Red Plenty
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Narrated by:
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Roger Clark
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By:
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Francis Spufford
About this listen
Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the 20th-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working.
Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.
Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.
©2010 Francis Spufford (P)2017 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Mad scientists have never had it so tough. In super-hero comics, graphic novels, films, TV series, video games, and even works of what may be fiction, they are besieged by those who stand against them, devoid of sympathy for their irrational, megalomaniacal impulses to rule, destroy, or otherwise dominate the world as we know it. It’s just not fair. So those of us who are so twisted and sick that we love mad scientists have created this guide.
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HAND DANCING
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 05-30-15
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Transmission
- By: Hari Kunzru
- Narrated by: Hari Kunzru
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Transmission, Hari Kunzru's new novel of love and lunacy, immigration and immunity, introduces a daydreaming Indian computer geek whose luxurious fantasies about life in America are shaken when he accepts a California job offer.
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Thoroughly Enjoyable
- By Don on 07-11-04
By: Hari Kunzru
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Angelmaker
- By: Nick Harkaway
- Narrated by: Daniel Weyman
- Length: 18 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Joe Spork repairs clocks, a far cry from his late father, a flashy London gangster. But when Joe fixes one particularly unusual device, his life is suddenly upended. Joe's client, Edie Banister, is more than just a kindly old lady - she's a former superspy. And the device? It's a 1950s doomsday machine. And having triggered it, Joe now faces the wrath of both the government and a diabolical South Asian dictator, Edie's old arch-nemesis.
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A cure for the modern cynic
- By Maine Colonial 🌲 on 08-28-12
By: Nick Harkaway
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Single & Single
- By: John le Carré
- Narrated by: Michael Jayston
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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A lawyer from the London finance house of Single & Single is shot dead on a Turkish hillside by people with whom he thought he was in business. A children's magician is asked by his bank to explain the unsolicited arrival of more than five million pounds sterling in his young daughter's modest trust. A freighter bound for Liverpool is boarded by Russian coast guards in the Black Sea. The celebrated London merchant venturer "Tiger" Single disappears into thin air.
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The spy who came back to the bank
- By Darwin8u on 03-12-14
By: John le Carré
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The Year's Top Short SF Novels 5
- By: Cory Doctorow, Ken Liu, John P Murphy, and others
- Narrated by: Tom Dheere, Nancy Linari
- Length: 15 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Short novels are movie-length narratives that may well be the perfect length for science fiction stories. This audio collection presents the best-of-the-best short science fiction novels published in 2014 by current and emerging masters of this vibrant form of storytelling.
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Narrator sounds like Tony Danza
- By Sean on 03-05-16
By: Cory Doctorow, and others
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Welcome to the Monkey House
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: David Strathairn, Maria Tucci, Bill Irwin, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.
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Classic Vonnegut
- By Michael Carrato on 08-17-06
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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London Fields
- By: Martin Amis
- Narrated by: Steven Pacey
- Length: 21 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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The murderee is Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing who is intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts; or the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch. As Nicola leads her suitors towards the precipice, London--and, indeed, the whole world--seems to shamble after them in a corrosively funny novel of complexity and morality.
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Big chewy novel, excellent narration
- By Sand on 08-21-14
By: Martin Amis
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Koko
- Blue Rose Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Peter Straub
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 22 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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KOKO. Only four men knew what it meant. Now they must stop it. They are Vietnam vets — a doctor, a lawyer, a working stiff, and a writer. Very different from each other, they are nonetheless linked by a shared history and a single shattering secret. Now, they have been reunited and are about to embark on a quest that will take them from Washington, D.C., to the graveyards and fleshpots of the Far East to the human jungle of New York.
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7 hours in and I am done
- By bionichands on 01-26-12
By: Peter Straub
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In the First Circle
- By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Harry T. Willets - translator
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 31 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Moscow, Christmas Eve, 1949. The Soviet secret police intercept a call made to the American embassy by a Russian diplomat who promises to deliver secrets about the nascent Soviet Atomic Bomb program. On that same day, a brilliant mathematician is locked away inside a Moscow prison that houses the country's brightest minds. He and his fellow prisoners are charged with using their abilities to sleuth out the caller's identity, and they must choose whether to aid Joseph Stalin's repressive state - or refuse and accept transfer to the Siberian Gulag camps, and almost certain death.
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One of the five finest novels written in the 20th Century
- By Ellis D Vener on 04-08-19
By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and others
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Outstanding... breathtaking
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For three crucial years in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America and around the world as volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Today we're accustomed to remembering the war through Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Robert Capa's photographs. But Adam Hochschild has discovered some less familiar yet far more compelling characters who reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war.
