The Untold Story of the Talking Book

Author: Matthew Rubery
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674974530
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Book Description
A history of audiobooks, from entertainment & rehabilitation for blinded World War I soldiers to a twenty-first-century competitive industry. Histories of the book often move straight from the codex to the digital screen. Left out of that familiar account are nearly 150 years of audio recordings. Recounting the fascinating history of audio-recorded literature, Matthew Rubery traces the path of innovation from Edison’s recitation of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” for his tinfoil phonograph in 1877, to the first novel-length talking books made for blinded World War I veterans, to today’s billion-dollar audiobook industry. The Untold Story of the Talking Book focuses on the social impact of audiobooks, not just the technological history, in telling a story of surprising and impassioned conflicts: from controversies over which books the Library of Congress selected to become talking books—yes to Kipling, no to Flaubert—to debates about what defines a reader. Delving into the vexed relationship between spoken and printed texts, Rubery argues that storytelling can be just as engaging with the ears as with the eyes, and that audiobooks deserve to be taken seriously. They are not mere derivatives of printed books but their own form of entertainment. We have come a long way from the era of sound recorded on wax cylinders, when people imagined one day hearing entire novels on mini-phonographs tucked inside their hats. Rubery tells the untold story of this incredible evolution and, in doing so, breaks from convention by treating audiobooks as a distinctively modern art form that has profoundly influenced the way we read. Praise for The Untold Story of the Talking Book “If audiobooks are relatively new to your world, you might wonder where they came from and where they’re going. And for general fans of the intersection of culture and technology, The Untold Story of the Talking Book is a fascinating read.” —Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times “[Rubery] explores 150 years of the audio format with an imminently accessible style, touching upon a wide range of interconnected topics . . . Through careful investigation of the co-development of formats within the publishing industry, Rubery shines a light on overlooked pioneers of audio . . . Rubery’s work succeeds in providing evidence to ‘move beyond the reductive debate’ on whether audiobooks really count as reading, and establishes the format’s rightful place in the literary family.” —Mary Burkey, Booklist (starred review)

The Untold Story

Author: Genevieve Cogman
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1529000653
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
Return to the world of the Invisible Library for Irene's most perilous mission yet . . . Librarian Spy Irene is heading into danger. Not for the first time, but could this be her last? She’s tasked with a terrifyingly dangerous solo mission to eliminate an old enemy, which must be kept secret at all costs. But even more troubling news emerges. Multiple worlds are disappearing – and the Library may have something to do with it. Determined to uncover the truth behind the vanished worlds, Irene and her friends must descend into the unplumbed depths of the Library. And what they find will change everything they know. This may be Irene’s most dangerous assignment of her hazardous career. The Untold Story is the unputdownable eighth book in the Invisible Library fantasy series by Genevieve Cogman. Praise for the series: ‘I absolutely loved this’ – N. K. Jemisin, author of The Fifth Season ‘Irene is a great heroine: fiery, resourceful and no one’s fool’ – Guardian ‘Brilliant and so much fun. Skullduggery, Librarians and dragons – Cogman keeps upping the ante on this delightful series!’ – Charles Stross, author of the Merchant Princes series

The Untold Story of Douglas MacArthur

Author: Frazier Hunt
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1789127947
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 918

Book Description
Frazier Hunt’s friendship with Douglas MacArthur began on the battlefields of France during World War I. The young general, not quite six years the author’s senior, had already caught the allure of Pacific destiny by the time that Hunt made his first long trip to the Orient—Japan, Siberia, China, the Philippines, Australia, Southeast Asia, India. Both Hunt and MacArthur, from their separate viewpoints, early foresaw that America’s destiny lay in the Pacific. Hunt had the unique experience of covering for newspapers and magazines every war and revolution. Following four months at General MacArthur’s headquarters in New Guinea in 1944, he wrote MacArthur and the War Against Japan. The Untold Story of Douglas MacArthur was his fourteenth and final book. A fitting monument to an outstanding reporter. “Warmly written, argumentative, greatly detailed, yet fast moving...It is a racing, readable book.”—New York Times Book Review “This is a most unusual book—with its power and sweep and fierce passion for the truth. It is a book that every American should be interested in, the full-length story of the boy, the man, the General.”—The Army-Navy-Air Force Register “An important contribution to the history of the times.”—San Francisco Call-Bulletin “A thrilling biography. Frazier Hunt had a background of information and experience that better fitted him than any other to tell the intimate MacArthur story.”—Montgomery Advertiser “It is a skillful, objective study of a great man, documented to the nines, the product of highly disciplined research. It is honest biography...Anyone wishing to understand the things that moved and formed Douglas MacArthur will find most of the answers in this book.”—Cincinnati Enquirer

Alice in Chains

Author: David de Sola
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250048079
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 415

Book Description
Four years after their first meeting at a warehouse under Seattle's Ballard Bridge, Alice in Chains became the first of grunge's big four to get a gold record and achieve national recognition. One of the loudest voices out of Seattle, they became influential and successful. But as the band got bigger, so did its problems. De Sola delves beneath the secrecy, gossip and rumor surrounding the band to tell its full story for the first time.

