CatoAudio, December 2003

Detroit: An American Autopsy

• UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 25 mins)
• By Charles LeDuff
• Narrated By Eric Martin

In the heart of America, a metropolis is quietly destroying itself. Detroit, once the richest city in the nation, is now its poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age - mass production, automobiles, and blue-collar jobs - Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, foreclosure, and dropouts.

With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark and the righteous indignation that only a native son can possess, journalist Charlie LeDuff sets out to uncover what has brought low this once-vibrant city, his city.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

• UNABRIDGED (18 hrs and 4 mins)
• By George Packer
• Narrated By Robert Fass
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives. The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation.

A Short History of Nearly Everything

• UNABRIDGED (17 hrs and 48 mins)
• By Bill Bryson
• Narrated By Richard Matthews

Bill Bryson has been an enormously popular author both for his travel books and for his books on the English language. Now, this beloved comic genius turns his attention to science. Although he doesn't know anything about the subject (at first), he is eager to learn, and takes information that he gets from the world's leading experts and explains it to us in a way that makes it exciting and relevant.

The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

• UNABRIDGED (32 hrs and 24 mins)
• By Rick Atkinson
• Narrated By L. J. Ganser
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

It is the 20th century's unrivaled epic: At a staggering price, the United States and its allies liberated Europe and vanquished Hitler. In the first two volumes of his best-selling Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson recounted the history of how the American-led coalition fought its way from North Africa and Italy to the threshold of victory. Now he tells the most dramatic story of all - the titanic battle in Western Europe. D-Day marked the commencement of the war's final campaign, and Atkinson's astonishingly fresh account of that enormous gamble sets the pace for the masterly narrative that follows.

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs)
• By Laura Hillenbrand
• Narrated By Edward Herrmann
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Why we think it’s a great listen: Seabiscuit was a runaway success, and Hillenbrand’s done it again with another true-life account about beating unbelievable odds. On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared.....