Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio" in Science & Engineering

Zookeeper Iris Oakley is sent to a remote farm in Washington state to rescue animals found during a drug bust. While the marijuana-growing operation and the meth lab are the cops’ problem, the smuggling sideline is hers. Instead of pets, she finds exotic contraband: parrots and tortoises destined for sale to unscrupulous or unsuspecting collectors. The zoo’s facilities are full, and she ends up with two macaws shrieking in her basement.

Theodora "Teddy" Bentley, zookeeper at the Gunn Zoo, takes the zoo's llama, Alejandro, to a Renaissance fair in the Monterey Bay area. That is where Teddy discovers the still-warm body of the Reverend Victor Emerson, owner of the local wedding chapel, dressed in his costume as Henry the Eighth. At first it appears that Alejandro stomped the man to death, but a closer look shows a crossbow dart in the man’s back.

Where can you find the worst weather on earth? The surprising answer in Tying Down the Wind is: everywhere. Eric Pinder invites you to experience the excitement of the world's worst weather in the comfort of your own home.

On April 12, 1862—one year to the day after Confederate guns opened on Fort Sumter and started the Civil War—a tall, mysterious smuggler and self-appointed Union spy named James J. Andrews and 19 infantry volunteers infiltrated Georgia and stole a steam engine called the General. Racing northward at speeds near 60 miles an hour, cutting telegraph lines, and destroying track along the way, Andrews planned to open East Tennessee to the Union army, cutting off men and materiel from the Confederate forces in Virginia.

With this satirical novella, English schoolmaster Edwin A. Abbott provides both a mathematical fantasy and pointed observations on the social hierarchy of Victorian culture. The narrator, “a Square,” resides in the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland. When he is visited by a sphere, he is suddenly faced with proof of the existence of three dimensions and is forced to see the limitations of his world.

In June 1960, Alzada Kistner and her husband, David, a promising entomologist, left their 18-month-old daughter in the care of relatives and began what was to be a four month scientific expedition in the Belgian Congo. Three weeks after their arrival, the country was gripped by a violent revolution, trapping the Kistners in its midst. Despite having to face numerous life-threatening situations, the Kistners were not to be dissuaded.

Entre los escombros del huracan Maria, los puertorriquenos y los "Puertopians" ultra-ricos estan atrapados en una batalla campal sobre como reconstruir la isla. Autora Naomi Klein revela como las fuerzas de las politicas de "shock" y del capitalismo del desastre, buscan minar la vision radical y resiliente de una recuperacion justa. El cien por ciento de las regalias por la venta de este libro iran directamente a JunteGente, un espacio de encuentro entre organizaciones en resistencia al capitalismo del desastre y que luchan por una recuperacion justa y sostenible de Puerto Rico. 

In late March 2015, ornithologist Bruce M. Beehler set off on a solo three-month trek to track songbird migration and the northward progress of spring through America. Traveling via car, canoe, bike, and on foot, Beehler followed woodland warblers and other neotropical songbird species from the southern border of Texas, where the birds first arrive after their winter sojourns in South America and the Caribbean, northward through the Mississippi drainage to its headwaters in Minnesota and onward to their nesting grounds in the north woods of Ontario.

In 1839, two years after graduating from Harvard, Henry David Thoreau and his older brother, John, took a boat-and-hiking trip from Concord, Massachusetts, to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. After John's sudden death in 1842, Thoreau began to prepare a memorial account of their excursion during his stay at Walden Pond. Modern listeners have come to see Thoreau's story of the river journey as an appropriate predecessor to Walden, depicting the early years of his spiritual and artistic growth.

When not writing his famous Western novels, Zane Grey was an insatiable angler. Tales of Southern Rivers recounts his tales of fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida Keys, the Everglades, and on remote rivers in the jungles of Mexico. With many of these venues being some of today's most popular saltwater fly-fishing destinations, no one will want to miss these highly entertaining and informative stories. Armchair fishing will never be the same. 

Every spring, billions of birds sweep north, driven by ancient instincts to return to their breeding grounds. This vast parade often goes unnoticed, except in a few places where these small travelers concentrate in large numbers. One such place is along Lake Erie in northwestern Ohio. There, the peak of spring migration is so spectacular that it attracts bird watchers from around the globe, culminating in one of the world’s biggest birding festivals. Now climate change threatens to disrupt patterns of migration and the delicate balance between birds, seasons, and habitats.

In 1910, Mary Acworth Evershed (1867-1949) sat on a hill in southern India staring at the moon as she grappled with apparent mistakes in Dante's Divine Comedy. Was Dante's astronomy unintelligible? Or was he, for a man of his time and place, as insightful as one could be about the sky? As the 20th century began, women who wished to become professional astronomers faced difficult cultural barriers, but Evershed joined the British Astronomical Association and, from an Indian observatory, became an experienced observer of sunspots, solar eclipses, and variable stars.

In this audiobook, David Gunkel offers a provocative attempt to think about what has been previously regarded as unthinkable: whether and to what extent robots and other technological artifacts of our own making can and should have any claim to moral and legal standing.

The New York Times best-selling author of Einstein's Dreams presents a collection of essays, written over the past 20 years, that displays his genius for bringing literary and scientific concerns into ringing harmony. Sometimes provocative, sometimes fanciful, always elegantly conceived and written, these meditations offer listeners a fascinating look into the creative compulsions shared by the scientist and the artist. 

A dozen years into his dream job keeping watch over the Gila National Forest of New Mexico, Philip Connors bore witness to the blaze he had always feared: a megafire that forced him off his mountain by helicopter and forever changed the forest and watershed he loved. It was one of many transformations that arrived in quick succession, not just fire and flood, but the death of a fellow lookout in a freak accident and a tragic plane crash that rocked the community he called home.

On December 16, 1947, two physicists at Bell Laboratories, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, jabbed two electrodes into a sliver of germanium half an inch long. The electrical power coming out of that piece of germanium was 100 times stronger than what went in. In that moment, the transistor was invented and the information age began. Crystal Fire recounts the story of the transistor team at Bell Labs, led by William Shockley, who shared the Nobel Prize with Bardeen and Brattain. 

Where can you find the worst weather on earth? The surprising answer in Tying Down the Wind is: everywhere. You don’t need to climb Mount Everest or voyage to the icy desert of Antarctica to witness both the beauty and the destructiveness of weather. The same forces are at work in your own backyard.

Siroccos, Santa Anas, chinooks, monsoons...the wind has as many names as moods. Few other forces have so universally shaped the lands and waters of the earth, the plants and animals, the patterns of exploration, settlement, and civilization. Few other phenomena have exerted such a profound influence on the history and psyche of humankind. Wind touches all of us every day of our lives, yet remarkably little has been written about it except as a component of the weather.

With the lucid verve and solid scientific grounding of an Oliver Sacks or Malcolm Gladwell, Dr. Brian Boxer Wachler guides listeners on a fascinating tour of the bedrock of our existence - the way our senses perceive everything and everyone in the world around us. Why does one person see Jesus in a shower curtain, get a "bad feeling" about someone they've just met, or hear a conversation so differently than the other person? Boxer Wachler describes some of the mysterious medical conditions that cause non-psychiatric hallucinations and neurological mix-ups.