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  Lady Helena Investigates: Book One of the Scott-De Quincy Mysteries , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 689min

  A reluctant lady sleuth finds she's investigating her own family.Step into Lady Helena Whitcombe's world with the first novel in a series that will blend family saga and mystery-driven action with a slow-burn romance in seven pause-resisting investigations.Sussex, 1881. Lady Helena Scott-De Quincy's marriage to Sir Justin Whitcombe, three years before, gave new purpose to a life almost destroyed by the death of Lady Helena's first love. After all, shouldn't the preoccupations of a wife and hostess be sufficient to fulfill any aristocratic female's dreams? Such a shame their union wasn't blessed by children...but Lady Helena is content with her quiet country life until Sir Justin is found dead in the river overlooked by their grand baroque mansion.The intrusion of attractive, mysterious French physician Armand Fortier, with his meddling theory of murder, into Lady Helena's first weeks of mourning is bad enough. But with her initial ineffective efforts at investigation and her attempts to revive her long-abandoned interest in herbalism comes the realization that she may have been mistaken about her own family's past. Every family has its secrets - but, as this absorbing series will reveal, the Scott-De Quincy family has more than most.Can Lady Helena survive bereavement the second time around? Can she stand up to her six siblings' assumption of the right to control her new life as a widow? And what role will Fortier - who, as a physician, is a most unsuitable companion for an earl's daughter - play in her investigations?A new series by Jane Steen, author of the House of Closed Doors series that has delighted thousands of fans. If you're looking for a pause-resisting Victorian mystery saga, here's where you start! ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Elizabeth Klett. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/133712/bk_acx0_133712_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  Oh the Glory of It All , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 1283min

  In the most talked-about memoir of the year, a founding editor of McSweeney's gives us his wise, electric, and painfully funny story. "In the beginning we were happy. And we were always excessive. So in the beginning we were happy to excess." With these opening lines Sean Wilsey takes us on an exhilarating tour of life in the strangest, wealthiest, and most grandiose of families. Sean's blonde-bombshell mother regularly entertains Black Panthers and movie stars in her marble and glass penthouse, "800 feet in the air above San Francisco". His enigmatic father uses a jet helicopter to drop Sean off at the video arcade and lectures his son on proper hygiene in public restrooms, "You should wash your hands first, before you use the urinal. Not after. Your penis isn't dirty. But your hands are."When Sean turns nine years old, his father divorces his mother and marries her best friend. Sean's life blows apart. His mother first invites him to commit suicide with her, then has a "vision" of salvation that requires packing her Louis Vuitton luggage and traveling the globe, a retinue of multiracial children in tow. Her goal: peace on earth (and a Nobel Prize). Sean meets Indira Gandhi, Helmut Kohl, Menachem Begin, and the pope, hoping each one might come back to San Francisco and persuade his father to rejoin the family.With its multiplicity of settings and kaleidoscopic mix of preoccupations - sex, Russia, jet helicopters, seismic upheaval, boarding schools, Middle Earth, skinheads, home improvement, suicide, skateboarding, Sovietology, public transportation, massage, Christian fundamentalism, dogs, Texas, global thermonuclear war, truth, evil, masturbation, hope, Bethlehem, CT, eventual salvation...Oh the Glory of It All is memoir as bildungsroman as explosion. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Scott Brick. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/peng/000408/bk_peng_000408_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 988min

  In this epic history of extermination and survival, Timothy Snyder presents a new explanation of the great atrocity of the 20th century and reveals the risks that we face in the 21st. Based on new sources from Eastern Europe and forgotten testimonies from Jewish survivors, Black Earth recounts the mass murder of the Jews as an event that is still close to us, more comprehensible than we would like to think and thus all the more terrifying. The Holocaust began in a dark but accessible place, in Hitler's mind, with the thought that the elimination of Jews would restore balance to the planet and allow Germans to win the resources they desperately needed. Such a worldview could be realized only if Germany destroyed other states, so Hitler's aim was a colonial war in Europe itself. In the zones of statelessness, almost all Jews died. A few people, the righteous few, aided them, without support from institutions. Much of the new research in this book is devoted to understanding these extraordinary individuals. The almost insurmountable difficulties they faced only confirm the dangers of state destruction and ecological panic. These men and women should be emulated, but in similar circumstances few of us would do so. By overlooking the lessons of the Holocaust, Snyder concludes, we have misunderstood modernity and endangered the future. The early 21st century is coming to resemble the early twentieth, as growing preoccupations with food and water accompany ideological challenges to global order. Our world is closer to Hitler's than we like to admit, and saving it requires us to see the Holocaust as it was - and ourselves as we are. Groundbreaking, authoritative, and utterly absorbing, Black Earth reveals a Holocaust that is not only history but warning. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Mark Bramhall. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/rand/004330/bk_rand_004330_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  The Future of War (eBook, ePUB)

