Browse audiobooks narrated by Peter Marinker, listen to samples and when you're ready head over to Audiobooks.com where you can get 3 FREE audiobooks on us
For years legendary broadcaster Alistair Cooke brought America to the rest of the world with incomparable wit and wisdom. This is his classic 'personal history' of America, guiding us through centuries of changing life in the USA. Beginning with his own arrival in America as a graduate in the 1930s, Alistair Cooke discusses the explorers who put their new-found land on the map, the pioneers who tamed the Wild West, the soldiers who fought for independence and the tycoons who built fortunes. From the Mayflower to the gold rush, the jazz age to Pearl Harbour, with figures as varied as Buffalo Bill, John D. Rockefeller and Martin Luther King, here is the defining portrait of America.
Alistair Cooke (Author), Peter Marinker (Narrator)
Audiobook
Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice
Our ability to make choices is fundamental to our sense of ourselves as human beings, and essential to the political values of freedom-protecting nations. Whom we love; where we work; how we spend our time; what we buy; such choices define us in the eyes of ourselves and others, and much blood and ink has been spilt to establish and protect our rights to make them freely. Choice can also be a burden. Our cognitive capacity to research and make the best decisions is limited, so every active choice comes at a cost. In modern life the requirement to make active choices can often be overwhelming. So, across broad areas of our lives, from health plans to energy suppliers, many of us choose not to choose. By following our default options, we save ourselves the costs of making active choices. By setting those options, governments and corporations dictate the outcomes for when we decide by default. This is among the most significant ways in which they effect social change, yet we are just beginning to understand the power and impact of default rules. Many central questions remain unanswered: When should governments set such defaults, and when should they insist on active choices? How should such defaults be made? What makes some defaults successful while others fail? Cass R. Sunstein has long been at the forefront of developing public policy and regulation to use government power to encourage people to make better decisions. In this major new book, Choosing Not to Choose, he presents his most complete argument yet for how we should understand the value of choice, and when and how we should enable people to choose not to choose. The onset of big data gives corporations and governments the power to make ever more sophisticated decisions on our behalf, defaulting us to buy the goods we predictably want, or vote for the parties and policies we predictably support. As consumers we are starting to embrace the benefits this can bring. But should we? What will be the long-term effects of limiting our active choices on our agency? And can such personalized defaults be imported from the marketplace to politics and the law? Confronting the challenging future of data-driven decision-making, Sunstein presents a manifesto for how personalized defaults should be used to enhance, rather than restrict, our freedom and well-being.
Cass R. Sunstein (Author), Peter Marinker (Narrator)
Audiobook
Constitutional Personae: Heroes, Soldiers, Minimalists, and Mutes (Inalienable Rights)
Since America's founding, the U.S. Supreme Court had issued a vast number of decisions on a staggeringly wide variety of subjects. And hundreds of judges have occupied the bench. Yet as Cass R. Sunstein, the eminent legal scholar and bestselling co-author of Nudge, points out, almost every one of the Justices fits into a very small number of types regardless of ideology: the hero, the soldier, the minimalist, and the mute. Heroes are willing to invoke the Constitution to invalidate state laws, federal legislation, and prior Court decisions. They loudly embrace first principles and are prone to flair, employing dramatic language to fundamentally reshape the law. Soldiers, on the other hand, are skeptical of judicial power, and typically defer to decisions made by the political branches. Minimalists favor small steps and only incremental change. They worry that bold reversals of long-established traditions may be counterproductive, producing a backlash that only leads to another reversal. Mutes would rather say nothing at all about the big constitutional issues, and instead tend to decide cases on narrow grounds or keep controversial cases out of the Court altogether by denying standing. As Sunstein shows, many of the most important constitutional debates are in fact contests between the four Personae. Whether the issue involves slavery, gender equality, same-sex marriage, executive power, surveillance, or freedom of speech, debates have turned on choices made among the four Personae?choices that derive as much from psychology as constitutional theory. Sunstein himself defends a form of minimalism, arguing that it is the best approach in a self-governing society of free people. More broadly, he casts a genuinely novel light on longstanding disputes over the proper way to interpret the constitution, demonstrating that behind virtually every decision and beneath all of the abstract theory lurk the four Personae. By emphasizing the centrality of character types, Sunstein forces us to rethink everything we know about how the Supreme Court works. 'Cass Sunstein provides an enlightening look at the different ways to approach the Constitution. In doing so, he transcends ideology and helps us appreciate different perspectives. He also shows the virtue of his own favorite approach, that of minimalism, which seeks to respect traditions and long-settled practices.' -Walter Isaacson, President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, and author of The Innovators 'In this remarkable addition to Oxford University Press' 'Inalienable Rights' series on the American Constitution, Cass Sunstein persuasively speaks not to theories of constitutional interpretation, but to four archetypical judicial personalities reflected in opinion-writing, and in doing so he opens up an imaginative new perspective for appreciating our constitutional history.' -Peter L. Strauss, Betts Professor of Law, Columbia Law School 'In Constitutional Personae, Cass Sunstein analyzes judicial review in the United States in terms of four personalities or archetypes. He shows how this model illuminates a wide range of questions, and he offers a subtle restatement and defense of his favorite persona, the constitutional minimalist. Filled to the brim with insights, this is a splendid and imaginative contribution to constitutional theory.' -Jack Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law, Yale Law School 'A novel approach...carefully reasoned and clearly explained, Sunstein's approach offers a more insightful way of analyzing the positions of individual justices than resorting to simplistic ideologies.' - Kirkus Reviews '[A] valuable study of the different approaches that Supreme Court justices take in deciding cases...Given the significance of recent Supreme Court decisions on such issues as campaign finance, health care coverage, and marriage equality, Sunstein has performed a public service by enabling a better comprehension of how these judgments are reached.' -Publishers Weekly 'Constitutional Personae has all sorts of treasures in it. Its classifications are illuminating.' - The New York Review of Books
Cass R. Sunstein (Author), Peter Marinker (Narrator)
Audiobook
Winner of the WH Smith Fresh Talent prize, author David Hewson is one of Britain's finest crime novelists. Epiphany effortlessly jumps back and forth between the 1970s and 1990s to tell a riveting tale. In 1975, a small group of students gathers in an abandoned barn near San Francisco to indulge in drugs. When one of them commits a heinous act, he is sent to prison. Twenty years later he is released, and the questions about what really happened that day resurface.
