Audiobooks narrated by Tom Beyer

Conscience Incorporated: Pursue Profits While Protecting Human Rights

Amid growing international concerns about income inequality, labor abuses, racial injustice, and disinformation online, Conscience Incorporated examines the gaps in current corporate social responsibility measures and what more needs be done to address these challenges. The rise of new technologies such as smartphones and social media have made it easier than ever to document and spread awareness of corporate actions. Despite these developments, large corporations often fail to meaningfully address the human rights abuses linked to their business models and practices. Drawing from research into the history of business ethics, Michael Posner provides a blueprint for global business leaders to navigate human rights challenges and adopt sustainable corporate practices. He highlights the need for increased protections for outsourced workers in faraway nations, greater attention to harmful online content, and prioritization of human rights by investors. Posner proposes a series of concrete reforms and argues compellingly for why businesses need to devote greater time and resources to protecting basic human rights. Conscience Incorporated is a powerful challenge to the status quo and advocates for a fundamental shift in the principles that govern global businesses.

Michael Posner (Author), Tom Beyer (Narrator)

Audiobook

Breaking the Medicine Monopolies: Reflections of a Generic Drug Pioneer

Breaking the Medicine Monopolies is a lawyer's personal narrative of the events that led to the widespread use of low-cost generic drugs and the current drug price crisis. Breaking the Medicine Monopolies is a personal narrative about Alfred Engelberg's fifty years of legal work in the drug industry. He takes you inside the mysterious world of patents to provide a basic understanding of how drug makers have gamed the laws governing brand and generic competition, misused patents to prolong monopolies, and delayed generic competition on old drugs instead of focusing on discovering new ones. In this book, Engelberg provides listeners with an understanding of how the growing use of low-cost generic drugs led to the highest prices in the world for new drugs, and how middlemen in the drug distribution chain have exploited a lack of price transparency in order to earn excessive profits. Breaking the Medicine Monopolies is a must-listen for anyone who wants to understand how ill-considered policy decisions and an inept patent system led to unaffordable prices for new drugs, and what can be done to correct the problem.

Alfred Engelberg (Author), Tom Beyer (Narrator)

Audiobook

Cerebral Entanglements: How the Brain Shapes Our Public and Private Lives

It took a brain surgeon who's spent a lifetime in the operating room experiencing the brain's union of form and function to write this book. Cerebral Entanglements, unlike most books on the brain, looks at the intimate and vital emotions in our lives, and shows as well, how neuroimaging studies can transform our understanding of crucial emotional or mental health concerns. Why do we love? Why do we hate? Why do we kill? Why do we laugh? Why do we have faith? Why does time stand still or speed up? Focusing on the nature of consciousness, affection, trust, romance, empathy, kindness, prejudice, sadness, happiness, depression, grief, and the nature of laughter, the author shows us how neuroscience has changed our understanding of these emotions as he explores the extraordinary revelations that have emerged from brain imaging and functional studies. We see that we are the first generation to perceive the contours of a human thought, track the course of an emotion, even watch memory come together. Allan Hamilton writes clearly and accessibly, about the complex science driving our emotions and experiences, and shows how our newfound knowledge can impact our well-being, individually and as a society. Additionally, Hamilton writes about how the brain perceives and experiences music, memory, and time itself.

Allan J. Hamilton (Author), Tom Beyer (Narrator)

Audiobook

Leading Winning Teams: How Teamwork, Motivation, and Strategy Achieve Big League Success

What do a Formula One driver, a center for the New England Patriots, and a Major League Baseball agent have in common? All achieved success in their sporting career and in life, translating the lessons they'd learned in elite racing, football, and baseball respectively to the world outside of elite athletics. In Leading Winning Teams, veteran Major League Baseball coach and internationally recognized speaker Trent Clark delivers an inspirational and exciting new discussion of how to build and lead a winning organization. You'll dive deep into insightful lessons on leadership, teamwork, motivation, strategy, and more as you explore how to overcome the challenges and adversity that lie on the road to ultimate victory and success. The author offers interviews with and stories from a wide variety of sporting and business legends, including Chad Curtis, Mark Shapiro, Marques Ogden, Ann Gaffigan, and others. Drawing on the real-life experiences of people who faced daunting setbacks before ultimately realizing their dreams, he explains how to navigate the challenges in your own life and use them as fuel for building the future you've always wanted for yourself and your team.

