chloe kelly
- 40
- reviews
- 19
- helpful votes
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We Solve Murders
- A Novel
- By: Richard Osman
- Narrated by: Nicola Walker
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Steve Wheeler is enjoying retired life. He still does the odd bit of investigation work, but he prefers his familiar routines: the pub quiz, his favorite bench, his cat waiting for him at home. His days of adventure are over. Adrenaline is daughter-in-law Amy’s job now. Amy Wheeler thinks adrenaline is good for the soul. Working in private security, every day is dangerous. She’s currently on a remote island protecting mega-bestselling author Rosie D’Antonio, until a dead body and a bag of money mean trouble in paradise. So she sends an SOS to the only person she trusts . . .
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Who are you?
- By Karen A. on 09-24-24
- We Solve Murders
- A Novel
- By: Richard Osman
- Narrated by: Nicola Walker
Cheap writing, cruddy characters
Reviewed: 01-01-25
I liked the Thursday Murder Club for some mindless cartoonish fun - witty, amusing, not a whit believable. It didn’t need to be with fun characters one could get into.
Characters in We Solve Murders were insipid, smug, violent and completely preposterous. They had privilege, wealth and super powers, without an ounce of likeability. The plot was ultra contrived into a chain of supposedly amusing events that did nothing to intrigue the reader and endear the players. The book was annoying from beginning to end.
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The Path Between the Seas
- The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914
- By: David McCullough
- Narrated by: Nelson Runger
- Length: 31 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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The Path Between the Seas tells the story of the men and women who fought against all odds to fulfill the 400-year-old dream of constructing an aquatic passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It is a story of astonishing engineering feats, tremendous medical accomplishments, political power plays, heroic successes, and tragic failures. McCullough expertly weaves the many strands of this momentous event into a captivating tale.
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No Stone Unturned
- By Tim on 06-25-13
- The Path Between the Seas
- The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914
- By: David McCullough
- Narrated by: Nelson Runger
Good, detailed account
Reviewed: 11-06-24
Exhaustive history of the Panama Canal. Should be mandatory reading for anyone who insists on opining about the US role in its existence.
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Technofeudalism
- What Killed Capitalism
- By: Yanis Varoufakis
- Narrated by: Yanis Varoufakis
- Length: 7 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Technofeudalism says Yanis Varoufakis, is the new power that is reshaping our lives and the world, and is the greatest current threat to the liberal individual, to our efforts to avert climate catastrophe—and to democracy itself. It also lies behind the new geopolitical tensions, especially the New Cold War between the United States and China. Drawing on stories from Greek myth and pop culture, from Homer to Mad Men, Varoufakis explains this revolutionary transformation: how it enslaves our minds, how it rewrites the rules of global power, and, ultimately, what it will take overthrow it.
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A non-academic, non-evidence-based look at big tech
- By Anonymous User on 08-31-24
- Technofeudalism
- What Killed Capitalism
- By: Yanis Varoufakis
- Narrated by: Yanis Varoufakis
Read this book if you want a competent explanation of how we got where we are financially
Reviewed: 11-01-24
Karl Marx used the term "means of production" to describe the ownership and use of the resources required to produce goods and services in a society. That lends a good bit of insight as to what drives society to make massive changes dressed in ideological clothes. As humans chew through their ecosphere with the rate and underlying reasoning little different than a swarm of locusts, great insights presented by empirical people with the access to history and information required, Yanis is one such provider. He explains how capitalism, driven by financialization of production has reverted to feudalism, the ownership of where goods and services are produced and consumed. Growth and discovery are circular now. With no new worlds to conquer, mankind I’d entered into a new dark age in which we are progressively constrained and oppressed. It takes freedom and expansion of the human potential to discover and fulfill potential. That isn’t needed in a time of contraction. In this book, Janis explains how this great new oppression is unfolding. But he is only human, and after his fantastic thesis on where we as a species in a fatally injured biosphere states a way we can somehow create an egalitarian Utopia - something that we have never managed to do except through brief periods, by an entitled subset of people in general, during periods of opportunity for growth. To do that we would have to stop being people and come together as a kind of zooid.
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The Swarm
- The Second Formic War (Volume 1)
- By: Orson Scott Card, Aaron Johnston
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki, Vikas Adam, Stephen Hoye, and others
- Length: 18 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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The first invasion of Earth was beaten back by a coalition of corporate and international military forces and the Chinese army. China has been devastated by the Formic's initial efforts to eradicate Earth life forms and prepare the ground for their own settlement. The Scouring of China struck fear into the other nations of the planet; that fear blossomed into drastic action when scientists determined that the single ship that wreaked such damage was merely a scout ship. There is a mothership out beyond the solar system's Kuiper Belt, and it's heading into the system.
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Interesting, but feels unnecessarily drawn out
- By Eric A. Smalling on 09-02-16
- The Swarm
- The Second Formic War (Volume 1)
- By: Orson Scott Card, Aaron Johnston
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki, Vikas Adam, Stephen Hoye, Arthur Morey, Paul Boehmer
So tired of current tropes in science fiction
Reviewed: 10-10-24
Why do nations of the future maintain the same 20th century structures - you know, NATO, UN, former Soviet Union. There are also the military and business frameworks that supposedly wouldn't have changed despite profound changes in technology and society.
