Audiobooks narrated by Kc Wayman

What Does That Mean?: Better Understand Idioms, Phrases, and Sayings | And Discover the Fascinating

They say 'ignorance is bliss,' but there's no reason to 'take a rain check' on learning more about the English language.What does it mean for something to be 'a dime a dozen'? Why on earth would you tell someone to 'break a leg' when wishing them good luck? Idioms and expressions are a part of everyday English, but they aren't always the easiest to figure out. Many of these phrases have meanings that aren't immediately clear, and it can be confusing when they come up in conversations. For instance, 'a blessing in disguise' can easily become 'a blessing in the skies,' which is still less ridiculous than some of the very real idioms you'll find within these pages! Expanding your knowledge of English and the phrases used by native speakers will not only help you speak more confidently, but it will also assist in understanding complicated conversations and stories. In this guide, here is just a fraction of what you will discover: - The meanings and history behind 101 phrases and idioms for every situation - The obscure origins of many sayings and their enduring legacy throughout the years - How to properly use idioms in casual conversation to boost your speaking ability and conversational skills - Example sentences using the phrases so that you can see them in action And much more. Whether you're a native speaker looking to deepen your understanding of these common and not-so-common phrases or are learning English with the goal of speaking naturally and casually, this is the book for you! If you're ready to 'read between the lines' and master the art of the idiom, then scroll up and click the “Add to Cart” button right now.

Cooper The Pooper (Author), Kc Wayman (Narrator)

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Viracocha: The History and Legacy of the Inca’s Creator God

Although the Inca’s oral traditions suggested that the history of the region began with their empire, the various gods and the religious ceremonies of the peoples that inhabited the Inca’s lands before their arrival were assimilated into the Inca Empire and were incorporated into Inca religion. However, under Inca rule, all those gods were to be subordinate to those gods of the Incas themselves, so as to ensure that imperial authority was clear and without dispute among all quarters of the empire. Viracocha was the primary god in the Inca pantheon as the origin and creator of all things. His son, the god Inti, or the Sun, was married to Mama Quilla, the Moon, who was also created by Viracocha. According to one myth, Inti was the father of Manco Cápac, the founder of the Inca ruling dynasty, but it was believed by some that Viracocha himself fathered Manco Cápac. In practice, the Inca centered their religious worship on Inti, and this god's High Priest was the second most important person in Inca society. The god Inti was honored at an annual celebration held each June, and the Inti Raymi festival included sacrifices, feasts and sexual abstinence. This cosmology was imposed throughout the empire, and temples to the Sun were constructed and staffed by religious officials who were allotted farmland called “lands of the Sun.” Other local cults were provided with produce from these lands as well. The main temple of Inca religion was the Coricancha or Sun Temple in Cuzco, in which was kept the great golden disk of the Sun. The disk was appropriated by the Spanish in 1571 and sent off to the Pope. While it has disappeared, perhaps lost somewhere during the tortuous route to Spain, it remains alive in the fabulous world of adventure story writers, New Age mystics and manufacturers of souvenirs. It became a major element in the iconography of the 19th century independence movement in South America.

Charles River Editors (Author), Kc Wayman (Narrator)

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Vagus Nerve 2 books in 1: The Complete Guide to Activate the Healing Power of Vagus Nerve with Self-

