Books published by publisher HighBridge Audio

The complete soundtrack from the phenomenally popular PBS series whose message about myth, ritual, and spiritual potentialities exhilarated millions of people.Contents:Program 1: The Hero's Adventure Program 2: The Message of the MythProgram 3: The First StorytellersProgram 4: Sacrifice and BlissProgram 5: Love and the GoddessProgram 6: Masks of Eternity

In The Third Revolution, eminent China scholar Elizabeth C. Economy provides an incisive look at the transformative changes underway in China today. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has unleashed a powerful set of political and economic reforms: the centralization of power under Xi, himself, the expansion of the Communist Party's role in Chinese political, social, and economic life, and the construction of a virtual wall of regulations to control more closely the exchange of ideas and capital between China and the outside world. Beyond its borders, Beijing has recast itself as a great power, seeking to reclaim its past glory and to create a system of international norms that better serves its more ambitious geostrategic objectives. In so doing, the Chinese leadership is reversing the trends toward greater political and economic opening, as well as the low-profile foreign policy, that had been put in motion by Deng Xiaoping's "Second Revolution" thirty years earlier.

Some say a place is home when you know where all the roads go. Over in Lake Wobegon, all the roads take you there, and it's never been any different. And what you learn along the way is that-quicker than any road sign or street map or pair of shiny red shoes-all you really need is a story to get you from here to there. A story about an ordinary day, any ordinary day. About a young woman and her bridal shower, about a fishing shack and when it's prudent to drive out on the ice. A story about springtime, and air thick with desire, or about the advantages of dynamite when you're digging a grave in winter. Interim pastors, and lutefisk dinners, hunting pheasant in autumn and a food fight with spaghetti. Home is a fine place to listen. No need for a parka. No need to get up. Just light the fire, make some popcorn and hit "Play." The Road Home will take you all the way to where you already are. No place like it. No place at all.Garrison Keillor has been delighting audiences for four decades now with heartfelt, moving, and downright hilarious tales from the shores of Lake Wobegon. Never before collected, these expertly crafted stories are full of gentle humor, genuine emotion, and (more often than not) surprising insights into family, relationships, community, faith, and hope.

A New York Times Bestseller and Whitbread Book of the Year.Heaney's performance reminds us that Beowulf, written near the turn of another millennium, was intended to be heard not read.Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and lives to old age before dying in a vivid fight against a dragon.The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the end of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface.While an abridgment of Heaney's full translation of Beowulf, Heaney prepared this abridgment himself to read for the BBC program from which this recording is taken.

A mayor's inspirational story of a Midwest city that has become nothing less than a blueprint for the future of American renewal.Once described by the Washington Post as "the most interesting mayor you've never heard of," Pete Buttigieg, the thirty-six-year-old Democratic mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has improbably emerged as one of the nation's most visionary politicians. First elected in 2011, Buttigieg left a successful business career to move back to his hometown, previously tagged by Newsweek as a "dying city," because the industrial Midwest beckoned as a challenge to the McKinsey-trained Harvard graduate. Whether meeting with city residents on middle-school basketball courts, reclaiming abandoned houses, confronting gun violence, or attracting high-tech industry, Buttigieg has transformed South Bend into a shining model of urban reinvention.While Washington reels with scandal, Shortest Way Home interweaves two once-unthinkable success stories: that of an Afghanistan veteran who came out and found love and acceptance, all while in office, and that of a Rust Belt city so thoroughly transformed that it shatters the way we view America's so-called flyover country.

Award-winning writer Matti Friedman's tale of Israel's first spies has all the tropes of an espionage novel, including duplicity, betrayal, disguise, clandestine meetings, the bluff, and the double bluff-but it's all true.The four spies at the center of this story were part of a ragtag unit known as the Arab Section, conceived during World War II by British spies and Jewish militia leaders in Palestine. Intended to gather intelligence and carry out sabotage and assassinations, the unit consisted of Jews who were native to the Arab world and could thus easily assume Arab identities. In 1948, with Israel's existence in the balance during the War of Independence, our spies went undercover in Beirut, where they spent the next two years operating out of a kiosk, collecting intelligence, and sending messages back to Israel via a radio whose antenna was disguised as a clothesline. While performing their dangerous work these men were often unsure to whom they were reporting, and sometimes even who they'd become. Of the dozen spies in the Arab Section at the war's outbreak, five were caught and executed. But in the end the Arab Section would emerge, improbably, as the nucleus of the Mossad, Israel's vaunted intelligence agency.

