
Beyond
The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space
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Narrated by:
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David Rintoul
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By:
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Stephen Walker
About this listen
“This remarkable account of the 1961 race into space is a thrilling piece of storytelling.... It is high definition history: tight, thrilling, and beautifully researched.” (The Times, London, front-page lead review)
“Beyond has the exhilaration of a fine thriller, but it is vividly embedded in the historic tensions of the Cold War, and peopled by men and women brought sympathetically, and sometimes tragically, to life.” (Colin Thubron, author of Shadow of the Silk Road)
09.07 am. April 12, 1961. A top secret rocket site in the USSR. A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile - originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead - and blasts into the skies. His name is Yuri Gagarin. And he is about to make history.
Travelling at almost 18,000 miles per hour - 10 times faster than a rifle bullet - Gagarin circles the globe in just 106 minutes. From his windows, he sees the Earth as nobody has before, crossing a sunset and a sunrise, crossing oceans and continents, witnessing its beauty and its fragility. While his launch begins in total secrecy, within hours of his landing, he has become a world celebrity - the first human to leave the planet.
Beyond tells the thrilling story behind that epic flight on its 60th anniversary. It happened at the height of the Cold War as the US and USSR confronted each other across an Iron Curtain. Both superpowers took enormous risks to get a man into space first, the Americans in the full glare of the media, the Soviets under deep cover. Both trained their teams of astronauts to the edges of the endurable. In the end, the race between them would come down to the wire.
Drawing on extensive original research and the vivid testimony of eyewitnesses, many of whom have never spoken before, Stephen Walker unpacks secrets that were hidden for decades and takes the listener into the drama of one of humanity’s greatest adventures - to the scientists, engineers, and political leaders on both sides, and, above all, to the American astronauts and their Soviet rivals battling for supremacy in the heavens.
©2021 Stephen Walker (P)2021 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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A wonderful Biography, I feel like I know him.
- By Nebbie on 12-18-21
By: Richard Rhodes
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Spearhead
- An American Tank Gunner, His Enemy, and a Collision of Lives in World War II
- By: Adam Makos
- Narrated by: Johnathan McClain
- Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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From the author of the international best seller A Higher Call comes the riveting World War II story of an American tank gunner’s journey into the heart of the Third Reich, where he will meet destiny in an iconic armor duel - and forge an enduring bond with his enemy.
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Excellent
- By Msgr. John R. McGrath on 03-11-19
By: Adam Makos
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Wild Ride
- A Memoir of I.V. Drips and Rocket Ships
- By: Hayley Arceneaux
- Narrated by: Hayley Arceneaux
- Length: 5 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In this boldly optimistic debut memoir, Hayley Arceneaux details how she overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to grab hold of a life greater than she’d ever imagined. With her signature upbeat messaging, Arceneaux recounts her odyssey, from her cancer diagnosis at age ten and the yearlong treatment that inspired her goal of working with pediatric cancer patients, to living through her father’s terminal cancer diagnosis, to getting her lifelong dream job at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as a physician assistant.
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Great outsider’s perspective on splaceflight
- By JUSTIN on 11-10-24
By: Hayley Arceneaux
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His Truth Is Marching On
- John Lewis and the Power of Hope
- By: Jon Meacham, John Lewis - afterword
- Narrated by: JD Jackson, Jon Meacham
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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An intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and longtime US congressman John Lewis, linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present - from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of America.
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Absolutely remarkable!
- By Janie on 08-30-20
By: Jon Meacham, and others
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The Abyss
- Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962
- By: Max Hastings
- Narrated by: Max Hastings, John Hopkins
- Length: 19 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Bestselling author Max Hastings offers a welcome re-evaluation of one of the most gripping and tense international events in modern history—the Cuban Missile Crisis—providing a people-focused narrative that explores the attitudes and conduct of Russians, Cubans, Americans, and a terrified world that followed each moment as it unfolded.
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Good book, but has some issues
- By Mike From Mesa on 11-10-22
By: Max Hastings
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Becoming Dr. Q
- My Journey from Migrant Farm Worker to Brain Surgeon
- By: Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, Mim Eichler Rivas
- Narrated by: Henry Levya
- Length: 13 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Today he is known as Dr. Q, an internationally renowned neurosurgeon and neuroscientist who leads cutting-edge research to cure brain cancer. But not too long ago, he was Freddy, a 19-year-old undocumented migrant worker toiling in the fields of Central California. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa tells his amazing life story - from his impoverished childhood in the tiny village of Palaco, Mexico, to his harrowing border crossing and his transformation from illegal immigrant to American citizen and gifted student at the University of California at Berkeley and at Harvard Medical School.
