I recommend the Stuff You Should Know Podcast "The Wind Cries Typhoid Mary": http://castroller.com/Podcasts/StuffYouShould/2635149
Great listen:
How much manure does a horse produce a day: 25 pounds
How many horses were in NYC in 1894: 225,000
How much manure is that a day in NYC: 5.6 million pounds of horse shit a day
Can you imagine how filthy NYC must have been back then? This is pre-sanitation department, they just let it get pounded in to the streets.
Caption from one of the photos: The exam table in the morgue. Note that this was not the autopsy table, which would have been a single-piece lipped table with sluices for the blood to drain. Sadly, this artifact was removed from the island in late 2008.
Similar to your link:
I like the images in the link from the post because you see in the buildings the remnants of the occupants. -Empty rusted chairs, beds etc. You can imagine the sick, quarantined inhabitants living in squalor juxtaposed against what is now a lush and rather beautiful scene. aside: Have you ever listened to the podcast I linked to: "stuff you should know"? You might like it. I have to drive a 6 hour drive today and I cranked out several of them. Their fun and I always come away learning something.
That said, I downloaded one yesterday and made it halfway through. If I get into the habit, I'll revisit this.
I would imagine that even the best of books could be ruined by a bad reader. -Am I right? Do the authors themselves ever read or is it usually an actor?? I just started reading Mythago Wood per Hein and lessismore's suggestion. When I finish it, I'll start down the "audio book" path.
The audiobook treatment of Dan Simmons' Hyperion series is about five different voice actors. While I hated the hell out of Hyperion, I loathed the approach they took. And I've avoided Vernor Vinge's "Fire Upon The Deep" because the narrator sucks so hard. Meanwhile, some readers f'ing rawk. Simon Vance has read a bunch of Richard K Morgan's stuff and he hits it out of the park. Meanwhile, four out of five of the books in The Song of Ice and Fire have been read by Roy Dotrice: http://www.roydotrice.com/ And then, of course, Audible gave away this for Christmas two years ago:
I'm just getting in to the genre, I've read the LOTR and some Harry Potter but the others on the list are new to me. I am currently reading Mythago Wood, which so far I'm enjoying.
I'm reading some J.G. Ballard at the minute because it's architectural but also seems like science fiction/fantasy too and it's really enjoyable. ASOIAF is great, it's more enjoyable that LotR in my opinion as it seems to be a lot more accessible. It may as well have been set in New York gangs instead as the fantasy element is just a setting and it's the politics that drive the narrative. If you're unsure of it you could check out the TV show which I watched first, and subsequently ordered all the books and read them in quick succession (no internet to distract me either).
Audible: 1 credit a month for $15 a month, 2 credits a month for $22.95 a month. Rule of thumb, books over 1000 pages are 2 credits, most other books are 1. And then, they often do "2 for 1" and things like that. I've been an Audible member for four years now. I have 48 days of audiobooks. Granted, by my math I've given them something like a thousand dollars... which makes me feel not particularly bad about ripping lots of things down to mp4 so I can lend them out. I'd upload Game of Thrones except I generally keep my audiobooks at stupid-high resolution so it's 2.9 GB. Sorry.
Cool, I'll check out that series it received some pretty high praise on Amazon.