Documentary

Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, or geography that determines prosperity or poverty? As Why Nations Failshows, none of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Drawing on fifteen years of original research, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is our man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or the lack of it). Korea, to take j

A CLASSIC FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF ONE SUMMER Every time Bill Bryson walks out the door, memorable travel literature threatens to break out. His previous excursion along the Appalachian Trail resulted in the sublime national bestseller A Walk in the Woods. In A Sunburned Country is his report on what he found in an entirely different place: Australia, the country that doubles as a continent, and a place with the friendliest inhabitants, the hottest, driest weather, and the m

Developing video games - hero’s journey or fool’s errand? The creative and technical logistics that go into building today’s hottest games can be more harrowing and complex than the games themselves, often seeming like an endless maze or a bottomless abyss. In Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, Jason Schreier takes listeners on a fascinating odyssey behind the scenes of video game development, where the creator may be a team of 600 overworked underdogs or a solitary geek genius. Exploring the artistic ch

The Roman gladiator has long been a figure of fascination. Portrayed frequently in fine art and popular culture alike, the gladiator is both a real part of history and a legend of a romanticized past. We know that these men entertained Roman audiences by fighting in dangerous and often deadly games. But who were the gladiators? What were their lives like? And why do they continue to have such a strong hold on our imagination, centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire?

Imaginative play is a crucial part of growing up. It has a major impact on cognitive, emotional, and intellectual development. It’s also a joyous activity that gifts us with some of our fondest and most resilient childhood memories. Toys and games have long been a part of childhood, but the 20th century saw the rise of an entire industry devoted to the business of play, one that would constantly evolve over the years to reflect the rapid changes of the 20th and 21st centuries.

site's users are only for evaluation and tryout, you'd better delete them in 24 hours after evaluation. An **audiobook** is a recording that is primarily of the spoken word as opposed to music. While it is often based on a recording of commercially available printed material, this is not always the case. It was not intended to be descriptive of the word "book" but is rather a recorded spoken program in its own right and not necessarily an audio version of a book. Copyrighted © (AB

Gravity’s Century: From Einstein’s Eclipse to Images of Black Holes A sweeping account of the century of experimentation that confirmed Einstein’s general theory of relativity, bringing to life the science and scientists at the origins of relativity, the development of radio telescopes, the discovery of black holes and quasars, and the still unresolved place of gravity in quantum theory.

A groundbreaking new biography of philosophy’s greatest iconoclast. Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most enigmatic figures in philosophy, and his concepts - the Übermensch, the will to power, slave morality - have fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the human condition. But what do most people really know of Nietzsche - beyond the mustache, the scowl, and the lingering association with nihilism and fascism? Where do we place a thinker who was equally beloved by Albert Camus, Ayn Rand,

We can learn a lot about American history and culture by looking at the horror films of the 1980s. The horror boom that began in 1978 coincided with an era of global nuclear fears, urban decay, and recession as well as the collapse of the Hollywood studio system and the decline of censorship laws that had held sway for nearly 50 years. This volatile mix of circumstances gave rise to the gory, violent, over-the-top—and very successful—genre of horror that we now know as the “slasher” or “splatter

The Defector is the untold account of how, in 1971, the defection of a KGB saboteur in London led to the expulsion of more than a hundred Soviet ‘diplomats’ from the UK. Drawing on newly declassified intelligence documents and dozens of interviews with spymasters, The Defector tells a startling story of a Soviet mission to plant fake Kremlin agents within British and American intelligence services, the paranoia that ensued, and how the actions of a genuine turncoat, the former KGB officer Oleg L