Empire

Niall Ferguson reminds us why the British Empire is still important. It's no accident that today the international language of science, diplomacy, and commerce is English, or that the predominant superpower in the world is the United States. All of this is a consequence of the British Empire's world domination, which peaked at the end of the nineteenth century and essentially ended by the mid-twentieth. How this came to be is a "ripping yarn." Ferguson compresses three hundred years of history by focusing on exemplary men and events, recounting their stories in a dramatic fashion more worthy of the cinema than a textbook. The tone is more than appropriate for the highway-bound multitasking audiophile who seeks to understand the broad strokes of history. J.W. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine


In a departure from the science fiction and the historical re-creations for which he's known, the ENDER'S GAME scribe explores what might happen if a civil war were to break out in early-twenty-first-century America. The battle lines this time are drawn not along North and South, but between liberal and conservative. Stefan Rudnicki's hypnotic bass voice reflects both Card's cynicism and his guarded optimism as he narrates the story of Major Reuben Malek and Captain Bartholomew Coleman, who find themselves in the middle of a coup mounted by a thinly veiled George Soros. The author adds to the experience by reading chapter epigraphs and the insightful afterword. S.E.S. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine