Audio Books

Free Download The Devil to Pay: A Mobster's Road to Perdition (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0CZPJTX6M | 2024 | 8 hours and 23 minutes | M4B@64 kbps | 238 MB
Author: Sean Scott Hicks
Narrator: Keith Szarabajka
Goodfellas meets the Irish mob in The Devil to Pay, the incredible true story of one man's unconventional upbringing in the criminal gangs of Boston and his eventual road to redemption. Growing up in South Boston, Sean Scott Hicks was running jobs for the Irish mob before his voice changed. Mistreated by his drug-addled mother, Hicks found sanctuary with his adoptive family of felonious uncles-known to law enforcement officials as the Winter Hill Gang. These crooks knew where all the bodies were buried-because they'd done the burying-but they also looked out for young Sean. Even the notorious gangster known worldwide as Whitey Bulger was simply "Uncle Jim" to him.

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Free Download The Day After: Why America Wins the War but Loses the Peace (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B07RWL12NP | 2019 | 10 hours and 33 minutes | M4B@128 kbps | 576 MB
Author: Brendan R. Gallagher
Narrator: Lloyd James
Since 9/11, why have we won smashing battlefield victories only to botch nearly everything that comes next? In the opening phases of war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, we mopped the floor with our enemies. But in short order, things went horribly wrong. We soon discovered we had no coherent plan to manage the "day after". The ensuing debacles had truly staggering consequences - many thousands of lives lost, trillions of dollars squandered, and the apparent discrediting of our foreign policy establishment. This helped set the stage for an extraordinary historical moment in which America's role in the world, along with our commitment to democracy at home and abroad, have become subject to growing doubt. With the benefit of hindsight, can we discern what went wrong? Why have we had such great difficulty planning for the aftermath of war?

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Free Download The Conservative Environmentalist: Common Sense Solutions for a Sustainable Future (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0CKK9P4FK | 2024 | 5 hours and 54 minutes | M4B@128 kbps | 331 MB
Author: Benji Backer
Narrator: Benji Backer
A conservative young environmentalist provides an intrepid vision for both solving our climate crisis and prioritizing the American national interest. Politicians, pseudo-experts, and other partisans have led us to believe that there are only two approaches to climate change: doomerism or denial. Benji Backer, Founder and Executive Chairman of the American Conservation Coalition, argues that both are dead ends. In The Conservative Environmentalist, he delivers an entirely new strategy to take care of the planet while putting the economic interest of the American people first. Backer makes the compelling case that conservative principles are the key to climate solutions that actually work. In this book, you'll visit the country's most diverse ecosystems and consequential manufacturing hubs-from Utah coal mines and Texas oil fields to Louisiana wetlands and Rhode Island offshore wind farms-witnessing the power of individual entrepreneurship and local problem-solving.

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Free Download The Cambridge Companion to Sherlock Holmes (Audiobook)
English | November 28, 2019 | ASIN: B0822XLWN5 | M4B@128 kbps | 11h 52m | 681 MB
Editors: Janice M. Allan, Christopher Pittard | Narrators: Elizabeth Sastre, John Keating
Sherlock Holmes is the most famous fictional detective in history, with a popularity that has never waned since catching the imagination of his late-Victorian readership. This Companion explores Holmes' popularity and his complex relationship to the late-Victorian and modernist periods; on one hand bearing the imprint of a range of Victorian anxieties and preoccupations, while on the other shaping popular conceptions of criminality, deviance, and the powers of the detective.
This collection explores these questions in three parts. 'Contexts' explores late-Victorian culture, from the emergence of detective fiction to ideas of evolution, gender, and Englishness. 'Case Studies' reads selected Holmes adventures in the context of empire, visual culture, and the gothic. Finally, 'Holmesian Afterlives' investigates the relationship between Holmes and literary theory, film and theatre adaptations, new Holmesian novels, and the fandom that now surrounds him.

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Free Download The Britannias: An Island Quest (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0CDXQ8M8C | 2023 | 12 hours and 32 minutes | M4B@64 kbps | 376 MB
Author: Alice Albinia
Narrator: Alice Albinia
The Britannias tells the story of Britain's islands and how they are woven into its collective cultural psyche. From Neolithic Orkney to modern-day Thanet, Alice Albinia explores the furthest reaches of Britain's island topography, once known (wrote Pliny) by the collective term, Britanniae. Sailing over borders, between languages and genres, trespassing through the past to understand the present, this book knocks the centre out to foreground neglected epics and subversive voices.

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Free Download The Breakout Principle: How to Activate the Natural Trigger That Maximizes Creativity, Athletic Performance, Productivity and Personal Well-Being (Audiobook)
English | 2004 | ASIN: n/a | M4B@128 kbps | 9h 25m | 526 MB
Authors: Herbert Benson M.D., William Proctor | Narrator: James Jenner
Would it surprise you to learn that to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem, you need to get up and leave the room? A walk in the woods will help you finish your novel? Humming can make you a better tennis player? Or that completely giving up is the way to succeed?
In The Breakout Principle, Dr. Herbert Benson delivers the ultimate self-help principle - simple instructions to activate a powerful biological trigger that converts conflict and confusion into clarity and extraordinary performance, a state athletes refer to as "the zone."

