General Audiobooks | Science & Technology

Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution

The heroic story of the founding of the US Navy during the Revolution has been told many times, yet largely missing from maritime histories of America's first war is the ragtag fleet of private vessels that truly revealed the new nation's character-above all, its ambition and entrepreneurial ethos. In Rebels at Sea, Eric Jay Dolin corrects that significant omission, and contends that privateers, as they were called, were in fact critical to the American victory. Privateers were privately owned vessels that were granted permission by the new government to seize British merchantmen and men of war. As Dolin stirringly demonstrates, at a time when the young Continental Navy numbered no more than about sixty vessels, privateers rushed to fill the gaps. Nearly 2,000 set sail over the course of the war, with tens of thousands of Americans serving on them and capturing some 1,800 British ships. Some Americans viewed these men as cynical opportunists whose only aim was loot. Yet Dolin shows that privateersmen were as patriotic as their fellow Americans, and moreover that they greatly contributed to the war's success: diverting critical British resources to protecting their shipping, providing much-needed supplies at home, and bolstering the new nation's confidence that it might actually defeat the most powerful military force in the world.

Eric Jay Dolin (Author), Eric Jason Martin (Narrator)

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Reality No Reality

'Reality, No Reality' – Lia Kim's New Project The first photobook by world-renowned choreographer Lia Kim is out now! Lia Kim is the co-founder of 1MILLION Dance Studio, whose YouTube channel has nearly twenty million subscribers, and over three billion cumulative views. In her book 'Reality, No Reality', Lia Kim fully reveals her very own sensibility, not only as a choreographer but also as a visual director. 1MILLION Dance Studio, which she started in 2014 with four other choreographers in a small basement studio, has been a tremendous success. It has now expanded to a full-fledge dance agency with over 20 choreographers. From the very beginning, 1MILLION Dance Studio's dream has been to inspire one million people to dance, hence its name. Seeing the number of views of its videos on YouTube, one cannot help thinking that 1BILLION might have been an even better name. Lia Kim's book is an embodiment of her own words, 'Life Is Beautiful When We Dance. ' It is for everyone who is interested in dance, whether they are longtime fans of Lia Kim, or beginners who have just begun to learn her dance through 1MILLION's videos. 'Reality, No Reality' is a 2-in-1 book structured with two distinct parts, 'Reality' and 'No Reality'. Both have their own cover and can been read in no specific order. Lia Kim's work has always been inspired by visual art, and is quite artistic in itself, as known by those who have been following her. This double photobook was born from her idea of a double concept, a double way of showing her choreographic art. Lia Kim is a popular dance icon and her new photobook is her dance archive. Contents Prologue Reality Look I Am, Lia Kim Flowers & Freckles I Hate U, I Love U Life Is Beautiful When We Dance by Lia Kim Inspiration The Future Cold Water The Muse Movement by Hur Yoon Sun Adventure Waterscapes Killing Me Perfectly The Greatest Creation of a New Dance Culture! by Hur Yumi Choreography No Reality Author: Lia Kim Choreographer. Co-founder of 1MILLION Dance Studio. Creating a new dance culture around the globe

Lia Kim (Author), Stephanie Cannon (Narrator)

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Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States

A transgender reporter's narrative tour through the surprisingly vibrant queer communities sprouting up in red states, offering a vision of a stronger, more humane America. Ten years ago, Samantha Allen was a suit-and-tie-wearing Mormon missionary. Now she's a senior Daily Beast reporter happily married to another woman. A lot in her life has changed, but what hasn't changed is her deep love of Red State America, and of queer people who stay in so-called 'flyover country' rather than moving to the liberal coasts. In Real Queer America, Allen takes us on a cross-country road-trip stretching all the way from Provo, Utah to the Rio Grande Valley to the Bible Belt to the Deep South. Her motto for the trip: 'Something gay every day.' Making pit stops at drag shows, political rallies, and hubs of queer life across the heartland, she introduces us to scores of extraordinary LGBT people working for change, from the first openly transgender mayor in Texas history to the manager of the only queer night club in Bloomington, Indiana, and many more. Capturing profound cultural shifts underway in unexpected places and revealing a national network of chosen family fighting for a better world, Real Queer America is a treasure trove of uplifting stories and a much-needed source of hope and inspiration in these divided times.

Samantha Allen (Author), Samantha Allen (Narrator)

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Reagan: The Hollywood Years

Marc Eliot (Author), Marc Eliot (Narrator)

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Ready to Come About

Three hundred nautical miles from shore, I‘m cold and sick and afraid. I pray for reprieve. I long for solid ground. And I can‘t help but ask myself, What the hell was I thinking? When Sue Williams set sail for the North Atlantic, it wasn’t a mid-life crisis. She had no affinity for the sea. And she didn’t have an adventure-seeking bone in her body. In the wake of a perfect storm of personal events, it suddenly became clear: her sons were adults now; they needed freedom to figure things out for themselves; she had to get out of their way. And it was now or never for her husband, David, to realize his dream to cross an ocean. So she’d go too. Ready to Come About is the story of a mother’s improbable adventure on the high seas and her profound journey within, through which she grew to believe that there is no gift more precious than the liberty to chart one’s own course, and that risk is a good thing … sometimes, at least.