Supercharge your health and uncover the secrets of the vagus nerve with this incredible two-in-one bundle! Do you want to learn about the amazing, proven healing power of the Vagus nerve? Want to gain a deeper understanding of the Polyvagal theory and how it can drastically boost your mental, emotional, and physical well-being? Then keep reading...Inside this comprehensive two-in-one book bundle, you’ll discover how you can harness the power of the vagus nerve to boost your health like never before. With a detailed breakdown of how this nerve works, how the Polyvagal theory explains mental illness, and how you can heal a damaged Vagus nerve for better emotional, physical, and mental health, this book is your ticket to a new and improved you. Inside book one, you’ll discover: - Understanding The Vagus Nerve and How It Works - The Secret To Why Your Nervous System Impacts Your Emotions - How Anxiety, Depression, and Inflammation Are All Related - Simple Yet Powerful Strategies For Stimulating Your Vagus Nerve - How To Use Mediation, Yoga, and Massages To Improve Your Nervous System - Plus Tips and Tricks For Healing a Damaged Vagus Nerve And in book two, you’ll learn: - An exploration of the automatic nervous system - Understanding the Polyvagal theory (and why it matters) - Overcoming emotional stress and healing with the power of the vagal tone - Powerful strategies for reclaiming control of your well-being - How to practice yoga and therapy for healing your vagus nerve Packed with a wealth of valuable strategies as well as the real science and psychology behind the vagus nerve, this bundle is perfect for anyone looking to take charge of their health and improve their nervous system. Buy now to uncover the secret to supercharging your well-being today!

Josh Brown (Author), Kc Wayman (Narrator)

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Unlimited Memory Power: How to Remember More, Improve Your Concentration and Develop a Photographic

Wouldn't it be amazing if you could unlock the full potential of your memory? Imagine having the ability to learn faster, remember everything effortlessly, and skyrocket your productivity. Picture yourself as a real-life superhero with a photographic memory, effortlessly recalling facts, names, and events with precision. Enter the world of 'Unlimited Memory Power,' a book that holds the key to transforming your memory into a superpower. Inside its pages, you'll embark on a journey filled with actionable steps designed to deliver the results you crave. Say goodbye to forgetfulness and welcome the dawn of a sharper, more powerful memory. What you’ll learn: - Advanced Learning Strategies to Remember More in Less Time. - How to Memorize Names, Dates, Game Cards and Useful Info Like a Superhero. - The Main Secret of Better Focus and Concentration. - High-Speed Memory Tips. - A Brain-Enhancing and Memory Improvement Menu. - An Action Plan for How to Improve Memory in Two Weeks. - Foreign Language Hacking - The Best Methods to Learn and Speak a New Language. - The Beginner’s Guide to Developing Photographic Memory Skills. + BONUS: 21 Memory Improvement Exercises and Techniques Discover basic skills and advanced memory strategies, including mnemonic devices, the memory palace, and the military method. Cultivate a photographic memory to recall faces, names, numbers, dates, languages, and game cards effortlessly. Join us on a journey to boost your brainpower, enhance memory, and amplify your focus. Unleash your potential for success and fulfillment. Want to know more? Start listening to learn how to remember more, stress less, and live a meaningful, productive life starting now!

Scott Sharp (Author), Kc Wayman (Narrator)

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The Velociraptor: The History of the Popular but Misunderstood Dinosaur Genus

The massively popular 1990 novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton and its subsequent movie adaptations led to a huge resurgence in interest in dinosaurs and the prehistoric world. That interest continues to the present day, even though most of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park weren’t actually from the Jurassic period. Triceratops, Velociraptor, Tyrannosaurus Rex and the huge sauropods such as Brachiosaurus that feature in the book and movies all actually belong to the Late Cretaceous period, more than 40 million years after the end of the Jurassic. Regardless, the movie made certain kinds of dinosaurs instantly recognizable, even if associated with the wrong era. Thanks to the movie, there has been some unwitting confusion over the identity of the Velociraptor, and this confusion was due in large part to the fact the name sounds far more scary than the creature to which the name originally belonged. Moreover, the creature to which the label was applied in the novel and movie was actually a distant cousin named Deinonychus, but as the story goes, the author, Michael Crichton, thought “Velociraptor” sounded “more dramatic.” The actual Velociraptor lived not in the badlands of North America, but in the badlands of central-eastern Asia, and it was not nearly as intimidating as Deinonychus. In fact, the main species of genus Velociraptor - Velociraptor mongoliensis - was no bigger than a turkey. Thus, in a very real sense, the Velociraptor has taken on a larger-than-life reputation.

