Free Download Catherine de' Medici: The Life and Times of the Serpent Queen (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0DCHGYSY1 | 2024 | 15 hours and 23 minutes | M4B@64 kbps | 422 MB
Author: Mary Hollingsworth
Narrator: Rachel Bavidge
During an age of heightened religious conflict, Catherine de' Medici lived her life at the center of sixteenth-century European and French politics. Daughter of Lorenzo II, the Medici ruler of Florence-and then wedded to a French prince by papal decree at the age of fourteen-Catherine first became queen consort of France and then mother to three French kings (Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III) who reigned in an era of almost continuous civil and religious strife. A lavish promoter of the arts, Catherine patronized poets, painters, and sculptors; lavished ruinous sums on the building and embellishment of monuments and palaces; and masterminded spectacular entertainments and tournaments that prefigure the splendor and ritual of the court of Versailles. Catherine maintained eighty ladies-in-waiting at court; it was rumored she used these women as bait to seduce courtiers for her political ends. Her admiration for the seer Nostradamus fueled claims of her love for the occult and the dark arts. Posterity has condemned her as the epitome of the scheming royal matriarch, her reputation tainted forever by her role in instigating the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of Protestants in 1572. Catherine de' Medici: The Life and Times of the Serpent Queen is Mary Hollingsworth's evocative, authoritative biography of the most extraordinary woman of the sixteenth-century.

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Free Download Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0CX25SVMJ | 2024 | 8 hours and 7 minutes | M4B@64 kbps | 238 MB
Author: Porter Fox
Narrator: Jeremy Arthur
Superstorms, hurricanes, typhoons, and spiraling freak weather: the fallout of global warming is a real-life natural thriller, as captured in Porter Fox's urgent and stunning story of chasing the world's most devastating storms. Here is the story of the largest storms on earth and how those storms are growing bigger and stronger. The tale of extreme weather doesn't begin with floods, fires, or even the air that carries this change to our lives. It begins with the ocean. Oceans create weather, climate, floods, droughts, and most of the geophysical fallout of global warming. Exactly how, award-winning writer Porter Fox contends, depends on invisible ocean currents, planetary cycles just now being defined, and processes in the deep ocean that may well have already saved us from the worst effects of the climate crisis. In an attempt to avert a coming age of superstorms, sea level rise, and catastrophic warming, scientists followed the lead of a college drop-out-turned-maverick sailor and storm-chaser; a Romanian refugee turned BBC radio host turned circumnavigating mapmaker; and an audacious new attempt to study storms above as well as deep below the ocean depths, using drones. Throughout Category Five, Fox shadows these explorers, scientists, oceanographers, and weather forecasters in an attempt to understand, forestall, and possibly harness the awesome power of our oceans.

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Free Download Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (Audiobook)
English | December 02, 2020 | ASIN: B08PC4TNDQ, B00F2OP3R4 | M4B@128 kbps | 25h 25m | 1.35 GB
Author: Max Hastings | Narrator: Simon Vance
From the acclaimed military historian, a new history of the outbreak of World War I: the dramatic stretch from the breakdown of diplomacy to the battles - the Marne, Ypres, Tannenberg - that marked the frenzied first year before the war bogged down in the trenches.
In Catastrophe 1914, Max Hastings gives us a conflict different from the familiar one of barbed wire, mud, and futility. He traces the path to war, making clear why Germany and Austria-Hungary were primarily to blame, and describes the gripping first clashes in the West, where the French army marched into action in uniforms of red and blue with flags flying and bands playing. In August, four days after the French suffered 27,000 men dead in a single day, the British fought an extraordinary holding action against oncoming Germans, one of the last of its kind in history. In October, at terrible cost the British held the allied line against massive German assaults in the first battle of Ypres. Hastings also recreates the lesser-known battles on the Eastern Front, brutal struggles in Serbia, East Prussia, and Galicia, where the Germans, Austrians, Russians, and Serbs inflicted three million casualties upon one another by Christmas.

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Free Download Mel Bunce, Kate Wright, Martin Scott, Tom Campbell (Narrator), "Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America"
English | ASIN: B0DDZBV68B | 2024 | MP3@64 kbps | ~09:44:00 | 268 MB
The Voice of America (VOA) is the oldest and largest US government-funded international media organization. In 2020, Donald Trump nominated Michael Pack, a right-wing documentarian and close friend of Steve Bannon, to lead the US Agency for Global Media-the independent federal agency overseeing US-funded international media. During Pack's seven month tenure, more than thirty whistleblowers filed complaints against him, and a judge ruled that he had infringed journalists' constitutional right to freedom of speech.
How did such a major international public service media network become intensely politicized by government allies in such a short time, despite having its editorial independence protected by law?

