Sustainability Man
- 20
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- 2
- helpful votes
- 29
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G-Man (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
- J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
- By: Beverly Gage
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 36 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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A major new biography of J Edgar Hoover that draws from never-before-seen sources to create a groundbreaking portrait of a colossus who dominated half a century of American history and planted the seeds for much of today's conservative political landscape.
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Amazing!
- By Jessica Armas on 12-06-22
- G-Man (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
- J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
- By: Beverly Gage
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
Compelling portrait of America’s most influential and powerful bureaucrat
Reviewed: 12-11-24
A well written, well narrated, frankly epic biography of the man who managed to stay in power at the head of the FBI from the 1920s to 1970s. It is fair and objective about his flaws and excesses as well as about his skill in building a professional national law enforcement service.
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When the Clock Broke
- Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
- By: John Ganz
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 15 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated, and U.S. power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a “kinder, gentler America.” Instead, it was a period of rising anger and domestic turmoil, anticipating the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today. In When the Clock Broke, the acclaimed political writer John Ganz tells the story of America’s late-century discontents.
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Amazing history of the early 90s
- By Aaron R. Isaacson on 06-25-24
- When the Clock Broke
- Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
- By: John Ganz
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
The best book about Trumpism to date barely even mentions Donald
Reviewed: 08-30-24
An absolutely brilliant book painstakingly tracing a whole tapestry of threads in the early nineties that constituted early symptoms of the cancer of MAGA fascism with which the American body politic has been afflicted since 2016. Many of the connections are so subtly drawn that a reader/listener who has not paid close attention to the horrors of the Trump years may miss some of them, but it is food for thought for all.
There’s David Duke’s mainstreaming of Nazism, John Gotti making NY gangsterism fashionable, right wing police thuggery in LA and NY, Ross Perot building a populist movement on the basis of POW-MIA conspiracy theories and a billionaire’s cash, and more. Honestly the best book on the MAGA phenomenon yet, with its creatively assembled mosaic of the movement’s prehistory. Should be a model for studies of contemporary American politics moving forward.
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1 person found this helpful
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Kissinger
- A Biography
- By: Walter Isaacson
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 34 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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By the time Henry Kissinger was made secretary of state in 1973, he had become, according to a Gallup poll, the most admired person in America and one of the most unlikely celebrities ever to capture the world’s imagination. Yet Kissinger was also reviled by large segments of the American public, ranging from liberal intellectuals to conservative activists. Kissinger explores the relationship between this complex man's personality and the foreign policy he pursued.
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A dissapointment
- By Mike From Mesa on 12-16-13
- Kissinger
- A Biography
- By: Walter Isaacson
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
Reads like a novel
Reviewed: 06-19-24
Isaacson refuses to pull his punches, producing a book that caused Kissinger to not talk with him for years. But neither does he neglect to show his subject’s brilliance and wit - even as he endlessly slams his immorality. The result is a fascinating, entertaining and enlightening book, well worth the listen.
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King: A Life
- By: Jonathan Eig
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 20 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.—and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself.
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My Time
- By Susan on 06-18-23
- King: A Life
- By: Jonathan Eig
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
A great inspiration
Reviewed: 04-01-24
Though I’ve read a number of books about MLK over the years, the man’s life and words always blows me away.
The story that most sticks with me from this book is the one about the speech where a Nazi jumped up from the audience to punch King in the face. MLK dropped his hands, refusing to defend himself and even inviting the man to return to the audience after the attack. I can’t think of anyone so deeply committed to their values in this day and age.
In addition to the engaging writing, the narrator is superb - he does an excellent imitation of King but wisely does not try to imitate the voice of other characters.
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Hero of the Empire
- The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill
- By: Candice Millard
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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At age 24 Winston Churchill was utterly convinced it was his destiny to become prime minister of England one day, despite the fact he had just lost his first election campaign for Parliament. He believed that to achieve his goal, he had to do something spectacular on the battlefield. Despite deliberately putting himself in extreme danger as a British army officer in colonial wars in India and Sudan and as a journalist covering a Cuban uprising against the Spanish, glory and fame had eluded him.
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Far More Than Simply, Hero of the Empire!
- By Matthew on 09-21-16
- Hero of the Empire
- The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill
- By: Candice Millard
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
History written like a novel
Reviewed: 02-10-24
As in her other books, Millard brings this piece of history to sparkling life as if it were a novel, with great character studies, gripping scene setting and beautiful prose. And Churchill is always a fascinating subject.
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The Nutmeg's Curse
- Parables for a Planet in Crisis
- By: Amitav Ghosh
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, The Nutmeg’s Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation—of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis.
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performance....
- By Bonnie on 11-15-22
- The Nutmeg's Curse
- Parables for a Planet in Crisis
- By: Amitav Ghosh
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
A brilliant, challenging work
Reviewed: 01-15-24
At a time when a determined minority of the US is trying to shut down even the most benign education of our children about the history of race and racism, here comes Ghosh’s book which pulls no punches while pulling back the curtain on the linked history of colonialism and the destruction of the environment - the subjugation of human beings and of nature working hand in hand.
Brace yourself - this is not easy stuff to listen to, as he delves into true stories of genocide as well as ecoside that have many of our ancestors’ fingerprints on them.
