Why Dinosaurs Matter

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President

• UNABRIDGED (12 hrs and 5 mins)
• By Bandy X. Lee - editor
• Narrated By Nanette Gartrell, Luba Kessler, Bandy X. Lee, and others

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump describes the consensus view held by two dozen psychiatrists and psychologists that Donald Trump is dangerously mentally ill and that he presents a clear and present danger to the nation and our own mental health.

The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 57 mins)
• By Peter Brannen
• Narrated By Adam Verner

Our world has ended five times: It has been broiled, frozen, poison gassed, smothered, and pelted by asteroids. In The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen dives into deep time, exploring Earth's past dead ends, and in the process offers us a glimpse of our possible future. Many scientists now believe that the climate shifts of the 21st century have analogs in these five extinctions.

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs and 39 mins)
• By Richard Dawkins
• Narrated By Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward, Gillian Somerscales

For decades Richard Dawkins has been the world's most brilliant scientific communicator, consistently illuminating the wonders of nature and attacking faulty logic. Science in the Soul brings together 42 essays, polemics, and paeans - culled from personal papers, newspapers, lectures, and online salons - all written with Dawkins' characteristic erudition, remorseless wit, and unjaded awe of the natural world.

The Physics of Everyday Things: The Extraordinary Science Behind an Ordinary Day

• UNABRIDGED (5 hrs)
• By James Kakalios
• Narrated By Jonathan Todd Ross

Most of us are clueless when it comes to the physics that makes our modern world so convenient. What's the simple science behind motion sensors, touch screens, and toasters? How do we glide through tolls using an E-ZPass or find our way to new places using GPS? In The Physics of Everyday Things, James Kakalios takes us on an amazing journey into the subatomic marvels that underlie so much of what we use and take for granted.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

• UNABRIDGED (19 hrs and 35 mins)
• By Kurt Andersen
• Narrated By Kurt Andersen
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A razor-sharp thinker offers a new understanding of our post-truth world and explains the American instinct to believe in make-believe, from the Pilgrims to P. T. Barnum to Disneyland to zealots of every stripe...to Donald Trump. In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen demonstrates that what's happening in our country today - this strange, post-factual, "fake news" moment we're all living through - is not something entirely new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character and path.

Atomic Adventures: Secret Islands, Forgotten N-Rays, and Isotopic Murder - A Journey into the Wild World of Nuclear Science

• UNABRIDGED (13 hrs and 29 mins)
• By James Mahaffey
• Narrated By Keith Sellon-Wright

Whether you are a scientist or a poet, pro-nuclear energy or staunch opponent, conspiracy theorist or pragmatist, James Mahaffey's books have served to open up the world of nuclear science like never before. With clear explanations of some of the most complex scientific endeavors in history, Mahaffey's new book looks back at the atom's wild, secretive past and then toward its potentially bright future.

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.

You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself

• UNABRIDGED (8 hrs and 24 mins)
• By David McRaney
• Narrated By Don Hagen
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

An entertaining illumination of the stupid beliefs that make us feel wise. You believe you are a rational, logical being who sees the world as it really is, but journalist David McRaney is here to tell you that you're as deluded as the rest of us. But that's OK - delusions keep us sane. You Are Not So Smart is a celebration of self-delusion. It's like a psychology class, with all the boring parts taken out, and with no homework. Based on the popular blog of the same name, You Are Not So Smart collects more than 46 of the lies we tell ourselves everyday.

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight

• UNABRIDGED (16 hrs and 36 mins)
• By Julian Guthrie, Richard Branson - preface, Stephen Hawking - afterword
• Narrated By Rob Shapiro
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

The story of the bullet-shaped SpaceShipOne and the other teams in the hunt is an extraordinary tale of making the impossible possible. It is driven by outsized characters - Burt Rutan, Richard Branson, John Carmack, Paul Allen - and obsessive pursuits. In the end, as Diamandis dreamed, the result wasn't just a victory for one team; it was the foundation for a new industry and a new age.

Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History

• UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 44 mins)
• By Katy Tur
• Narrated By Katy Tur
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The NBC journalist who covered - and took fire from - Donald Trump on the campaign trail offers an inside look at the most shocking presidential election in American history. Intriguing, disturbing, and powerful, Unbelievable is an unprecedented eyewitness account of the 2016 election from an intelligent, dedicated journalist at the center of it - a thoughtful historical record that offers eye-opening insights and details on our political process, the media, and the mercurial 45th president of the United States.

Leonardo da Vinci

• UNABRIDGED (17 hrs and 1 min)
• By Walter Isaacson
• Narrated By Alfred Molina
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Leonardo da Vinci created the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. But in his own mind, he was just as much a man of science and engineering. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry.

