4th Rock from the Sun: The Story of Mars

A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 22 mins)
• By Jennifer A. Doudna, Samuel H. Sternberg
• Narrated By Erin Bennett
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Not since the atomic bomb has a technology so alarmed its inventors that they warned the world about its use. Not, that is, until the spring of 2015, when biologist Jennifer Doudna called for a worldwide moratorium on the use of the new gene-editing tool CRISPR - a revolutionary new technology that she helped create - to make heritable changes in human embryos.

The Vacation Guide to the Solar System

• UNABRIDGED (5 hrs and 52 mins)
• By Olivia Koski, Jana Grcevich
• Narrated By Kathleen McInerney, Olivia Koski, Jana Grcevich
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Imagine taking a hike along the windswept red plains of Mars to dig for signs of life or touring one of Jupiter's 64 moons, where you can photograph its swirling storms. For a shorter trip on a tight budget, the moon is quite majestic and very quiet if you can make it during the off-season. Packed with real-world science, The Vacation Guide to the Solar System is the must-have planning guide for the curious space adventurer, covering all of the essentials for your next voyage, how to get there, and what to do when you arrive.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

• UNABRIDGED (17 hrs and 23 mins)
• By Carl Sagan
• Narrated By Cary Elwes, Seth MacFarlane
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How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don't understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan argues that scientific thinking is critical not only to the pursuit of truth but to the very well-being of our democratic institutions.

Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster

• UNABRIDGED (6 hrs and 24 mins)
• By Andrew Leatherbarrow
• Narrated By Michael Page
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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.

Cosmos

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs and 31 mins)
• By Carl Sagan
• Narrated By LeVar Burton, Seth MacFarlane, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and others

Cosmos is one of the best-selling science books of all time. In clear-eyed prose, Sagan reveals a jewel-like blue world inhabited by a life form that is just beginning to discover its own identity and to venture into the vast ocean of space.

The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume I, Fort Sumter to Perryville

• UNABRIDGED (43 hrs and 4 mins)
• By Shelby Foote, Ken Burns - introduction
• Narrated By Grover Gardner
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The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume I begins one of the most remarkable works of history ever fashioned. All the great battles are here, of course, from Bull Run through Shiloh, the Seven Days Battles, and Antietam, but so are the smaller ones: Ball's Bluff, Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, Island Ten, New Orleans, and Monitor versus Merrimac.

Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters; From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

• UNABRIDGED (15 hrs and 54 mins)
• By James Mahaffey
• Narrated By Tom Weiner

From the moment radiation was discovered in the late nineteenth century, nuclear science has had a rich history of innovative scientific exploration and discovery, coupled with mistakes, accidents, and downright disasters.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

• UNABRIDGED (15 hrs and 25 mins)
• By Tim Wu
• Narrated By Marc Cashman
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In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials and other efforts to harvest our attention. Over the last century, few times or spaces have remained uncultivated by the "attention merchants", contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this is not simply the byproduct of recent inventions, but the end result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention.

Sapiens

• UNABRIDGED (15 hrs and 18 mins)
• By Yuval Noah Harari
• Narrated By Derek Perkins
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Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it. Us. We are the most advanced and most destructive animals ever to have lived. What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us sapiens? In this bold and provocative audiobook, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here, and where we're going.

The Dead Zone

• UNABRIDGED (16 hrs and 11 mins)
• By Stephen King
• Narrated By James Franco
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Johnny Smith awakens from a five-year coma after his car accident and discovers that he can see people's futures and pasts when he touches them. Many consider his talent a gift; Johnny feels cursed. His fiancée married another man during his coma, and people clamor for him to solve their problems. When Johnny has a disturbing vision after he shakes the hand of an ambitious and amoral politician, he must decide if he should take drastic action to change the future.

The War Below: The Story of Three Submarines That Battled Japan

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs and 20 mins)
• By James Scott
• Narrated By Donald Corren
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The War Below is a dramatic account of extraordinary heroism, ingenuity, and perseverance—and the vital role American submarines played in winning the Pacific War. Focusing on the unique stories of the submarines Silversides, Drum, and Tang—and the men who skippered and crewed them—James Scott takes readers beneath the waves to experience the thrill of a direct hit on a merchant ship and the terror of depth charge attacks.

