Audiobooks narrated by Tom Perkins

U.S.S. Seawolf: Submarine Raider of the Pacific

The USS Seawolf was one of the greatest submarine raiders of all time. Having narrowly avoided the attack on Pearl Harbor the Seawolf set out for the seas of the Pacific to wreak havoc on Japanese shipping. Joseph Melvin Eckberg was on the Seawolf from her maiden voyage and remained with her until January 1943. As chief radioman he was instrumental in assisting Captain Frederick Warder to find and destroy enemy targets. From the claustrophobia of being trapped under water and the overwhelming fear of depth charges to the joys of aiding the war-effort and the camaraderie on the ship, Eckberg's account, told to the authors Gerold Frank and James Horan, gives remarkable insight into submarine warfare of the Second World War.

Gerold Frank, James D. Horan, Joseph Eckberg (Author), Tom Perkins (Narrator)

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The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Moder

Roughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now their identity has remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists, archaeologists, and even Nazis seeking the roots of the Aryan race. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization. Linking prehistoric archaeological remains with the development of language, David W. Anthony identifies the prehistoric peoples of central Eurasia's steppe grasslands as the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and shows how their innovative use of the ox wagon, horseback riding, and the warrior's chariot turned the Eurasian steppes into a thriving transcontinental corridor of communication, commerce, and cultural exchange. He explains how they spread their traditions and gave rise to important advances in copper mining, warfare, and patron-client political institutions, thereby ushering in an era of vibrant social change. Anthony also describes his fascinating discovery of how the wear from bits on ancient horse teeth reveals the origins of horseback riding. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language solves a puzzle that has vexed scholars for two centuries-the source of the Indo-European languages and English-and recovers a magnificent and influential civilization from the past.

David W. Anthony (Author), Tom Perkins (Narrator)

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Hank: The Short Life and Long Country Road of Hank Williams

After he died in the backseat of a Cadillac at the age of twenty-nine, Hank Williams?a frail, flawed man who had become country music's first real star?instantly morphed into its first tragic martyr. Having hit the heights with simple songs of despair, depression, and tainted love, he would, with that outlaw swagger, become in death a template for the rock generation to follow. Six decades later, Mark Ribowsky now weaves together the first fully realized biography of Hank Williams in a generation. Examining his music while also re-creating days and nights choked in booze and desperation, Ribowsky traces the miraculous rise of this music legend?from the dirt roads of rural Alabama to the now-immortal stage of the Grand Ole Opry, and finally to a sad, lonely end on New Year's Day, 1953. The result is an original work that promises to uncover the real Hank beneath the myths that have long enshrouded his legacy.

Mark Ribowsky (Author), Tom Perkins (Narrator)

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Ocean Life in the Old Sailing Ship Days: From Forecastle to QuarterDeck

Orphaned at five, nothing held Whidden back from embarking on sea life seven years later. Serving as an apprentice, he quickly proved his worth, and earned himself a mate's position by his early twenties. Graduating to third, second, and first office, he ended his career in command of, and having partownership of his own vessel. This memoir, Ocean Life in the Old Sailing Ship Days, records a series of real events, from his childhood impressions of rough and ready seamen, to his thrilling and brutal experiences of war. His travels saw him spanning the world, with stops at major ports such as Honolulu, Buenos Aires, Calcutta, and Liverpool. His life spans the changes in the shipping industry over the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. During the Civil War, Whidden was heavily involved in profitable island trading in the Bahamas to elude Confederate sailors. However, shortly after the close of the war, in 1870, Whidden left sailing as he found it being overtaken by foreign interests.

John D. Whidden (Author), Tom Perkins (Narrator)

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The Cyanide Canary: A True Story of Injustice

Early in the morning on August 27, 1996, twenty-year-old Scott Dominguez showed up for an ordinary day at the fertilizing plant where he worked. By 11:00 a.m., he was clinging to life, unconscious and suffocating from toxic exposure to cyanide in a tank that was supposed to contain only mud and water. EPA Special Agent Joseph Hilldorfer was tasked with finding out what really happened on that horrific day in Soda Springs, Idaho, but the answers would not be easily uncovered. For more than four years Hilldorfer, his partner Bob Wojnicz, and a force of top-ranking U.S. attorneys struggled to expose the disturbing truths behind the tragedy, but would their efforts be enough to put the man responsible, Allan Elias, behind bars?

