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Audiobooks Narrated by Nelson Runger
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The plague of 1665 was followed by the Great Fire of London in 1666: great disasters evoking great responses. Those events re-fashioned the London landscape, and Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year re-fashioned English literature.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is one of the finest historians of our age. A former special assistant to President Kennedy, he received the National Humanities Medal in 1998. In this first volume of memoirs Schlesinger turns a keen eye on his own remarkable life--from his Midwestern upbringing, through his days at Harvard, to his involvement with World War II. The engrossing story of his life reads like a timeline of the twentieth century. With anecdotes featuring the major politicians, intellectuals, and entertainers of the era, it is easy to see why Dr. Henry Kissinger called this work "one of the definitive histories of the period." Schlesinger's shrewd observations and sharp wit have long helped Americans understand who they are and where they've come from. Now his own story comes to life with a lucid, often humorous narration by Nelson Runger.
In American Brutus, popular historian Michael W. Kauffman delivers a history that reads more like a best-selling novel. This definitive masterwork dispels commonly held myths and reveals the truth about John Wilkes Booth. Luring Southern sympathizers into a "noble" presidential kidnapping, Booth stunned his puzzled pawns by murdering Lincoln. From Booth's early life and acting career to his escape and death, this meticulously researched book re-examines it all using a wealth of primary sources.
In the early 1960s Donald McCaig left his job at a hot New York advertising agency and his Greenwich Village apartment for a rustic farm in a remote county in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. This is McCaig's story of farming in contemporary America, a timely tribute to a dying way of life.
Europe was in the long slumber of the Middle Ages, the Roman Empire was in tatters, and the Greek language was all but forgotten, until a group of twelfth-century scholars rediscovered and translated the works of Aristotle. His ideas spread like wildfire across Europe, offering the scientific view that the natural world, including the soul of man, was a proper subject of study. The rediscovery of these ancient ideas sparked riots and heresy trials, caused major upheavals in the Catholic Church, and also set the stage for today's rift between reason and religion. In Aristotle's Children, Richard Rubenstein transports us back in history, rendering the controversies of the Middle Ages lively and accessible-and allowing us to understand the philosophical ideas that are fundamental to modern thought.
Thirty years ago, the theory that continents are comprised of drifting plates-plate tectonics-evoked more scorn than serious research. Today, this revolutionary theory continues to dazzle and challenge geologists and laymen alike. Assembling California explores an area uniquely demonstrative of the plate tectonic theory: California, which according to "tectonicists," is breaking apart at its seams.
To geologists, rocks are beautiful, roadcuts are windowpanes, and the earth is alive-a work in progress. The cataclysmic movement that gives birth to mountains and oceans is ongoing and can still be seen at certain places on our planet. One of these is the Basin and Range region centered in Nevada and Utah. In this first book of a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, the author crosses the spectacular Basin and Range with geology professor Kenneth Deffeyes in tow. McPhee draws on Deffeyes' expertise to dazzle you with the vast perspective of geologic time and the fascinating history of vanished landscapes. The effect is guaranteed to expand your mind. McPhee's enthusiasm is infectious, as he provides one of the best introductions to plate tectonics and the New Geology. His elegant style is more pleasing than ever with narrator Nelson Runger's smooth, enthusiastic delivery. Runger mines the book's rich veins of poetic prose and subtle humor-and the result is pure gold.
Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us, the one who seems made of flesh rather than marble. In this authoritative and engrossing full-scale biography, Walter Isaacson shows how the most fascinating of America's founders helped define our national character.
In a sweeping narrative that follows Franklin's life from Boston to Philadelphia to London and Paris and back, Isaacson chronicles the adventures of the spunky runaway apprentice who became, during his 84-year life, America's best writer, inventor, media baron, scientist, diplomat, and business strategist, as well as one of its most practical and ingenious political leaders. He explores the wit behind Poor Richard's Almanac and the wisdom behind the Declaration of Independence, the new nation's alliance with France, the treaty that ended the Revolution, and the compromises that created a near-perfect Constitution.
Above all, Isaacson shows how Franklin's unwavering faith in the wisdom of the common citizen and his instinctive appreciation for the possibilities of democracy helped to forge an American national identity based on the virtues and values of its middle class.
Claudius has survived the murderous intrigues of his predecessors to become, reluctantly, Emperor of Rome. Here, he recounts his surprisingly successful reign: how he cultivates the loyalty of the army and the common people to repair the damage caused by Caligula; his relations with the Jewish King Herod Agrippa; and his invasion of Britain. But the growing paranoia of absolute power and the infidelity of his promiscuous young wife, Messalina mean that his good fortune will not last forever. In this second part of Robert Graves' fictionalized autobiography, Claudius - wry, rueful, always inquisitive - brings to life some of the most scandalous and violent times in history.
Those who have traveled into America's only remaining frontier rarely come back out the same. Only in Alaska can we come close to understanding what our forefathers must have felt upon their arrival in the New World. McPhee brings to this narrative the qualities that have distinguished him in the field of travel literature-tolerance, brisk, and entertaining prose, and a fascination with things most of us never bother to notice.
Comrades is a celebration of male friendships. Acclaimed historian Stephen Ambrose begins his examination with a glance inward -- he starts this book with his brothers, his first and forever friends, and the shared experiences that join them for a lifetime, overcoming distance and misunderstandings. He next writes of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had a golden gift for friendship and who shared a perfect trust with his younger brother Milton in spite of their apparently unequal stations. With great emotion, Ambrose describes the relationships of the young soldiers of Easy Company who fought and died together from Normandy to Germany, and he recalls with admiration three unlikely friends who fought in different armies in that war. He recounts the friendships of Lewis and Clark and of Crazy Horse and He Dog, and he tells the story of the Custer brothers who died together at the Little Big Horn. Ambrose remembers and celebrates the friends he has made and kept throughout his life.
Comrades concludes with the author's recollection of his own friendship with his father. "He was my first and always most important friend," Ambrose writes. "I didn't learn that until the end, when he taught me the most important thing, that the love of father-son-father-son is a continuum, just as love and friendship are expansive."
Throughout the devastating years of the Civil War, the Union Army of the Potomac seldom marched in step. In this provocative book, acclaimed historian and award-winning author Stephen W. Sears takes a fascinating look at some of the intriguing Union generals and the controversies that swirled around them. Delving into historical documents and the personal papers of military officers, Sears shares the compelling stories of oft-maligned Generals McClellan and Hooker, the shocking court-martial of patriotic General Stone, the failed plots to kidnap Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and more. As the facts come to light, the Union's renowned leaders stand revealed as what they really were: ordinary men in the grip of extraordinary times. An authority on the Civil War, Sears skillfully paints a remarkable portrait of the personalities and events that shaped our nation's greatest crisis. The rich analysis becomes ever more clear and accessible with Nelson Runger's thoughtful narration.
