Mao Zedong: A Life from Beginning to End
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Narrated by:
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Sean Tivenan
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By:
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Hourly History
About this listen
For a champion of the poor, Mao Zedong was born to a wealthy aristocratic family in Shaoshan, Hunan, China. As an adolescent, he once had to defend his father’s farm during a famine from starving peasants who wished to seize his father's land and steal his grain. This same Mao would later promote a policy of land reform that would give those peasants the green light to violently overthrow the rich land owners all over the Chinese countryside.
Inside you will hear about....
- Where revolution was made
- Mao comes into his own
- Mao the pragmatist
- From Nanking to Pearl Harbor
- Consolidating power
- Mao’s stranglehold
- Mao loses face
- And much more!
Mao Zedong was a Marxist revolutionary wishing to overthrow regimes he viewed as imperialist, and yet Mao, often referred to as the Red Emperor, behaved much like totalitarian emperors of China’s medieval past. Mao was a man of intriguing contradiction. This audiobook takes the time to explore them all.
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In sobering detail, The Korean War chronicles a US home front agitated by Joseph McCarthy, where absolutist conformity discouraged open inquiry and citizen dissent. Cumings incisively ties our current foreign policy back to Korea: an America with hundreds of permanent military bases abroad, a large standing army, and a permanent national security state at home, the ultimate result of a judicious and limited policy of containment evolving into an ongoing and seemingly endless global crusade.
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A real eye-opener
- By Bookworm on 10-09-19
By: Bruce Cumings
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A Brief History of Ukraine
- A Singular People Within the Crucible of Empires
- By: Dominic Haynes
- Narrated by: Jordan Vogt
- Length: 3 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Ukraine is a geographically diverse country with the unfortunate fate of being sandwiched between empires. Though this is frequently explored no further than the global conflicts of the 20th century, in reality, Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination has far deeper roots than most people realize. See the splendor of the Kyivan Rus, gallop with the Golden Horde across the Ukrainian steppe, encounter the legendary Cossacks, and witness the terror of the tsars. From the Romans to the Mongols to the Russians, Ukraine has seen it all and remained uniquely Ukrainian through it all.
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Excellent quick listen
- By Thomas J Anderson on 12-14-23
By: Dominic Haynes
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They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else
- A History of the Armenian Genocide
- By: Ronald Grigor Suny
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 15 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Starting in early 1915, the Ottoman Turks began deporting and killing hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the first major genocide of the 20th century. By the end of the First World War, the number of Armenians in what would become Turkey had been reduced by 90 percent - more than 1,000,000 people. A century later, the Armenian genocide remains controversial but relatively unknown, overshadowed by later slaughters and the chasm separating Turkish and Armenian versions of events.
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Great book, unbiased view finally
- By Raffy Afarian on 10-30-15
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Stalin
- New Biography of a Dictator
- By: Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Nora Seligman Favorov - translator
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 18 hrs
- Unabridged
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This essential biography, by the author most deeply familiar with the vast archives of the Soviet era, offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin, the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves numerous controversies about specific events in the dictator's life while assembling many hundreds of previously unknown letters, memos, reports, and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that altered the course of world history.
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Loved it, but wouldn't want to live it
- By Neil on 01-12-20
By: Oleg V. Khlevniuk, and others
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Vietnam
- A New History
- By: Christopher Goscha
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 23 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In Vietnam, Christopher Goscha tells the full history of Vietnam, from antiquity to the present day. Generations of emperors, rebels, priests, and colonizers left complicated legacies in this remarkable country. Periods of Chinese, French, and Japanese rule reshaped and modernized Vietnam, but so too did the colonial enterprises of the Vietnamese themselves as they extended their influence southward from the Red River Delta.
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Not bad, but not great.
- By Kp on 08-06-18
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A Thousand Hills
- Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It
- By: Stephen Kinzer
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Paul Kagame grew up as a wretched refugee. He and a group of comrades, determined to force their way back home after a generation of exile, designed one of the most audacious covert operations in the history of clandestine war. Then, after taking power, they amazed the world by stabilizing and reviving their devastated country.
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Best Most Comprehensive Work on Rwanda
- By Greg on 07-30-10
By: Stephen Kinzer
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The Vanquished
- Why the First World War Failed to End
- By: Robert Gerwarth
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Vanquished, a highly original and gripping work of history, Robert Gerwarth asks us to think again about the true legacy of the First World War. In large part it was not the fighting on the Western Front that proved so ruinous to Europe's future but the devastating aftermath, as countries on both sides of the original conflict were savaged by revolutions, pogroms, mass expulsions, and further major military clashes.
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little-known period following WWI is illuminated
- By John on 02-16-17
By: Robert Gerwarth
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Stalin, Volume I
- Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928
- By: Stephen Kotkin
- Narrated by: Paul Hecht
- Length: 38 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Volume One of Stalin begins and ends in January 1928 as Stalin boards a train bound for Siberia, about to embark upon the greatest gamble of his political life. He is now the ruler of the largest country in the world, but a poor and backward one, far behind the great capitalist countries in industrial and military power, encircled on all sides. In Siberia, Stalin conceives of the largest program of social reengineering ever attempted.
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Excellent Book But First Time Listener Beware
- By Nostromo on 03-23-15
By: Stephen Kotkin
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Nazi Germany: History in an Hour
- By: Rupert Colley
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 1 hr and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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History for busy people. Nazi Germany, or the Third Reich, was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. Hitler was intent on the supremacy of the Aryan race and persecution of the Jews, which affected every citizen living in Germany at the time. Learn just how and why the Nazi’s rose to power in just one hour.
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Nazi for beginners
- By Jon W Burris on 08-07-12
By: Rupert Colley
What listeners say about Mao Zedong: A Life from Beginning to End
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- KM
- 12-14-18
An understated / careless summary
To me this was not at all a clear overview of the life of the world champion of mass death. Every estimate I've read or heard has put the number of deaths Mao was responsible for at between 40 and 70 million. However this book dances around that pretty central fact. No where does the reader get the picture on that scale! Only near the end in a comment questioning the imagery of Nixon shaking Mao's hand does it address this at all, and even then in a kind of off hand comment about the US President shaking the hand of a man responsible for the death of "millions". At times the writer even made comments that minimized Mao's responsibility for mass killing ... saying Mao didn't "explicitly approve of these things, though he didn't speak out against them"! The same could be said of Hitler in regards to most if not all of the organization and execution of the Holocaust! And those comments, if made, would be equally idiotic. Some of the facts and phrasing was a bit sloppy as well. The atomic bombs were not dropped in 1942, as the writer and everyone else should know. And whether or not Mao was exaggerating about how crowded he was in bed at a point when he was young does not "Remain to be seen" ... if so, when might we see, and who cares to see? I bought several dozen of these 1 hour history books on sale recently, I really hope the rest of them are more carefully written, but this does not bode well ...
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