The Absolutely Indispensable Man
Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire
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Narrated by:
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Jonathan Todd Ross
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Leon Nixon
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By:
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Kal Raustiala
About this listen
A legendary diplomat, scholar, and civil rights leader, Ralph Bunche was one of the most prominent Black Americans of the twentieth century. The first African American to obtain a political science Ph.D. from Harvard and a celebrated diplomat at the United Nations, he was once so famous he handed out the Best Picture award at the Oscars. Yet today Ralph Bunche is largely forgotten.
In The Absolutely Indispensable Man, Kal Raustiala restores Bunche to his rightful place in history. He shows that Bunche was not only a singular figure in midcentury America; he was also one of the key architects of the postwar international order. Raustiala tells the story of Bunche’s dramatic life, from his early years in prewar Los Angeles to UCLA, Harvard, the State Department, and the heights of global diplomacy at the United Nations. After narrowly avoiding assassination, Bunche received the Nobel Peace Prize for his ground-breaking mediation of the first Arab-Israeli conflict, catapulting him to popular fame. A central player in some of the most dramatic crises of the Cold War, he pioneered conflict management and peacekeeping at the UN. But as Raustiala argues, his most enduring achievement was his work to dismantle European empire. Bunche perceptively saw colonialism as the central issue of the 20th century and decolonization as a project of global racial justice.
From marching with Martin Luther King to advising presidents and prime ministers, Ralph Bunche shaped our world in lasting ways. This definitive biography gives him his due. It also reminds us that postwar decolonization not only fundamentally transformed world politics, but also powerfully intersected with America’s own civil rights struggle.
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Fascinating listen
- By Amy Neff on 12-15-22
By: Robert Gellately
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Europe's Last Summer
- By: David Fromkin
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 10 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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The early summer of 1914 was the most glorious Europeans could remember. But, behind the scenes, the most destructive war the world had yet known was moving inexorably into being, a war that would continue to resonate into the 21st century. The question of how the Great War of 1914 began has long vexed historians. In a gripping narrative, Fromkin shows that hostilities were started deliberately and that two wars were waged, one serving as pretext for the other.
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A different take on the events leading to the Great War
- By Chris on 09-04-20
By: David Fromkin
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Watching Darkness Fall
- FDR, His Ambassadors, and the Rise of Adolf Hitler
- By: David McKean
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 13 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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As German tanks rolled toward Paris in late May 1940, the US Ambassador to France, William Bullitt, was determined to stay put, holed up in the Chateau St. Firmin in Chantilly, his country residence. Bullitt told the president that he would neither evacuate the embassy nor his chateau. As German forces closed in on the French capital, Bullitt wrote the president, "In case I should get blown up before I see you again, I want you to know that it has been marvelous to work for you."
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Interesting book
- By Rodney on 05-29-24
By: David McKean
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Tomorrow, the World
- The Birth of US Global Supremacy
- By: Stephen Wertheim
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
- Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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For most of its history, the US avoided making political and military commitments that would entangle it in European-style power politics. Then, suddenly, it conceived a new role for itself as the world’s armed superpower and never looked back. In Tomorrow, the World, Wertheim traces America’s transformation to the crucible of World War II, especially in the months prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. As the Nazis conquered France, the architects of the nation’s new foreign policy came to believe that the US ought to achieve primacy in international affairs forevermore.
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Powerful punch to American dogma.
- By JLK on 06-30-21
By: Stephen Wertheim
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Appeasement
- Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War
- By: Tim Bouverie
- Narrated by: John Sessions
- Length: 22 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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On a wet afternoon in September 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stepped off an airplane and announced that his visit to Hitler had averted the greatest crisis in recent memory. It was, he later assured the crowd in Downing Street, "peace for our time." Less than a year later, Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began. Appeasement is a groundbreaking history of the disastrous years of indecision, failed diplomacy, and parliamentary infighting that enabled Hitler's domination of Europe.
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I cannot tolerate the narrator
- By DrBCFR on 06-05-19
By: Tim Bouverie
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Can We Talk About Israel?
- A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted
- By: Daniel Sokatch
- Narrated by: Daniel Sokatch
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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'Can’t you just explain the Israel situation to me? In, like, 10 minutes or less?' This is the question Daniel Sokatch is used to answering on an almost daily basis as the head of the New Israel Fund, an organization dedicated to equality and democracy for all Israelis, not just Jews. Can We Talk About Israel? is the story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, grappling with a century-long struggle between two peoples that both perceive themselves as (and indeed are) victims.