David Hewson (Author), Peter Marinker (Narrator)
Audiobook
At Christmas 1975 a group of Californian students experiment with LSD. One of them, Michael Quinn kidnaps the son of an English professor. When he is released from jail twenty years later, a mysterious young English woman named Joni Lascelles begins to ask questions that will unravel the past...
David Hewson (Author), Peter Marinker (Narrator)
Audiobook
In 1940 a boy bursts from the mud of a war-torn Polish city, where he has buried himself to hide from the soldiers who murdered his family. His name is Jakob Beer. He is only seven years old. And although by all rights he should have shared the fate of the other Jews in his village, he has not only survived but been rescued by a Greek geologist, who does not recognize the boy as human until he begins to cry. With this electrifying image, Anne Michaels ushers us into her rapturously acclaimed novel of loss, memory, history, and redemption. As Michaels follows Jakob across two continents, she lets us witness his transformation from a half-wild casualty of the Holocaust to an artist who extracts meaning from its abyss. Filled with mysterious symmetries and rendered in heart-stopping prose, Fugitive Pieces is a triumphant work, a book that should not so much be read as it should be surrendered to. “Extraordinarily magical.”—New York Times
Anne Michaels (Author), Peter Marinker (Narrator)
Audiobook
From Socrates to Charles I, Danton to Lincoln - here are some of history's most significant figures with their most important speeches. Fighting for justice, for freedom of speech, and sometimes even for their own lives, these orators demonstrate the finest resources of language in the service of the most dramatic issues of their day.
Various Authors (Author), Elizabeth Bell, Norman Rodway, Peter Marinker, Samuel West (Narrator)
Audiobook
His Dark Materials Part 2: The Subtle Knife (Radio Full-Cast Dramatisation)
A breathtaking epic, the award-winning His Dark Materials trilogy spans a multitude of worlds. The second instalment, The Subtle Knife, introduces Will Parry – a young boy in search of his long-lost explorer father. Will’s discovery of an extraordinary ‘window in the air’ near the Oxford ring road leads him out of our world and into the strange and unsettling Cittàgazze. There he meets Lyra, a girl who is herself searching for something: the secret of the mystical substance Dust. Moving back and forth through the portal, Will and Lyra join forces in their quest. As they make allies and enemies along the way, they also learn of the subtle knife. An object which many would kill to possess, the knife has incredible powers, and Will finds himself reluctantly in a fight for its possession. Ray Fearon, Emma Fielding, Peter Marinker and Jack Klaff are amongst the cast in this gripping dramatisation.
Philip Pullman (Author), Emma Fielding, Jack Klaff, Peter Marinker, Ray Fearon (Narrator)
Audiobook
The different ways that social change happens, from unleashing to nudging to social cascades. How does social change happen? When do social movements take off? Sexual harassment was once something that women had to endure; now a movement has risen up against it. White nationalist sentiments, on the other hand, were largely kept out of mainstream discourse; now there is no shortage of media outlets for them. In this book, with the help of behavioral economics, psychology, and other fields, Cass Sunstein casts a bright new light on how change happens. Sunstein focuses on the crucial role of social norms-and on their frequent collapse. When norms lead people to silence themselves, even an unpopular status quo can persist. Then one day, someone challenges the norm-a child who exclaims that the emperor has no clothes; a woman who says 'me too.' Sometimes suppressed outrage is unleashed, and long-standing practices fall. Sometimes change is more gradual, as 'nudges' help produce new and different decisions-apps that count calories; texted reminders of deadlines; automatic enrollment in green energy or pension plans. Sunstein explores what kinds of nudges are effective and shows why nudges sometimes give way to bans and mandates. Finally, he considers social divisions, social cascades, and 'partyism,' when identification with a political party creates a strong bias against all members of an opposing party-which can both fuel and block social change. 'Sunstein's book is illuminating because it puts norms at the center of how we think about change.' DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times
Cass R. Sunstein (Author), Peter Marinker (Narrator)
Audiobook
Samuel Beckett, one of the great avant-garde Irish dramatists and writers of the second half of the twentieth century, was born on 13 April 1906. His centenary will be celebrated throughout 2006 with performances of his major plays, including Waiting for Godot. Here are the two most famous plays for solo voice. Krapp's Last Tape finds an old man, with his tape recorder, musing over the past and future. Not I is a remarkable tour de force for a single actress, as a woman emits memories and fears. Also included are two other singular short dramas for single voice, That Time read by John Moffatt and A Piece of Monologue read by Peter Marinker. It follows the highly acclaimed recordings of Beckett's Trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable published by Naxos AudioBooks.
