Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios for Bloomsbury" in All Categories

One winter's night in 1976, over 20 million people in Britain watched John Curry skate to Olympic glory on an ice rink in Austria. Many millions more watched around the world. Overnight he became one of the most famous men on the planet. He was awarded the OBE. He was chosen as BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Curry had changed ice skating from marginal sport to high art. And yet the man was - and would always remain - an absolute mystery to a world that had been dazzled by his gift.

Farm animals have been disappearing from our fields as the production of food has become a global industry. We no longer know for certain what is entering the food chain and what we are eating - as the UK horsemeat scandal demonstrated. We are reaching a tipping point as the farming revolution threatens our countryside, health, and the quality of our food wherever we live in the world.

In the early 19th century passenger pigeons accounted for 25 to 40 percent of North America’s birds, traveling in flocks so massive as to block out the sun for hours. Although adults weighed only twelve ounces, they nested and roosted in the millions, destroying large oaks as if hit by hurricanes. Their favorite foods were the seeds and nuts of beech, chestnuts, and other forest trees, but they also raided farmers’ buckwheat, wheat, corn, and rye crops.

The Art of the Infinite takes infinity, in its countless guises, as a touchstone for understanding mathematical thinking. Robert and Ellen Kaplan guide us through the “Republic of Numbers,” where we meet both its upstanding citizens and its more shadowy dwellers; and transport us across the plane of geometry into the unlikely realm where parallel lines meet.

The familiar call of the common cuckoo, "cuck-oo", has been a harbinger of spring ever since our ancestors walked out of Africa many thousands of years ago. However, for naturalist and scientist Nick Davies, the call is an invitation to solve an enduring puzzle: How does the cuckoo get away with laying its eggs in the nests of other birds and tricking them into raising young cuckoos rather than their own offspring?

In The Revolution of Robert Kennedy, journalist John R. Bohrer focuses in intimate and revealing detail on Bobby Kennedy's life during the three years following JFK's assassination. Torn between mourning the past and plotting his future, Bobby was placed in a sudden competition with his political enemy, Lyndon Johnson, for control of the Democratic Party.

Two men with a passion for vinyl create a society for the appreciation of records. Their aim is simple: to elevate the art of listening by doing so in forensic detail. The society enjoys moderate success in the back room of their local pub, The Half Moon, with other enthusiasts drawn to the initial promise of the weekly gathering. However, as the club gains popularity, its founder's uncompromising dogma results in a schism within the movement and soon a counter group forms.

The budget battles of recent years have amplified the warnings of demographic doomsayers who predicted that a wave of baby boomers would bleed America dry, bankrupting Social Security and Medicare as they faded into an impoverished old age. On the contrary, argues award-winning journalist Chris Farrell, we are instead on the verge of a broad, positive transformation of our economy and society.

A revelatory and entertaining book about the pitfalls of how we measure our economy and how to correct them, by an award-winning editor of The Financial Times. According to GDP, the economy is in a golden era: economic growth has risen steadily over the past 70 years and shows no sign of stopping. But if this is the case, why are we living in such fractured times, with global populism on the rise and wealth inequality as stark as ever?

The continuing crisis in Syria has raised a question mark over the common perception of Middle Eastern affairs as an offshoot of global power politics. To Western intellectuals, foreign-policy experts, and politicians, "empire" and "imperialism" are categories that apply exclusively to the European powers and more recently to the United States of America. Lacking an internal dynamic of its own, the view of such people is that Middle Eastern history is the product of its unhappy interaction with the West.

The world's most lethal computer virus has been unleashed into cyberspace, and now the Urban Outlaws - five tough kids dedicated to justice - must destroy it. Leader Jack knows that they have to shut it down before it throws the world into chaos. But how can he find a virus that might be anywhere, and everywhere?

Rita Gabis comes from a family of Eastern European Jews and Lithuanian Catholics. She was close to her Catholic grandfather as a child and knew one version of his past: Prior to immigration, he had fought the Russians, whose brutal occupation of Lithuania destroyed thousands of lives before Hitler's army swept in.

When a British computer hacker finds his name coded into a centuries-old manuscript, TimeRider Maddy recognizes it as the same message she had also been sent. Sure it must be communication from other TimeRiders agents, she sends Liam and the two support units back to Robin Hood's time to search for the fabled document - possibly the Holy Grail. But as a war begins to brew between King Richard and his brother John, Liam unwittingly takes on the role of the Sheriff of Nottingham and discovers that the mythical Robin Hood may have been another support unit all along.

Everything that could possibly be wrong with a city was wrong with Calcutta. When Kushanava Choudhury arrived in New Jersey at the age of 12, he had already migrated halfway around the world four times. After graduating from Princeton, he moved back to the world which his immigrant parents had abandoned, to a city built between a river and a swamp, where the moisture-drenched air swarms with mosquitos after sundown.

The question of how and why organisms age has teased scientists for centuries. There are myriad competing theories, from the idea that ageing is a simple wear and tear process, like the rusting of a car, to the belief that ageing and death are genetically programmed and controlled. In fact, there is no clearly defined limit to life and no single, predictable program playing itself out: different things are happening within and between tissues, and each system or organ accumulates damage at its own pace, according to the kind of insults imposed on it by daily living.

This enthralling audiobook takes us on a tour of the most dangerous, exciting, and often eccentric escapades of literature's sailing stars and how these true stories inspired and informed their best-loved works. Arthur Ransome, Erskine Childers, Jack London, and many others are featured as we find out how extraordinary fact fed into unforgettable fiction.

From young artists trying to elbow their way in to those working hard at dropping out, White's essential audiobook offers a once-in-a-generation glimpse of the inner workings of the American art world at a moment of unparalleled ambition, uncertainty, and creative exuberance.

Simon Thorn has only recently discovered that he's an Animalgam, a member of a secret race of people who can shift into animals, and found a home where he truly belongs. But not everything is as good as it seems. Simon's evil grandfather, Orion, is bent on taking over the entire animal kingdom, and to do so, he'll need to gather the pieces of a terrible weapon - one that could shred the very foundations of the Animalgams' world...unless Simon can gather the pieces first.

Sixteen-year-old Holly wants to remember her Grandpa forever, but she’d rather forget what he left her in his will: his wedding chapel on the Las Vegas strip. Whatever happened to gold watches, savings bonds, or some normal inheritance? And then there's Grandpa's letter. Not only is Holly running the business with her recently divorced parents, but she needs to make some serious money - fast. Grandpa also insists Holly reach out to Dax, the grandson of her family's mortal enemy and owner of the cheesy chapel next door.

Overwhelmed is a map of the stresses that have ripped our leisure to shreds, and a look at how to put the pieces back together. Schulte speaks to neuroscientists, sociologists, and hundreds of working parents to tease out the factors contributing to our collective sense of being overwhelmed, seeking insights, answers, and inspiration.