This book was especially hackneyed, and the voice acting was terrible. Really annoyed at the lack of quality.
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Leviathan Falls
- Expanse, Book 9
- By: James S.A. Corey
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 19 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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The Laconian Empire has fallen, setting the 1,300 solar systems free from the rule of Winston Duarte. But the ancient enemy that killed the gate builders is awake, and the war against our universe has begun again.
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Awesome conclusion to an awesome series!
- By Kindle Customer on 12-01-21
- Leviathan Falls
- Expanse, Book 9
- By: James S.A. Corey
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
Great, as every book in the series
Reviewed: 02-10-23
The performer is among the best!
I loved the description of humanity becoming a zooid.
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Parable of the Sower
- By: Octavia E. Butler
- Narrated by: Lynne Thigpen
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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God is change. That is the central truth of the Earthseed movement, whose unlikely prophet is 18-year-old Lauren Olamina. The young woman's diary entries tell the story of her life amid a violent 21st-century hell of walled neighborhoods and drug-crazed pyromaniacs - and reveal her evolving Earthseed philosophy. Against a backdrop of horror emerges a message of hope: if we are willing to embrace divine change, we will survive to fulfill our destiny among the stars.
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Dystopia before dystopia was cool...
- By Amber on 05-28-14
- Parable of the Sower
- By: Octavia E. Butler
- Narrated by: Lynne Thigpen
Gloomy yet hopeful
Reviewed: 02-02-23
Oh my- Butler knew how our capitalism would corrode society. Specifically how the decline would take shape here in the US. She made the universal, and I guess necessary mistake of assuming the stable framework of government and belief in money, no matter how dire the situation. The story reads like a historical account that is both mythologized and peppered with personal experience as it would be interpreted by someone of our culture - a common tendency of historians.
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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
- The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
- By: Shoshana Zuboff
- Narrated by: Nicol Zanzarella
- Length: 24 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. Rather, it offers a deeply reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization in the 21st century. The stark issue at hand is whether we will be the masters of information and machines or its slaves.
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Book Editors failed to trim the word count
- By Todd B on 07-14-19
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
- The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
- By: Shoshana Zuboff
- Narrated by: Nicol Zanzarella
Mind blowing
Reviewed: 01-29-23
The author introduced a the next chapter of the means of production and the accompanying changes in ownership, labor relationship - not to mention the introduction of human behavior as raw material.
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Showstopper
- Peter Diamond, Book 21
- By: Peter Lovesey
- Narrated by: James Langton
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Since the start of the hit TV show Swift in 2013, its cast and crew have been plagued by misfortune. First, a star actress pulls out of the show before it begins—and by 2019, there have been multiple injuries by fall, fire, or drowning; two deaths; and two missing persons cases. The popular media around Bath, England, quickly decides it's a curse, but is it as simple as that? Is someone behind these fishy incidents?
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Wonderful- but just one thing…
- By GailGSO on 12-08-22
- Showstopper
- Peter Diamond, Book 21
- By: Peter Lovesey
- Narrated by: James Langton
Love the reader
Reviewed: 12-17-22
Lovesey books are great fun. They don’t have to lapse into emotionality nor hyper action to entertain. The author introduces eccentric characters and engaging plots with humorous descriptions and voila - another great read.
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Superhubs
- How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World
- By: Sandra Navidi
- Narrated by: Catherine Fenton
- Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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$uperhubs is a rare, behind-the-scenes look at how the world's most powerful titans, the superhubs, pull the levers of our global financial system. Combining insider's knowledge with principles of network science, Sandra Navidi offers a startling new perspective on how superhubs build their powerful networks and how their decisions impact all our lives. $uperhubs reveals what happens at the exclusive, invitation-only platforms - the World Economic Forum in Davos, the meetings of the International Monetary Fund, think tanks....
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The big controllers
- By Dyvette K Collins on 11-08-18
- Superhubs
- How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World
- By: Sandra Navidi
- Narrated by: Catherine Fenton
Sleight of hand
Reviewed: 12-04-22
As one who observed with shocked disbelief at the impunity of the financial elite for decades, I was greatly enlightened by this book at how they pull it off. The author, using masterful double speak, reveals how human nature and systems result in the monopolization of power by one super-clique such that they loot the public and exonerate themselves at the same time. All the while, the author appears to speak admiringly of the wielders of finance as she lays bare bare how, in plain sight, they rob the world of its assets through simple collusion.
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King Rat
- The Epic Novel of War and Survival
- By: James Clavell
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 15 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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The time is World War II. The place is a brutal prison camp deep in Japanese-occupied territory. Here, within the seething mass of humanity, one man, an American corporal, seeks dominance over both captives and captors alike. His weapons are human courage, unblinking understanding of human weaknesses, and total willingness to exploit every opportunity to enlarge his power and corrupt or destroy anyone who stands in his path.
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Lord of the Flies; Lord of the Rats. One Together
- By J.B. on 08-12-16
- King Rat
- The Epic Novel of War and Survival
- By: James Clavell
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
Clavell’s best and most realistic
Reviewed: 11-24-22
Great book despite the nonsense about 14 year old native girls living to be sex objects.
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