Science & Technology audiobooks

Plato in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 14 minutes

Abridged: No

In an age when philosophers had scarcely glimpsed the horizons of the mind, a boy named Aristocles decided to forgo his ambitions as a wrestler. Adopting the nickname Plato, he embarked instead on a life in philosophy. In 387 BC he founded the Academy, the world's first university, and taught his students that all we see is not reality but... Read more

Scourge

By: Jonathan B. Tucker

Narrated by: John Lescault

Length: 9 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

Smallpox, the only infectious disease to have been eradicated, was one of the most terrifying of human scourges. It covered the skin with hideous, painful boils, killed a third of its victims, and left the survivors disfigured for life. In this riveting, often terrifying look at the history of smallpox, Jonathan B. Tucker tells the story of this... Read more

Aristotle in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Aristotle wrote on everything from the shape of seashells to sterility, from speculations on the nature of the soul to meteorology, poetry, art, and even the interpretation of dreams. Apart from mathematics, he transformed every field of knowledge that he touched. Above all, Aristotle is credited with the founding of logic. When he first divided... Read more

St. Augustine in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 13 minutes

Abridged: No

Augustine’s spiritual crisis and conversion to Christianity, detailed in his Confessions, ultimately led him to his major contribution to philosophy: the fusion of the two doctrines of Christianity and Neoplatonism. This not only provided Christianity with a strong intellectual backing but tied it to the Greek tradition of philosophy, which... Read more

Hegel in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Hegel’s dialectical method produced the most grandiose metaphysical system known to man. Its most vital element was the dialectic of the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. This sprung from Hegel’s aim to overcome the deficiencies of logic and ascend toward Mind as the ultimate reality. His view of history as a process of humanity’s... Read more

Heidegger in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 27 minutes

Abridged: No

One of two major philosophical traditions of the twentieth century was Wittgenstein's linguistic analysis. The other, diametrically opposed, came from Heidegger, and his fundamental question: "What is the meaning of existence?" For Heidegger, this question was beyond the reach of reason and was the primary "given" of every individual life. To... Read more

Marx in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 23 minutes

Abridged: No

Karl Marx's devastating critique of capitalism, and his proposal of communism as the answer to the failings of the capitalist system, bore their greatest fruits in the twentieth century with the formation of the communist state in the Soviet Union. This great venture has now all but completely failed. Yet the force of the communist belief... Read more

Sartre in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 40 minutes

Abridged: No

During his lifetime, Jean-Paul Sartre enjoyed unprecedented popularity for a philosopher, due partly to his role as a spokesman for existentialism—at the opportune moment when this set of ideas filled the spiritual gap left amidst the ruins of World War II. Existentialism was a philosophy of action and showed the ultimate freedom of the... Read more

Thomas Aquinas in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 21 minutes

Abridged: No

We see our age as the greatest in human history, filled with seemingly unending originality. Yet such dynamism is not a necessary characteristic of great eras. Among the most long-lasting and stable civilizations was that of medieval Europe. There stasis was achieved, and with it a stability that permitted the development of structured thought... Read more

Hume in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 17 minutes

Abridged: No

Hume reduced philosophy to ruins: he denied the existence of everything—except our actual perceptions themselves. I alone exist, he argued, and the world is nothing more than part of my consciousness. Yet we know that the world remains, and we go on as before. What Hume expressed was the status of our knowledge about the world, a world in which... Read more

Socrates in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 18 minutes

Abridged: No

Just a century after it had begun, philosophy entered its greatest age with the appearance of Socrates, who spent so much of his time talking about philosophy on the streets of Athens that he never got around to writing anything down. His method of aggressive questioning, called dialectic, was used to cut through the palaver of his adversaries... Read more

Nietzsche in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 14 minutes

Abridged: No

With Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophy was dangerous not only for philosophers but for everyone. Nietzsche ultimately went mad, but his ideas presaged a collective madness that had horrific consequences in Europe in the early 1900s. Though his philosophy is more one of aphorisms and insights than a system, it is brilliant, persuasive, and... Read more

Wittgenstein in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 16 minutes

Abridged: No

If we accept Wittgenstein's word for it, he is the last philosopher. In his view, philosophy in the traditional sense was finished.Ludwig Wittgenstein was a superb logician who distrusted language and sought to solve the problems of philosophy by reducing them to logic. All else—metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, finally even philosophy itself—was... Read more

