Cork Wars
Intrigue and Industry in World War II
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Narrated by:
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Robin J Sitten
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By:
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David A. Taylor
About this listen
In 1940, with German U-boats blockading all commerce across the Atlantic Ocean, a fireball at the Crown Cork and Seal factory lit the sky over Baltimore. The newspapers said you could see its glow as far north as Philadelphia and as far south as Annapolis. Rumors of Nazi sabotage led to an FBI investigation and pulled an entire industry into the machinery of national security as America stood on the brink of war.
In Cork Wars, David Taylor traces this fascinating story through the lives of three men and their families, who were all drawn into this dangerous intersection of enterprise and espionage.
At the heart of this tale is self-made mogul Charles McManus, son of Irish immigrants, who grew up on Baltimore’s rough streets. McManus ran Crown Cork and Seal, a company that manufactured everything from bottle caps to oil-tight gaskets for fighter planes.
Frank DiCara, as a young teenager growing up in Highlandtown, watched from his bedroom window as the fire blazed at the factory. Just a few years later, under pressure to support his family after the death of his father, DiCara quit school and got a job at Crown.
Finally, Melchor Marsa, Catalan by birth, managed Crown Cork and Seal’s plants in Spain and Portugal - and was perfectly placed to be recruited as a spy.
McManus, DiCara, and Marsa were connected by the unique properties of a seemingly innocuous substance. Cork, unrivaled as a sealant and insulator in defense equipment, was crucial to the war effort. From secret missions in North Africa to 4-H clubs growing seedlings in America to secret intelligence agents working undercover in the industry, this audiobook examines cork’s surprising wartime significance.
Taylor weaves this by turns beautiful, dark, and outrageous narrative with the drama of a thriller. From the factory floor to the corner office, Cork Wars is a bold and frightening tale of a forgotten episode of American history.
©2018 David A. Taylor (P)2018 David A. TaylorListeners also enjoyed...
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For fans of Radium Girls and history and WWII buffs, The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line takes you inside the lives and experiences of 15 unknown women heroes from the Greatest Generation, the women who served, fought, struggled, and made things happen during WWII - in and out of uniform, for theirs is a legacy destined to embolden generations of women to come.
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Ending very poorly done
- By Jacqueline Bailey on 10-03-21
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Appetite for America
- Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West - One Meal at a Time
- By: Stephen Fried
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 18 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Appetite for America is the incredible real-life story of Fred Harvey - told in depth for the first time ever. As a young immigrant, Fred Harvey worked his way up from dishwasher to household name. With the verve and passion of Fred Harvey himself, Stephen Fried tells the story of how this visionary built his business from a single lunch counter into a family empire whose marketing and innovations we still encounter in myriad ways. Inspiring, instructive, and hugely entertaining, Appetite for America is historical biography that is as richly rewarding.
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I loved listening to this fabulous story!
- By A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. on 01-27-20
By: Stephen Fried
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The Wolves at the Door
- The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy
- By: Judith Pearson
- Narrated by: Patrice O’Neill
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Virginia Hall left her comfortable Baltimore roots in 1931 to follow a dream of becoming a Foreign Service Officer. After watching Hitler roll over Poland and France, she enlisted to work for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret espionage and sabotage organization. She was soon deployed to occupied France where, if captured, imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Gestapo was all but assured.
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The narrator is ruining the book for me
- By Penni Khandi on 06-19-14
By: Judith Pearson
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Agent Sonya
- Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy
- By: Ben Macintyre
- Narrated by: Ben Macintyre
- Length: 14 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1942, in a quiet village in the leafy English Cotswolds, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. By all accounts, she seemed to be living a simple, unassuming life. Her neighbors in the village knew little about her. They didn’t know that she was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. They didn’t know that her husband was also a spy, or that she was running powerful agents across Europe.
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Wanted to love it
- By Robert Bell on 09-30-20
By: Ben Macintyre
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Our Mothers' War
- American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II
- By: Emily Yellin
- Narrated by: Susan Ericksen
- Length: 18 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Our Mothers' War is an eye-opening and moving portrait of women during World War II, a war that forever transformed the way women participate in American society. Never before has the vast range of women's experiences during this pivotal era been brought together in one book.
