Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Professionals & Academics

Before he conceived of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk flexed his control and influence during his unprecedented, $44 billion buyout of Twitter. This is the stunning true story of how Musk managed to upend the world's largest free speech platform through sheer, unilateral force—and what that means for the protection of power in the modern age.

Born in war-torn Afghanistan, Waheed Arian's earliest memories are of bombs. Fleeing the conflict with his family, he spent much of his childhood in refugee camps in Pakistan, living sometimes 10 to a room without basic sanitation or access to education. After he contracted tuberculosis, his first-hand experience of the power of medicine inspired Waheed to dedicate his life to healing others. But how does a boy with nothing hope to become a doctor?

As a 24-year-old line cook, Ellen Marie Bennett couldn't stand the kitchen staff’s poorly designed, cheaply made aprons. So when her head chef announced he was ordering a new batch, she blurted out, “Chef, I have an apron company” - even though she had no company, no business plan - just a glimmer of a design idea and a business license. Through hustle and a willingness to leap into the unknown, time and time again, she built that first order into a multi-million-dollar company called Hedley & Bennett.

Michele Harper is a female African-American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, DC, in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn't move with her. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman.

Banking on It is the firsthand account of one woman's quest to rebuild Britain's broken banking system. After a lengthy career at the top of some of Britain's leading banks, Anne Boden had become disillusioned with the status quo - the financial crash had broken trust in the whole sector, but there seemed to be little appetite to make the most of emerging technologies to revolutionise customer experience. Increasingly frustrated with the inertia within the industry, she decided to shake things up herself by doing something totally radical - setting up her own bank.

Young Mary Newton, born into a large Irish family in a small Watford semi, is always getting into trouble. When she isn’t choking back fits of giggles at Holy Communion or eating Chappie dog food for a bet, she’s accidentally setting fire to the local school. Mary is a trouble magnet. And unlike her brothers, somehow she always gets caught.... Britain in the 1970s is a world where R. White's lemonade is drunk in secret, curry comes in a box marked "Vesta", and beanz meanz Heinz.

Adam Smith is now widely regarded as 'the father of modern economics' and the most influential economist who ever lived. But what he really thought, and what the implications of his ideas are, remain fiercely contested. Was he an eloquent advocate of capitalism and the freedom of the individual? Or a prime mover of 'market fundamentalism' and an apologist for inequality and human selfishness? This exceptional book, by a writer who combines to an unusual degree intellectual training and practical political experience, dispels the myths and caricatures and gives us Smith in the round.

In the summer of 1964, a reclusive young professor at the University of Edinburgh wrote two scientific papers which have come to change our understanding of the most fundamental building blocks of matter and the nature of the universe. Peter Higgs posited the existence an almost infinitely tiny particle—today known as the Higgs boson—which is the key to understanding why particles have mass, and but for which atoms and molecules could not exist.

Strange Frequencies takes listeners on an extraordinary narrative and historical journey to discover how people have used technology in an effort to search for our own immortality. Bebergal builds his own ghostly gadgets to reach the other side and follows the path of famous inventors, engineers, seekers, and seers who attempted to answer life's ultimate mysteries. He finds that not only are technological innovations potent metaphors keeping our spiritual explorations alive, but literal tools through which to experiment the boundaries of the physical world and our own psyches.

A week after her 41st birthday, Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living payslip to payslip who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic condition was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness.

At age eleven, Sola Mahfouz was told she could no longer attend school. The Taliban threatened that any girl who dared to continue their education would have acid thrown in their face, be kidnapped, or worse. Confined to the walls of her home, Sola watched as the few freedoms of childhood were stripped away. She was forbidden to play, to sing, even to laugh. Her early teenage years were consumed by restrictions. Realising that she would have to either succumb to this life or find a way out, she decided on the latter.

When Dr Arthur Kleinman, an eminent Harvard psychiatrist and social anthropologist, began caring for his wife, Joan, after she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, he found just how far the act of caregiving extended beyond the boundaries of medicine. In The Soul of Care, he delivers a deeply inspiring story about what it means to grapple with illness from both sides, as an experienced doctor and a loving husband. Caregiving is long, hard, unglamorous work - at moments joyous, more often tedious, sometimes agonising, but always rich in meaning.

Grief. Anger. Joy. Fear. Distraction. Disgust. Hope. All emotions we expect to encounter over our lifetime. But what if this was every day? And what if your ability to manage them was the difference between life and death? For a doctor in intensive care, this is part of the job. Fear in the eyes of a terminally ill patient who pleads with you to not let them die. Grief when you make a potentially fatal mistake. Disgust at caring for a convicted rapist.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of A Half Baked Idea by Olivia Potts. At the moment her mother died, Olivia Potts was baking a cake. She was trying to impress the man who would later become her husband. Meanwhile, 275 miles away, her mother was dying. In the grief-stricken months that followed, Olivia came home from her job as a criminal barrister miserable and tired, and baked soda bread, pizza, and chocolate banana cake. Even when it went badly (which was often), cooking brought her comfort.

The world is shaped by complexity. In this enlightening book, Nobel Prize winner Giorgio Parisi guides us through his unorthodox yet exhilarating work to show us how. It all starts with investigating the principles of physics by observing the sophisticated flight patterns of starlings. Studying the movements of these birds, he has realized, proves an illuminating way into understanding complex systems of all kinds - collections of everything from atoms to planets to other animals like ourselves.

The life-affirming memoir of Lindsey Burrow, the working mother of three young children who has inspired the nation through her selfless commitment to husband Rob Burrow (CBE), the rugby league legend she has cared for full time since his Motor neurone disease (MND) diagnosis.

Averil Mansfield established herself as a pioneer in every sense of the word when she qualified as a surgeon in the early 1970s. At the time just two per cent of her colleagues were female, and she was often met with surprise, bordering on disbelief and amusement, when telling people what she did. But time and again, Averil proved herself more than capable of the role which had been her greatest dream since the age of eight. After a formidable operating career in Liverpool and London, she went on to became the UK's first ever female professor of surgery.

From its creation as a mail-order record company to the literal launch of Virgin Galactic, today Virgin is one of the premier ‘way-of-life’ brands in the world, trusted and enjoyed by many millions of people. In Business Stripped Bare, Sir Richard Branson shares the inside track on his life in business and reveals the incredible truth about his most risky, brilliant and audacious deals.

In 1962, Stephanie 'Steve' Shirley created a software company when the concept of software barely existed. Freelance Programmers employed women to work on complex projects such as Concorde's black box recorder from the comfort of their own homes. Shirley empowered a generation of women in technology, giving them unheard of freedom to choose their own hours and manage their own workloads. The business thrived, and Shirley gradually transferred ownership to her staff, creating 70 millionaires in the process.

While on a year of study in Paris in 1927, Liebling acquired the friendship and tutelage of Yves Mirande, 'one of the last great Gastronomes of France', beginning a joyous apprenticeship in the fine art of eating. Told with gluttonous joie de vivre, Between Meals expounds on the delights and pitfalls of a life dedicated to food, from bad rosé ('a pinkish cross between No-Cal and vinegar') to lobster a l'Américaine, to a memorable stay at a Swiss slimming-clinic with a masseur named Sprudli.