Technology & Engineering Audiobooks | Science & Technology

The Killing Zone, 2nd edition: How and Why Pilots Die

This survival guide for new pilots identifies the pitfalls waiting inside the killing zone, the period from 50 to 350 flight hours when they leave their instructors behind and fly as pilot in command for the first time. Although they're privately certified, many of these unseasoned aviators are unaware of the potential accidents that lie ahead while trying to build decision-making skills on their own-many times falling victim to inexperience. Based on the first in-depth scientific study of pilot behavior and general aviation flying accidents in over twenty years, The Killing Zone, Second Edition offers practical advice to help identify the time frame in which you are most likely to die. Aviation specialist Paul Craig offers rare insights into the special risks new pilots face and includes updated preventive strategies for flying through the killing zone . . . alive: - New to the Second Edition: Dealing with Glass Cockpits; GPS Moving Maps; Collision Avoidance Systems - Alerts you to the 12 mistakes likely to kill you - Provides guidelines for avoiding, evading, diverting, correcting, and managing dangers - Includes a 'Pilot Personality Self-Assessment Exercise' for an individualized survival strategy ***Please contact Customer Service for additional content.***

Paul A. Craig (Author), David Marantz (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Flight: Charles Lindbergh's Daring and Immortal 1927 Transatlantic Crossing

A gripping and unique "in-the-cockpit" account of Charles Lindbergh’s extraordinary first transatlantic flight from New York to Paris, by acclaimed aviation historian (Viper Pilot, Lords of the Sky) and former fighter pilot Dan Hampton—"one of the most decorated pilots in Air Force history" (New York Post). America’s finest aviation story in the hands of our finest aviation historian, The Flight is Dan Hampton’s biggest, most dramatic book yet. On the morning of May 20, 1927, a little known pilot named Charles Lindbergh waited to take off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island. He was determined to claim the $25,000 Orteig Prize promised to the first pilot to fly nonstop from New York to Paris—a contest that had already claimed six men’s lives. Just twenty-five years old, Lindbergh had never before flown over water. Yet thirty-three hours later, his single-engine monoplane, The Spirit of St. Louis, touched down in Paris. Overnight, Charles Lindbergh became the most famous aviator of all time. The Flight is a long overdue, flyer’s-eye-view look at Lindbergh’s legendary journey. Decorated fighter pilot and bestselling author Dan Hampton offers a unique appreciation for Lindbergh’s accomplishment: Hampton has flown the exact same route many times, knowledge that informs and shapes The Flight. Relying upon a trove of primary sources, including Lindbergh’s own personal diary and writings, Hampton crafts a dramatic narrative of a challenging, death-defying feat that many had believed was impossible. Moving hour by hour, Hampton recounts Lindbergh’s uncertainty over his equipment and his courage as he traverses the vast darkness of the Atlantic with no radar. Moving between the sky and ground, Hampton intersperses the tale of the flight with Lindbergh’s personal history as well as some of the stories of those waiting for him on the ground, praying he would make it safely across.

Dan Hampton (Author), John Pruden (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Sunken Gold: A Story of World War I Espionage and the Greatest Treasure Salvage in History

On January 25, 1917, HMS Laurentic struck two German mines off the coast of Ireland and sank. The ship was carrying 44 tons of gold bullion to the still-neutral United States via Canada in order to finance the war effort for Britain and its allies. Britain desperately needed that sunken treasure, but any salvage had to be secret since the British government dared not alert the Germans to the presence of the gold. Lieutenant Commander Guybon Damant was the most qualified officer to head the risky mission. Wild gales battered the wreck into the shape of an accordion, turning the operation into a multiyear struggle of man versus nature. As the war raged on, Damant was called off the salvage to lead a team of covert divers to investigate and search through the contents of recently sunk U-boats for ciphers, minefield schematics, and other secrets. The information they obtained, once in the hands of British intelligence, proved critical toward Allied efforts to defeat the U-boats and win the war. But Damant had become obsessed with completing his long-deferred mission. His team struggled for five more years as it became apparent that the work could only be accomplished by muscle, grit, and persistence. Using newly discovered sources, author Joseph A. Williams provides the first full-length account of the quest for the Laurentic's gold. More than an incredible story about undersea diving adventure, The Sunken Gold is a story of human persistence, bravery, and patriotism.

