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"The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great" by Susan Casey Length: 10 hours and 51 min. ISBN: 1-4159-2029-X New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

Travel 30 miles north, south, or east of San Francisco city hall and you’ll be engulfed in a landscape of thick traffic, fast enterprise, and $6 cappuccinos. Venture 30 miles due west, however, and you will find yourself on what is virtually another planet: a spooky cluster of rocky islands called the Farallones.

Journalist Susan Casey was in her living room when she first glimpsed this strange place and its resident sharks, their dark fins swirling around a tiny boat in a documentary. These great whites were the alphas among alphas, the narrator said, some of them topping 18 feet in length, and each fall they congregated here off the northern California coast. That so many of these magnificent and elusive animals lived in the 415 area code, crisscrossing each other under the surface like jets stacked in a holding pattern, seemed stunningly improbable and irresistible. Casey knew she had to see them for herself.

Within a matter of months she was in a 17-foot Boston Whaler, being hoisted up a cliff to face onto the barren surface of Southeast Farallon Island, part of the group known to 19th-century sailors as the “Devil’s Teeth”. There she joined the two biologists who study the sharks, bunking down in the island’s one habitable building, a haunted, 120-year-old house spackled with lichen and gull guano. Less than 48 hours later she had her first encounter with the famous, terrifying jaws and was instantly hooked. Curiosity yielded to obsession, and when the opportunity arose to return for a longer stay she jumped at it. But as Casey readied herself for shark season, she had no way of preparing for what she would find among the dangerous, forgotten islands.

The Devil’s Teeth offers a rare glimpse into the lives of nature’s most mysterious predators, and of those who follow them. Here is a vivid dispatch from an otherworldly outpost, a story of crossing the boundary between society and an untamed place where humans are neither wanted nor needed.

Tags: the devil’s teeth: a true story of obsession and survival among america’s great white sharks, susan casey, science, travel and adventure, a true story of obsession and survival among america’s great white sharks, farallones islands, san francisco, california

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"Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indo" by Elizabeth Gilbert Length: 12 hours and 49 min. ISBN: 0-14-305852-5 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

Around the time Elizabeth Gilbert turned 30, she went through an early-onslaught midlife crisis. She had everything an educated, ambitious American woman was supposed to want: a husband, a house, a successful career. But instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she was consumed with panic, grief, and confusion. She went through a divorce, a crushing depression, another failed love, and the eradication of everything she ever thought she was supposed to be.

To recover from all this, Gilbert took a radical step. In order to give herself the time and space to find out who she really was and what she really wanted, she got rid of her belongings, quit her job, and undertook a yearlong journey around the world, all alone. Eat, Pray, Love is the absorbing chronicle of that year. Her aim was to visit three places where she could examine one aspect of her own nature set against the backdrop of a culture that has traditionally done that one thing very well. In Rome, she studied the art of pleasure, learning to speak Italian and gaining the 23 happiest pounds of her life. India was for the art of devotion, and with the help of a native guru and a surprisingly wise cowboy from Texas, she embarked on four uninterrupted months of spiritual exploration. In Bali, she studied the art of balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence. She became the pupil of an elderly medicine man and also fell in love the best way, unexpectedly.

An intensely articulate and moving memoir of self-discovery, Eat, Pray, Love is about what can happen when you claim responsibility for your own contentment and stop trying to live in imitation of society’s ideals. It is certain to touch anyone who has ever woken up to the unrelenting need for change.

Tags: eat, pray, love: one woman’s search for everything across italy, india, and indonesia, elizabeth gilbert, bios & memoirs, travel & adventure, one woman’s search for everything across italy, india, and indonesia, best of 2006

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"The Places in Between" by Rory Stewart Length: 8 hours and 39 min. ISBN: 1-428-1167-02 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

In January 2002, Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan, surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day, he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers’ floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders, and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion: a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan’s first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following. Through these encounters, by turns touching, confounding, surprising, and funny, Stewart makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map’s countless “places in between”.

Tags: the places in between, rory stewart, travel & adventure, afghanistan, journey, walking, taliban, villagers, dog

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"My Life in France" by Julia Child and Alex Prud'Homme Length: 11 hours and 17 min. ISBN: 1-4159-2724-3 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

In her own words, here is the captivating story of Julia Child’s years in France, where she fell in love with French food and found “her true calling”.

From the moment the ship docked in Le Havre in the fall of 1948 and Julia watched the well-muscled stevedores unloading the cargo to the first perfectly soigne meal that she and her husband, Paul, savored in Rouen en route to Paris, where he was to work for the USIS, Julia had an awakening that changed her life. Soon this tall, outspoken gal from Pasadena, California, who didn’t speak a word of French and knew nothing about the country, was steeped in the language, chatting with purveyors in the local markets, and enrolled in the Cordon Bleu.

After managing to get her degree despite the machinations of the disagreeable directrice of the school, Julia started teaching cooking classes herself, then teamed up with two fellow gourmettes, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, to help them with a book they were trying to write on French cooking for Americans. Throwing herself heart and soul into making it a unique and thorough teaching book, only to suffer several rounds of painful rejection, is part of the behind-the-scenes drama that Julia reveals with her inimitable gusto and disarming honesty.

This memoir is laced with wonderful stories about the French character, particularly in the world of food, and the way of life that Julia embraced so wholeheartedly. Above all, she reveals the kind of spirit and determination, the sheer love of cooking, and the drive to share that with her fellow Americans that made her the extraordinary success she became.

Le voici. Et bon appetit!

Tags: my life in france, julia child and alex prud’homme, bios & memoirs, travel & adventure, cuisine, food, paris, mastering the art of french cooking

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"Wild Ducks Flying Backward: The Short Writings of Tom Robbins" by Tom Robbins Length: 7 hours and 39 min. ISBN: 0-7393-2175-7 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

Known for his meaty seriocomic novels, expansive works that are simultaneously lowbrow and highbrow, Tom Robbins has also published over the years a number of short pieces, predominantly nonfiction. His travel articles, essays, and tributes to actors, musicians, sex kittens, and thinkers have appeared in publications ranging from Esquire to Harper’s, from Playboy to The New York Times, High Times, and Life. A generous sampling, collected here for the first time and including works as diverse as scholarly art criticism and some decidedly untypical country music lyrics, Wild Ducks Flying Backward offers a rare sweeping overview of the eclectic sensibility of an American original.

Whether he is rocking with the Doors, depoliticizing Picasso’s Guernica, lamenting the angst-ridden state of contemporary literature, or drooling over tomato sandwiches and a species of womanhood he calls “the genius waitress,” Robbins’s briefer writings often exhibit the same five traits that perhaps best characterize his novels: an imaginative wit, a cheerfully brash disregard for convention, a sweetly nasty eroticism, amystical but keenly observant eye, and an irrepressible love of language.

Embedded in this primarily journalistic compilation are a couple of short stories, a sheaf of largely unpublished poems, and an off-beat assessment of our divided nation. And wherever we open Wild Ducks Flying Backward, we’re apt to encounter examples of the intently serious playfulness that percolates from the mind of a self-described “romantic Zen hedonist” and “stray dog in the banquet halls of culture.”

Tags: wild ducks flying backward: the short writings of tom robbins, tom robbins, arts & leisure, biographies and memoirs, fiction, nonfiction, travel and adventure, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, new york times, high times, life, harper’s, esquire, playboy