Trent Clark, Trent M. Clark (Author), Tom Beyer (Narrator)

Audiobook

Cryptography

We all keep secrets—from our locker codes to our passwords to our online interactions. And we choose to share those secrets only with those whom we trust. So, too, do organizations, businesses, governments, and armies. In Cryptography, Panos Louridas provides a broad and accessible introduction to cryptography, the art and science of keeping and revealing secrets. Louridas explains just how cryptography works to keep our communications confidential, tracing it back all the way to its ancient roots. Then he follows its long and winding path to where we are today and reads the signs that point to where it may go tomorrow. A few years back, interest in cryptography was restricted to specialists. Today, as we all live our lives attuned to our digital footprint and the privacy issues it entails, it becomes more and more essential to have a basic understanding of cryptography and its applications to everyday life. Starting with classical cryptography, Cryptography takes the listener all the way up to the twenty-first century cryptographic applications that underpin our lives in the digital realm. Along the way, Louridas also explains concepts such as symmetric cryptography, asymmetric cryptography, cryptographic protocols and applications, and finally, quantum and post-Quantum cryptography as well as the links between cryptography and computer security.

Panos Louridas (Author), Tom Beyer (Narrator)

Audiobook

Tough Rugged Bastards: A Memoir of a Life in Marine Special Operations

Following the 9/11 attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld directed the Marine Corps to establish a unit that would answer to US Special Operations Command. The eighty-six-man 'Detachment One' was formed with a two-year charter to train and deploy as a 'proof-of-concept' to assess the viability of a larger Marine Special Operations contribution in support of the Global War on Terror. For such a departure from the norm, a special leader was needed. The Commanding Officer—Colonel Robert J. Coates, a Marine Force Recon legend—was given his pick of personnel. One of the four team leaders he selected was Gunnery Sergeant John A. Dailey. These men built a unit from nothing, trained for unknown missions in an unknown location, and deployed amid controversy and skepticism. Once in Iraq, they were dubbed 'Task Unit Raider' and quickly won over the naysayers who doubted the Marine's ability to operate successfully. This book tells Dailey's story of the creation, training, and volatile 2004 Iraq deployment of Task Unit Raider that led to the creation of the Marine Forces Special Operations Command. Det-1 served as the bridge between the Raiders of WWII and the Marine Raiders of today.

John A. Dailey (Author), Tom Beyer (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Wehrmacht's Last Stand: The German Campaigns of 1944-1945

By 1943, the war was lost, and most German officers knew it. What kept the German army going in an increasingly hopeless situation? Where some historians have found explanations in the power of Hitler or the role of ideology, Robert M. Citino, the world's leading scholar on the subject, posits a more straightforward solution: Bewegungskrieg, the way of war cultivated by the Germans over the course of history. In this book, Citino charts the path by which Bewegungskrieg, or a 'war of movement,' inexorably led to Nazi Germany's defeat. The Wehrmacht's Last Stand analyzes the German Totenritt, or 'death ride,' from January 1944-with simultaneous Allied offensives at Anzio and Ukraine-until May 1945, the collapse of the Wehrmacht in the field, and the Soviet storming of Berlin. In clear and compelling prose, and bringing extensive reading of the German-language literature to bear, Citino focuses on the German view of these campaigns. Often very different from the Allied perspective, this approach allows for a more nuanced and far-reaching understanding of the last battles of the Wehrmacht than any now available. With Citino's previous volumes, Death of the Wehrmacht and The Wehrmacht Retreats, The Wehrmacht's Last Stand completes a uniquely comprehensive picture of the German army's strategy, operations, and performance against the Allies in World War II.

Robert M. Citino (Author), Tom Beyer (Narrator)

Audiobook

Quantum Drama: From the Bohr-Einstein Debate to the Riddle of Entanglement

In 1927, Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein began a debate about the interpretation and meaning of the new quantum theory. This would become one of the most famous debates in the history of science. What (if any) limits should we place on our expectations for what science can tell us about physical reality? Our protagonists slowly disappeared from the vanguard of physics, as its center of gravity shifted from a war-ravaged Continental Europe to post-war America. What Einstein and Bohr had considered to be matters of the utmost importance were now set aside. Their debate was regarded either as settled in Bohr's favor or as superfluous to real physics. As quantum entanglement became a real physical phenomenon, whole new disciplines were established, such as quantum computing, teleportation, and cryptography. The efforts of the experimentalists were rewarded with shares in the 2022 Nobel prize in physics. As Quantum Drama reveals, science owes a large debt to those who kept the discussions going before definitive experimental inquiries became possible. Although experiment moved the Bohr-Einstein debate to a new level, it has by no means removed or resolved the fundamental question.

