Audiobooks by Sebastian Junger

In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

A near-fatal health emergency leads to this powerful reflection on death—and what might follow—by the bestselling author of Tribe and The Perfect Storm. For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. “It’s okay,” his father said. “There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll take care of you.” That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived. This experience spurred Junger—a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical—to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when forced to reckon with such existential questions? In My Time of Dying is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery.

Sebastian Junger (Author), Sebastian Junger, TBD (Narrator)

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The Storm

On October 29, 1991, the 70-foot longliner Andrea Gail,on day 40 of an extended commercial swordfishing trip, was lost in a convergence of three powerful storms off Canada’s Grand Banks. Data buoys measured waves as high as 100 feet, and the boat was hit with winds measuring 80 knots (92 miles per hour). The Andrea Gail’s emergency beacon washed ashore that November on Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, but the boat and 6-man crew were never found. The crew left behind five children among them, and the entire small town mourned the loss. Junger article, “The Storm,” which ran in the October 1994 issue of Outside, grew into the 1997 bestselling book The Perfect Storm, and the 2000 movie of the same name, starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. This selection is part of the full length audiobook, "Storm: Stories of Survival From Land and Sea."

Sebastian Junger (Author), Rick Foucheux (Narrator)

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An Audio Bundle: Epic & Rough Water

· Publishers Weekly 'Listen Up' Award Winner · ForeWord Magazine's 'Audiobook of the Year' Winner · AFIM Indie Award Winner · Independent Publisher Magazine’s ‘IPPY Award’ Finalist. Epic--a mountaineering term that evokes a sense of treacherous disaster. The climb that went wrong: fighting blinding snowstorms and horrific avalanches; days spent tentbound running low on food, water and oxygen; surviving broken bones and shattered spirits. With writing from Greg Child, David Roberts, Stephen Venables, Alfred Lansing and others, Epic is a collection of the most memorable accounts of legend-making expeditions to the world’s most famous peaks, often in the worst possible conditions! In Rough Water, hear the stories of men and women battling the elements, and sometimes each other, to stay alive, confronting savage storms, rogue waves, icebergs, sharks, starvation and their own fear and suffering. From Sebastian Junger’s The Whale Hunter to Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny to Lawrence Beesley’s The Loss of The S.S. Titanic, Rough Water is a unique collection of the finest writing on why men and women go to sea, and what they find there!

Alfred Lansing, Art Davidson, Charles Houston, David Lewis, David Roberts, Fa Worsley, Greg Child, Herman Wouk, Lawrence Beesley, Maurice Herzog, Patrick O’brian, Robert Bates, Samuel Leech, Sebastian Junger, Stephen Venables, Steven Callahan (Author), Alan Sklar, Eric Conger, George Guidall, Graeme Malcolm, Rick Adamson, Simon Prebble (Narrator)

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An Audio Bundle: Storm & Deep Blue

Most people associate storms and other big weather with death-with the kind of force that makes each of us wonder about life, and time and the nature of our surroundings. Some people go out looking for bad weather or go to places where they're likely to encounter it. Others have the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Still, the stories in Storm have more to say than that. They tell us about what happens when people find that treacherous weather-or when it finds them-and we are reminded of the fragility of life, the capriciousness of Nature's will, and how little we can do when both cross paths. In Deep Blue, for those who dare, things often go wrong under the sea. Such tragedies, spurred by the booming interest in the Titanic and the Andrea Doria, have been the focus of tremendous literature form the world's finest authors. Deep Blue offers compelling tales of shipwrecks and salvage, submarine adventure and free diving, nautical survival and cannibalism.

Farley Mowat, Gordon Chaplin, Herman Melville, Jack Lemoyne, Jack London, John Muir, John Vaillant, Michael Groom, Nathaniel Philbrick, Patrick O'brian, Philip Ashton, Richard Byrd, Rick Bass, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rockwell Kent, Sebastian Junger, Stephen Crane, Whitney Balliett (Author), Barrett Whitener, Gary Telles, Nick Sampson, Richard Rohan, Rick Foucheux, Terence Aselford (Narrator)

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Freedom

A profound rumination on the concept of freedom from the bestselling author of The Perfect Storm 'Sebastian Junger bears witness to a hard-won and an uncertain new world, framed in vital and brilliant prose: a true and honest accounting of everything that underlies the frantic performance of life' Philip Hoare, author of Albert and the Whale Throughout history, humans have been driven by the quest for two cherished ideals: community and freedom. The two don't coexist easily: we value individuality and self-reliance, yet are utterly dependent on community for our most basic needs. In this intricately crafted and thought-provoking book, Sebastian Junger examines this tension that lies at the heart of what it means to be human. For much of a year, Junger and three friends-a conflict photographer and two Afghan war vets-walked the railroad lines of the east coast. It was an experiment in personal autonomy, but also in interdependence. Dodging railroad cops, sleeping under bridges, cooking over fires and drinking from creeks and rivers, the four men forged a unique reliance on one another. In Freedom, Junger weaves his account of this journey together with primatology and boxing strategy, the role of women in resistance movements and apache renegrades, and the brutal reality of life on the Pennsylvania frontier. Written in exquisite, razor-sharp prose, the result is a powerful examination of the primary desire that defines us.