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Free Download The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0CYDF4G5P | 2024 | 11 hours and 59 minutes | MP3@64 kbps | 329 MB
Author: Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson
Narrator: Perry Daniels
In The Blind Spot, astrophysicist Adam Frank, theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson call for a revolutionary scientific worldview, where science includes-rather than ignores or tries not to see-humanity's lived experience as an inescapable part of our search for objective truth. They urge practitioners to reframe how science works for the sake of our future in the face of the planetary climate crisis and increasing science denialism. When we try to understand reality only through external physical things imagined from this outside position, we lose sight of the necessity of experience. This is the Blind Spot, which the authors show lies behind our scientific conundrums about time and the origin of the universe, quantum physics, life, AI and the mind, consciousness, and Earth as a planetary system. The authors propose an alternative vision: scientific knowledge is a self-correcting narrative made from the world and our experience of it evolving together. The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes, urging us to create a new scientific culture that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature's self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium.

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Free Download The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man, 2nd Edition (Audiobook)
English | March 24, 2020 | ASIN: B085P38HWK | M4B@64 kbps | 8h 35m | 242 MB
Author: Ernest Becker | Narrator: Chris Sorensen
Uses the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, sociology and psychiatry to explain what makes people act the way they do.
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Free Download Charles River Editors, Steve Knupp (Narrator), "The Battle of Fornovo: The History of the Italian Wars' First Major Battle"
English | ASIN: B0CZVPDW19, ISBN: 9798882299384 | 2024 | MP3@64 kbps | ~01:42:00 | 47 MB
In 1494, there were five sovereign regional powers in Italy: Milan, Venice, Florence, the Papal States and Naples. In 1536, only one remained: Venice. These decades of conflict precipitated great anxiety among Western thinkers, and Italians responded to the fragmentation, forevermore, of Latin Christendom, the end of self-governance for Italians, and the beginning of the early modern era in a myriad of ways. They were always heavily influenced by the lived experience of warfare between large Christian armies on the peninsula.
The diplomatic and military history of this 30-year period was a complex situation that one eminent Renaissance historian, Lauro Martines, has described as "best told by a computer, so many and tangled are the treatises, negotiations and battles." At the same time, the fighting went in tandem with the Renaissance and was influenced by it. Most historians credit the city-state of Florence as the place that started and developed the Italian Renaissance, a process carried out through the patronage and commission of artists during the late 12th century. If Florence is receiving its due credit, much of it belongs to the Medicis, the family dynasty of Florence that ruled at the height of the Renaissance. The dynasty held such influence that some of its family members even became Pope.
Meanwhile, plans for a French invasion were years in the making, and France's young King Charles VIII, heavily influenced by chivalric tales and his men of finance, had begun his preparations for conquering Naples as a base from which to launch a crusade in 1491. Two key events were the catalysts for these plans. The first was the arrival of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere at Avignon in May 1494.

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Free Download Charles River Editors, Victoria Woodson (Narrator), "The Battle of Crécy: The History and Legacy of England's Most Important Victory in the Hundred Years' War"
English | ISBN: 9798882221088 | 2024 | MP3@64 kbps | ~01:36:00 | 44 MB
Although it ended over 550 years ago, the Hundred Years' War still looms large in the historical consciousness of England and France, even if the name of the famous war is a misnomer. The war was more of a series of separate conflicts between the English and French monarchies, interspersed with periods of peace, and its reputation remains an odd one, in part because its origins were based on royal claims that dated back centuries. Furthermore, the English and French remained adversaries for nearly 400 years after it ended.
That said, the war was transformative in many respects, and the impact it had on the geopolitical situation of Europe cannot be overstated. While some might think of the war as being a continuation of the feudal tradition of knights and peasants, the Hundred Years' War revolutionized European warfare, and it truly helped to usher in the concept of nationalism on the continent. In England, it is remembered as a period of grandeur and success, even though the English lost the war and huge swathes of territory with it, while the French remember it as a strategic victory that ensured the continued independence of France and the denial of English hegemony. The legacy of the war has lived on ever since, helping determine how England became politically severed from the continent, how the knightly chivalric tradition slid into irrelevance, and how battlefield dominance can still leave a nation a loser in war.
Indeed, nothing characterized that dominance quite like the campaign that culminated with the Battle of Crécy, where the English used their diverse forces to maximum effect to defeat the French, a victory that allowed the English to eventually take and hold Calais. For about two centuries, Calais would remain the last foothold England retained on the continent, and the famous Tudor King Henry VIII conducted one of the last campaigns of his life in an effort to maintain it.

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