Audiobooks narrated by Kent Cassella

Steel: From Mine to Mill the Metal that Made America

"Steel is the metal that built the modern world. When its formula was finally deciphered about 150 years ago, it began to flow from hearths in increasing amounts. It built railroads, steel ships, skyscrapers, and bridges around the world, in the process propelling the great powers of the world -- Great Britain, Germany, the United States, Japan, and the Soviet Union -- into global economic dominance. In Steel, author Brooke C. Stoddard follows the fascinating story of iron and steel from pre-history through the Industrial Revolution and into the present age. Stoddard then dives into the world of modern steelmaking, joining the men and women who live in this world every day: he visits open-pit iron mines in the Mesabi Iron range, rides with 58,000 tons of iron ore on a thousand-foot ore boat from Duluth to Cleveland, climbs to the top of the country’s largest blast furnace, interviews workers as they toil next to their furnaces of liquid metal, and walks through the immense rolling mills where steel is pressed into products. The result is an extraordinary book about what many may think of as ordinary, but in reality is the metal that forms the backbone of modern civilization. "

Brooke C. Stoddard (Author), Kent Cassella (Narrator)

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Alzheimer's Canyon: One Couple's Reflections on Living with Dementia

"'In the middle of the night I wake up and don't know where I am.... Am I in my house? My neighbor's house? Do I turn on the light? Do I get dressed? I turn to Jane, hold her hand, and let her bring me back to reality.' What do you do when your reality slips away? If you're Sky Yardley and Jane Dwinell, you accept each new challenge, reshape your life, and write. When Sky was diagnosed with 'probable early stage Alzheimer's' at age 66, he was determined to live as fully as possible. He researched dementia, talked about dementia, connected with other people with the disease, and, finally, he wrote about it. With humor and honesty, love and compassion, Sky and his wife Jane describe what it's like to live with a constantly evolving and mysterious new life. 'The brain is a mysterious thing,' writes Jane, as Sky muses about traveling unmapped roads with no GPS. Welcome to Alzheimer's Canyon: there is one way in, and no way out. Follow Jane and Sky as they navigate this journey they did not ask to take, a journey that balances pain, loss, and confusions with gratitude, wonder, and transformation."

Jane Dwinell, Sky Yardley (Author), Jane Dwinell, Kent Cassella (Narrator)

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The Correctional Facility: A Journey into Dante's Inferno and the Ensuing Metastasis of Evil

"Raised as a Catholic in rural Vermont, I was infused with an awareness of sin and penitence, but also absolution and forgiveness. My late teenage encounter with Dostoevsky’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” shattered my youthful allegiance to Catholic dogma, but it’s one thing to walk away from Catholic doctrine and quite another to lose the weight of its beauty, fear, and guilt. Shortly after I read The Brothers Karamazov, in which “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” occurs as a story told by Ivan Karamazov, the sybarite, to his novice monk brother, Alyosha, I read Dante’s Inferno. I was fascinated by the vivid portrayal of the hell I’d heard about so graphically from the Québécois sisters who came down to teach Saturday morning catechism. I saw in Dante’s work and the extraordinary illustrations of Gustav Doré the hell I had imagined in catechism, a hell that haunts my imagination to this day. Is sin a temporal concept? Some of the sins of Dante’s time are not viewed as such today: heresy, suicide, concupiscence. His simple architecture of human sin is lost today in scale and technology. In 1320, one killed with one’s hands or with a piercing weapon like a stiletto, battle-axe, or sword, or with poison. Today, we have drones, nuclear bombs, and industrial toxins leaching into our soil, water, food, and air — and Pharma: subliminal mass homicides. The Correctional Facility comes after a lifetime of living with Catholicism and Dante’s weight of sin, evil, punishment, expiation, and redemption, and is my effort to make sense of it all."

Bill Schubart (Author), Kent Cassella (Narrator)

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Panhead

"Paul and Glenda grew up on a farm in Vermont’s remote Northeast Kingdom. They keep close to each other and have a shared sense that their way of life is coming to an end. But only when Paul returns home on his Harley Panhead to help his parents with the farm does the drama really begin. The dream of the open road—wind in the hair, power in the groin—is common among men young and old, but it is fraught with complexity and often danger. Panhead follows Paul on his journey from a hillside farm to college, to work in the Midwest and almost home again."

Bill Schubart (Author), Kent Cassella (Narrator)

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The Remedy: Bringing Lean Thinking Out of the Factory to Transform the Entire Organization

"A business novel about using the Lean quality improvement method to turnaround a failing company. It is the sequel to the author's successful business novel, Andy downstream into distribution and sales. Thus, we will transform our entire enterprise. At CMM union members will get their jobs back, but there will only be two job classifications: production and maintenance team member. Team members will be involved in continuous improvement work. The union and management will work together under a totally different contract based on worker involvement, flexibility and continuous improvement. Rachel asks Tom to lead the transformation of not just CMM, but of the entire enterprise. Tom is ambivalent. He knows the history & culture of the plant -- and company. He realizes changing engineering, design, marketing, distribution and so on will be even harder than changing an awful old factory. Why take on such a monster job? Maybe because he knows he can do it!"

Pascal Dennis (Author), Kent Cassella (Narrator)

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The Lamoille Stories

"Schubart brings to life the friends and characters of his native Lamoille County, where in the late 1950s and early 1960s, life was lived close to the earth and often against the grain. Schubart's collection of twenty-two stories captures Vermont in its transition from an enclave of hill farms and small towns where everyone knew your grandfather to a place where vehicles bearing license plates from "away" mix with hippie vans filled with born-again Vermonters getting back to the land...until snowfall."

