States left them enemies. Alliances defined Madison, too. The vivacious Dolley Madison used her social and political talents to win her husband new supporters in Washington-and define the diplomatic customs of the capital's society. Madison's relationship with James Monroe, a mixture of friendship and rivalry, shaped his presidency and the outcome of the War of 1812. We may be more familiar with other Founding Fathers, but the United States today is in many ways Madisonian in nature. Madison predicted that foreign threats would justify the curtailment of civil liberties. He feared economic inequality and the power of financial markets over politics, believing that government by the people demanded resistance to wealth. Madison was the first Founding Father to recognize the importance of public opinion, and the first to understand that the media could function as a safeguard to liberty. The Three Lives of James Madison is an illuminating biography of the man whose creativity and tenacity gave us America's distinctive form of government. His collaborations, struggles, and contradictions define the United States to this day. Jacket illustration adapted from a 1792 portrait of James Madison by Charles Willson Peale (Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Okla.) Advance praise for The Three Lives of James Madison "Noah Feldman brings a scholarly rigor and a gift for narrative to this impressive account of the sprawling-and often perplexing-life of James Madison. Understanding America requires understanding this often-overlooked Founder and his long, eventful life in the arena. We are fortunate indeed that Feldman has given us such a thoughtful examination of Madison's mind and its still-unfolding role in the story of the nation."-Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power "James Madison is famously known as the 'Father' of the American Constitution. With great insight, conveyed in elegant and commanding prose, Noah Feldman gives us a rich portrait of our fourth president in all his many aspects: constitution maker, politician, partisan, friend, slaveholder, husband, president, and elder statesmen. The result is a fresh, bold, and much-needed look at a pivotal figure in American and, therefore, world history."-Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

Noah Feldman (Author), John H. Mayer (Narrator)

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The Terror Years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State

With the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright became generally acknowledged as one of our major journalists writing on terrorism in the Middle East. Here, in ten powerful pieces first published in The New Yorker, he recalls the path that terror in the Middle East has taken, from the rise of al-Qaeda in the 1990s to the recent beheadings of reporters and aid workers by ISIS. The Terror Years draws on several articles he wrote while researching The Looming Tower, as well as many that he’s written since, following where and how al-Qaeda and its core cultlike beliefs have morphed and spread. They include a portrait of the “man behind bin Laden,” Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the tumultuous Egypt he helped spawn; an indelible impression of Saudi Arabia, a kingdom of silence under the control of the religious police; the Syrian film industry, at the time compliant at the edges but already exuding a feeling of the barely masked fury that erupted into civil war; the 2006–11 Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza, a study in the disparate value of human lives. Other chapters examine al-Qaeda as it forms a master plan for its future, experiences a rebellion from within the organization, and spins off a growing web of worldwide terror. The American response is covered in profiles of two FBI agents and the head of the intelligence community. The book ends with a devastating piece about the capture and slaying by ISIS of four American journalists and aid workers, and our government’s failed response. On the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, The Terror Years is at once a unifying recollection of the roots of contemporary Middle Eastern terrorism, a study of how it has grown and metastasized, and, in the scary and moving epilogue, a cautionary tale of where terrorism might take us yet. With a Prologue read by the Author AFP PHOTO/HO/ISIL

Lawrence Wright (Author), John H. Mayer, Lawrence Wright (Narrator)

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The Rose Man of Sing Sing

Today, seventy-three years after his death, journalists still tell tales of Charles E. Chapin. As city editor of Pulitzeras New York Evening World, Chapin was the model of the take-no-prisoners newsroom tyrant: he drove reporters relentlesslyaand kept his paper in the center ring of the circus of big-city journalism. From the Harry K. Thaw trial to the sinking of the Titanic, Chapin set the pace for the evening press, the CNN of the pre-electronic world of journalism. In 1918, at the pinnacle of fame, Chapinas world collapsed. Facing financial ruin, sunk in depression, he decided to kill himself and his beloved wife Nellie. On a quiet September morning, he took not his own life, but Nellieas, shooting her as she slept. After his trialaand one hell of a story for the Worldas competitorsahe was sentenced to life in the infamous Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. In this story of an extraordinary life set in the most thrilling epoch of American journalism, James McGrath Morris tracks Chapinas rise from legendary Chicago street reporter to celebrity powerbroker in media-mad New York. His was a human tragedy played out in the sensational stories of tabloids and broadsheets. But itas also an epic of redemption: in prison, Chapin started a newspaper to fight for prisoner rights, wrote a best-selling autobiography, had two long-distance love affairs, and tapped his prodigious talents to transform barren prison plots into world-famous rose gardens before dying peacefully in his cell in 1930. The first portrait of one of the founding figures of modern American journalism, and a vibrant chronicle of the cutthroat culture of scoops and scandals, The Rose Man of Sing Sing is also a hidden history of New York at its most colorful and passionate.James McGrath Morris is a former journalist, author of Jailhouse Journalism: The Fourth Estate Behind Bars, and a historian. He lives in Falls Church, Virginia, and teaches at West Springfield High School.

James McGrath Morris (Author), John H. Mayer (Narrator)

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The Reivers

One of Faulkner's comic masterpieces, The Reivers is a picaresque that tells of three unlikely car thieves from rural Mississippi. Eleven-year-old Lucius Priest is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck, one of his family's retainers, to steal his grandfather's car and make a trip to Memphis. The Priest's black coachman, Ned McCaslin, stows away, and the three of them are off on a heroic odyssey, for which thy are all ill-equipped, that ends at Miss Reba's bordello in Memphis. From there a series of wild misadventures ensues--involving horse smuggling, trainmen, sheriff's deputies, and jail.

William Faulkner (Author), John H. Mayer (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by John H. Mayer