MY AUDIOBOOK LIBRARY

This is a new reading of the thrilling account of one of the most astonishing feats of exploration and human courage ever recorded.

In August of 1914, the British ship Endurance set sail for the South Atlantic. In October, 1915, still half a continent away from its intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in the ice. For five months, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men, drifting on ice packs, were castaways in one of the most savage regions of the world.

Lansing describes how the men survived a 1,000-mile voyage in an open boat across the stormiest ocean in the world and an overland trek through forbidding glaciers and mountains. The book recounts a harrowing adventure, but ultimately it is the nobility of these men and their indefatigable will that shines through.

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (commonly known as The Pickwick Papers) is the first novel by Charles Dickens. The book became the first real publishing phenomenon, with bootleg copies, theatrical performances, Sam Weller joke books, and other merchandise. Written for publication as a serial, The Pickwick Papers is a sequence of loosely-related adventures. The novel's main character, Mr. Samuel Pickwick, Esquire, is a kind and wealthy old gentleman, and the founder and perpetual president of the Pickwick Club. To extend his researches into the quaint and curious phenomena of life, he suggests that he and three other "Pickwickians" (Mr. Nathaniel Winkle, Mr. Augustus Snodgrass, and Mr. Tracy Tupman) should make journeys to remote places and report on their findings to the members of the club. Their travels throughout the English countryside provide the chief theme of the novel. Its main literary value and appeal is formed by its numerous memorable characters. Each character in The Pickwick Papers, as in many other Dickens novels, is drawn comically, often with exaggerated personalities. Alfred Jingle provides an aura of comic villainy. His misadventures repeatedly land the Pickwickians in trouble. These include Jingle's elopement with the spinster, Aunt Rachael of Dingley Dell manor, misadventures with Dr. Slammer, and others.

Blackstone Audio presents a new recording of this dramatically popular book. George Orwell depicts a gray, totalitarian world dominated by Big Brother and its vast network of agents, including the Thought Police, a world in which news is manufactured according to the authorities' will and people live tepid lives by rote. Winston Smith, the hero with no heroic qualities, longs only for truth and decency. But living in a social system in which privacy does not exist and where those with unorthodox ideas are brainwashed or put to death, he knows there is no hope for him. The year 1984 has come and gone, yet George Orwell's nightmare vision in 1949 of the world we were becoming is still the great modern classic of negative Utopia.

“Every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding,” says Scrooge. Mean old Scrooge despises Christmas until Christmas Eve, when a haunted voice from the past changes his life––overnight! Many know the story but few have experienced the marvel of the book.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, Germany was the Mecca of science and technology in the world. However, by the beginning of the First World War, Germany began to display some of the features that would blight the conduct of ideal science through the rest of the century. After Hitler came into power in 1933, science and technology were quickly pressed into service by racist, xenophobic idealologies. From 1939 to the war's end, scientists working under military control began research on nuclear chain reaction with the prospect of arming Hitler with an atomic bomb. By 1943, few areas of German science, technology, and industry had not been experimentation and mass killing. How German scientists behaved in the era spanning the beginning of the First War and the end of the Second raises many questions, disturbing and relevant to this day, about how scientist act under pressure of social and political circumstances and events. In pondering the moral and political predicament of the unregulated pursuit of scientific progress, Hitler's Scientist today prompts uncomfortable parallels with the past. About the Author: John Cornwell is in the department of history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University. He is also an award winning journalist and director of the Science and Human Dimension Project at Cambridge University. He is a regular feature writer at the Sunday Times (London) and the author and editor of four books on science, including Power to Harm, on the Louisville Prozae trial. He lives in Cambridge, England. About the Narrator: Simon Prebble is considered one of the premier voices in the audiobook industry, having narrated nearly 150 titles. In addition, the UK native has extensive voice-over experience in industrial, public service, radio, television advertising campaigns, and has been an on-camera spokesman for corporate presentations and a veteran of television soap operas, "As The World Turns" and "Loving". "Hitler's Scientists" is his first Audie Award nomination.

The Monkey's Paw is a classic horror short story written by author W. W. Jacobs, published in England in 1902. In the story, the paw of a dead monkey is a talisman that grants its possessor three wishes, but the wishes come with an enormous price. About the Author: William Wymark Jacobs (September 8, 1863–September 1, 1943), was an English author of short stories and novels. He is best remembered for his macabre tales, "The Monkey's Paw" and "The Toll House," however, the majority of his writing was humorous in tone and his favourite subjects were marine life. About the Narrator: Simon Prebble is considered one of the premier voices in the audiobook industry, having narrated nearly 150 titles. In addition, the UK native has extensive voice-over experience in industrial, public service, radio, television advertising campaigns, and has been an on-camera spokesman for corporate presentations and a veteran of television soap operas, "As The World Turns" and "Loving". "Hitler's Scientists" is his first Audie Award nomination.