Charles River Editors (Author), Kc Wayman (Narrator)

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The Utah War: The History of the Federal Government’s Controversial Conflict with Brigham Young and

Joseph Smith’s death was one of the catalysts for the Mormons’ great migration to Utah, and today that state and the Mormons are virtually synonymous. To this day, Mormons still form a majority of the population, and members of the Church have prominent political and economic roles. Both of Utah’s U.S. Senators, Mike Lee and Mitt Romney, are Mormons, as is Governor Gary Herbert. The story of the Mormon pioneers and the trail they trod is one of the great stories of the westward expansion of the United States. Frenchman Hyppolite Taine wrote of the migration in romantic terms in the 1860s: “Since the exodus of the Israelites there is no example of so great a religious emigration executed across such great spaces in spite of such obstacles, by so great a number of men, with so much order, obedience, courage, patience, and devotion…But the mainsprings of this great will was faith. Without it men would not have done such things. These exiles thought that they were founding the city of God, the metropolis of mankind. They considered themselves the renovators of the world. Let us remember our youth, and with what force an idea...merely by the fact that it seems good and true to us hurls us forward despite natural egotism, daily weakness, habits that we have contracted, surrounding prejudices, and accumulated obstacles! We don’t know of what we are capable.” The Mormon response to the federal government and the Buchanan administration in 1857 and 1858 was shaped by the faith’s experience of previous conflicts, which had included an extermination order proclaimed by the governor of Missouri against Mormons, the murder of Smith, and a massacre of Mormon men and boys. As a result, when things came to a head in Utah, the Mormons were more willing to fight.

Charles River Editors (Author), Kc Wayman (Narrator)

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The Underground Railroad to Mexico: The History and Legacy of the Southern Routes to Freedom for Ame

The Underground Railroad is one of the most taught topics to young schoolchildren, and every American is familiar with the idea of fugitive slaves escaping to Canada and the North with the help of determined abolitionists and even former escaped slaves like Harriet Tubman. The secrecy involved in the Underground Railroad made it one of the most mysterious aspects of the mid-19th century in America, to the extent that claims spread that 100,000 slaves had escaped via the Underground Railroad. Of course, from a practical standpoint, the Underground Railroad had to remain covert not only for the sake of thousands of slaves, but for a small army of men and women of every race, religion and economic class who put themselves in peril on an ongoing basis throughout the first half of the 19th century, and in the years leading up to the war. Over 150 years later, that same secrecy has helped the Underground Railroad become so romanticized and mythologized that people often visualize it in ways that were far different from reality. Before the American Civil War eliminated slavery, it was a fixture in North America for over 200 years, and by 1850 a trained slave was worth approximately $2,500, around 10 times the sum of a typical annual salary in that day. As a result, the economic dependence on slavery in the South was an extreme one, and in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act, black people in the North were under constant pressure to defend their “credentials” to bounty hunters and owners. Between the value of slaves in America, rising abolitionist sentiment at home and overseas, and political debates promoting or hindering the movement toward equality, the era in which the Underground Railroad operated cannot be easily fit into a concise body of principles, actions or geography.

Charles River Editors (Author), Kc Wayman (Narrator)

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The Underground City of Derinkuyu: The History and Mystery of the Ancient Subterranean City in Turke

