A Sea of Glass: Searching for the Blaschkas' Fragile Legacy in an Ocean at Risk By Drew Harvell
2016 | 230 Pages | ISBN: 0520285689 | PDF | 104 MB
It started with a glass octopus. Dusty, broken, and all but forgotten, it caught Drew Harvell's eye. Fashioned in intricate detail by the father-son glassmaking team of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, the octopus belonged to a menagerie of unusual marine creatures that had been packed away for decades in a storage unit. More than 150 years earlier, the Blaschkas had been captivated by marine invertebrates and spun their likenesses into glass, documenting the life of oceans untouched by climate change and human impacts. Inspired by the Blaschkas' uncanny replicas, Harvell set out in search of their living counterparts. In A Sea of Glass, she recounts this journey of a lifetime, taking readers along as she dives beneath the ocean's surface to a rarely seen world, revealing the surprising and unusual biology of some of the most ancient animals on the tree of life. On the way, we glimpse a century of change in our ocean ecosystems and learn which of the living matches for the Blaschkas' creations are, indeed, as fragile as glass. Drew Harvell and the Blaschka menagerie are the subjects of the documentary Fragile Legacy, which won the Best Short Film award at the 2015 Blue Ocean Film Festival & Conservation Summit. Learn more about the film and check out the trailer here. See the Blaschka collection in person at the Corning Museum of Glass beginning in May 2016. Click here for more information.

English | ASIN: B099X8T88C | 2021 | 6 hours and 3 minutes |MP3|M4B | 167 MB
A few months before the virus slammed the world, global public health experts declared the United States the most prepared for a possible pandemic. Instead, we watched as the disease killed half a million Americans. A stunned nation has been too busy grieving and doing damage control to ask why, or to comprehend just how much of the blundering and chaos of the pandemic response was either deliberate or entirely predictable.
New York Times best-selling author Nina Burleigh weaves together the key narrative strands to create an uncompromising and highly informed expose about our shared global pandemic experience and what it means for our future. Here, listeners will learn: How the Trump administration packed public health agencies with right-wing Christians and their political allies who cared more about gender norms and policing morality than a possible pandemic. How America's anti-expertise culture, long nurtured by right-wing media and conservative politicians, and now at its apogee, has left countless millions of Americans doubting the efficacy and safety of vaccines.

English | ASIN: B09B18G8QH | 2021 | 4 hours and 30 minutes |MP3|M4B | 124 MB
The truth is that many smart students reach a point where they feel overwhelmed and stressed out. As their grades drop, so does their self-esteem, and this combination of external and internal pressures can seem insurmountable. To make matters worse, students feel unable to ask for or accept help. In The Disintegrating Student, Jeannine Jannot, PhD, draws on her decades of experience as a school psychologist, educator, and student coach to explain the reasons for this increasingly common phenomenon. Dr. Jannot identifies the skill deficits and counterproductive behaviors of disintegrating students, and provides a complete toolbox of techniques and strategies to combat them.

English | ASIN: B08W76FD5F | 2021 | 8 hours and 48 minutes |MP3|M4B | 236 MB
Super Founders uses a data-driven approach to understand what really differentiates billion-dollar start-ups from the rest - revealing that nearly everything we thought was true about them is false! Ali Tamaseb has spent thousands of hours manually amassing what may be the largest dataset ever collected on start-ups, comparing billion-dollar start-ups with those that failed to become one - 30,000 data points on nearly every factor: number of competitors, market size, the founder's age, his or her university's ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more. Packed with counterintuitive insights and inside stories from people who have built massively successful companies, Super Founders is a paradigm-shifting and actionable guide for entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone interested in what makes a start-up successful.

English | ASIN: B08KHP4JZQ | 2021 | 11 hours and 35 minutes |MP3|M4B | 318 MB
From medical expert Leana Wen, MD, Lifelines is an insider's account of public health and its crucial role - from opioid addiction to global pandemic - and an inspiring story of her journey from struggling immigrant to being one of Time's 100 Most Influential People. "Public health saved your life today - you just don't know it", is a phrase that Dr. Leana Wen likes to use. You don't know it because good public health is invisible. It becomes visible only in its absence, when it is underfunded and ignored, a bitter truth laid bare as never before by the devastation of COVID-19.
Leana Wen - emergency physician, former Baltimore health commissioner, CNN medical analyst, and Washington Post contributing columnist - has lived on the front lines of public health, leading the fight against the opioid epidemic, outbreaks of infectious disease, maternal and infant mortality, and COVID-19 disinformation. Here, in gripping detail, Wen lays bare the lifesaving work of public health and its innovative approach to social ills, treating gun violence as a contagious disease, for example, and racism as a threat to health.