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Free Download Karl Marx, Paul North - editor, Paul Reitter - translator, Simon Vance (Narrator), "Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1"
English | ASIN: B0D6J2L3J9 | 2024 | MP3@64 kbps | ~30:17:00 | 832 MB
A major new translation of the explosive book that transformed our world
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious multivolume critique of the capitalist system of production. Though only the first volume saw publication in Marx's lifetime, it would become one of the most consequential books in history. This magnificent new edition of Capital is a translation of Marx for the twenty-first century. It is the first translation into English to be based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself, the only version that can be called authoritative, and it features extensive commentary and annotations by Paul North and Paul Reitter that draw on the latest scholarship and provide invaluable perspective on the book and its complicated legacy. At once precise and easily digestible, this translation captures the momentous scale and sweep of Marx's thought while recovering the elegance and humor of the original source.

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Free Download Mike Chapple, George W. Sarris (Narrator), "CC Certified in Cybersecurity Study Guide"
English | ASIN: B0DF8WRT4L | 2024 | MP3@64 kbps | ~07:38:00 | 210 MB
Prepare for the ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity exam, as well as a new career in cybersecurity, with this effective study guide.
In Certified in Cybersecurity Study Guide, veteran IT and cybersecurity educator Mike Chapple delivers a one-stop resource for anyone planning to pursue the ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity credential, as well as those getting ready to take on a challenging and rewarding new career in cybersecurity. The author walks you through the info you'll need to succeed on both the exam and in your first day at a cybersecurity-focused job.

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Free Download By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0CKZJRN39 | 2024 | 8 hours and 15 minutes | M4B@64 kbps | 236 MB
Author: Rebecca Nagle
Narrator: Rebecca Nagle
A powerful work of reportage and American history that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation's earliest days, and a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land more than a century later. Before 2020, American Indian reservations made up roughly 55 million acres of land in the United States. Nearly 200 million acres are reserved for National Forests-in the emergence of this great nation, our government set aside more land for trees than for Indigenous peoples. In the 1830s Muscogee people were rounded up by the US military at gunpoint and forced into exile halfway across the continent. At the time, they were promised this new land would be theirs for as long as the grass grew and the waters ran. But that promise was not kept. When Oklahoma was created on top of Muscogee land, the new state claimed their reservation no longer existed.

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Free Download Julie Bee (Author, Narrator), "Burned: How Business Owners Can Overcome Burnout and Fuel Success"
English | ASIN: B0DDZDPR9W | 2024 | MP3@64 kbps | ~05:35:00 | 154 MB
Burnout is an epidemic in the business owner community, and the guidance to overcome it by taking a vacation, getting more exercise, and incorporating meditation into their days isn't the advice they need. During more than fifteen years as a business owner and leader, Julie Bee has experienced firsthand this unique struggle-one that often requires that they continue working while overcoming their burnout. With this comprehensive guide, Bee helps listeners:
- Understand the three types and two cycles of burnout, and learn how to identify signs of each in yourself

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Free Download Burn Out by Joshua Hood, Scott Brick, Blackstone Publishing
English | August 13, 2024 | ISBN: B0CRS15VC2 | 8 hours and 4 minutes | MP3 64 Kbps | 240 Mb
From the USA Today bestselling author of Robert Ludlum's Treadstone series, Burn Out is a no-holds-barred thriller from the "master of action" (✅Publishers Weekly) Joshua Hood.
Becoming one of the US Forest Service's elite smokejumpers has been Jake Slade's dream. Parachuting into the path of a raging fire and beating it into submission isn't a job for the faint of heart, but after four years in Folsom, he's ready to prove himself. After surviving the grueling six-week training course, he thinks he's ready for anything nature has to dish out.
But when fighting a wildfire gets Slade involved in a string of murders deep in the mountains of California's notorious Emerald Triangle, Slade finds himself caught between a disgraced DEA agent trying to solve his final case and the ruthless cartel hit man determined to kill them both.

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Free Download Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0CQMJFV5G | 2024 | 10 hours and 16 minutes | M4B@64 kbps | 294 MB
Author: Ryann Liebenthal
Narrator: Eileen Stevens
An urgent investigation of student debt in America revealing the corrupt systems, rotten policies, and bad actors that have created a $1.7 trillion crisis. College costs more today than ever and is worth less. Tuition at public colleges has more than tripled in the past 50 years. Over the same period student debt has grown from virtually nothing to more than $1.7 trillion, second only to home mortgages. Skyrocketing student-loan burdens are leading an entire generation to put off the traditional milestones of adulthood: buying homes, getting married, starting families, and saving for retirement. The burden weighs heavier on women and black Americans, and with almost 10 percent of student debtors now over the age of 60, it is a crisis no longer limited to the young. Ryann Liebenthal's Burdened tells the maddening story of how the power plays of legislators and presidents, the commodification of higher ed, and the rapacious practices of for-profit colleges and private lenders have created today's student-debt lava pit. As the notion of student-loan cancellation percolates into the political mainstream, Liebenthal offers a deeply researched, sweeping narrative of our broken system. Rather than give in to despair, she boldly charts a way out, offering hopeful solutions to this seemingly unfixable problem.

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