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Audiobooks Narrated by Mack Gordon
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"Some individuals have such a magnetic personality that they can attract a hugely devoted following, ignoring the misdeeds of their leader and even committing evil on their behalf. With religious, spiritual or philosophical beliefs to guide them, cults can lead to some of the disturbing events of the modern era. Filled with shadowy rituals and sinister hierarchies and led by masterful manipulators, they can easily become the site of unthinkable horror - and it is only after the leader is brought down that those caught deep inside truly understand what was going on.
This book explores the cases of some of the most horrifying cults ever to have existed, including:
- The Family, led by Charles Manson, a cult of death and destruction which terrorized Los Angeles in the 1960s.
- The Branch Davidians, led by David Koresh, a doomsday cult that ended in a tragic shootout with the authorities.
- The Peoples Temple, led by the Reverend Jim Jones, who orchestrated a mass murder-suicide after convincing his followers to relocate to a remote commune in the Guyana jungle.
- Aum Shinrikyo, founded by Shoko Asahara, which carried out a number of terrorist attacks in Japan in the late 20th century."
"Award-winning architecture writer Ike Ijeh introduces 50 of the world's most influential architects and a selection of their most celebrated buildings, showcased with full-colour photography.
The 50 architects selected here have designed buildings that are as dramatic as their impact on the world of architecture. From Zaha Hadid to Nicholas Hawksmoor, architect and journalist Ike Ijeh reveals his top 50 list of the architects deserving of the description 'greatest'."
"A History of the Americas is an extraordinary narrative weaving together common threads of history of the two continents from the end of the ice ages until the present day.
Covering the breadth of one of the world's largest and most important landmasses, A History of the Americas takes you from the emergence of the first civilizations of Norte Chico in Peru and the Olmecs in Mesoamerica to the rise of the Maya, Aztecs and Inca during the Middle Ages, as well as the remarkable settlements such as Cahokia and Mesa Verde in North America, through the tragedies of contact between New and Old Worlds to the establishment of new nations like the United States of America.
Examining themes such as trade, agriculture, politics, war, imperialism and culture along the way, the author reveals the fascinating threads that connected a diverse array of peoples and nations. Impressive monuments and architectural wonders join an array of sources in helping us understand the past of this most fascinating place."
"From their promising beginnings at Stanford to their founding of Google and beyond, this fascinating biography charts the extraordinary rise of tech duo Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
As PhD students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin devised a powerful search engine. Google, the company they founded in 1998 became a brand, the world's pre-eminent search engine, a centre of artificial intelligence and a source of data collection. This fascinating biography looks at the background behind the formation of the company, as well as the technology and the business model that led it to become so successful.
Chronicling their rise to success, this book is fascinating read for aspiring entrepreneurs or anyone looking to build a successful business."
"Even as security has grown ever stronger and the techniques to catch criminals are more advanced than ever, serial killers still find a way to conduct their murderous business. In the 21st century, violent killers have used modern technology to help them commit their horrific crimes. Some look to the internet to stalk their victims, while the dark web is home to a shadowy world of illegal weapon sales, murder-for-hire sites and criminal forums providing tips on how to kill and get away with it.
This book includes:
- Philip Markoff, aka the Craigslist Killer, who used the e-commerce site Craigslist to solicit victims
- Stephen Paddock, who killed 60 people and injured nearly 1,000 more after opening fire at a music festival in Las Vegas
- Maury Travis, who sent a map with his victims' locations to the detectives on the case, daring them to find the man behind the murder."
"Sent to Reformatory at the age of 10, Sicilian-American Sam Giancana lived a gilded life as mobster and mob boss at a pivotal point in history when the mafia decided who ruled America, who lived and who died.
Born in 1908, in The Patch, Chicago, Giancana joined the Forty-Two gang of lawless juvenile punks in 1921 and quickly proved himself as a skilled 'wheel man' (or getaway driver), extortionist and vicious killer. Called up to the ranks of the Outfit, he reputedly held talks with the CIA about assassinating Fidel Castro, shared a girlfriend with John F. Kennedy and had friends in high places, including Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, Marilyn Monroe and, some say, the Kennedys, although he fell out with them.
The story of Sam Giancana will overturn many of your beliefs about America during the Kennedy era. If you want to know Giancana's role in the brother's deaths, and more of the intrigue surrounding that of Marilyn Monroe, this book will fill you in on the murky lives of many shady characters who really ruled the day, both in Chicago and elsewhere."
"The diminutive Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known universally by his nickname of 'El Chapo' ('Shorty' in Spanish), is the highest-profile narco-terrorist since the demise of Pablo Escobar in the 1990s. Loera began work at the age of nine as a gomero - a farmhand harvesting opium - and as he grew up he shot and murdered his way to the top. In 2009, he made the Forbes annual billionaires list and, before his capture by Mexican marines in 2016, the Sinaloa cartel which he commanded was turning over more than $11 billion in annual sales to North America, supplying more than 10 per cent of all illegal narcotics used on that continent. This made him Public Enemy Number One in the USA.