And Then You're Dead: What Really Happens If You Get Swallowed by a Whale, Are Shot from a Cannon, or Go Barreling over Niagara

• UNABRIDGED (4 hrs and 58 mins)
• By Cody Cassidy, Paul Doherty
• Narrated By Dennis Boutsikaris
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

A gleefully gruesome look at the actual science behind the most outlandish, cartoonish, and impossible deaths you can imagine. What would happen if you took a swim outside a deep-sea submarine wearing only a swimsuit? How long could you last if you stood on the surface of the sun? How far could you actually get in digging a hole to China? Paul Doherty, senior staff scientist at San Francisco's famed Exploratorium Museum, and writer Cody Cassidy explore the real science behind these and other fantastical scenarios.

My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs

• UNABRIDGED (6 hrs and 38 mins)
• By Brian Switek
• Narrated By Brian Switek
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Dinosaurs, with their awe-inspiring size, terrifying claws and teeth, and otherworldly abilities, occupy a sacred place in our childhoods. They loom over museum halls, thunder through movies, and are a fundamental part of our collective imagination. In My Beloved Brontosaurus, the dinosaur fanatic Brian Switek enriches the childlike sense of wonder these amazing creatures instill in us. Investigating the latest discoveries in paleontology, he breathes new life into old bones.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

• UNABRIDGED (19 hrs and 13 mins)
• By Geoffrey West
• Narrated By Bruce Mann
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Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term complexity can be misleading, however, because what makes West's discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities, and our businesses.

Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

• UNABRIDGED (12 hrs and 32 mins)
• By Lisa Randall
• Narrated By Carrington MacDuffie
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Sixty-six million years ago, an object the size of a city descended from space to crash into Earth, creating a devastating cataclysm that killed off the dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of the other species on the planet. What was its origin? In Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, Lisa Randall proposes it was a comet that was dislodged from its orbit as the solar system passed through a disk of dark matter embedded in the Milky Way. In a sense it might have been dark matter that killed the dinosaurs.

Letter to a Christian Nation

• UNABRIDGED (1 hr and 56 mins)
• By Sam Harris
• Narrated By Jordan Bridges
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"Forty-four percent of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next 50 years," writes Sam Harris. "Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this...should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency."

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

• UNABRIDGED (13 hrs and 18 mins)
• By Carl Sagan
• Narrated By Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan

In Cosmos, the late astronomer Carl Sagan cast his gaze over the magnificent mystery of the Universe and made it accessible to millions of people around the world. Now in this stunning sequel, Carl Sagan completes his revolutionary journey through space and time.

Angels and Demons

• UNABRIDGED (18 hrs and 33 mins)
• By Dan Brown
• Narrated By Richard Poe
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World-renowned Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to a Swiss research facility to analyze a cryptic symbol seared into the chest of a murdered physicist. What he discovers is unimaginable: a deadly vendetta against the Catholic Church by a centuries-old underground organization, the Illuminati. Desperate to save the Vatican from a powerful time bomb, Langdon joins forces in Rome with the beautiful and mysterious scientist Vittoria Vetra.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

• UNABRIDGED (26 hrs and 26 mins)
• By Robert M. Sapolsky
• Narrated By Michael Goldstrom
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Why do we do the things we do? More than a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful, but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: He starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs and then hops back in time from there in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy.

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 46 mins)
• By Charles P. Pierce
• Narrated By Bronson Pinchot
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

The culture wars are over and the idiots have won. This is a veteran journalist’s caustically funny, righteously angry lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States. The three Great Premises of Idiot America: · Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units; anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough; "fact" is that which enough people believe. And "truth" is determined by how fervently they believe it.

Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon

• UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 23 mins)
• By Jeffrey Kluger
• Narrated By Brian Troxell
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

In August 1968 NASA made a bold decision: In just 16 weeks, the United States would launch humankind's first flight to the moon. Only the year before, three astronauts had burned to death in their spacecraft, and since then the Apollo program had suffered one setback after another. Meanwhile, the Russians were winning the space race, the Cold War was getting hotter by the month, and President Kennedy's promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade seemed sure to be broken.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

• UNABRIDGED (13 hrs and 24 mins)
• By Mark Twain
• Narrated By Nick Offerman
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With his trademark mirth and boundless charisma, actor Nick Offerman brought the loveable shenanigans of Twain's adolescent hero to life in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Now, in yet another virtuosic performance, the actor proves that despite being separated by a span of over a century, his connection to the author and his work is undeniable and that theirs is a timeless collaboration that should not be missed.

The Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition

• ORIGINAL (30 hrs and 10 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Daniel N. Robinson

Grasp the important ideas that have served as the backbone of philosophy across the ages with this extraordinary 60-lecture series. This is your opportunity to explore the enormous range of philosophical perspectives and ponder the most important and enduring of human questions-without spending your life poring over dense philosophical texts.

The Foundations of Western Civilization

• ORIGINAL (24 hrs and 54 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Thomas F. X. Noble

What is Western Civilization? According to Professor Noble, it is "much more than human and political geography," encompassing myriad forms of political and institutional structures - from monarchies to participatory republics - and its own traditions of political discourse. It involves choices about who gets to participate in any given society and the ways in which societies have resolved the tension between individual self-interest and the common good.