Author: Frank W. Abagnale
Narrator: Barrett Whitener
Unabridged Nonfiction
Audio Length: 8 hours and 36 min.

Frank W. Abagnale, alias Frank Williams, Robert Conrad, Frank Adams, and Robert Monjo, was one of the most daring conmen, forgers, imposters, and escape artists in history. In his brief but notorious criminal career, Abagnale donned a pilot's uniform and copiloted a Pan Am jet, masqueraded as the supervising resident of a hospital, practiced law without a license, passed himself off as a college sociology professor, and cashed over $2.5 million in forged checks, all before he was 21. Known by the police of 26 foreign countries and all 50 states as "The Skywayman," Abagnale lived a sumptuous life on the lam - until the law caught up with him. Now recognized as the nation's leading authority on financial foul play, Abagnale is a charming rogue whose hilarious, stranger-than-fiction international escapades and ingenious escapes - including one from an airplane - make Catch Me If You Can an irresistible tale of deceit. It's also a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks.

©1980 Frank Abagnale, Jr.; (P)2001 Blackstone Audiobooks

Author: James Patterson
Narrator: Peter J. Fernandez and Michael Emerson
Unabridged Fiction
Audio Length: 7 hours and 46 min.

Detective Alex Cross is on his way to resign from the Washington, D.C. Police Force when his partner shows up at his door with a case he can't refuse. One of John Sampson's oldest friends, from their days together in Vietnam, has been arrested for murder. Worse yet, he is subject to the iron hand of the United States Army. The evidence against him is strong enough to send him to the gas chamber.

Sampson is certain his friend has been framed, and Alex's investigation turns up evidence overlooked - or concealed - by the military authorities. Drawing on their years of street training and an almost telepathic mutual trust, Cross and Sampson go deep behind military lines to confront the most ruthless - and deadliest - killers they have ever encountered. Behind these three highly skilled killing machines there appears to be an even more threatening controller. Discovering the identity of this lethal genius will prove to be Cross' most terrifying challenge ever.

On his visits home, Alex must confront another, more disturbing mystery: what's the matter with Nana Mama? As he explores the possibility of a relationship with a woman who offers him new hope, Alex must also face the fact that his beloved grandmother is only human.

©2002 James Patterson, All Rights Reserved; (P)2002 Time Warner AudioBooks, a Division of the AOL Time Warner Book Group

Author: Jonathan Franzen
Narrator: Dylan Baker
Abridged Fiction
Audio Length: 9 hours

After almost 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly in his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain on an affair with a married man - or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.

Stretching from the Midwest at midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today, The Corrections brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental health care, and globalized greed. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it confirms Jonathan Frazen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.

©2001 Jonathan Franzen; (P)2001 Simon & Schuster Inc.; AUDIOWORKS Is an Imprint of Simon & Schuster Audio Division, Simon & Schuster Inc.

Author: Henry N. Raymond
Audio Original Nonfiction
Audio Length: 3 hours

The Learn in Your Car language series is the first system ever designed to teach a language in your car...or anywhere...without a textbook. Simple and effective, you can learn to converse in another language while driving, walking, or doing tasks around the house. And now with Learn in Your Car from audible.com, you can turn your PC, your Rio, or any mobile device into your own personal language tutor.

Each course is organized the way you learn best - by learning words and phrases - and building these into sentences and clear conversations. Arrange hotel accommodations, order in restaurants, change money, and feel more at home next time you travel!

The Learn in Your Car language series is:

• Easy to use without a textbook
• Prepared by dialect-free professionals
• Available in levels for students of all abilities
• Designed to teach grammar basics through recorded examples

Level 1 offers an introduction to key words, numbers, phrases, sentence structure, and basic grammar.
Level 2 teaches more challenging vocabulary, additional grammar, and targeted sentences designed to generate confidence in your ability to comprehend and converse.
Level 3 presents expanded vocabulary, advanced grammar, and more detailed sentences to extend your conversational skills.

Author: Laura Hillenbrand
Narrator: Campbell Scott
Abridged Nonfiction
Audio Length: 6 hours

Seabiscuit was a rough-hewn, undersized horse with a sad little tail and knees that wouldn't straighten all the way. For two years, he fought his trainers and floundered at the lowest level of racing, misunderstood and mishandled, before his dormant talent was discovered by three men. One was Red Pollard, a failed prizefighter and failing jockey. Another was Tom Smith, "The Lone Plainsman," an enigmatic mustang breaker who had come from the vanishing frontier, bearing generations of lost wisdom about the secrets of horses. The third was a cavalry veteran named Charles Howard, a former bicycle repairman who had made a fortune by introducing the automobile to the American West.

In the summer of 1936, Howard bought Seabiscuit for a bargain-basement price and entrusted him to Smith and Pollard. Using frontier training methods that raised eyebrows on the backstretch, they discovered that beneath the hostility and fear was a gentlemanly horse with keen intelligence, awe-inspiring speed, and a ferocious competitive will. Competing in the cruelest years of the Depression, the rags-to-riches horse emerged as an American cultural icon, drawing an immense and fanatical following, inspiring an avalanche of merchandising, and establishing himself as the single biggest newsmaker of 1938 - receiving more coverage than FDR or Hitler.

Laura Hillenbrand beautifully renders this breathtaking saga of one horse's journey from also-ran to national luminary. Seabiscuit: An American Legend is an inspiring tale of unlikely heroes, a classic story of three embattled individuals overcoming the odds in the Great Depression.

©2001 Laura Hillenbrand; (P)2001 Random House, Inc.

