The Holy Grail: The Pocket Essential Guide

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 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.

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.....

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.

Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

• UNABRIDGED (24 hrs and 8 mins)
• By Jeremy Scahill
• Narrated By Tom Weiner
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

From Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen, Somalia, and beyond, Scahill speaks to the CIA agents, mercenaries, and elite Special Operations Forces operators who populate the dark side of American war-fighting. He goes deep into al Qaeda-held territory in Yemen and walks the streets of Mogadishu with CIA-backed warlords. We also meet the survivors of US night raids and drone strikes - including families of US citizens targeted for assassination by their own government - who reveal the human consequences of the dirty wars the United States struggles to keep hidden.