Audiobooks narrated by William Hughes

Ultimate Physics: From Quarks to the Cosmos

The fundamental outlines of the physical world, from its tiniest particles to massive galaxy clusters, have been apparent for decades. Does this mean physicists are about to tie it all up into a neat package? Not at all. Just when you think you’re figuring it out, the universe begins to look its strangest, and this audiobook illustrates how answers often lead to more questions and open up new paths to insight.

Scientific American (Author), William Hughes (Narrator)

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A Better Planet: Forty Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future

A practical, bipartisan call to action from the world's leading thinkers on the environment and sustainability Sustainability has emerged as a global priority over the past several years. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change and the adoption of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals through the United Nations have highlighted the need to address critical challenges, like the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, water shortages, and air pollution. But in the United States, partisan divides, regional disputes, and deep disagreements over core principles have made it nearly impossible to chart a course toward a sustainable future. This timely new book, edited by celebrated scholar Daniel C. Esty, offers fresh thinking and forward-looking solutions from environmental thought leaders across the political spectrum. The book's forty essays cover such subjects as ecology, environmental justice, Big Data, public health, and climate change, all with an emphasis on sustainability. This book focuses on moving toward sustainability through actionable, bipartisan approaches based on rigorous analytical research.

Daniel C. Esty (Author), Alex Boyles, Caroline Shaffer, Erica Sullivan, Kate Mulligan, Kevin Kenerly, Traber Burns, William Hughes (Narrator)

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Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles

In Solid State, Kenneth Womack offers the most definitive account of the conception, recording, mixing, and reception of Abbey Road. In February 1969, the Beatles began working on what became their final album together. Abbey Road introduced a number of new techniques and technologies to the Beatles' sound and included "Come Together," "Something," and "Here Comes the Sun," which all emerged as classics. Womack's colorful retelling of how this landmark album was written and recorded is a treat for fans of the Beatles. Solid State takes listeners back to 1969 and into EMI's Abbey Road Studios, which boasted an advanced solid state transistor mixing desk. Womack focuses on the dynamics between John, Paul, George, and Ringo and producer George Martin and his team of engineers, who for the most part set aside the tensions and conflicts that had arisen on previous albums to create a work with an innovative (and among some fans and critics, controversial) studio-bound sound that prominently included the new Moog synthesizer, among other novelties. As Womack shows, Abbey Road was the culmination of the instrumental skills, recording equipment, and artistic vision that the band and George Martin had developed since their early days in the same studio seven years before. A testament to the group's creativity and their producer's ingenuity, Solid State is required reading for all fans of the Beatles and the rock 'n' roll.

Kenneth Womack (Author), William Hughes (Narrator)

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The Cryotron Files: The Untold Story of Dudley Buck, Cold War Computer Scientist and Microchip Pione

The riveting true story of Dudley Buck-American scientist, government agent, and Cold War hero-whose pioneering work with computer chips placed him firmly in the sights of the KGB. Dr. Dudley Allen Buck was a brilliant young scientist on the cusp of fame and fortune when he died suddenly on May 21, 1959, at the age of thirty-two. He was the star professor at MIT and had done stints with the NSA and Lockheed. His latest invention, the Cryotron-an early form of the microchip-was attracting attention all over the globe. It was thought that the Cryotron could guide a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles to their targets. Four weeks before Dudley Buck's death, he was visited by a group of the Soviet Union's top computer experts. On the same day that he died from a mysterious heart attack, his close colleague, Dr. Louis Ridenour, was also found dead from similar causes. Two top American computer scientists had unexpectedly died young on the same day. Were their deaths linked? Two years old when his father died, Douglas Buck was never satisfied with the explanation of his father's death and has spent more than twenty years investigating it, acquiring his father's lab books, diaries, correspondence, research papers, and patent filings. Armed with this research, award-winning journalist Iain Dey tells, with compelling immediacy, the story of Dudley Buck's life and groundbreaking work, starting from his unconventional beginnings in California through to his untimely death and beyond. The Cryotron Files is at once the gripping narrative history of America and its computer scientists during the Cold War and the dramatic personal story of rising MIT star Dudley Buck in the high-stakes days of spies, supercomputers, and the space and nuclear race.