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Amazing
- By Sam I on 02-04-22
By: Emily Yellin
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Fulfillment
- Winning and Losing in One-Click America
- By: Alec MacGillis
- Narrated by: Danny Gavigan
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Alec MacGillis’ Fulfillment is not another inside account or exposé of our most conspicuously dominant company. Rather, it is a literary investigation of the America that falls within that company’s growing shadow. As MacGillis shows, Amazon’s sprawling network of delivery hubs, data centers, and corporate campuses epitomizes a land where winner and loser cities and regions are drifting steadily apart, the civic fabric is unraveling, and work has become increasingly rudimentary and isolated.
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Missing some important angles
- By D. Zimmerle on 08-19-21
By: Alec MacGillis
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The Darkest Year
- The American Home Front, 1941-1942
- By: William K. Klingaman
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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The Darkest Year focuses on Americans’ state of mind not only through what they said, but in the day-to-day details of their behavior. William K. Klingaman blends these psychological effects with the changes the war wrought in American society and culture, including shifts in family roles, race relations, economic pursuits, popular entertainment, education, and the arts.
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An important book
- By reader on 10-07-24
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Light and Shadow
- Memoirs of a Spy's Son
- By: Mark Colvin
- Narrated by: Mark Colvin
- Length: 13 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Mark Colvin is a broadcasting legend. He is the voice of ABC Radio’s leading current affairs program PM; he was a founding broadcaster for the groundbreaking youth station Double J; he initiated The World Today program; and he’s one of the most popular and influential journalists in the twittersphere. Mark has been covering local and global events for more than four decades. He has reported on wars, royal weddings and everything in between. In the midst of all this he discovered that his father was an MI6 spy.
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Probably of most interest to Australian readers
- By Robyn on 04-12-17
By: Mark Colvin
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From Warsaw with Love
- Polish Spies, the CIA, and the Forging of an Unlikely Alliance
- By: John Pomfret
- Narrated by: Donald Corren
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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From the award-winning and acclaimed author of The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, From Warsaw with Love tells the epic story of how Polish intelligence officers forged an alliance with the CIA in the twilight of the Cold War. In 1990, soon after the Polish people voted in their first democratic election since the 1930s, the young Polish government sent a veteran spy, who’d battled the West for decades, to rescue six American officers trapped in Baghdad.
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Fascinating and well researched
- By wacek szymkowiak on 07-23-24
By: John Pomfret
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The Rebel and the Kingdom
- The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime
- By: Bradley Hope
- Narrated by: Lee Osorio
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 2000s, Adrian Hong was a soft-spoken Yale undergraduate looking for his place in the world. After reading a harrowing account of life inside North Korea, he realized he had found a cause so pressing that he was ready to devote his life to it. Hong journeyed to China, outwitting Chinese security services as he helped ferry asylum-seeking North Korean escapees to safety. The Rebel and the Kingdom is an exhilarating account of a man who turns his back on the status quo—to instead live boldly by his principles.
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Phenomenal true story
- By NYCdogmomma on 11-13-22
By: Bradley Hope
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Spies in the Family
- An American Spymaster, His Russian Crown Jewel, and the Friendship That Helped End the Cold War
- By: Eva Dillon
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 1975, 17-year-old Eva Dillon's family was living in New Delhi when her father was exposed as a CIA spy. Eva had long believed that her father was a US State Department employee. She had no idea that he was handling the CIA's highest ranking double agent - Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov, a Soviet general whose code name was TOPHAT. Dillon's father and Polyakov had a close friendship that went back years, to their first meeting in Burma in the mid-1960s.
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LOVED it!
- By SaraofDI on 11-06-17
By: Eva Dillon
What listeners say about Cork Wars
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jean
- 12-26-18
Absorbing
This is a book about industrial espionage in 1940 America.
The book is well written and researched. Primarily, this is about the Crown Cork and Seal Company of Baltimore, Maryland. They make everything from bottle caps to oil tight gaskets for automobiles and airplanes. In 1940 the plant in Baltimore blew up. Why and how is the question.
The author tells of the investigation and how important the plant was to the war effort. The author almost writes this as a novel instead of a history book. If you are interested in industrial sabotage or the cork industry in the United States during World War II, this book is for you.
The book is seven hours and fifteen minutes. Robin J. Sitten does a good job narrating the book. Sitten has been narrating audiobooks for over twenty years.
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3 people found this helpful