Joseph Hilldorfer, Robert Dugoni (Author), Tom Perkins (Narrator)

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Mosby's Rangers: A Record Of The Operations Of The Forty-Third Battalion Virginia Cavalry, From Its

Mosby's Rangers were some of the most feared Confederate troops of the American Civil War. Under the command of Col. John S. Mosby, they executed small raids behind Union lines, raiding at will and then vanishing quickly into the countryside to remain undetected. Formally known as the 43rd Battalion, Virginia Cavalry, they were formed after the Partisan Ranger Act of 1862. By the summer of 1864 Mosby had around four hundred men at his disposal in six cavalry companies and one artillery company. Their success led to the area around Fauquier and Loudoun counties becoming known as "Mosby's Confederacy," due to the grip that he and his men held on the area. James Joseph Williamson was a private who fought under Mosby from April, 1863, through until the end of the war. He records in fascinating detail the activity of Mosby and his men from their companies' organization until the moment that they were disbanded. Williamson provides brilliant insight into the campaigns that Mosby's men fought, how they were organized, who led them, and the difficulties they faced, as well as their greatest victories. The effectiveness of Mosby and his small band can be seen in these two statements: General Lee said that Mosby was "zealous, bold, and skillful, and with very small resources he has accomplished a great deal." While on the Union side, "General at one point reported that seventeen thousand of his men were engaged in keeping Mosby from attacking his weak points, and thus away from active service on the firing line. Finally it was not safe to send despatches by a courier unless a regiment was sent along to guard him." Yet, after the war, Grant held no animosity against his former foe, and stated "I have come to know Mosby personally and somewhat intimately. He is a different man entirely from what I supposed. He is able and thoroughly honest and truthful. There were probably but few men in the South who could have commanded successfully a separate detachment in the rear of an opposing army, and so near the borders of hostilities as long as he did without losing his entire command." Thus demonstrating the respect that Mosby and his men engendered with their enemies even after the war. Mosby's Rangers is a perfect book for anyone interested in the partisan activities of Mosby and his men through the course of the American Civil War.

James Joseph Williamson (Author), Tom Perkins (Narrator)

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A Wolf Called Romeo

No stranger to wildlife, Nick Jans had lived in Alaska for nearly thirty years. But when one evening at twilight a lone black wolf ambled into view not far from his doorstep, Nick would finally come to know this mystical species-up close as never before. A Wolf Called Romeo is the remarkable story of a wolf who returned again and again to interact with the people and dogs of Juneau, engaging in an improbable, awe-inspiring interspecies dance and bringing the wild into sharp focus. At first the people of Juneau were guarded, but as Romeo began to tag along with cross-country skiers on their daily jaunts, play fetch with local dogs, or simply lie near Nick and nap under the sun, they came to accept Romeo, and he them. Written with a deft hand and a searching heart, A Wolf Called Romeo is an unforgettable tale of a creature who defied nature and thus gave humans a chance to understand it a little more.

Nick Jans (Author), Tom Perkins (Narrator)

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A Rabble of Dead Money: The Great Crash and the Global Depression: 1929 - 1939

There is no single theory of what caused the Great Depression, and never will be, Morris argues. Macreconomics is a social science, and such a massive event always takes its shape from a terrible confluence of factors. The mismanagement of the gold standard, the growth in consumer credit, the insistence on deflation by some of the best minds in finance, the spread of "Fordism" through the manufacturing sector, the global agricultural catastrophe, and the inability of the major European belligerents of World War I to agree on a reconstruction agenda, are just a few of the shocks that in aggregate pushed the world into an economic Armageddon. Morris does not fail to provide lessons that modern readers can learn from the Great Crash. It's tempting to pontificate about events of eighty years ago, but as Morris reminds us, our modern macroeconomics is still coming to terms with its failure to forecast how directly the much-trumpeted Great Moderation would lead to the Great Financial Crash of 2008.