English | 2017 |MP3|M4B | ASIN: B0719LFGJW | Duration: 0:33 h | 15 MB
Lauren Johnson / Narrated by Jae Huff
Ivanka Trump is an American businesswoman and former fashion model who is currently assistant to President Donald Trump. She is the daughter of the president and his first wife, former model Ivana Trump.

English | ASIN: B08QX6JYQM | 2021 | 3 hours and 45 minutes |MP3|M4B | 104 MB
After hearing the words no one wants to hear - "you have cancer" - Jim Burns set out to articulate the most important principles for a life well lived and now shares them with you as a collection of essential truths for a healthy, balanced, and successful life. What's truly important for leading a life well lived? After being diagnosed with cancer and facing his mortality, prolific author and family-life expert Jim Burns learned what it really means to live a meaningful life from the perspective and practical wisdom only gained from facing death.
Now cancer free, those same life-changing lessons continue to guide and enrich Jim's faith, work, and relationships in immeasurable ways. With his conversational style and heartwarming and entertaining stories, Jim brilliantly distills that hard-earned wisdom into 13 simple yet powerful life principles you can put into practice today. Don't wait any longer. Let these principles guide you into deeper joy, more purpose, and better connection - and start truly living today.

English | ASIN: B091J9NJ3W | 2021 | 5 hours and 57 minutes |MP3|M4B | 164 MB
Hack your gut health and unlock a variety of benefits that a healthy gut brings with these 200 easy, accessible tips for promoting good bacteria, achieving balance in your gut microbiome, and feeling your best every day. Bloating. Heartburn. Weight gain. Frequent visits to the restroom. It's no surprise: Bad gut health can have a big impact on your daily life. But what if there were quick and easy ways to improve your digestive system so you could feel your best every day?
In Gut Health Hacks, you'll find 200 practical tips and tricks to support good bacteria and achieve a balanced gut mircrobiome. From ways to hack your meals to simple lifestyle changes, you'll find tips and tricks. From improved mental health to weight loss to resolved digestion issues, balanced gut health can make all the difference. Now you can start feeling your best today with a little help from Gut Health Hacks.

English | ASIN: B08LLGN3PZ | 2021 | 10 hours and 43 minutes |MP3|M4B | 294 MB
As the shockwaves of COVID-19 continue to spread, and as the smoke clears from a year of anger and unrest, many people feel forlorn about the future. In End State, James Plunkett argues that this can be a moment not of despair, but of historic opportunity - a chance to rethink, renew, and reform some of the most fundamental ways we organise society. In much the same way as societies emerged stronger from crises in the past - building the state as we know it today - we, too, can build a happier future. James Plunkett has spent his career thinking laterally about the complicated relationships between individuals and the state. First as an advisor to Gordon Brown, then a leading economic researcher and writer, and then in the charity sector, helping people struggling at the front-line of economic change.
James combines a deep understanding of social issues with an appreciation of how change is playing out not in the ivory tower, but in the reality of people's lives. Now, in his first book, he sets out an optimistic vision, exploring nine ways in which our social settlement can be upgraded to harness the power of the digital age. Covering a dizzying sweep of geography and history, from London's 18th Century sewage systems to the uneasy inequality of Silicon Valley, it's a thrilling and iconoclastic account of how society can not only survive, but thrive, in the digital age. End State provides a much-needed map to help us navigate our way over the curious terrain of the twenty-first century.

English | ASIN: B098YQG6D2 | 2021 | 15 hours and 21 minutes |MP3|M4B | 421 MB
In Cross of Snow, the result of more than 12 years of research, including access to never-before-examined letters, diaries, journals, and notes, Nicholas Basbanes reveals the life, the times, the work - the soul - of the man who shaped the literature of a new nation with his countless poems, sonnets, stories, essays, and translations, and whose renown was so wide-reaching that his deep friendships included Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, and Oscar Wilde.
Basbanes writes of the shaping of Longfellow's character, his huge body of work that included translations of numerous foreign works, among them, the first rendering into a complete edition by an American of Dante's Divine Comedy. A portrait of a bold artist, experimenter of poetic form, and an innovative translator - the human being he was, the times in which he lived, the people whose lives he touched, his monumental work, and its place in his America and ours.