Author: Michael Moore
Narrator: Arte Johnson
Unabridged Nonfiction
Audio Length: 7 hours and 48 min.

The government has been seized by a ne'er-do-well rich boy and his elderly henchmen...Our great economic expansion is unraveling faster than a set of Firestones...Our water is poisoned, the ozone's in shreds, and the SUVs are advancing like a plague of locusts...

Remember when everything was looking up? When the government was running at a surplus, pollution was disappearing, peace was breaking out in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, and the Bridge to the Twenty-First Century was strung with high-speed Internet cable and paved with 401K gold?

Well, so much for the future. Michael Moore, the award-winning provocateur behind Roger & Me and the best seller Downsize This!, now returns to size up the new century - and that big, ugly special-interest group that's laying waste to the world as we know it: stupid white men.

Whether he's calling for United Nations action to overthrow the Bush Family Junta, begging African-Americans to place "whites only" signs over the entrances of unfriendly businesses, or praying that Jesse Helms will get kissed by a man, Stupid White Men is Mike's Manifesto on Malfeasance and Mediocrity. Among his targets:

Author: Alan Deutschman
Narrator: Charles Stransky
Unabridged Nonfiction
Audio Length: 8 hours

From the acclaimed Vanity Fair and GQ journalist - an unprecedented, in-depth portrait of the man whose return to Apple precipitated one of the biggest turnarounds in business history.

When Steve Jobs became the acting CEO of Apple Computers, it was hemorrhaging more than a billion dollars a year. His return after twelve years of exile to the company he co-founded completely revitalized Apple. With the revolutionary success of the iMac, Apple turned a profit of over $600 million last year.

Based on interviews with scores of people - rivals, colleagues, friends - who have worked with Jobs over the years, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs presents the most revealing portrait yet of this extraordinarily complex man; how and why he almost gave up his career; the details of his negotiations with Disney's Jeffrey Kaztenberg and Michael Eisner and of the culture clash between Silicon Valley and Hollywood; his methods of leadership, management, creativity, and innovation; his friendship and rivalry with Bill Gates - and much more.

Since the early days of Apple, Steve Jobs has captivated the public. Now, as Jobs prepares to conquer Hollywood with his enormously successful animation film studio, Pixar, Alan Deutschman brings listeners what will be one of the most talked-about business audios of the year.

Alan Deutschman is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. For the past twelve years, he has covered business and technology. He was a correspondent for Fortune for seven years, a senior writer at GQ, and a contributing editor at New York magazine.

Author: Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan
Narrator: John Bedford Lloyd
Unabridged Nonfiction
Audio Length: 8 hours and 10 min.

The audio that shows how to get the job done and deliver results...whether you're running an entire company or in your first management job.

Larry Bossidy is one of the world's most acclaimed CEOs, with a track record for delivering results. Ram Charan is a legendary adviser to senior executives and boards of directors, a man with unparalleled insight into why some companies are successful and others are not. Together they've pooled their knowledge and experience into one guide on how to close the gap between results promised and results delivered.

The discipline of execution means understanding how to link together people, strategy, and operations, the three core processes of every business. Leading these processes is the real job of running a business, not formulating a "vision" and leaving the work of carrying it out to others. Bossidy and Charan show the importance of being deeply and passionately engaged in an organization and why robust dialogues about people, strategy, and operations result in a business based on intellectual honesty and realism.

The leader's most important job - selecting and appraising people - is one that should never be delegated. As a CEO, Larry Bossidy personally makes the calls to check references for key hires. Why? With the right people in the right jobs, there's a leadership gene pool that conceives and selects strategies that can be executed. People then work together to create a strategy building block by building block, a strategy in sync with the realities of the marketplace, the economy, and the competition. Once the right people and strategy are in place, they are then linked to an operating process that results in the implementation of specific programs and actions and that assigns accountability. This kind of effective operating process goes way beyond the typical budget exercise that looks into a rearview mirror to set its goals. It puts reality behind the numbers and is where the rubber meets the road.

Author: Tom Clancy
Narrator: Dennis Boutsikaris
Abridged Fiction
Audio Length: 5 hours and 34 min.

In the early 1980s, long before he was President or head of the CIA, even before a submarine named Red October crossed the Atlantic, Jack Ryan was an historian, teacher, and recent ex-Marine temporarily living in England. A series of deadly encounters with an IRA splinter group had brought him to the attention of the CIA's Deputy Director, Vice Admiral James Greer - and when Greer asked him to come aboard Jack was quick to accept. The opportunity was irresistible.

Then Jack forgot about the rest of his work, because on his first day, an extraordinary document crossed his desk. The new Pope had just delivered a private ultimatum to Warsaw: If the government persisted in its repression, he would feel compelled to resign the papacy and return to Poland.

That was going to have consequences.

In Moscow, another man was contemplating those very same consequences. Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the KGB, did not like what this meant for him or for his nation. All it took was one man to cause everything he had worked for to crumble...and all it took was one man to stop him. The Pope was very powerful - but he was also mortal.

And so it begins, an almost unthinkable plot - a plan to bring down not just leaders, but nations. Ryan will find himself in the middle of a chain reaction, a high-stakes game meant to shake the world...and in which a novice CIA analyst might just be out of his depth.

©2002 Rubicon Inc., (P)2002 Random House Inc., Random House Audio, a Division of Random House Inc.

Audio Length: 1 hour and 17 min.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright's testimony before the 9-11 Commission, presented March 23, 2004.

Want to hear more? Listen to Madeleine Albright read her new memoir, Madam Secretary.

©2004 C-SPAN