Sue Williams (Author), Dina Pearlman (Narrator)

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README.txt: A Memoir

Brought to you by Penguin. An extraordinarily brave and moving memoir from one of the world's most famous transparency activists and trans women. In 2010, Chelsea Manning, working as an intelligence analyst in the United States Army in Iraq, disclosed classified military documents that she had smuggled out via the memory card of her digital camera. The army sentenced Manning to thirty-five years in military prison, charging her with twenty-two counts relating to the unauthorized possession and distribution of classified military documents. The day after her conviction, Manning declared her gender identity as a woman and began to transition. In 2017, President Barack Obama commuted her sentence and she was released from prison. In her memoir, Manning recounts how her pleas for increased institutional transparency and government accountability took place alongside a fight to defend her rights as a trans woman. She reveals her challenging childhood, her struggles as an adolescent, what led her to join the military, and the fierce pride she took in her work. We also learn the details of how and why she made the decision to send classified military documents to WikiLeaks. This powerful, observant memoir will stand as one of the definitive testaments of the digital age. **CHOSEN AS A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK TO WATCH OUT FOR, A NEW STATESMAN BOOK TO READ, AND ONE OF COSMOPOLITAN'S BEST FORTHCOMING BOOKS** © Chelsea Manning 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Chelsea Manning (Author), Chelsea Manning (Narrator)

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Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

Azar Nafisi (Author), Azar Nafisi (Narrator)

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Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis never wrote a memoir, but she told her life story and revealed herself in intimate ways through the nearly 100 books she brought into print during the last two decades of her life as an editor at Viking and Doubleday. Based on archives and interviews with Jackie's authors, colleagues, and friends, Reading Jackie mines this significant period of her life to reveal both the serious and the mischievous woman underneath the glamorous public image. Though Jackie had a reputation for avoiding publicity, she willingly courted controversy in her books. She was the first editor to commission a commercially-successful book telling the story of Thomas Jefferson's relationship with his female slave. Her publication of Gelsey Kirkland's attack on dance icon George Balanchine caused another storm. Jackie rarely spoke of her personal life, but many of her books ran parallel to, echoed, and emerged from her own experience. She was the editor behind bestsellers on the assassinations of Tsar Nicholas II and John Lennon, and in another book she paid tribute to the allure of Marilyn Monroe and Maria Callas. Her other projects take us into territory she knew well: journeys to Egypt and India, explorations of the mysteries of female beauty and media exploitation, into the minds of photographers, art historians, and the designers at Tiffany & Co. Many Americans regarded Jackie as the paragon of grace, but few knew her as the woman sitting on her office floor laying out illustrations, or flying to California to persuade Michael Jackson to write his autobiography. Reading Jackie provides a compelling behind-the-scenes look at Jackie at work: how she commissioned books and nurtured authors, as well as how she helped to shape stories that spoke to her strongly. Jackie is remembered today for her marriages to JFK and to Aristotle Onassis, but her real legacy is the books that reveal the tastes, recollections, and passions of an independent woman. From the Hardcover edition.

William Kuhn (Author), Susan Denaker (Narrator)

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Read My Heart: A Love Story in England's Age of Revolution

Jane Dunn (Author), Wanda McCaddon (Narrator)

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Reaching Ninety

Martin Duberman, one of the LGBTQ+ community’s maverick thinkers and historians, looks back on ninety years of life, his history in the movement, and what he’s learned. In the early Sixties, Martin Duberman published a path-breaking article defending the Abolitionists against the then-standard view of them as “misguided fanatics.” In 1964, his documentary play, In White America, which reread the history of racist oppression in this country, toured the country—most notably during Freedom Summer—and became an international hit. Duberman then took on the profession of history for failing to admit the inherent subjectivity of all re-creations of the past. He radically democratized his own seminars at Princeton, for which he was excoriated by powerful professors in his own department, leading him to renounce his tenured full professorship and to join the faculty of the CUNY Graduate School. At CUNY, too, he was initially blocked from offering a pioneering set of seminars on the history of gender and sexuality, but after a fifteen-year struggle succeeded in establishing the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies—which became a beacon for emerging scholars in that new field. By the early Seventies, Duberman had broadened his struggle against injustice by becoming active in protesting the war in Vietnam and in playing a central role in forming the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force and Queers for Economic Justice. Down to the present-day he continues through his writing to champion those working for a more equitable society.

Martin Duberman (Author), Donald Corren (Narrator)

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Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: A Renowned Neurologist Explains the Mystery and Drama of Brain Diseas

Brian David Burrell, Dr. Allan H. Ropper (Author), Paul Boehmer (Narrator)

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Reach for the Skies: Ballooning, Birdmen and Blasting into Space

As far back as stories go, pioneers have reached for the skies. In the last two hundred years, they have mastered the air and made the modern world possible. Today they are bringing outer space within our reach. They're inventors and toymakers, amateurs and adventurers, visionaries, dreamers and, yes, crackpots. Some have called them irresponsible, even dangerous. But I have met many of them. I have worked with them, and funded them, and flown with them. I admire them, and trust them, and I think they and their kind are our future. In this book I look at the history of flight through the stories and people who have inspired me. These are tales of miraculous rescues; of records made and broken; of surprising feats of endurance and survival, including some of my own adventures, as well as developments in the future of air (and space) travel. This is a story of pioneers, and of course it includes the world famous Montgolfiers and the Wright brothers. But I also want to describe some of the lesser-known trailblazers -- people like Tony Jannus, who in 1914 created the world's first scheduled commercial flight, flying his passengers over the waters of Tampa Bay at an altitude of just fifty feet; the 'bird man' Leo Valentin, who in the 1950s jumped from 9,000 feet with wooden wings attached to his shoulders; and my friend, Steve Fossett, who dedicated his life to breaking records and having adventures. This is their story. It is also, in a small way, my own.

Richard Branson, Sir Richard Branson (Author), Adrian Mulraney (Narrator)

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General Audiobooks in Science & Technology