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Not completely sincere in its promise
- By Buretto on 10-30-21
By: Daniel Sokatch
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The Death of Democracy
- Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic
- By: Benjamin Carter Hett
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 11 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Why did democracy fall apart so quickly and completely in Germany in the 1930s? How did a democratic government allow Adolf Hitler to seize power? In this dramatic audiobook, Benjamin Carter Hett answers these questions, and the story he tells has disturbing resonances for our own time. Benjamin Carter Hett is one of America’s leading scholars of 20th-century Germany and a gifted storyteller whose portraits of the feckless politicians of the Weimar Republic show how fragile democracy can be when those in power do not respect it.
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I can't trust the author's account of these events
- By Example: Mark Twain on 11-10-19
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The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
- A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917--2017
- By: Rashid Khalidi
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi, Rashid Khalidi - introduction
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members - mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists - The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age.
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Thoroughly Researched and Evidence-Based, but...
- By K on 05-24-21
By: Rashid Khalidi
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Armed Struggle
- The History of the IRA
- By: Richard English
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 20 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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The IRA has been a much richer, more complexly layered, and more protean organization than is frequently recognized. It is also more open to balanced examination now - at the end of its long war in the north of Ireland - than it was even a few years ago. Richard English's brilliant audiobook offers a detailed history of the IRA, providing invaluable historical depth to our understanding of the modern-day Provisionals, the more militant wing formed in 1969 dedicated to the removal of the British Government from Northern Ireland and the reunification of Ireland.
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A comprehensive history of the IRA
- By Stefan Filipovits on 02-04-20
By: Richard English
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Fascism
- A Warning
- By: Madeleine Albright
- Narrated by: Madeleine Albright
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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At the end of the 1980s, when the Cold War ended, many, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, believed that democracy had triumphed politically once and for all. Yet nearly 30 years later, the direction of history no longer seems certain. A repressive and destructive force has begun to reemerge on the global stage - sweeping across Europe, parts of Asia, and the United States - that to Albright, looks very much like fascism.
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Warning!
- By JAL on 04-19-18
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Revolutionary Iran
- A History of the Islamic Republic
- By: Michael Axworthy
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 19 hrs
- Unabridged
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The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was a defining moment of the modern era. Its success unleashed a wave of Islamist fervor across the Middle East and signaled a sharp decline in the appeal of Western ideologies in the Islamic world. Michael Axworthy takes listeners through the major periods in Iranian history over the last 30 years: the overthrow of the old regime and the creation of the new one; the Iran-Iraq war; the reconstruction era following the war; the reformist wave led by Mohammed Khatami; and the present day, in which reactionaries have re-established control.
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Questionable Narration
- By Arya Pourtabatabaie on 07-17-21
By: Michael Axworthy
What listeners say about The Absolutely Indispensable Man
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- PCDB
- 11-06-23
Excellent - History & Human
An awesome walk through the development of the early United Nations, via the exploration of the successes and tribulations of Ralph Bunche. Bunche’s work at the UN touches on many foundations of the modern world, including the end of colonialism which created the modern Middle East and Africa (a lively and violent history) and, particularly prominent to readers in this moment, Israel. Bunche’s life at the front of international affairs also crosses over with the domestic civil rights movement, and with the cultural understanding of the world from within the United States. Beyond the global, it’s a compelling story about a striving man, whose arena was generally one of peace and political achievement in international cooperation, rather than personal power, wealth, or acclaim (although Bunche seems to have had the last as his most personally attractive vice - don’t we all have at least one!).
I strongly recommend giving it a read, even if only for the look inside the early Israel state from an American’s perspective.
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- PD
- 04-07-23
Best book I have listened to in a while!
A great book. Great narrator and subject. Clearly an indispensable man, a man I knew nothing about. He was present at so many important moments. A great education on post war diplomacy. I have been pestering my family to read it so we can talk about it. Generally the book has to be amazing for me to pester them.
Everyone interested in 20th Century history should read it.
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- Anonymous User
- 06-12-23
Indispensable information in international institutions
Absolutely top notch coverage of the growth of the organizations for peace on earth and the era that birthed them. Indispensable to look at this part of the past if we are to keep an international system for the future.
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