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Thank Heaven for Mexican Immigrants
- By DiK on 06-01-24
By: Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, and others
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The Last Season
- By: Eric Blehm
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Destined to become a classic of adventure literature, The Last Season examines the extraordinary life of legendary backcountry ranger Randy Morgenson and his mysterious disappearance in California's unforgiving Sierra Nevada - mountains as perilous as they are beautiful. Eric Blehm's masterful work is a gripping detective story interwoven with the riveting biography of a complicated, original, and wholly fascinating man.
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Well Written Character Study of an NPS Ranger
- By Kathy in CA on 06-23-16
By: Eric Blehm
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Call Sign Chaos
- Learning to Lead
- By: Jim Mattis, Bing West
- Narrated by: Danny Campbell
- Length: 12 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Call Sign Chaos is the account of Jim Mattis’ storied career, from wide-ranging leadership roles in three wars to ultimately commanding a quarter of a million troops across the Middle East. Along the way, Mattis recounts his foundational experiences as a leader, extracting the lessons he has learned about the nature of warfighting and peacemaking, the importance of allies, and the strategic dilemmas - and short-sighted thinking - now facing our nation.
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A pleasant surprise
- By Fountain of Chris on 09-06-19
By: Jim Mattis, and others
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Gideon's Promise
- A Public Defender Movement to Transform Criminal Justice
- By: Jonathan Rapping
- Narrated by: Frank Gerard
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Combining wisdom drawn from over a dozen years as a public defender and cutting-edge research in the fields of organizational and cultural psychology, Jonathan Rapping proposes a radical cultural shift to a “fiercely client-based ethos” driven by values-based recruitment training, awakening defenders to their role in upholding an unjust status quo, and a renewed pride in the essential role of moral lawyering in a democratic society.
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A professional ethic for public defenders
- By Amazon Customer on 03-23-24
By: Jonathan Rapping
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Indianapolis
- By: Lynn Vincent, Sara Vladic
- Narrated by: John Bedford Lloyd
- Length: 18 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Just after midnight on July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis is sailing alone in the Philippine Sea when she is sunk by two Japanese torpedoes. For the next five nights and four days, almost 300 miles from the nearest land, nearly 900 men battle injuries, sharks, dehydration, insanity, and eventually each other. Only 316 will survive. Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic tell the complete story of the ship, her crew, and their final mission to save one of their own.
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As good as In Harm's Way but different
- By tru britty on 07-13-18
By: Lynn Vincent, and others
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Abe
- Abraham Lincoln in His Times
- By: David S. Reynolds
- Narrated by: Leon Nixon
- Length: 33 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Abraham Lincoln did not come out of nowhere. But if he was shaped by his times, he also managed at his life's fateful hour to shape them to an extent few could have foreseen. Ultimately, this is the great drama that astonishes us still, and that Abe brings to fresh and vivid life. The measure of that life will always be part of our American education.
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A Cultural History is not a biography
- By Marc M. Sager on 11-09-20
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Five Families
- The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires
- By: Selwyn Raab
- Narrated by: Paul Costanzo
- Length: 33 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Genovese, Gambino, Bonnano, Colombo, and Lucchese. For decades these Five Families ruled New York and built the American Mafia (or Cosa Nostra) into an underworld empire. Today, the Mafia is an endangered species, battered and beleaguered by aggressive investigators, incompetent leadership, betrayals, and generational changes that produced violent, unreliable leaders and recruits.
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7326451
- By Mark on 10-13-16
By: Selwyn Raab
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The Plague Year
- America in the Time of COVID
- By: Lawrence Wright
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19 - its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it.
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Best book about Covid-19 I’ve read so far
- By KarenT on 06-11-21
By: Lawrence Wright
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Professional Troublemaker
- The Fear-Fighter Manual
- By: Luvvie Ajayi Jones
- Narrated by: Luvvie Ajayi Jones
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Luvvie Ajayi Jones is known for her trademark wit, warmth, and perpetual truth-telling. But even she's been challenged by the enemy of progress known as fear. She was once afraid to call herself a writer, and nearly skipped out on doing a TED talk that changed her life because of imposter syndrome. As she shares in Professional Troublemaker, she's not alone.
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I’m missing something
- By Cheval Violet on 04-22-21
One of the best non-fiction thrillers
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Insightful and engaging
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Space Fan
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This narrative telling of Yuri’s experience juxtaposed with the US Astronauts like Glen and Shepard is truly remarkable.
Great research, insight and story weaving that create a sense of urgency and magnitude. When Yuri is about to blast off you become glued to the narrator and when the rocket finally bursts off the ground I yelled out loud in jubilation. Highly recommend.
Terrific story and performance.
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The Soviet story was interesting
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Riveting
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A true "untold story"
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A Fantastic reading!
The book covers the American space program of the early 1960’s also.
What a Ride!!
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riskier venture than we ever knew
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The Story Not Told In School
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