Among all the early Iron Age people from the Near East who inherited the geopolitical vacuum of power left by the Sea Peoples invasions, the Phrygians are perhaps one of the most misunderstood. They built a powerful and wealthy kingdom, but were overshadowed by their more powerful and wealthier neighbors, the Lydians. From the early 7th century BCE until the middle of the 6th century BCE, the Lydians played an important role in the history of the eastern Mediterranean region as they took on the role of middleman between the empires of the Near East and the emerging Hellenic civilization in Greece. From their capital in Sardis, the Lydian kings traded and made alliances and war with numerous kings, tyrants, and generals, which ultimately cemented their role as a brief but historically important people and kingdom in the ancient world. It seems that around this time, one of the most unique sites in antiquity was being constructed in central Turkey, an archaeological mystery modern scholars have only recently begun to uncover. Known as Derinkuyu in the Turkish language, the archaeological site is as expansive as any other in Turkey, but its expanse is more vertical than horizontal, which is what makes it so unusual. The lost city of Derinkuyu descends to depths of nearly 300 feet under the wind-swept cliffs and rock formations of the otherwise desolate region known as Cappadocia. Cappadocia’s landscape looks otherworldly, windswept, and unlivable in places, and if not for modern technologies, including electricity, sanitation, and irrigation, it surely would be considered inhabitable by many people. More recently, Derinkuyu has caught the attention of tourists, while academics have started to ask serious questions about this important site. Recent studies of Derinkuyu have helped illuminate how a city able to house 20,000 or more people could exist in antiquity, particularly with regard to logistics.

Charles River Editors (Author), Kc Wayman (Narrator)

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The Tyrannosaurus Rex: The History of the World’s Most Famous Dinosaur

The massively popular 1990 novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton and its subsequent movie adaptations led to a huge resurgence in interest in dinosaurs and the prehistoric world. That interest continues to the present day, even though most of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park weren’t actually from the Jurassic period. Triceratops, Velociraptor, Tyrannosaurus Rex and the huge sauropods such as Brachiosaurus that feature in the book and movies all actually belong to the Late Cretaceous period, more than 40 million years after the end of the Jurassic. Regardless, certain kinds of dinosaurs remain instantly recognizable, and among them, the “king” is undoubtedly the Tyrannosaurus. The first discovery of a Tyrannosaurus was made in 1902 and the largest carnivorous dinosaur ever found at the time quickly gripped the popular imagination. Even its name was dramatic - Tyrannosaurus Rex means “King of the Tyrant Lizards.” The T-Rex as it quickly became known didn’t appear until the last age of the Late Cretaceous period, the Maastrichtian, but when it did, it was the biggest and most terrifying of all the theropod predators. The T-Rex was around 13 feet tall at the hips (its tallest point since it isn’t believe to have stood upright), it was over 35 feet long, and it weighed about nine metric tons. Like most therapods, it had very powerful hind legs and much smaller fore legs, so the front legs look almost comically small. This dinosaur also had a large and powerful tail to counterbalance its very large head (some T-Rex skulls are nearly five feet long). Within the skull was a massive jaw lined with teeth up to a foot long. A reconstructive study has estimated that a T-Rex jaw was capable of exerting a pressure of over 55,000 Newtons; the equivalent of almost six tons of pressure. It was fast too, possibly capable of moving at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour.

Charles River Editors (Author), Kc Wayman (Narrator)

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The Tainos and Caribs: The History of the Indigenous Natives Who Encountered Christopher Columbus in

On October 12, 1492, one of the most important “first contacts” of the modern era was made when three ships of Spanish origin approached the island archipelago now known as the Bahamas, cautiously dropping anchor as the captain of the fleet gazed across to what he assumed was the coast of India. According to the popular version of the story, amazed at the sight of ships and men of such unfamiliar appearance, the native people of the island plunged into the clear waters of the western Atlantic, expertly swimming or aboard dugout canoes, and came out to greet the strangers. In all probability, the meeting was much more cautious and incremental, but the idea that these innocent people, raised in a tropical Eden, might embrace with such open enthusiasm their own destruction is picturesque, and no doubt appeals to contemporary perceptions. By whatever means one might choose to view it, this meeting of cultures certainly did mark the beginning of a bold new chapter in the history of Europe, and the beginning of the end of an ancient race of native people occupying a vast new continent. The entries into Christopher Columbus’ log as he recorded his first encounters with the indigenous people of the “Indies” are very telling. The island people arrived alongside his ships, offering humble gifts that Columbus described as “parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells.” These were the Taínos people, or the “Arawaks” as they would come to be known, and Columbus described them as “well built…with good bodies and handsome features.” This description, while deceptively simple, had a chilling implication, because Columbus was not taking note of these facts out of idle interest but in terms of how best to exploit them. As the natives offered up gifts aand by implication the freedom of their islands, Columbus remarked simply on their primitive appearance.