But the brilliance of his analysis make the ride worthwhile - I particularly admired how he repurposed the science fiction conceit into a concept to explain colonial history. Here in the US, we wiped out the buffalo and all those old growth forests and thereby both destroyed and remade the environment in which the Native American lived and thrived.
The narrator is good except when he tries to twist his British accent to imitate an American, at which times his voice sounds kind of awful.
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Built from the Fire
- The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street; One Hundred Years in the Neighborhood That Refused to Be Erased
- By: Victor Luckerson
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 19 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his family joined a community soon to become the center of black life in the West. But just a few years later, on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood, laying waste to thirty-five blocks and murdering as many as three hundred people in one of the worst acts of racist violence in U.S. history. The Goodwins and their neighbors soon rebuilt the district into “a Mecca,” in Ed’s words, where nightlife thrived and small businesses flourished. E
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Brilliant and Moving
- By Peter Riley on 07-24-23
- Built from the Fire
- The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street; One Hundred Years in the Neighborhood That Refused to Be Erased
- By: Victor Luckerson
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
Drawing hope from the ashes of tragedy
Reviewed: 12-19-23
It is impossible to fully understand American history without grappling with the violent extremes to which racism has driven some and the incredible hurdles and traumas that others have had to fight their way through in order to survive and prosper. This engaging book is about both.
I know, being Jewish, that historical trauma is a real thing with consequences that extend across generations in ways that it is really hard for those who don’t have such trauma in their psyches to comprehend. This book is about the before, during and after of the Greenwood massacre, an event so senseless and incredible that it is frankly hard to believe such a thing could happen in America.
But it’s not a downer - the massacre takes up about two chapters preceded by the incredible story of black people freed from slavery just 50 years past building their own very business-oriented community. Many chapters follow afterward about the people of Greenwood rebuilding their legacy after having everything stolen away from them.
Though the book is a bit long, I was never bored by this narrative of the life of the black middle class anchored by the incredible Williams family and the newspaper they kept grounded in the community for a century.
Great narrator, BTW - with a flat tone like you’d expect from the storyteller of an old fashioned detective show but with appropriately dramatic intonation when portraying the characters. You really get to see life as they have lived it.
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A Fever in the Heartland
- The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
- By: Timothy Egan
- Narrated by: Timothy Egan
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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The Roaring Twenties—the Jazz Age—has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.
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This is a must read!
- By V. Richmond on 04-14-23
- A Fever in the Heartland
- The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
- By: Timothy Egan
- Narrated by: Timothy Egan
Riveting, searing account of the deep roots of white supremacy in America
Reviewed: 11-11-23
Powerful account of the rise and fall of a major KKK leader in the ‘20s. Hard to stomach at times for its descriptions not only of the repellent racist and antisemitic acts of the Klan but of the lead character’s genuinely beastly assaults on women.
Author does not shrink from discussing the deep roots of prejudice in America and how much the KKK succeeded in putting its platform in place for years afterward, from immigration restrictions to eugenic sterilization. An important reminder that the MAGA movement did not come from nowhere but reflects political currents that have always been present in US society.
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The Supermajority
- How the Supreme Court Divided America
- By: Michael Waldman
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean, Michael Waldman - introduction
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Supermajority, Michael Waldman explores the tumultuous 2021–2022 Supreme Court term. He draws deeply on history to examine other times the Court veered from the popular will, provoking controversy, and backlash. And he analyzes the most important new rulings and their implications for the law and for American society. Waldman asks: What can we do when the Supreme Court challenges the country?
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This should be a serialized media presentation, for the return of some normalization of the Supreme Court.
- By Elaine on 06-08-23
- The Supermajority
- How the Supreme Court Divided America
- By: Michael Waldman
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean, Michael Waldman - introduction
A well-grounding manifesto against the right wing takeover of the SCOTUS
Reviewed: 10-08-23
A solid discussion of how the court got to where it is right now, in the grips of a majority packed and shaped by the right wing. The author does not pull any punches but also backs up his take with tons of historical background and reasoning .
My favorite part of the book was the ongoing mini biographies of each Justice - e.g., how Neil Gorsuch’a perspective was shaped by watching his mom Anne Gorsuch get rightfully hammered for her illegal and immoral efforts to demolish the EPA under the Reagan administration.
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Reagan
- An American Journey
- By: Bob Spitz
- Narrated by: Paul Michael
- Length: 32 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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More than five years in the making, based on hundreds of interviews and access to previously unavailable documents, and infused with irresistible storytelling charm, Bob Spitz's Reagan stands fair to be the first truly post-partisan biography of our 40th president, and thus a balm for our own bitterly divided times. Absorbing and richly detailed, it is a revelatory chronicle of the full arc of Ronald Reagan's epic life - giving full weight to the Hollywood years, his transition to politics and successful run as California governor, and ultimately, his iconic presidency.
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Pretty obvious this was written by a Democrat
- By Amazon Customer on 11-04-19
- Reagan
- An American Journey
- By: Bob Spitz
- Narrated by: Paul Michael
Like a novel
Reviewed: 09-26-23
A terrific listen - the author keeps it interesting as well as fair, with an honest assessment of Reagan’s strengths and weaknesses. The narrator is a perfect choice, with the kind of straightforward, aw shucks delivery that fits the subject like a glove. Thoroughly enjoyable, even for someone like me who can remember almost every major event and issue discussed.
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