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The Kuwaiti Oil Fires
- The Disaster Series
- Narrated by: The Staff at High Noon Books
- Length: 42 mins
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The Kuwaiti Oil Fires
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Political Asides Have Become Bombastic Didactic
- By Mark Patterson on 12-25-15
By: Simon Winchester
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Coal
- A Human History
- By: Barbara Freese
- Narrated by: Shelly Frasier
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 375
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 182
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Story4 out of 5 stars 188
The fascinating, often surprising story of how a simple black rock altered the course of history. Yet the mundane mineral that built our global economy, and even today powers our electrical plants, has also caused death, disease, and environmental destruction. In this remarkable book, Barbara Freese takes us on a rich historical journey that begins three hundred million years ago and spans the globe.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Uses Coal to push her Political Agenda
- By Kismet on 08-22-06
By: Barbara Freese
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Energy
- A Human History
- By: Richard Rhodes
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 11 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 752
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 639
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 638
Through an unforgettable cast of characters, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes explains how wood gave way to coal and coal made room for oil, as we now turn to natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable energy. Rhodes looks back on five centuries of progress, through such influential figures as Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford.
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4 out of 5 stars
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No more accents, please!
- By Ned Gulley on 08-30-18
By: Richard Rhodes
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Uranium
- War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World
- By: Tom Zoellner
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 12 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 379
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 181
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Story4 out of 5 stars 187
Uranium is a common element in the earth's crust and the only naturally occurring mineral with the power to end all life on the planet. After World War II, it reshaped the global order---whoever could master uranium could master the world. Marie Curie gave us hope that uranium would be a miracle panacea, but the Manhattan Project gave us reason to believe that civilization would end with apocalypse.
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4 out of 5 stars
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GREAT book, awful narration
- By Carolyn on 03-30-09
By: Tom Zoellner
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Windfall
- The Booming Business of Global Warming
- By: McKenzie Funk
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 70
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 59
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Story4 out of 5 stars 59
Global warming's physical impacts can be separated into three broad categories: melt, drought, and deluge. Funk travels to two dozen countries to profile entrepreneurial people who see a potential windfall in each of these forces. The melt is a boon for newly arable, mineral rich regions of the Arctic, such as Greenland - and for the man-made snow trade. Drought creates opportunities for private firefighters working for insurance companies as well as for fund managers backing south Sudanese warlords who control local farmland.
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4 out of 5 stars
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unintended windfalls mixed with obvious perils
- By Andy on 02-09-14
By: McKenzie Funk
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No Immediate Danger
- Carbon Ideologies, Volume One
- By: William T. Vollmann
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 16 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 46
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 39
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Story4 out of 5 stars 39
In his nonfiction, William T. Vollmann has won acclaim as a singular voice tackling some of the most important issues of our age. Now, Vollmann turns to a topic that will define the generations to come - the factors and human actions that have led to global warming. Vollmann begins No Immediate Danger by examining and quantifying the many causes of climate change, from industrial manufacturing and agricultural practices to fossil fuel extraction, economic demand for electric power, and the justifiable yearning of people all over the world to live in comfort.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Look at the brightside always and die in a dream!
- By Darwin8u on 04-14-19
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The Age of Radiance
- The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era
- By: Craig Nelson
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 14 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 88
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 79
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 79
From the New York Times best-selling author of Rocket Men and the award-winning biographer of Thomas Paine comes the first complete history of the Atomic Age, a brilliant, magisterial account of the men and women who uncovered the secrets of the nucleus, brought its power to America, and ignited the 20th century.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Strong finish
- By David's Opinions and Reviews on 05-04-14
By: Craig Nelson
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Rain
- A Natural and Cultural History
- By: Cynthia Barnett
- Narrated by: Christina Traister
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 96
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 87
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Story4 out of 5 stars 87
It is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive. It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of all the world's water. Yet this is the first audiobook to tell the story of rain.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Mostly a cultural history
- By serine on 02-10-16
By: Cynthia Barnett
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Chernobyl 01:23:40
- The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster
- By: Andrew Leatherbarrow
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 989
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 874
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 873
At 01:23:40 on April 26th 1986, Alexander Akimov pressed the emergency shutdown button at Chernobyl's fourth nuclear reactor. It was an act that forced the permanent evacuation of a city, killed thousands, and crippled the Soviet Union. The event spawned decades of conflicting, exaggerated, and inaccurate stories.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Lost in his own navel
- By Christopher on 10-17-16
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Ignition!