Thunder Below!: The USS Barb Revolutionizes Submarine Warfare in World War II

• UNABRIDGED (15 hrs and 27 mins)
• By Eugene B. Fluckey
• Narrated By Corey Snow
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Under the leadership of her fearless skipper, Captain Gene Fluckey, the Barb sank the greatest tonnage of any American sub in World War II. At the same time, the Barb did far more than merely sink ships-she changed forever the way submarines stalk and kill their prey.

This is a gripping adventure chock-full of "you-are-there" moments. Fluckey has drawn on logs, reports, letters, interviews, and a recently discovered illegal diary kept by one of his torpedomen.

Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 30 mins)
• By Amy Shira Teitel
• Narrated By Laurence Bouvard
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NASA's history is a familiar story, culminating with the agency successfully landing men on the moon in 1969. But NASA's prehistory is a rarely told tale, one that is largely absent from the popular space-age literature but that gives the context behind the incredible lunar program. America's space agency wasn't created in a vacuum; it was assembled from preexisting parts, drawing together some of the best minds the non-Soviet world had to offer.

The Story of World War II

• UNABRIDGED (24 hrs and 58 mins)
• By Donald L. Miller, Henry Steele Commager
• Narrated By Michael Kramer
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Drawing on previously unpublished eyewitness accounts, prizewinning historian Donald L. Miller has written what critics are calling one of the most powerful accounts of warfare ever published. Here are the horror and heroism of World War II in the words of the men who fought it, the journalists who covered it, and the civilians who were caught in its fury. Miller gives us an up-close, deeply personal view of a war that was more savagely fought - and whose outcome was in greater doubt - than one might imagine. This is the war that Americans on the home front would have read about had they had access to previously censored testimony.

A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts

• UNABRIDGED (22 hrs and 59 mins)
• By Andrew Chaikin
• Narrated By Bronson Pinchot

Audie Award, History/Biography, 2016. On the night of July 20, 1969, our world changed forever when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. Based on in-depth interviews with 23 of the 24 moon voyagers, as well as those who struggled to get the program moving, A Man on the Moon conveys every aspect of the Apollo missions with breathtaking immediacy and stunning detail.

The Unknown Universe: A New Exploration of Time, Space and Cosmology

• UNABRIDGED (8 hrs and 22 mins)
• By Stuart Clark PhD
• Narrated By Stephen Hoye
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On March 21, 2013, the European Space Agency released a map of the afterglow of the big bang. Taking in 440 sextillion kilometers of space and 13.8 billion years of time, it is physically impossible to make a better map: We will never see the early universe in more detail. On the one hand, such a view is the apotheosis of modern cosmology; on the other, it threatens to undermine almost everything we hold cosmologically sacrosanct.

Young Frankenstein: A Mel Brooks Book: The Story of the Making of the Film

• UNABRIDGED (1 hr and 54 mins)
• By Mel Brooks, Judd Apatow - foreword
• Narrated By Mel Brooks, Michael Gruskoff, Robert Petkoff, and others

Young Frankenstein was made with deep respect for the craft and history of cinema - and for the power of a good schwanzstucker joke. This book, written by one of the greatest comedy geniuses of all time, takes listeners inside the classic film's marvelous creation story via contemporary interviews with the cast and crew, most notably legendary writer-director Mel Brooks.

What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves

• UNABRIDGED (8 hrs and 45 mins)
• By Benjamin K. Bergen
• Narrated By Benjamin K. Bergen

Nearly everyone swears - whether it's over a few too many drinks, in reaction to a stubbed toe, or in flagrante delicto. And yet we sit idly by as words are banned from television and censored in books. We insist that people excise profanity from their vocabularies, and we punish children for yelling the very same dirty words that we'll mutter in relief seconds after they fall asleep. Swearing, it seems, is an intimate part of us that we have decided to selectively deny.