Joseph A. Williams (Author), Paul Boehmer (Narrator)

Audiobook

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That Will Improve and/or Ruin Everything

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Soonish by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, read by Kelly Weinersmith and Joseph May. What will the world of tomorrow be like? How does progress happen? And why don't we have a lunar colony already? In this witty and entertaining book, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith give us a snapshot of the transformative technologies that are coming next - from robot swarms to nuclear fusion powered-toasters - and explain how they will change our world in astonishing ways. By weaving together their own research, interviews with pioneering scientists and Zach's trademark comics, the Weinersmiths investigate why these innovations are needed, how they would work, and what is standing in their way.

Dr. Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith (Author), Dr. Kelly Weinersmith, Joseph May (Narrator)

Audiobook

Too Far From Home: A Story of Life and Death in Space

An incredible true-life adventure set on the most dangerous frontier of all–outer space For a special breed of individual, the call of space is worth the risk it entails: men such as U.S. astronauts Donald Pettit and Kenneth Bowersox, and Russian flight engineer Nikolai Budarin, who in November 2002 left on what was to be a routine fourteen-week mission maintaining the International Space Station. But then, on February 1, 2003, the Columbia exploded beneath them. With the launch program suspended indefinitely, these astronauts had suddenly lost their ride home. TOO FAR FROM HOME chronicles the efforts of the beleaguered Mission Controls in Houston and Moscow as they work frantically against the clock to bring their men safely back to Earth. Chris Jones writes beautifully of the majesty and mystique of space travel, while reminding us all how perilous it is to soar beyond the sky. From the Compact Disc edition.

Chris Jones (Author), Erik Davies (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Planter of Modern Life: Louis Bromfield and the Seeds of a Food Revolution

Louis Bromfield was a World War I ambulance driver, a Paris expat, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist as famous in the 1920s as Hemingway or Fitzgerald. But he cashed in his literary success to finance a wild agrarian dream in his native Ohio. The ideas he planted at his utopian experimental farm, Malabar, would inspire America's first generation of organic farmers and popularize the tenets of environmentalism years before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. A lanky Midwestern farm boy dressed up like a Left Bank bohemian, Bromfield stood out in literary Paris for his lavish hospitality and his green thumb. He built a magnificent garden outside the city where he entertained aristocrats, movie stars, flower breeders, and writers of all stripes. Millions savored his novels, which were turned into Broadway plays and Hollywood blockbusters, yet Bromfield's greatest passion was the soil. In 1938, Bromfield returned to Ohio to transform 600 badly eroded acres into a thriving cooperative farm, which became a mecca for agricultural pioneers and a country retreat for celebrities. This sweeping biography unearths a lost icon of American culture, a fascinating, hilarious and unclassifiable character who-between writing and plowing-also dabbled in global politics and high society.

Stephen Heyman (Author), Robertson Dean (Narrator)

Audiobook

Alien Thinking: How to Bring Your Breakthrough Ideas to Life

Brought to you by Penguin. How did a balloonist circumnavigate the earth without fuel? How did an inventor design a device that creates electrical power from human footsteps? How did the WHO figure out how to treat and reduce the transmission of Ebola? They all used alien thinking. For over a decade, innovation experts Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux and Michael Wade have studied individuals around the world who have made leaps of creative genius. Their research shows that they are five patterns of thinking that distinguish true innovators from the rest of us. These five patterns are marked by a flexibility and a freshness of approach that transcends conventional problem-solving: - Attention - Levitation - Imagination - Experimentation - Navigation Alien thinkers know how to free their imagination and detect hard-to-observe patterns. They practice deliberate ways to retreat from the world in order to see the big picture underlying a problem. And they prototype ideas in systematic ways to reflect feedback and the constraints of reality. Alien Thinking will help you innovate better and develop world-changing ideas of your own. © Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux and Michael Wade 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux, Michael Wade (Author), Daniel Henning (Narrator)

Audiobook

Irresistible: Why We Can't Stop Checking, Scrolling, Clicking and Watching

Random House presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Irresistible, written and read by Adam Alter. 'Truly addictive' Malcolm Gladwell * 'Brilliant' Susan Cain * 'Essential' Charles Duhigg How many times have you checked your phone today? Why are messaging apps, email and social media so hard to resist? How come we always end up watching another episode? In recent years, media and technology have perfected the lucrative art of gaining and holding our attention. This extraordinary feat has changed the behaviour of billions of people, and especially the young: by current medical standards, we are experiencing an unprecedented, global pandemic of addiction. But what exactly is an addiction? And what, if anything, might we do about it? From cliff-hangers to earworms, from religion to pornography, and from the awesome allure of the 'Kim Kardashian: Hollywood' app to the unexpected benefits of the 'butt-brush effect', Irresistible blends fascinating stories with ingenious science to explain how and why we all got hooked. Revealing the surprising causes and sometimes bizarre nature of addiction, this book will equip you with the tools and understanding you need to navigate our irresistible new world.