Jim Baggott, John L. Heilbron (Author), Tom Beyer (Narrator)

Audiobook

Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942

For Hitler and the German military, 1942 was a key turning point of World War II, as an overstretched but still lethal Wehrmacht replaced brilliant victories and huge territorial gains with stalemates and strategic retreats. In this major reevaluation of that crucial year, Robert Citino shows that the German army's emerging woes were rooted as much in its addiction to the 'war of movement'-attempts to smash the enemy in 'short and lively' campaigns-as they were in Hitler's deeply flawed management of the war. From the overwhelming operational victories at Kerch and Kharkov in May to the catastrophic defeats at El Alamein and Stalingrad, Death of the Wehrmacht offers an eye-opening new view of that decisive year. Building upon his widely respected critique in The German Way of War, Citino shows how the campaigns of 1942 fit within the centuries-old patterns of Prussian/German warmaking and ultimately doomed Hitler's expansionist ambitions. He examines every major campaign and battle in the Russian and North African theaters throughout the year to assess how a military geared to quick and decisive victories coped when the tide turned against it. More than the turning point of a war, 1942 marked the death of a very old and traditional pattern of warmaking, with the classic 'German way of war' unable to meet the challenges of the twentieth century.

Robert M. Citino (Author), Tom Beyer (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Diplomacy of the American Revolution

'To the superficial observer there would seem never to have been an age less propitious for the birth of a new nation. The tendency of the times was altogether for the aggrandizement of big states and the consolidation of their territory at the expense of the little ones, for the extinction of the weaker nations and governments rather than for the creation of new ones. Nevertheless it was this bitter cut-throat international rivalry which was to make American independence possible.' On April 15th, 1783, the Articles of Peace between the United States and Great Britain went into effect proclaiming that 'His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the United States . . . to be free Sovereign and independent States.' That recognition represented a monumental achievement for the new American nation. It also, as Samuel Flagg Bemis shows us, marked the end of a world war. France's search for revenge against Britain after the French and Indian War, Spain's attempt to retake Gibraltar, the complicated trade interests of the Netherlands and Russia, Austria's fears of a two-front war-each of these saw America's struggle for independence as an event that affected their own strategies. And, as Bemis shows us, it is through that prism that we should consider the actions of those who supported America and Great Britain.

Samuel Flagg Bemis (Author), Tom Beyer (Narrator)

Audiobook

How to Become Famous: Lost Einsteins, Forgotten Superstars, and How the Beatles Came to Be

It's hard to imagine our world without its stars and celebrity geniuses-they become a part of our culture and history, seeming permanent and preordained. But as Cass Sunstein shows in this startling book, that is far from the case. Focusing on both famous and forgotten (or simply overlooked) artists and luminaries in music, literature, business, science, politics, and other fields, he explores why some individuals become famous and others don't and offers a new understanding of the role of greatness, luck, and contingency in the achievement of fame. First, Sunstein examines recent research-on informational cascades, power laws, network effects, and group polarization-to probe the question of how people become famous. He explores what ends up in the history books, in the great religious texts, and in the literary canon-and how that changes radically over time. He delves into the rich and entertaining stories of a diverse cast of famous characters, from John Keats, William Blake, and Jane Austen to Bob Dylan, Ayn Rand, and Stan Lee-as well as John, Paul, George, and Ringo. How to Become Famous takes you on a fun, captivating, and at times profound journey that will forever change your perspective on the latest celebrity's 'fifteen minutes,' the nature of memory, success and failure in business, and our enduring fascination with fame.

Cass R. Sunstein (Author), Tom Beyer (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics

America's political parties are hollow shells of what they could be, locked in a polarized struggle for power and unrooted as civic organizations. The Hollow Parties takes listeners from the rise of mass party politics in the Jacksonian era through the years of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Today's parties, overbearing and ineffectual, have emerged from the interplay of multiple party traditions that reach back to the Founding. Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld paint unforgettable portraits of figures such as Martin Van Buren, whose pioneering Democrats invented the machinery of the mass political party, and Abraham Lincoln and other heroic Republicans of that party's first generation who stood up to the Slave Power. And they show how today's fractious party politics arose from the ashes of the New Deal order in the 1970s. Activists in the wake of the 1968 Democratic National Convention transformed presidential nominations but failed to lay the foundations for robust, movement-driven parties. Instead, modern American conservatism hollowed out the party system. Party hollowness lies at the heart of our democratic discontents. With historical sweep and political acuity, The Hollow Parties offers answers to pressing questions about how the nation's parties became so dysfunctional-and how they might yet realize their promise.

Daniel Schlozman, Sam Rosenfeld (Author), Tom Beyer (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks Narrated by Tom Beyer