Bill Schubart (Author), Bill Schubart, Kent Cassella, Mary Catherine Jones (Narrator)

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Lila & Theron

"Lila and Theron is set in rural America and relates a personal story of love and sacrifice. Lila and Theron do not imagine themselves poor, nor do they covet what they don't have. They are whole in themselves and on their land - in marked contrast to today's victim culture of safe spaces and narcissism. Bill Schubart grew up among farmers and loggers in Vermont's rural Northeast Kingdom, where survival depended not on institutions but on family, neighbors, hand tools, and the bounty of wilderness. Lila and Theron are from a time and place where the arguments that divide us today would seem meaningless against the exigencies of kinship and survival."

Bill Schubart (Author), Kent Cassella (Narrator)

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For the Love of Physics: From the End of the Rainbow to the Edge of Time---A Journey Through the Won

"'You have changed my life' is a common refrain in the emails Walter Lewin receives daily from fans who have been enthralled by his world-famous video lectures about the wonders of physics. 'I walk with a new spring in my step and I look at life through physics-colored eyes,' wrote one such fan. When Lewin's lectures were made available online, he became an instant YouTube celebrity, and the New York Times declared, 'Walter Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of YouTube's greatest hits.' For more than thirty years as a beloved professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lewin honed his singular craft of making physics not only accessible but truly fun, whether putting his head in the path of a wrecking ball, supercharging himself with three hundred thousand volts of electricity, or demonstrating why the sky is blue and why clouds are white. Now, as Carl Sagan did for astronomy and Brian Green did for cosmology, Lewin takes listeners on a marvelous journey in For the Love of Physics, opening our eyes as never before to the amazing beauty and power with which physics can reveal the hidden workings of the world all around us. 'I introduce people to their own world,' writes Lewin, 'the world they live in and are familiar with but don't approach like a physicist—yet.' Could it be true that we are shorter standing up than lying down? Why can we snorkel no deeper than about one foot below the surface? Why are the colors of a rainbow always in the same order, and would it be possible to put our hand out and touch one? Whether introducing why the air smells so fresh after a lightning storm, why we briefly lose (and gain) weight when we ride in an elevator, or what the big bang would have sounded like had anyone existed to hear it, Lewin never ceases to surprise and delight with the extraordinary ability of physics to answer even the most elusive questions. Recounting his own exciting discoveries as a pioneer in the field of X-ray astronomy—arriving at MIT right at the start of an astonishing revolution in astronomy—he also brings to life the power of physics to reach into the vastness of space and unveil exotic uncharted territories, from the marvels of a supernova explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud to the unseeable depths of black holes. 'For me,' Lewin writes, 'physics is a way of seeing—the spectacular and the mundane, the immense and the minute—as a beautiful, thrillingly interwoven whole.' His wonderfully inventive and vivid ways of introducing us to the revelations of physics impart to us a new appreciation of the remarkable beauty and intricate harmonies of the forces that govern our lives."

Walter Lewin, Warren Goldstein (Author), Kent Cassella (Narrator)

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Pathways to the Gods: The Stones of Kiribati

"A spaceport in the Andes! A computer chart in Egyptian ruins! Primitive sculptures of figures wearing space suits! Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods stunned the world with the archaeological discovery that alien beings once colonized earth. Now, in Pathways to the Gods, von Däniken reveals the story of his travels following the trail of the ancient visitors—from the technologically sophisticated stone ruins in the Bolivian Andes to the sensational Sanskrit descriptions of space battles in Calcutta—new proof of von Däniken's startling theory that man descended from the stars!"

Erich Von Daniken (Author), Kent Cassella (Narrator)

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Tin Can Man

"E. J. Jernigan's memoir offers listeners a fascinating glimpse of life as an enlisted man aboard the USS Saufley, one of the most highly decorated destroyers of World War II. It is a rarely told story of the sailors who fought the war from boiler rooms, after-steering spaces, radio shacks, and other gritty places that keep a warship going. For the author, it was a world of strong emotions and quick reactions, where men had to adapt and grow if they were to survive. With its colorful view of what went on below decks, Tin Can Man has made a lasting contribution to World War II literature since its publication in 1993. It appeals to veterans, historians and naval enthusiasts alike looking for an honest account of what happened."

E. J. Jernigan (Author), Kent Cassella (Narrator)

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The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Bra

"In What's the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank pointed out that a great number of Americans actually vote against their own interests. In The Political Mind, George Lakoff explains why. As it turns out, human beings are not the rational creatures we've so long imagined ourselves to be. Ideas, morals, and values do not exist somewhere outside the body, ready to be examined and put to use. Instead, they exist quite literally inside the brain—and they take physical shape there. For example, we form particular kinds of narratives in our minds just like we form specific muscle memories such as typing or dancing, and then we fit new information into those narratives. Getting that information out of one narrative type and into another—or building a whole new narrative altogether—can be as hard as learning to play the banjo. Changing your mind isn't like changing your body—it's the same thing. But as long as progressive politicians and activists persist in believing that people use an objective system of reasoning to decide on their politics, the Democrats will continue to lose elections. They must wrest control of the terms of the debate from their opponents rather than accepting their frame and trying to argue within it. This passionate, erudite, and groundbreaking book will appeal to readers of Steven Pinker and Thomas Frank. It is a fascinating read for anyone interested in how the mind works, how society works, and how they work together."

George Lakoff (Author), Kent Cassella (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Kent Cassella