  A new approach to ideas about war, from one of the UK's leading strategic thinkersIn 1912 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a short story about a war fought from underwater submersibles that included the sinking of passenger ships. It was dismissed by the British admirals of the day, not on the basis of technical feasibility, but because sinking civilian ships was not something that any civilised nation would do. The reality of war often contradicts expectations, less because of some fantastic technical or engineering dimension, but more because of some human, political, or moral threshold that we had never imagined would be crossed. As Lawrence Freedman shows, ideas about the causes of war and strategies for its conduct have rich and varied histories which shape predictions about the future. Freedman shows how looking at how the future of war was conceived about in the past (and why this was more often than not wrong) can put into perspective current thinking about future conflicts. The Future of War - which takes us from preparations for the world wars, through the nuclear age and the civil wars which became the focus for debate after the end of the Cold War, to present preoccupations with hybrid and cyber warfare - is filled with fascinating insights from one of the most brilliant military and strategic historians of his generation.

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  Inflamed Invisible (eBook, ePUB)

  A rich collection of essays tracing the relationship between art and sound. In the 1970s David Toop became preoccupied with the possibility that music was no longer bounded by formalities of audience: the clapping, the booing, the short attention span, the demand for instant gratification. Considering sound and listening as foundational practices in themselves leads music into a thrilling new territory: stretched time, wilderness, video monitors, singing sculptures, weather, meditations, vibration and the interior resonance of objects, interspecies communications, instructional texts, silent actions, and performance art. Toop sought to document the originality and unfamiliarity of this work from his perspective as a practitioner and writer. The challenge was to do so without being drawn back into the domain of music while still acknowledging the vitality and hybridity of twentieth-century musics as they moved toward art galleries, museums, and site-specificity. Toop focused on practitioners, whose stories are as compelling as the theoretical and abstract implications of their works.Inflamed Invisible collects more than four decades of David Toop's essays, reviews, interviews, and experimental texts, drawing us into the company of artists and their concerns, not forgetting the quieter, unsung voices. The volume is an offering, an exploration of strata of sound that are the crossing points of sensory, intellectual, and philosophical preoccupations, layers through which objects, thoughts and air itself come alive as the inflamed invisible.

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  Postwar Modern

  This landmark volume offers a major reassessment of the art that emerged in Britain in the twenty years following the end of the Second World War: a period of anxiety, profound social change and explosive creativity. Published to coincide with the Barbican Centre's 40th anniversary it draws together the work of fifty artists, exploring a period straddled precariously between the horror of the past and the promise of the future.Spanning painting, sculpture, architecture, ceramics and photography, Postwar Modern will explore a rich field of experiment which challenges the idea that Britain was a cultural backwater at this time. Through new texts by Jane Alison, Hilary Floe, Ben Highmore, Hammad Nassar and Greg Salter, the book looks afresh at celebrated artists such as Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Lucian Freud and Eduardo Paolozzi, shown in dialogue with lesser-known figures. These will include those, like Francis Newton Souza, Avinash Chandra and Robert Adams, who were acclaimed by contemporaries but neglected in subsequent history-making; others, like Kim Lim, Anwar Jalal Shemza and Franciszka Themerson, are only now attracting the attention they deserve. Throughout their work, vital shared preoccupations become visible: gender, class, race and nationhood; the body, the bombsite, and the home. It is a period resonating strongly with our own: as the UK emerges from more than a decade of austerity and confronts the challenges of post-pandemic reconstruction, society is asking similarly deep questions about who we want and need to be.

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  The World According to Color: A Cultural History

  A kaleidoscopic exploration that traverses history, literature, art, and science to reveal humans' unique and vibrant relationship with color. We have an extraordinary connection to color-we give it meanings, associations, and properties that last millennia and span cultures, continents, and languages. In The World According to Color, James Fox takes seven elemental colors-black, red, yellow, blue, white, purple, and green-and uncovers behind each a root idea, based on visual resemblances and common symbolism throughout history. Through a series of stories and vignettes, the book then traces these meanings to show how they morphed and multiplied and, ultimately, how they reveal a great deal about the societies that produced them: reflecting and shaping their hopes, fears, prejudices, and preoccupations. Fox also examines the science of how our eyes and brains interpret light and color, and shows how this is inherently linked with the meanings we give to hue. And using his background as an art historian, he explores many of the milestones in the history of art-from Bronze Age gold-work to Turner, Titian to Yves Klein-in a fresh way. Fox also weaves in literature, philosophy, cinema, archaeology, and art-moving from Monet to Marco Polo, early Japanese ink artists to Shakespeare and Goethe to James Bond. By creating a new history of color, Fox reveals a new story about humans and our place in the universe: second only to language, color is the greatest carrier of cultural meaning in our world.