Adam Alter (Author), Adam Alter (Narrator)

Audiobook

Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground

The word spread through the hacking underground like some unstoppable new virus: Someone—some brilliant, audacious crook—had just staged a hostile takeover of an online criminal network that siphoned billions of dollars from the U.S. economy. The FBI rushed to launch an ambitious undercover operation aimed at tracking down this new kingpin. Other agencies around the world deployed dozens of moles and double agents. Together, the cybercops lured numerous unsuspecting hackers into their clutches. Yet at every turn, their main quarry displayed an uncanny ability to sniff out their snitches and see through their plots. The culprit they sought was the most unlikely of criminals: a brilliant programmer with a hippie ethic and a supervillain's double identity. Together with a smooth-talking con artist, he ran a massive real-world crime ring.

Kevin Poulsen (Author), Eric Michael Summerer (Narrator)

Audiobook

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)

Audiobook

Fins: Harley Earl, the Rise of General Motors, and the Glory Days of Detroit

The New York Times bestselling author of Bitter Brew chronicles the birth and rise to greatness of the American auto industry through the remarkable life of Harley Earl, an eccentric six-foot-five, stuttering visionary who dropped out of college and went on to invent the profession of automobile styling, thereby revolutionized the way cars were made, marketed, and even imagined. Harleys Earl’s story qualifies as a bona fide American family saga. It began in the Michigan pine forest in the years after the Civil War, traveled across the Great Plains on the wooden wheels of a covered wagon, and eventually settled in a dirt road village named Hollywood, California, where young Harley took the skills he learned working in his father’s carriage shop and applied them to designing sleek, racy-looking automobile bodies for the fast crowd in the burgeoning silent movie business. As the 1920s roared with the sound of mass manufacturing, Harley returned to Michigan, where, at GM’s invitation, he introduced art into the rigid mechanics of auto-making. Over the next thirty years, he functioned as a kind of combination Steve Jobs and Tom Ford of his time, redefining the form and function of the country’s premier product. His impact was profound. When he retired as GM’s VP of Styling in 1958, Detroit reigned as the manufacturing capitol of the world and General Motors ranked as the most successful company in the history of business. Knoedelseder tells the story in ways both large and small, weaving the history of the company with the history of Detroit and the Earl family as Fins examines the effect of the automobile on America’s economy, culture, and national psyche.

William Knoedelseder (Author), Peter Berkrot (Narrator)

Audiobook

Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Eart

Brought to you by Penguin. Award-winning American news presenter Rachel Maddow investigates remarkable stories from around the globe, all leading back to the same crooked source: the unimaginably lucrative and equally corrupting oil and gas industry. From Oklahoma, Texas and Washington, to Kyiv, Siberia and Moscow, to Equatorial Guinea and Alaska; from a mansion in Malibu with the world’s largest collection of Michael Jackson memorabilia to luxury hotels in central London; from deep within the earth’s crust to the icy surface of the Arctic seas, Blowout uncovers a web of international corruption. With her trademark black humour, Maddow takes us through the purposeful detonation of a fifty-kiloton nuclear bomb underground near Colarado, man-made earthquakes, murdered cows and the international financial crisis, to the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas, and a surprising conclusion about why the Russian government hacked the 2016 U.S. election. Chevron, BP, and a host of other industry players get their star turn, most notably ExxonMobil and the deceptively well-behaved Rex Tillerson. The oil and gas industry has weakened democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers, and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. But being outraged at it is, according to Maddow, 'like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a gazelle. You can't really blame the lion. It's in her nature.' Blowout is a call to contain the lion: to stop subsidizing the wealthiest businesses on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world's most destructive industry and its enablers. The stakes have never been higher. As Maddow writes, 'Democracy either wins this one or disappears.' © Rachel Maddow 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Rachel Maddow (Author), Rachel Maddow (Narrator)

Audiobook

Technology & Engineering Audiobooks in Science & Technology