The Alloy of Law: A Mistborn Novel
February 6, 2012
Unabridged by Brandon Sanderson. Narrated by Michael Kramer
Our Price: 27.99
Summary:
Fresh from the success of The Way of Kings, Brandon Sanderson, best known for completing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time?, takes a break to return to the world of the best-selling Mistborn series.
Three hundred years after the events of the Mistborn trilogy, Scadrial is now on the verge of modernity, with railroads to supplement the canals, electric lighting in the streets and the homes of the wealthy, and the first steel-framed skyscrapers racing for the clouds.Kelsier, Vin, Elend, Sazed, Spook, and the rest are now part of history – or religion.
Yet even as science and technology are reaching new heights, the old magics of Allomancy and Feruchemy continue to play a role in this reborn world. Out in the frontier lands known as the Roughs, they are crucial tools for the brave men and women attempting to establish order and justice. One such is Waxillium Ladrian, a rare Twinborn, who can Push on metals with his Allomancy and use Feruchemy to become lighter or heavier at will.
After 20 years in the Roughs, Wax has been forced by family tragedy to return to the metropolis of Elendel. Now he must reluctantly put away his guns and assume the duties and dignity incumbent upon the head of a noble house. Or so he thinks, until he learns the hard way that the mansions and elegant tree-lined streets of the city can be even more dangerous than the dusty plains of the Roughs.
Sample:
Length: 10 hour 51 min
Release date: 27-OCT-2011
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
February 5, 2012
Unabridged by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo. Narrated by Brian Holsopple
Our Price: 24.47
Summary:
Billions of government dollars, and thousands of charitable organizations and NGOs, are dedicated to helping the world’s poor. But much of their work is based on assumptions that are untested generalizations at best, harmful misperceptions at worst.
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics. Work based on these principles, supervised by the Poverty Action Lab, is being carried out in dozens of countries. Drawing on this and their 15 years of research from Chile to India, Kenya to Indonesia, they have identified wholly new aspects of the behavior of poor people, their needs, and the way that aid or financial investment can affect their lives. Their work defies certain presumptions: that microfinance is a cure-all, that schooling equals learning, that poverty at the level of 99 cents a day is just a more extreme version of the experience any of us have when our income falls uncomfortably low.
This important book illuminates how the poor live, and offers all of us an opportunity to think of a world beyond poverty.
Sample:
Length: 11 hours and 29 min.
Release date: 15-DEC-2011
Publisher: HighBridge Company
Brimstone: Pendergast, Book 5
February 5, 2012
Unabridged by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child. Narrated by Scott Brick
Our Price: 19.98
Summary:
Art critic Jeremy Grove is found dead, his face frozen in a mask of terror. His body temperature is grotesquely high; he is discovered in a room barricaded from the inside; the smell of brimstone is everywhere… and the unmistakable imprint of a claw is burned into the wall. As more bodies are discovered – their only connection the bizarre but identical manner of death – the world begins to wonder if the Devil has, in fact, come to collect his due.
Teaming with Police Officer Vincent D’Agosta (The Relic), Agent Pendergast is determined to solve this case that appears to defy everything except supernatural logic.
Sample:
Length: 19 hours and 42 min.
Release date: 17-DEC-2011
Publisher: Hachette Audio
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
February 5, 2012
Unabridged by Steven Levy. Narrated by L. J. Ganser
Our Price: 29.95
Summary:
Few companies in history have ever been as successful and as admired as Google, the company that has transformed the Internet and become an indispensable part of our lives. How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes listeners inside Google headquarters – the Googleplex – to explain how Google works.
While they were still students at Stanford, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin revolutionized Internet search. They followed this brilliant innovation with another, as two of Google’s earliest employees found a way to do what no one else had: make billions of dollars from Internet advertising. With this cash cow (until Google’s IPO, nobody other than Google management had any idea how lucrative the company’s ad business was), Google was able to expand dramatically and take on other transformative projects: more efficient data centers, open-source cell phones, free Internet video (YouTube), cloud computing, digitizing books, and much more.
The key to Google’s success in all these businesses, Levy reveals, is its engineering mind-set and adoption of such Internet values as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk taking. After it’s unapologetically elitist approach to hiring, Google pampers its engineers with free food and dry cleaning, on-site doctors and masseuses, and gives them all the resources they need to succeed. Even today, with a workforce of more than 23,000, Larry Page signs off on every hire.
But has Google lost its innovative edge? It stumbled badly in China. And now, with its newest initiative, social networking, Google is chasing a successful competitor for the first time. Some employees are leaving the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups. Can the company that famously decided not to be “evil” still compete?
No other book has turned Google inside out as Levy does with In the Plex.
Sample:
Length: 19 hour 45 min
Release date: 07. Apr 11
Publisher: Audible, Inc.
The Clockwork Prince: The Infernal Devices, Book 2
February 5, 2012
Unabridged by Cassandra Clare. Narrated by Ed Westwick, Heather Lind
Our Price: 27.99
Summary:
In the magical underworld of Victorian London, Tessa Gray has at last found safety with the Shadowhunters. But that safety proves fleeting when rogue forces in the Clave plot to see her protector, Charlotte, replaced as head of the Institute. If Charlotte loses her position, Tessa will be out on the street – and easy prey for the mysterious Magister, who wants to use Tessa’s powers for his own dark ends.
The special Collector’s First Edition will include a never-before-seen letter from Will to his family!
With the help of the handsome, self-destructive Will and the fiercely devoted Jem, Tessa discovers that the Magister’s war on the Shadowhunters is deeply personal. He blames them for a long-ago tragedy that shattered his life. To unravel the secrets of the past, the trio journeys from mist-shrouded Yorkshire to a manor house that holds untold horrors, from the slums of London to an enchanted ballroom where Tessa discovers that the truth of her parentage is more sinister than she had imagined. When they encounter a clockwork demon bearing a warning for Will, they realize that the Magister himself knows their every move – and that one of their own has betrayed them.
Tessa finds her heart drawn more and more to Jem, though her longing for Will, despite his dark moods, continues to unsettle her. But something is changing in Will – the wall he has built around himself is crumbling. Could finding the Magister free Will from his secrets and give Tessa the answers about who she is and what she was born to do?
As their dangerous search for the Magister and the truth leads the friends into peril, Tessa learns that when love and lies are mixed, they can corrupt even the purest heart.
Sample:
Length: 15 hours and 39 min.
Release date: 29. Nov 11
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