Sebastian Junger (Author), Sebastian Junger (Narrator)

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Tribe

From the author of THE PERFECT STORM and WAR comes a book about why men miss war, why Londoners missed the Blitz, and what we can all learn from American Indian captives who refused to go home. Tribe is a look at post-traumatic stress disorder and the challenges veterans face returning to society. Using his background in anthropology, Sebastian Junger argues that the problem lies not with vets or with the trauma they've suffered, but with the society to which they are trying to return.One of the most puzzling things about veterans who experience PTSD is that the majority never even saw combat-and yet they feel deeply alienated and out of place back home. The reason may lie in our natural inclination, as a species, to live in groups of thirty to fifty people who are entirely reliant on one another for safety, comfort and a sense of meaning: in short, the life of a soldier. It is one of the ironies of the modern age that as affluence rises in a society, so do rates of suicide, depression and of course PTSD. In a wealthy society people don't need to cooperate with one another, so they often lead much lonelier lives that lead to psychological distress. There is a way for modern society to reverse this trend, however, and studying how veterans react to coming home may provide a clue to how to do it. But it won't be easy.

Sebastian Junger (Author), Nick Landrum (Narrator)

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Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

We have a strong instinct to belong to small groups defined by clear purpose and understanding--"tribes." This tribal connection has been largely lost in modern society, but regaining it may be the key to our psychological survival. Decades before the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin lamented that English settlers were constantly fleeing over to the Indians-but Indians almost never did the same. Tribal society has been exerting an almost gravitational pull on Westerners for hundreds of years, and the reason lies deep in our evolutionary past as a communal species. The most recent example of that attraction is combat veterans who come home to find themselves missing the incredibly intimate bonds of platoon life. The loss of closeness that comes at the end of deployment may explain the high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by military veterans today. Combining history, psychology, and anthropology, TRIBE explores what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty, belonging, and the eternal human quest for meaning. It explains the irony that-for many veterans as well as civilians-war feels better than peace, adversity can turn out to be a blessing, and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations. TRIBE explains why we are stronger when we come together, and how that can be achieved even in today's divided world. ***Please contact member services for additional documents***

Sebastian Junger (Author), Sebastian Junger (Narrator)

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The Whale Hunters

This piece, which appeared in Outside magazine in 1995 and was originally recorded for "Rough Water: Stories of Survival From The Sea," is about an old man, a Bequian harpooner, who uses a wooden sailboat to hunt humpback whales. The piece is an elegy of sorts--an unsentimental lament for something lost.

Sebastian Junger (Author), George Guidall (Narrator)

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WAR

Sebastian Junger (Author), Sebastian Junger (Narrator)

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A Death in Belmont

In 1963, with the city of Boston already terrified by a series of savage crimes known as the Boston Stranglings, a murder occurred in the quiet suburb of Belmont, just a few blocks from the house of Sebastian Junger's family -- a murder that seemed to fit exactly the pattern of the Strangler. Roy Smith, a black man who had cleaned the victim's house that day, was arrested, tried, and convicted, but the terror of the Strangler continued. Two years later, Albert DeSalvo, a handyman who had been working at the Jungers' home on the day of the Belmont murder, and had often spent time there alone with Sebastian and his mother, confessed in lurid detail to being the Boston Strangler. This is the point of entry to Junger's first book-length project since The Perfect Storm: a narrowly averted tragedy for Junger's family opens out into an electrifying exploration of race and justice in America. By turns exciting and subtle, the narrative chronicles three lives that collide -- and are ultimately destroyed -- in the vortex of one of the first and most controversial serial murder cases in America. The power of the story and the brilliance of Junger's reporting place this book on the short shelf of classics beside In Cold Blood and Helter Skelter. Read by Kevin Conway

Sebastian Junger (Author), Kevin Conway, Kevin Conway (Narrator)

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Fire

For readers and viewers of The Perfect Storm, opening this long-awaited new work by Sebastian Junger will be like stepping off the deck of the Andrea Gail and into the inferno of a fire burning out of control in the steep canyons of Idaho. Here is the same meticulous prose brought to bear on the inner workings of a terrifying elemental force; here is a cast of characters risking everything in an effort to bring that force under control. Few writers have been to so many desperate corners of the globe as has Sebastian Junger; fewer still have provided such starkly memorable evocations of characters and events. From the murderous mechanics of the diamond trade in Sierra Leone to the logic of guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan and the forensics of genocide in Kosovo, this new collection of Junger's nonfiction will take you places you wouldn't dream of going to on your own.

Sebastian Junger (Author), Kevin Conway (Narrator)

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Fire

Sebastian Junger (Author), Sebastian Junger (Narrator)

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