Charles R. Morris (Author), Tom Perkins (Narrator)

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The Prince of Providence: The True Story of Buddy Cianci, America's Most Notorious Mayor, Some Wiseg

Welcome to Providence, Rhode Island, where corruption is entertainment and Mayor Buddy Cianci presided over the longest-running lounge act in American politics. In The Prince of Providence, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mike Stanton tells a classic story of wiseguys, feds, and politicians on a carousel of crime and redemption. Buddy Cianci was part urban visionary, part Tony Soprano-a flawed political genius in the mold of Huey Long and James Michael Curley. His lust for power cost him his marriage, his family, and close friendships. Yet he also revitalized the city of Providence, where ethnic factions jostle with old-moneyed New Englanders and black-clad artists from the Rhode Island School of Design rub shoulders with scam artists from City Hall. For nearly a quarter of a century, Cianci dominated this uneasy melting pot. During his first administration, twenty-two political insiders were convicted of corruption. In 1984, Cianci resigned after pleading guilty to felony assault, for torturing a man he suspected of sleeping with his estranged wife. In 1990, in a remarkable comeback, Cianci was elected mayor once again; he went on to win national acclaim for transforming a dying industrial city into a trendy arts and tourism mecca.

Mike Stanton (Author), Tom Perkins (Narrator)

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The Bomb and America's Missile Age

The intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), designed to quickly deliver thermonuclear weapons to distant targets, was the central weapons system of the Cold War. ICBMs also carried the first astronauts and cosmonauts into orbit. More than a generation later, we are still living with the political, technological, and scientific effects of the space race, while nuclear-armed ICBMs remain on alert and in the headlines around the world. In The Bomb and America's Missile Age, Christopher Gainor explores the U.S. Air Force's (USAF) decision, in March 1954, to build the Atlas, America's first ICBM. Beginning with the story of the guided missiles that were created before and during World War II, Gainor describes how the early Soviet and American rocket programs evolved over the course of the following decade. He argues that the USAF was wrongly criticized for unduly delaying the start of its ICBM program, endangering national security, and causing America embarrassment when a Soviet ICBM successfully put Sputnik into orbit ahead of any American satellite.

Christopher Gainor (Author), Tom Perkins (Narrator)

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Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

In his great triptych 'The Millennium,' Bosch used oranges and other fruits to symbolize the delights of Paradise. Whence Henry Miller's title for this, one of his most appealing books; first published in 1957, it tells the story of Miller's life on the Big Sur, a section of the California coast where he lived for fifteen years. Big Sur is the portrait of a place-one of the most colorful in the United States-and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there: writers (and writers who did not write), mystics seeking truth in meditation (and the not-so-saintly looking for sex-cults or celebrity), sophisticated children, and adult innocents; geniuses, cranks, and the unclassifiable, like Conrad Moricand, the 'Devil in Paradise,' who is one of Miller's greatest character studies. Henry Miller writes with a buoyancy and brimming energy that are infectious. He has a fine touch for comedy. But this is also a serious book-the testament of a free spirit who has broken through the restraints and cliches of modern life to find within himself his own kind of paradise.

Henry Miller (Author), Tom Perkins (Narrator)

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Dinner in Camelot: The Night America's Greatest Scientists, Writers, and Scholars Partied at the Ken

In April 1962, President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy hosted forty-nine Nobel Prize winners-along with many other prominent scientists, artists, and writers-at a famed White House dinner. Among the guests were J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was officially welcomed back to Washington after a stint in the political wilderness; Linus Pauling, who had picketed the White House that very afternoon; William and Rose Styron, who began a fifty-year friendship with the Kennedy family that night; James Baldwin, who would later discuss civil rights with Attorney General Robert Kennedy; Mary Welsh Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's widow, who sat next to the president and grilled him on Cuba policy; John Glenn, who had recently orbited the earth aboard Friendship 7; historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who argued with Ava Pauling at dinner; and many others. Actor Frederic March gave a public recitation after the meal, including some unpublished work of Hemingway's that later became part of Islands in the Stream. Held at the height of the Cold War, the dinner symbolizes a time when intellectuals were esteemed, divergent viewpoints could be respectfully discussed at the highest level, and the great minds of an age might all dine together in the rarefied glamour of 'the people's house.'

Joseph A. Esposito (Author), Tom Perkins (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Tom Perkins