Douglas Buck, Iain Dey (Author), William Hughes (Narrator)

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Going Broke, Updated Edition: Why Americans (Still) Can't Hold On to Their Money

Over the last four decades, debt, bankruptcy, and home foreclosures have risen to epidemic levels, and the personal savings rate has sunk dangerously low. Why, in the richest nation on Earth, can't Americans hold on to their money? First published in 2008, Stuart Vyse's Going Broke described the epidemic of personal debt that existed in the years leading up to the Great Recession, and anticipated the home mortgage crisis that started it. Ten years later, this fully updated new edition tackles the post-recession era of economic recovery. Today total household debt has actually surpassed pre-recession levels, and some of the same problems that preceded the crash are back again. But the shape of our troubles has changed: the new face of financial failure features auto repossession, bankruptcy, eviction, wage garnishment, and being sued for unpaid bills. Vyse offers a unique psychological perspective on the financial behavior of the many Americans today who find they cannot make ends meet, illuminating these and other causes of our wildly self-destructive spending habits. But he doesn't entirely blame the victim, arguing instead that the mountain of debt burying so many of us is the inevitable byproduct of America's turbo-charged economy together with social and technological trends that undermine our self-control. This new edition illuminates everything from the rise of the credit card and ballooning student loan debt, to the expansion of new shopping opportunities provided by social media, revealing how vast changes in American society over the last forty years have greatly complicated our relationship with money. Vyse concludes with both personal advice for the individual who wants to achieve greater financial stability and with pointed recommendations for economic and social change that will help promote the financial health of all Americans.

Stuart Vyse (Author), William Hughes (Narrator)

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Give-a-Damn Jones

Not all the folks who roamed the Old West were cowhands, rustlers, or cardsharps. And they certainly weren't all heroes.Give-a-Damn Jones, a free-spirited itinerant typographer, hates his nickname almost as much as the rumors spread about him. He's a kind soul who keeps finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.That's what happened in Box Elder, a small Montana town. Tensions are running high, and anything-or anyone-could be the fuse to ignite them: a recently released convict trying to prove his innocence, a prominent cattleman who craves respect at any cost, a wily traveling dentist at odds with a violent local blacksmith, or a firebrand of an editor who is determined to unlock the town's secrets.Jones walks into the middle of it all, and this time, he may be the hero that this town needs.

Bill Pronzini (Author), Armando Duran, Armando Durán, Chris Abell, Donald Corren, Eddie Lopez, Grover Gardner, Jim Meskimen, John Lescault, Johnny Heller, Michael Kramer, Nick Sullivan, Patrick Lawlor, R. C. Bray, Sam Osheroff, Traber Burns, Various, Various Narrators, William Hughes (Narrator)

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We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won their Civil Rights

In this groundbreaking portrait of corporate seizure of political power, We the Corporations reveals how American businesses won equal rights and transformed the Constitution to serve the ends of capital.Corporations-like minorities and women-have had a civil rights movement of their own and now possess nearly all the same rights as ordinary people. Uncovering the deep historical roots of Citizens United, Adam Winkler shows how that controversial 2010 Supreme Court decision was the capstone of a two-hundred-year battle over corporate personhood and constitutional protections for business.Bringing to resounding life the legendary lawyers and justices involved in the corporate rights movement-among them Daniel Webster, Roger Taney, Lewis Powell, and even Thurgood Marshall-Winkler's tour de force exposes how the nation's most powerful corporations gained our most fundamental rights and turned the Constitution into a bulwark against the regulation of big business.

Adam Winkler (Author), William Hughes (Narrator)

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Billionaire Democracy: The Hijacking of the American Political System

This isn't your America. No matter who the president is.We are told that, when we vote and elect representatives, we gain a voice in government and its policies. Yet, it hasn't translated our preferences into higher living standards for the majority of us.In America, the wealthy few have built a system that works in their favor, while maintaining the illusion of democracy. American voters have little influence on policies engineered by lawmakers. Political scientists call it the "income bias," causing lawmakers to compete to satisfy preferences of donors from the top 1 percent instead of the middle class. It is why our economy has been misfiring for most Americans for a generation, wages stagnating and opportunity dwindling.Economist George R. Tyler lays out the fundamental problems plaguing our democracy. He explains how our democratic system has eroded the middle class and provides a comparison to peer democracies abroad. He shows where we fall short and how other rich democracies avoid the income bias pitfall. He also outlines reforms to improve our government's responsiveness.It's time for the people of this nation to demand a government that properly serves us, the American people. **Contact Customer Service for Additional Material**

George R. Tyler (Author), William Hughes (Narrator)

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Unacknowledged: An Exposé of the World's Greatest Secret

The biggest lie in history is about to be shattered.UFOs are real. In late June of 1947, three extraterrestrial craft were downed outside Roswell Air Force Base. Many more followed, revealing dozens of ET species and a Rosetta Stone to a new physics, an energy generation and propulsion system responsible for interstellar space travel. This new system could have easily replaced oil, gas, coal, and nuclear plants-and with them, the entire geopolitical and economic order on our planet. But a cabal of bankers, the military-industrial complex, and Big Oil stopped it.We have been lied to. And now, seventy years after Roswell, the witnesses to that lie have come forward to testify in a must-read book that will shock the world. **Contact Customer Service for Additional Material**