El Chapo was among the most powerful individuals in the world. In Sinaloa, he was a folk hero and the subject of popular songs known as 'narcocorridos'. Meanwhile, America's Drug Enforcement Agency (the DEA) had sworn to hunt him down. Featuring the remarkable tale of El Chapo's arrest in Guatemala in 1993, how he continued to run his cartel from his cell in a Mexican jail and his subsequent escape in a prison laundry cart, along with his recapture in 2014, and ultimate extradition to the US for the Trial of the Century, this book gives you the inside track on the dog-eat-dog world of international drugs trafficking."
"This anthology brings together 20 texts which were vital in forging the United States and its constitution as we know it.
Since the founding of the republic, great thinkers and politicians have set out their visions for America through formal documents, impassioned speeches and momentous treaties. This collection includes some of the most important works that helped define the country that America was to become.
Politicians like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton helped define the founding values of the United States of America. Their bold and revolutionary ideas did not come about unopposed, and they found themselves called upon to explain their reasoning to the wider public. The words of these incredible individuals ring just as true today as when they were first made and provided a firm foundation for the country that is the America we know and love today.
This volume features documents such as:
- The Declaration of Independence
- Benjamin Franklin's Final Speech to the Constitutional Convention
- The Constitution and the Amendments
- The Federalist Papers
- President George Washington's Farewell Address
- The Emancipation Proclamation"
"Bloomsbury presents Earth by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Linda T. Elkins-Tanton, read by Rachel Handshaw and Mack Gordon.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
In Earth, a planetary scientist and a literary humanist explore what happens when we think of the Earth as an object viewable from space. As a “blue marble,” “a blue pale dot,” or, as Chaucer described it, “this litel spot of erthe,” the solitary orb is a challenge to scale and to human self-importance. Beautiful and self-contained, the Earth turns out to be far less knowable than it at first appears: its vast interior an inferno of incandescent and yet solid rock and a reservoir of water vaster than the ocean, a world within the world. Viewing the Earth from space invites a dive into the abyss of scale: how can humans apprehend the distances, the temperatures, and the time scale on which planets are born, evolve, and die?
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic. C 2017 Linda T. Elkins-Tanton P 2025 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC C 2017 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen"
"Bloomsbury presents Shopping Mall by Matthew Newton, read by Mack Gordon.
Object Lessons is a series of short books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
The mall near Mat thew Newton’s childhood home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was one of the state’s first enclosed shopping malls. Like all malls in their heyday, this one was a climate-controlled pleasuredome where strangers converged. It boasted waterfalls, fish ponds, an indoor ice skating rink larger than Rockefeller Center’s, and a monolithic clock tower illuminated year-round beneath a canopy of interconnected skylights. It also became the backdrop for filmmaker George A. Romero’s zombie opus Dawn of the Dead.
Part memoir and part case study, Shopping Mall examines the modern mythology of the mall and shows that, more than a collection of stores, it is a place of curiosity, ritual, and fantasy.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic. C 2017 Matthew Newton P 2025 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC"
"Bloomsbury presents The Trouble with Heroes by Kate Messner read by Mack Gordon
Bestselling and award-winning author Kate Messner takes readers on a heart-filling journey as a boy finds his path to healing.
One summer.
46 mountain peaks.
A second chance to make things right.
Finn Connelly is nothing like his dad, a star athlete and firefighter hero who always ran toward danger until he died two years ago. Finn is about to fail seventh grade and has never made headlines . . . until now.
Caught on camera vandalizing a cemetery, he's in big trouble for knocking down some dead old lady's headstone. Turns out that grave belongs to a legendary local mountain climber, and her daughter makes Finn an unusual offer: she'll drop all the charges if he agrees to climb all forty-six Adirondack High Peaks in a single summer. And there's just one more thing--he has to bring along the dead woman's dog.
In a wild three months of misadventures, mountain mud, and unexpected mentors, Finn begins to find his way on the trails. At the top of each peak, he can see for miles and slowly begins to understand more about himself and his dad. But the mountains don't care about any of that, and as the clock ticks down to September, they have more surprises in store. Finn's final summit challenge may be more than even a hero can face. C 2025 Kate Messner P 2025 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC"
"'Martin King tells the human side of the story of the Battle of the Bulge better than anyone.'
Commander Jeffrey Barta, US Navy (retired)
'I have walked the battlefields with Martin King, who has traversed them countless times with veterans of the Bulge. No one knows this story like Martin, and no one can tell it quite the way he does.'
Rick Beyer, New York Times bestselling author of The Ghost Army of World War II
The vortex of a tornado is a vacuum, and that is where we were, in the centre of a storm of armour and artillery pushing forward into the Ardennes.
- John Hillard Dunn, 106th Division, US Army
The Battle of the Bulge was the largest land engagement of World War II. The German counter-attack, spearheaded by three Panzer armies, found the Allies unprepared and ill-equipped. As the fighting raged across the frosty forests of the Ardennes, it was left to a few untested US Infantry divisions to hold the Allied lines. Written by one of the world's leading experts on the subject, this account provides an essential introduction to the events of winter 1944-5 and to the many soldiers who risked their lives in defence of freedom.
Drawing on personal interviews, extensive research, and an unparalleled knowledge of the region, Martin King explores one of the most important battles of World War II."
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