Charles River Editors (Author), Kc Wayman (Narrator)

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The Stuart Restoration: The History and Legacy of the English Monarchy’s Return to Power in the Late

Oliver Cromwell is one of the most important men in England’s history, but everything he struggled for collapsed within two decades of his death. The army, Parliament and the citizens of London grappled with each other for control of the country, and even the army no longer remained a united political force. Civil war almost broke out again as a force under Lambert failed to prevent General Monck, the military governor of Scotland, from marching south and dissolving the Rump Parliament. Excluded MPs were restored on condition that they themselves dissolve Parliament, and following fresh elections without military intervention, a new Parliament met on April 25, 1660. Dominated by Presbyterians and Royalists, it accepted a settlement offered by the man titling himself Charles II, the son and heir of Charles I. On May 25, 1660, Charles II returned to England, and less than two years after Cromwell’s death, his work was undone by the Restoration. King Charles II heaped ignominy upon defeat by having Cromwell’s body dug up and posthumously executed. Cromwell’s body was then decapitated, as was Ireton’s, and their heads were placed on a pike above Westminster Hall, where Charles I had been tried, for several years. Despite the Restoration, however, and despite the fact England’s republican experiment barely outlasted Cromwell, the Commonwealth and Restoration were hugely important in asserting the power of Parliament, and it permanently shifted England’s political balance firmly towards a constitutional monarchy limited by Parliament. The Stuart monarchy was restored on condition of compromise with Parliament and the army, and a precedent had been set for Parliament to replace the monarch, a precedent it would follow in the 1680s when James II was replaced by William and Mary in a settlement that set even more limits around the monarch.

Charles River Editors (Author), Kc Wayman (Narrator)

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The Start of World War II: The History of the Events that Culminated with Nazi Germany’s Invasion of

'My good friends,' the mustached, bony man with thick eyebrows and large, strong teeth somewhat reminiscent of those of a horse, shouted to the crowds from the second-floor window of his house at 10 Downing Street, 'this is the second time in our history, that there has come back to Downing Street from Germany peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time.' The man addressing the crowd, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, had just returned from the heart of Nazi Germany following negotiations with Adolf Hitler, and the crowd gathered outside the English leader's house on September 30, 1938 greeted these ringing words with grateful cheers. The piece of paper Chamberlain flourished exultantly seemed to offer permanent amity and goodwill between democratic Britain and totalitarian Germany. In it, Britain agreed to allow Hitler's Third Reich to absorb the Sudeten regions of Czechoslovakia without interference from either England or France, and since high percentages of ethnic Germans – often more than 50% locally – inhabited these regions, Hitler's demand for this territory seemed somewhat reasonable to Chamberlain and his supporters. With Germany resurgent and rearmed after the disasters inflicted on it by the Treaty of Versailles following World War I, the pact – known as the Munich Agreement – held out hope of a quick end to German ambitions and the return of stable, normal international relations across Europe. Of course, the Munich agreement is now notorious because its promise proved barren within a very short period of time. Chamberlain's actions either failed to avert or actually hastened the very cataclysm he wished to avoid at all costs. The 'Munich Agreement' of 1938 effectively signed away Czechoslovakia's independence to Hitler's hungry new Third Reich, and within two years, most of the world found itself plunged into a conflict which made a charnel house of Europe and left somewhere between 60-80 million people dead globally.

Charles River Editors (Author), Kc Wayman (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Kc Wayman