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  Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 1347min

  Norman Mailer was one of the towering figures of twentieth-century American letters and an acknowledged master of the essay. Mind of an Outlaw, the first posthumous publication from this outsize literary icon, collects Mailer's most important and representative work in the form that many rank as his most electrifying. As America's foremost public intellectual, Norman Mailer was a ubiquitous presence in our national life - on the airwaves and in print - for more than sixty years. With his supple mind and pugnacious persona, he engaged society more than any other writer of his generation. The trademark Mailer swagger is much in evidence in these pages as he holds forth on culture, ideology, politics, sex, gender, and celebrity, among other topics. Here is Mailer on boxing, Mailer on Hemingway, Mailer on Marilyn Monroe, and, of course, Mailer on Mailer - the one subject that served as the beating heart of all of his nonfiction. From his early essay "A Credo for the Living," published in 1948, when the author was twenty-five, to his final writings in the year before his death, Mailer wrestled with the big themes of his times. He was one of the most astute cultural commentators of the postwar era, a swashbuckling intellectual provocateur who never pulled a punch and was rarely anything less than interesting. Mind of an Outlaw spans the full arc of Mailer's evolution as a writer, including such essential pieces as his acclaimed 1957 meditation on hipsters, "The White Negro"; multiple selections from his seminal collection Advertisements for Myself; and a never-before-published essay on Sigmund Freud. Incendiary, erudite, and unrepentantly outrageous, Norman Mailer was a dominating force on the battlefield of ideas. Featuring an incisive Introduction by Jonathan Lethem, Mind of an Outlaw forms a fascinating portrait of Mailer's intellectual development across the span of his career as well as the preoccupations of ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Christopher Lane. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/brll/008473/bk_brll_008473_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  The Rig Veda , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 2482min

  Often appearing as Ṛgveda, the oldest of the four sacred books linked to Hinduism, it was composed in an ancient form of Sanskrit about 1500 BCE. The Rig Veda (Sanskrit: The Knowledge of Verses) was preserved in secrecy by ancient clans, initially orally, before it was written down about 300 BCE. These 1028 poems, grouped as 10 ‘Circles’ (mandalas), have variously been called hymns, poems or songs by Sanskrit scholars. The Rik (so pronounced by the ancient Angirases clans, or Seer-Priest families) was an experiment with sound. The emphasis is always on sounding the words perfectly. The focus tends to be on the ideas rather than on the authors in Vedic literature, they are largely religious in nature, reflecting the world view and spiritual preoccupations of ancient India. Like the Homeric epics, portions were composed during different periods in the north-western region of present-day India and Pakistan. That any of these verses have entered modern day usage is in itself extraordinary. No Hindu wedding is performed without reference to the Suryasukta, the model marriage of the Sun to the daughter of the Moon (Book 10, hymn 85). In India today certain surnames denote whether a family has a Vedic link, Dwivedi (knowledge of two vedas) Trivedi (three), Chaturvedi (four) among other Vedic linked ancestral roots. Very, very few had open access to this the Secret most Magical Veda. The writers or composers of the Vedic verses were essentially storytellers. Once they had told their stories enough times they began to believe in the mythology they had woven to explain the vagaries of the universe. The sudden flood, the torrential downpour, the landslides that killed life-giving cattle and the forest fires that consumed all it touched, the quaking earth or sudden drought, all of which disarrayed an agrarian community. In comparison with other ancient belief systems the magical practice contained herein link with the Judaic tradition. A social or ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Sagar Arya. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/dhrm/000265/bk_dhrm_000265_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  The Drug Essays: Aleister Crowley's Reflections on Hashish, Cocaine & Absinthe , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 177min

  The essays in this collection represent Aleister Crowley's ideas and meditations on drugs. Part one explores Crowley's experiences with hashish and its uses in mystical rituals. Part two examines cocaine and looks at whether it should be regulated by law. Finally, part three delves into the sensuality of absinthe and its role in society.The essays are fascinating, both for what they reveal about Crowley's views on drugs, and for the way they tap into some of the occultist's chief preoccupations: the quest for transcendence and the marriage of science to mysticism.Crowley wrote that intoxication - whether from wine, drugs, or art - was what made it possible for man to rise above his "grub" life and achieve transcendence. He said it well here:"The surplus of Will must find issue in the elevation of the individual towards the Godhead; and the method of such elevation is by religion, love, and art. These three things are indissolubly bound up with wine, for they are species of intoxication."Those lines come from Crowley's essay about absinthe, which is by far the most rhapsodic in this collection. Crowley makes no bones about his adoration for the liquor. He gets downright poetic about the drink's "opalescent" appearance and about the "rapture" it provokes. "Absinthe" is perceived as pure beauty, liberation from the grayness of the day-to-day.Perhaps that's the gift that these essays can give us. Perhaps, rather than examining them too closely for truth and accuracy, it would be wise to read the essays in this book as objects of beauty. They are not cold, hard, facts. They are ideas, as opalescent as the absinthe in Crowley's glass. They sound best when we can set aside our doubts and give ourselves up to the enjoyment of what this eccentric man was able to produce. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Henry Schrader. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/229814/bk_acx0_229814_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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