Samuel Beckett (Author), Jim Norton, John Moffatt, Juliet Stevenson, Peter Marinker (Narrator)
Audiobook
Now Comes Good Sailing: Writers Reflect on Henry David Thoreau
This audiobook brings together original pieces on Thoreau by twenty-seven of today's leading writers With narration by William Hope, Barbara Barnes, Kaliswa Brewster, Kate Harper, Peter Marinker, and Ako Mitchell Features essays by Jennifer Finney Boylan • Kristen Case • George Howe Colt • Gerald Early • Paul Elie • Will Eno • Adam Gopnik • Lauren Groff • Celeste Headlee • Pico Iyer • Alan Lightman • James Marcus • Megan Marshall • Michelle Nijhuis • Zoë Pollak • Jordan Salama • Tatiana Schlossberg • A. O. Scott • Mona Simpson • Stacey Vanek Smith • Wen Stephenson • Robert Sullivan • Amor Towles • Sherry Turkle • Geoff Wisner • Rafia Zakaria • and a cartoon by Sandra Boynton The world is never done catching up with Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the author of Walden, “Civil Disobedience,” and other classics. A prophet of environmentalism and vegetarianism, an abolitionist, and a critic of materialism and technology, Thoreau even seems to have anticipated a world of social distancing in his famous experiment at Walden Pond. In Now Comes Good Sailing, twenty-seven of today’s leading writers offer wide-ranging original pieces exploring how Thoreau has influenced and inspired them—and why he matters more than ever in an age of climate, racial, and technological reckoning. Here, Lauren Groff retreats from the COVID-19 pandemic to a rural house and writing hut, where, unable to write, she rereads Walden; Pico Iyer describes how Thoreau provided him with an unlikely guidebook to Japan; Gerald Early examines Walden and the Black quest for nature; Rafia Zakaria reflects on solitude, from Thoreau’s Concord to her native Pakistan; Mona Simpson follows in Thoreau’s footsteps at Maine’s Mount Katahdin; Jennifer Finney Boylan reads Thoreau in relation to her experience of coming out as a trans woman; Adam Gopnik traces Thoreau’s influence on the New Yorker editor E. B. White and his book Charlotte’s Web; and there’s much more. The result is a lively and compelling collection that richly demonstrates the countless ways Thoreau continues to move, challenge, and provoke readers today.
Various (Author), Ako Mitchell, Barbara Barnes, Kaliswa Brewster, Kate Harper, Peter Marinker, William Hope (Narrator)
Audiobook
On Rumours: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done
Rumours are as old as human history, but with the rise of the internet it's now possible to spread stories about anyone, anywhere, instantly. In the 2008 US election many Americans believed Barack Obama was a Muslim. The conspiracy theory book 9/11: The Big Lie has become a bestseller. Hearsay has fuelled economic boom and bust - so much so that in many places it's now a crime to circulate false rumours about banks. Why do ordinary people accept rumours, even untrue, bizarre or damaging ones? Does it matter? And, if so, what should we do about it? As Cass Sunstein shows in his brilliant analysis of the phenomenon, there are many different ways in which rumours are dispersed. He reveals how some people have pre-exisiting prejudices that make them particularly susceptible to certain falsehoods, but also why all of us (even the most sceptical) have a tipping point at which we will come to accept a rumour as true. He looks at why some groups, even different nations, believe different things (for example, many Germans think that drinking water after eating cherries is deadly), and he shows why some rumours spread faster than others. Even if we don't realize it, the most open-minded among us are subject to extraordinary biases. This groundbreaking book will make us think harder about the information we are given, and could help us move towards a more open-minded and fair culture. "Compelling...full of insights." GUARDIAN 'More than just a book: It's a manifesto.' PROSPECT
Cass R. Sunstein (Author), Peter Marinker, William Hope (Narrator)
Audiobook
©PTC International Ltd T/A LoveReading is registered in England. Company number: 10193437. VAT number: 270 4538 09. Registered address: 157 Shooters Hill, London, SE18 3HP.
Terms & Conditions | Privacy Policy | Disclaimer