- An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants
- By: John Drury Clark, Isaac Asimov - foreward
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 654
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 541
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 538
Ignition! is the story of the search for a rocket propellant which could be trusted to take man into space. This search was a hazardous enterprise carried out by rival labs who worked against the known laws of nature, with no guarantee of success or safety. John Drury Clark writes with irreverent and eyewitness immediacy about the development of the explosive fuels strong enough to negate the relentless restraints of gravity. The resulting volume is as much a memoir as a work of history, sharing a behind-the-scenes view of an enterprise that eventually took men to the moon.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Science man lists names of chemicals for 9 hours
- By Adrian on 05-06-19
By: John Drury Clark, and others
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Smokejumper
- A Memoir by One of America's Most Select Airborne Firefighters
- By: Jason A. Ramos, Julian Smith
- Narrated by: Ned Vaughn
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 585
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 516
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 512
In this extraordinarily rare memoir by an active-duty jumper, Jason Ramos takes listeners into his exhilarating and dangerous world, explores smokejumping's remarkable history, and explains why their services are more essential than ever before.
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5 out of 5 stars
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About damn time a book on wildland firefighting was written!!!
- By Jefferer R. Beren on 07-16-15
By: Jason A. Ramos, and others
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Rust
- The Longest War
- By: Jonathan Waldman
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 13 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 218
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 181
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Story4 out of 5 stars 182
In Rust journalist Jonathan Waldman travels from Key West, Florida, to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to meet the colorful and often reclusive people concerned with corrosion. He sneaks into an abandoned steelworks with a brave artist and nearly gets kicked out of Can School. Across the Arctic he follows a massive high-tech robot, hunting for rust in the Alaska pipeline.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Almost too geeky for geeks
- By Norman B. Bernstein on 03-26-15
By: Jonathan Waldman
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18 Miles
- The Epic Drama of Our Atmosphere and Its Weather
- By: Christopher Dewdney
- Narrated by: Angelo Di Loreto
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 45
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 37
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 36
We live at the bottom of an ocean of air - 5,200 million million tons, to be exact. It sounds like a lot, but Earth’s atmosphere is smeared onto its surface in an alarmingly thin layer - 99 percent contained within 18 miles. Yet, within this fragile margin lies a magnificent realm - at once gorgeous, terrifying, capricious, and elusive. With his keen eye for identifying and uniting seemingly unrelated events, Chris Dewdney reveals to us the invisible rivers in the sky that affect how our weather works and the structure of clouds and storms and seasons, the rollercoaster of climate.
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1 out of 5 stars
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10% science, 90% other stuff
- By Daniel W. Fox, Jr. on 10-09-20
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Cadillac Desert, Revised and Updated Edition
- The American West and Its Disappearing Water
- By: Marc Reisner
- Narrated by: Joe Spieler, Kate Udall
- Length: 27 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 557
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 472
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 472
The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. It is a tale of rivers diverted and dammed, of political corruptions and intrigue, of billion-dollar battles over water rights, of ecologic and economic disaster. In Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city's growth. He documents the bitter rivalry between two government giants to transform the West.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Too much mouth noise in narration
- By AES on 07-23-19
By: Marc Reisner
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The Boom
- How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World
- By: Russell Gold
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 250
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 209
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Story4 out of 5 stars 210
Russell Gold, a brilliant and dogged investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, has spent more than a decade reporting on one of the biggest stories of our time: the spectacular, world-changing rise of "fracking". Recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a recipient of the Gerald Loeb Award for his work, Gold has traveled along the pipelines and into the hubs of this country’s energy infrastructure; he has visited frack sites from Texas to North Dakota; and he has conducted thousands of interviews with engineers and wildcatters, CEOs and roughnecks, environmentalists and politicians.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Somehow the author manages to stay balanced
- By Emily C on 05-28-14
By: Russell Gold
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A Crack in the Edge of the World
- America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 584
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 328
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 324
San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative informative look at the tumultuous subterranean world that produces earthquakes, the planet's most sudden and destructive force. In the early morning hours of April 18, 1906, San Francisco and a string of towns to its north-northwest and the south-southeast were overcome by an enormous shaking that was compounded by the violent shocks of an earthquake, registering 8.25 on the Richter scale.
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2 out of 5 stars
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7 Hours and 45 minutes . . .
- By Tim on 12-09-05
By: Simon Winchester
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Brilliant Beacons
- A History of the American Lighthouse
- By: Eric Jay Dolin
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 42
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 40
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 40
Set against the backdrop of an expanding nation, Brilliant Beacons traces the evolution of America's lighthouse system, highlighting the political, military, and technological battles fought to illuminate the nation's hardscrabble coastlines.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great book about Lighthouses
- By Anastasia on 04-25-21
By: Eric Jay Dolin