Untold Story

Author: Monica Ali
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 147110009X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Book Description
She was the most famous woman in the world. She died tragically, too young, in a terrible accident. The world mourned. Monica Ali, the beloved author of Brick Lane, explores the extraordinary question: what if she hadn't died? Lydia lives in a nondescript town somewhere in the American Midwest. She's a nice, normal woman - if strikingly beautiful. She lives a nice, normal life: her friends are normal, her job is normal, her hobbies are normal. Her friends and boyfriend adore her. But her past is shrouded in mystery. Who is Lydia? Where does she come from? And why is her English accent so posh? Lydia is a woman with secrets. Extraordinary secrets. She might even be the most famous woman on the planet... a woman whose death the world mourned by millions. Who is she? *~*~* Praise for Untold Story*~*~* 'A beautiful, gripping accomplishment, a treat for the heart and the head, and will be a joy to readers who believe in the possibility that a book can transform your basic sense of life' Andrew O'Hagan 'A terrific, clever, multi-layered and subtle book (and let's not forget - hugely entertaining)' Joanne Harris 'Haunting and intensely readable, this is something between a thriller and a ghost story' Lady Antonia Fraser 'A startlingly intelligent, perceptive and entertaining piece of fiction. It's quite brilliant' Henry Sutton, Daily Mirror 'Thoughtful, compassionate... a suspenseful and gripping read' Suzi Feay, Financial Times 'Ali's third-person princess is a very convincing and sympathetic figure... extremely skilfully done' Tibor Fischer, Observer

The Untold Story of the World's Leading Environmental Institution

Author: Maria H. Ivanova
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780262363242
Category : Environmental protection
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
"A revisionist history of UNEP that recounts previously untold stories, corrects misperceptions, and reveals the life within what is often considered a lifeless bureaucracy"--

Marvel Comics

Author: Sean Howe
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062314696
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 569

Book Description
The defining, behind-the-scenes chronicle of one of the most extraordinary, beloved, and dominant pop cultural entities in America’s history -- Marvel Comics – and the outsized personalities who made Marvel including Martin Goodman, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby. “Sean Howe’s history of Marvel makes a compulsively readable, riotous and heartbreaking version of my favorite story, that of how a bunch of weirdoes changed the world…That it’s all true is just frosting on the cake.” —Jonathan Lethem For the first time, Marvel Comics tells the stories of the men who made Marvel: Martin Goodman, the self-made publisher who forayed into comics after a get-rich-quick tip in 1939, Stan Lee, the energetic editor who would shepherd the company through thick and thin for decades and Jack Kirby, the WWII veteran who would co-create Captain America in 1940 and, twenty years later, developed with Lee the bulk of the company’s marquee characters in a three-year frenzy. Incorporating more than one hundred original interviews with those who worked behind the scenes at Marvel over a seventy-year-span, Marvel Comics packs anecdotes and analysis into a gripping narrative of how a small group of people on the cusp of failure created one of the most enduring pop cultural forces in contemporary America.

The Warmth of Other Suns

Author: Isabel Wilkerson
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679763880
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 642

Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this beautifully written masterwork, the Pulitzer Prize–winnner and bestselling author of Caste chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.

Mother Teresa

Author: Aroup Chatterjee
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788175993310
Category : Kolkata (India)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"The popular tendency is to defy myths, gurus and personalities without investigating the claims thoroughly. Mother Teresa is one such name. Does Mother Teresa deserve her reputation as the most charitable person who ever lived ? This book makes for a gripping but disconcerting read."--Publisher's description.

COLUMBUS - the Untold Story

Author: Manuel Rosa
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578179315
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Book Description
In the year 1444, near long-lost Constantinople, a Christian monarch treacherously breaks his truce with the Muslims, but Fate double crosses him. He is crushed in battle. All of his personal knights are slain, and he vanishes without a trace. Some years later, on Madeira Island, 2,500 miles to the west, a mysterious Knight of Saint Catherine of Mount Sinai marries into the Portuguese elite . . . and has a son. Astonishing as it may seem, these two impossibly remote events have been connected -- and the clouded genesis of Christopher Columbus is thereby once and forever resolved. The key to unlocking the mystery was waiting in a place where nobody had ever looked before. 25 years of research has pieced together a stunning array of artifacts and data, from one end of Europe to another, from Asia, Africa and the Americas: a chapel ruin, a ceiling mural in a private palace, DNA test results, an impressive diversity of documents, keenly analyzed . . . and a sword, unearthed by a 19th century Bulgarian peasant, that found its way to a museum in Saint Petersburg. The study and comparison of carefully censored State archives also helped explain this life -- hitherto enshrouded in the deceitful machinations of power politics, false identities, and false discoveries in the Age of Exploration. Myth has at last been separated from fact, exposing what actually transpired. Being extremely fond of writing memoirs, journals and letters, the man known as Columbus left a great deal of this overwhelming proof himself. Many other clues have been painstakingly gathered and analyzed. Some were cryptically displayed in the details of portraiture and esoteric writings, others in the most obvious features of one of the greatest works of Spanish Baroque drama, on heraldry, on a gravestone, via signatures and pseudonyms. What emerges is the picture of a consummate double-agent, with a bold and grandiose agenda. Enter this 500-year-old labyrinth and discover the unimaginable: a medieval conspiracy so audacious, so massive, and so well executed that it fooled the world for half a millennium.The Christopher Columbus you knew will be history.