Steven M. Greer, Steven M. Greer MD (Author), William Hughes (Narrator)

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Freud: The Making of an Illusion

From the master of Freud debunkers, the book that definitively puts an end to the myth of psychoanalysis and its creatorSince the 1970s, Sigmund Freud's scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin-and for excellent reasons. Nevertheless, the idea persists that some of his proposals were visionary discoveries. In Freud: The Making of an Illusion, Frederick Crews investigates the record and reveals findings that will revolutionize our conception of the therapist, the theorist, and the human being. Drawing on rarely consulted archives, Crews shows us a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who never produced a corroborated cure, who promoted cocaine in one decade and was deluded by it in the next, who misunderstood the psychological controversies of the era, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise. The contrary legend has persisted, Crews shows, thanks to Freud's self-fashioning as a master detective of the psyche and later through a campaign of censorship and obfuscation conducted by his followers.A monumental biographical study and a slashing critique, Freud: The Making of an Illusion will stand as the last word on one of the most significant and contested figures of the twentieth century.

Frederick Crews (Author), William Hughes (Narrator)

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The Road to Serfdom, the Definitive Edition

Edited, with a foreword and introduction by Bruce Caldwell An unimpeachable classic work in political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, and economics, The Road to Serfdom has inspired and infuriated politicians, scholars, and general readers for half a century. Originally published in 1944-when Eleanor Roosevelt supported the efforts of Stalin, and Albert Einstein subscribed lock, stock, and barrel to the socialist program-The Road to Serfdom was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For F. A. Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would lead not to a utopia but to the horrors of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. First published by the University of Chicago Press on September 18, 1944, The Road to Serfdom garnered immediate, widespread attention. The first printing of 2,000 copies was exhausted instantly, and within six months more than 30,000 books were sold. In April 1945, Reader's Digest published a condensed version of the book, and soon thereafter the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed this edition to more than 600,000 readers. A perennial bestseller, the book has sold 400,000 copies in the United States alone and has been translated into more than twenty languages, along the way becoming one of the most important and influential books of the century. With this new edition, The Road to Serfdom takes its place in the series the Collected Works of F. A. Hayek. The volume includes a foreword by series editor and leading Hayek scholar Bruce Caldwell explaining the book's origins and publishing history and assessing common misinterpretations of Hayek's thought. Caldwell has also standardized and corrected Hayek's references and added helpful new explanatory notes. Supplemented with an appendix of related materials ranging from prepublication reports on the initial manuscript to forewords to earlier editions by John Chamberlain, Milton Friedman, and Hayek himself, this new edition of The Road to Serfdom is the definitive version of Hayek's enduring masterwork.

F. a. Hayek (Author), William Hughes (Narrator)

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Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development

During the nineteenth century, the United States entered the ranks of the world's most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human bondage. This was no mere coincidence. Slavery's Capitalism argues for slavery's centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. According to editors Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, the issue is not whether slavery itself was or was not capitalist but, rather, the impossibility of understanding the nation's spectacular pattern of economic development without situating slavery front and center. American capitalism-renowned for its celebration of market competition, private property, and the self-made man-has its origins in an American slavery predicated on the abhorrent notion that human beings could be legally owned and compelled to work under force of violence. Drawing on the expertise of sixteen scholars who are at the forefront of rewriting the history of American economic development, Slavery's Capitalism identifies slavery as the primary force driving key innovations in entrepreneurship, finance, accounting, management, and political economy that are too often attributed to the so-called free market. Approaching the study of slavery as the originating catalyst for the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism casts new light on American credit markets, practices of offshore investment, and understandings of human capital. Rather than seeing slavery as outside the institutional structures of capitalism, the essayists recover slavery's importance to the American economic past and prompt enduring questions about the relationship of market freedom to human freedom. Contributors: Edward E. Baptist, Sven Beckert, Daina Ramey Berry, Kathryn Boodry, Alfred L. Brophy, Stephen Chambers, Eric Kimball, John Majewski, Bonnie Martin, Seth Rockman, Daniel B. Rood, Caitlin Rosenthal, Joshua D. Rothman, Calvin Schermerhorn, Andrew Shankman, Craig Steven Wilder. **Contact Customer Service for Additional Materials**

Seth Rockman, Sven Beckert (Author), Bahni Turpin, Kevin Kenerly, Pam Ward, Ron Butler, William Hughes (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by William Hughes