Pointing from the Grave

By: Samantha Weinberg

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 12 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

This is the remarkable and gripping true story of a murderer and his victim, and of the tiny molecule that linked their fates. It is both the history of a science overlaid with human drama and a human tragedy inextricably entwined with science. It is about two lives made and destroyed by DNA—and by each other.In 1984, Helena Greenwood, a young... Read more

Guerrilla P.R. Wired

By: Michael Levine

Narrated by: Lloyd James

Length: 11 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

Guerilla P.R. Wired transports Michael Levine’s legendary street-fighting P.R. tactics to the wide-open domain of the World Wide Web. Motivating, brilliant, and filled with invaluable strategies for getting maximum attention regardless of your budget, Guerrilla P.R. Wired will show you how to get noticed now and help you craft a message that is... Read more

Silicon Gold Rush

By: Karen Southwick

Narrated by: Sneha Mathan

Length: 8 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

A hotbed of activity for farsighted thinkers and determined doers, the high-technology industry has given rise to a pioneering group of entrepreneurs and executives that is not only behind today’s most innovative technological advances, but at the forefront of a dynamic new movement in business.Armed with groundbreaking management approaches,... Read more

Choosing a College

By: Thomas Sowell

Narrated by: Robert Morris

Length: 6 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

This book starts you at square one: before you know what questions to ask, what colleges to read about, or what statistics to look up. Sowell pulls no punches as he candidly describes the inner and outer workings of scores of American colleges and universities, big and small. He gives equal attention to special programs, financial aid, and the... Read more

What One Man Said to Another

By: Peter Josyph

Narrated by: Peter Josyph & Raymond Todd

Length: 10 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

What One Man Said to Another is, on one level, a series of extended conversations between friends. On another, it is the spoken autobiography of Richard Selzer, respected surgeon and writer, as recorded by artist and writer Peter Josyph.In these pages, we learn firsthand of Selzer’s life as a surgeon in an isolated village in Korea in the early... Read more

Who Stole Feminism?

By: Christina Hoff Sommers

Narrated by: Kristen Underwood

Length: 13 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Philosophy professor Christina Sommers exposes a disturbing development: how a group of zealots, claiming to speak for all women, are promoting a dangerous new agenda that threatens our most cherished ideals and sets women against men in all spheres of life. In case after case, Sommers shows how these extremists have propped up their arguments... Read more

Unfinished People

By: Ruth Gay

Narrated by: Anna Fields

Length: 10 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

Nearly three million Jews came to America from Eastern Europe between 1880 and the outbreak of World War I, filled with the hope of life in a new land. Most were young, single, uneducated, and unskilled; many were children or teens. They were, in a sense, unfinished citizens of either the old or the new world.Within two generations, these... Read more

The Moral Sense

By: James Q. Wilson

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 11 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

Virtue has acquired a bad name, says Wilson, but it is nevertheless what we are referring to when we discuss a person's character, such as whether someone is kind, friendly, or loyal. Although we may disguise the language of morality as a language of personality, it is still, in Wilson's words, "the language of virtue and vice." Says the author,... Read more

An Affair with Africa

By: Alzada Carlisle Kistner

Narrated by: C. M. Hébert

Length: 8 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

In June 1960, a young faculty wife named Alzada Kistner and her husband David, a promising entomologist, left their eighteen-month-old daughter in the care of relatives and began what was to be a four-month scientific expedition in the Belgian Congo. Three weeks after their arrival, the country was gripped by a violent revolution, trapping the... Read more

Edison

By: Paul Israel

Narrated by: Raymond Todd

Length: 22 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

The definitive biography of the century's godfather of invention—from the preeminent Edison scholarThe conventional story of Thomas Edison reads more like myth than history: with only three months of formal education, a hardworking young man overcomes the odds to become one of the greatest inventors in history. But the portrait that emerges from... Read more

East to the Dawn

By: Susan Butler

Narrated by: Anna Fields

Length: 18 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

Amelia Earhart captured the hearts of the nation after becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1928—and her disappearance on an around-the-world flight in 1937 is an enduring mystery.The image we have of Amelia Earhart today—a tousle-haired, androgynous flier clad in shirt, silk scarf, leather jacket, and goggles—is only one... Read more