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EXCELLENT ACCOUNTING OF A WORLD POWER'S HISTORY
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In 1945, the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four million strong, 5,000 nuclear-tipped missiles, and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward, the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Its collapse was one of the seismic shifts of the 20th century.
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The Russian war effort to defeat invading Axis powers, an effort that assembled the largest military force in recorded history and that cost the lives of more than twenty-five million Soviet soldiers and civilians, was the decisive factor for securing an Allied victory. Now with access to the wealth of film archives and interview material from Russia used to produce the ten-hour television documentary Russia's War, Richard Overy tackles the many persuasive questions surrounding this conflict.
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It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any one person's or government's control. In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions made by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of the economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for World War II and reverberated for decades.
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interesting insight into interwar period!
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By: Liaquat Ahamed
What listeners say about Red Plenty
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- E
- 12-29-18
communism
turns out, difficult to feel happy while reading. like carrying around a stone, but worth the insights.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Gary Stocker
- 11-28-22
A wonderful, melancholic, and sometimes rather confusing journey through the USSR of the mid 20th century
What I wrote above largely says it all. I found myself very much invested in the story and characters of this book. it left me wanting to delve deeper into historical fiction involving the USSR. My only complaint with the book is that, possibly due to the Russian names, it was sometimes difficult to know when a character popped up later. This is probably less of an issue in the written version because the names are more distinct on paper.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Howard
- 03-30-21
The first book I have read that provided insight
on how the system actually functioned or was made to function by the actors in the USSR. Not a novel nor history or perhaps a bit of both Spufford takes us on a too and fro journey in time within the USSR. From General Secretary Khrushchev to a biologists in a "research city" to an aged functionary with lung cancer we learn how the system actually worked and ruined lives spiritually and economically while it strove for the magical horn of plenty promised by Communism. My favorite storyline was that of the fixer (or whatever you call the anti-salesperson who instead of selling worked sellers to actually sell and provide products to other producers. We learn the perverse incentives that made the system go off the rails, and then watch it happen in almost slow motion! Having read many many books on the USSR, Stalin, Communism and the leadership (including Khruschev's auto-biography) this fantastic book provided the first real insight on how it worked or did not work.
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- Leland Sainty
- 09-16-23
The Soul of Fact
As Spufford quoted elsewhere, “The imagination is the power to disimprison the soul of fact.”
Impressively demonstrated in this work.
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- Jason
- 03-20-24
A riveting novel for history buffs
This is a really entertaining and intriguing novel for those who are interested in Cold War history.
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- Jay J Peters
- 06-24-18
Simple review
Brilliant.
Apparently at least 15 words are required for a valid review. Here goes:
Brilliant.
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10 people found this helpful
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- okriczbyiu
- 05-22-22
Beautifully written, perfectly read
I’d avoided this book, despite hearing glowing reviews of it, for years because I assumed it was some dense work of theory based on the subject matter. I could not have been more wrong. This is a fantastic collection of interwoven stories give a clear-eyed postmortem to the Soviet project in which it tried to compete with capitalism on capitalism’s terms and failed. It shows the successes and failures of the Soviet system not through GDP growth figures or analysis of the productive output of the Soviet Union, but through the stories of people who lived in the system and whose lives were impacted by these successes and failures everyday.
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- A. W. Straub
- 10-23-20
Word cadence and emphasis is a bit monotonous.
The narrator's cadence and word emphasis reminds me a bit of William shatner's rendition of Captain Kirk in the original Star trek.
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- Ethan B Abraham
- 01-05-20
can't stand listening to it
The book seems decent so far but I can't stand the narrator. I think he's American but his reading voice almost sounds fake British mixed with New England snob, and the Russian accents he does are awful. Its basically a series of short stories so you need an enjoyable narrator to propel you through, and this doesn't have it.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Aleksei Poliakov
- 05-04-22
A jumble of loosely related stories
This book goes over a wide variety of topics, starting from describing the childbirth process for 30 minutes, through the chemical process of smoking a cigarette and description of how computers and linear programming specifically works, and ending in detailed description of certain historical events.
Characters come and go as they please, some are introduced once never to appear again, overs randomly appear throughout the book in the most random places, leaving you wondering if it's actually the same person, or a different person with the same name; but ultimately it matters not at all as there is practically no continuity between the chapters anyway.
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3 people found this helpful