Miracle in the Andes

On 13 October 1972, the members of a top Uruguayan rugby team were flying over the Andes to play in Chile. Their plane crashed into a mountain and was stranded 11, 000 feet up on an inhospitable glacier. Many died instantly in the crash, including the person sitting next to Nando , but others survived. They had almost no food or suitable equipment to withstand temperatures as low as -35C, and had to eat the bodies of their dead team-mates to survive. With the prospect only of a slow death, and no rescue likely, Nando and one of his friends set off on an impossible journey, walking and climbing for ten days in search of help. Finally, after 72 days, the 16 survivors were brought to safety.

In Her Own Words

Singer Betty Johnson’s extraordinary voice lifted her from the arduous cotton fields of North Carolina to the luxury of Park Avenue.

From the sweet sounds of the Johnson Family Singers, America’s first family of gospel, to the elegant rhythms of her solo career in top venues around the globe, music was the saving force in a difficult life filled with personal hardships and devastating secrets.

Best of Bryson City

Walt Larimore was a young “flatlander” physician with a wife and three-year-old daughter when he set up his first practice in the little mountain hamlet of Bryson City, North Carolina. Schooled in the latest medical technology, the eager doctor discovered that there were some things in rural practice for which medical school just hadn’t prepared him. He found his patients were often his best teachers, and his classroom ranged from hospital corridors and smelly barns to homey kitchens and mountain streams.

Then We Came To The End

The characters in Then We Came to the End cope with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, secret romance, elaborate pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. By day they compete for the best office furniture left behind and try to make sense of the mysterious pro-bono ad campaign that is their only remaining "work."

Freakonomics (Unabridged)

These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much-heralded scholar who studies the riddles of everyday life—from cheating and crime to sports and child-rearing—and whose conclusions turn the conventional wisdom on its head. Thus the new field of study contained in this audiobook: Freakonomics.