Based on the latest scientific findings, this breakthrough book argues that most of what we thought we knew about the Americas before Columbus was wrong.In the last twenty years, archaeologists and anthropologists equipped with new scientific techniques have made far-reaching discoveries about the Americas. For example, Indians did not cross the Bering Strait 12,000 years ago, as most of us learned in school. They were already here. Their numbers were vast, not few. And instead of living lightly on the land, they managed it beautifully and left behind an enormous ecological legacy.In this riveting, accessible work of science, Charles Mann takes us on an enthralling journey of scientific exploration. We learn that the Indian development of modern corn was one of the most complex feats of genetic engineering ever performed. That the Great Plains are a third smaller today than they were in 1700 because the Indians who maintained them by burning died. And that the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact.Compelling and eye-opening, this book has the potential to vastly alter our understanding of our history and change the course of today's environmental disputes.

A groundbreaking narrative on the urgency of ethically designed AI and a guidebook to reimagining life in the era of intelligent technologyA Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are examines the immense impact intelligent technology will have on humanity. These machines, while challenging our personal beliefs and our socio-economic world order, also have the potential to transform our health and well-being, alleviate poverty and suffering, and reveal the mysteries of intelligence and consciousness. International human rights attorney Flynn Coleman deftly argues that it is critical we instill values, ethics, and morals into our robots, algorithms, and other forms of AI. Equally important, we need to develop and implement laws, policies, and oversight mechanisms to protect us from tech's insidious threats.To realize AI's transcendent potential, Coleman advocates for inviting a diverse group of voices to participate in designing our intelligent machines and using our moral imagination to ensure that human rights, empathy, and equity are core principles of emerging technologies. Ultimately, A Human Algorithm is a clarion call for building a more humane future and moving conscientiously into a new frontier of our own design.

During a week-long suspension from school, a teenage transplant to impoverished rural Indiana searches for a job, the whereabouts of his vanished drug-addicted guardian, and meaning in the America of the Trump years.Seventeen-year-old Riggle is living in rural Indiana with his uncle and uncle's girlfriend after the death of both of his parents. Now his uncle has gone missing, probably on a drug binge. It's Monday, and $800 in rent is due Friday. Riggle, who's been suspended from school, has to either find his uncle or get the money together himself. His mission exposes him to a motley group of Opioid locals-encounters by turns perplexing, harrowing, and heartening. Meanwhile, Riggle marks each day by remembering the mythology his late mother invented for him about how the days got their names. With amazing directness and insight, Carr explores what it's like to be a high school kid in in the age of Trump, a time of economic inequality, addiction, confederate flags, and mass shootings. A work of empathy and insight, Opioid, Indiana pierces to the heart of our moment through an unforgettable protagonist.

For over 1,000 years, tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table have enthralled people, among them Henry VIII and T.E. Lawrence. Proof of the Arthurian legend's timeless appeal is the fact that scarcely a year goes by without a new adaptation. Published in 1485, Sir Thomas Malory's epic poem Le Morte d'Arthur became the standard source for future Arthurian works such as Idylls of the King by Lord Tennyson and T.H. White's The Once and Future King. With its expressive, vigorous dialogue, Le Morte d'Arthur resounds with colloquial liveliness and ceremonious dignity, the style for a 15th-century gentleman. This audio recording grips the listener with the fascinating, fateful story of Arthur's ascension to the throne as a boy, his marriage to Guenevere, the formation of the Round Table Knights, the quest for the Holy Grail, the ill-fated passion between Lancelot and Guenevere, the treachery of Arthur's illegitimate son Mordred, and the ultimate destruction of Arthur's realm. A superb story of adventure, love, honor, and betrayal, Le Morte d'Arthur is filled with dramatic power and deep, tragic irony.