The Man Who Saved India
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Narrated by:
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B. Andrew
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By:
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Hindol Sengupta
About this listen
There is perhaps no political figure in modern history who did more to secure and protect the Indian nation than Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. But, ironically, 70 years after Patel brought together piece-by-piece the map of India by fusing the princely states with British India to create a new democratic, independent nation, little is understood or appreciated about Patel's enormous contribution to the making of India.
Caricatured in political debate, all the nuances of Patel's difficult life and the daring choices he made are often lost, or worse, used as mere polemic. If Mahatma Gandhi was the spiritual core of India's freedom struggle and Jawaharlal Nehru its romantic idealism, it was Sardar Patel who brought in the vital pragmatism which held together the national movement and the first ideas of independent India. A naturally stoic man, Patel, unlike Gandhi or Nehru, wrote no personal history. He famously argued that its was better to create history than write it. This is why even his deepest misgivings and quarrels have been easily buried.
But every warning that Patel left for India - from the dangers of allowing groups to create private militias to his thoughtful criticism on India's approach to Kashmir, Pakistan, and China - are all dangerously relevant today. It is impossible to hear about Patel, who died in 1950, and not feel that had he lived on, India might have been a different country. It is also impossible to ignore Patel and understand not only what the idea of India is but also what it could have been, and might be in the future.
The Man Who Saved India is a sweeping, magisterial retelling of Sardar Patel's story. With fiercely detailed and pugnacious anecdotes, multiple award-winning, best-selling writer Hindol Sengupta brings alive Patel's determined life of struggle and his furious commitment to keep India safe. This audiobook brings alive all the arguments, quarrels, and clashes between some of the most determined people in Indian history and their battle to carve out an independent nation.
Through ravages of a failing body broken by decades of abuse in and outside prison, Patel stands out in this audiobook as the man who, even on his death bed, worked to save India. Hindol Sengupta's The Man Who Saved India is destined to define Patel's legacy for future generations.
©2018 Hindol Sengupta (P)2019 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"It is dangerous to put dreamers in power. Sardar Patel's pragmatism was the perfect antidote to Nehru's idealism in the early years of Independence. If only Patel had lived longer, India would have been spared the excesses of the License Raj and the Kashmir problem. This is one of the messages of this lively, highly readable book." (Gurcharan Das, best-selling author)
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-
Story
The Palestinian Delusion is unique in situating the Israeli/Palestinian conflict within the context of the global jihad that has found renewed impetus in the latter portion of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Briskly recounting the tumultuous history of the "peace process", Robert Spencer demonstrates that the determination of diplomats, policymakers, and negotiators to ignore this aspect of the conflict has led the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the world down numerous blind alleys. This has often only exacerbated, rather than healed, this conflict.
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The Real Facts
- By Canes580 on 01-25-20
By: Robert Spencer
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Heaven on Earth
- The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism
- By: Joshua Muravchik
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Socialism was man's most ambitious attempt to supplant religion with a doctrine claiming to ground itself in "science". Each failure to create societies of abundance or give birth to "the New Man" inspired more searching for the path to the promised land: revolution, communes, social democracy, communism, fascism, Arab socialism, African socialism. None worked, and some exacted a staggering human toll. Then, after two centuries of wishful thinking and bitter disappointment, socialism imploded in a fin de siecle drama of falling walls and collapsing regimes.
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A biased yet informative masterpiece
- By CodyPeacock12349 on 04-04-21
By: Joshua Muravchik
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Democracy
- Stories from the Long Road to Freedom
- By: Condoleezza Rice
- Narrated by: Grace Angela Henry
- Length: 12 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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From the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union to the ongoing struggle for human rights in the Middle East, Condoleezza Rice has served on the front lines of history. As a child, she was an eyewitness to a third awakening of freedom, when her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, became the epicenter of the civil rights movement for black Americans. In this book, Rice explains what these epochal events teach us about democracy.
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A Case for Democracy
- By Jean on 05-18-17
By: Condoleezza Rice
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The Russian Revolution
- By: Richard Pipes
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 41 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Groundbreaking in its inclusiveness, enthralling in its narrative of a movement whose purpose, in the words of Leon Trotsky, was "to overthrow the world", The Russian Revolution draws conclusions that aroused great controversy. Richard Pipes argues convincingly that the Russian Revolution was an intellectual, rather than a class, uprising; that it was steeped in terror from its very outset; and that it was not a revolution at all but a coup d'etat - "the capture of governmental power by a small minority."
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Destruction of the Lenin Myth
- By philip on 09-08-19
By: Richard Pipes
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The Nazi Menace
- Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War
- By: Benjamin Carter Hett
- Narrated by: Raphael Corkhill
- Length: 14 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Berlin, November 1937. Adolf Hitler meets with his military commanders to impress upon them the urgent necessity for a war of aggression in Eastern Europe. Some generals are unnerved by the Führer’s grandiose plan, but these dissenters are silenced one by one, setting in motion events that will culminate in the most calamitous war in history.
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Bad Melodramatic Reading
- By Tess on 08-18-20
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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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Stalin
- Passage to Revolution
- By: Ronald Grigor Suny
- Narrated by: Robbie Stevens
- Length: 28 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin from his birth to the October Revolution of 1917, a panoramic and often chilling account of how an impoverished, idealistic youth from the provinces of tsarist Russia was transformed into a cunning and fearsome outlaw who would one day become one of the 20th century's most ruthless dictators. In this monumental book, Ronald Grigor Suny sheds light on the least understood years of Stalin's career, bringing to life the turbulent world in which he lived and the extraordinary historical events that shaped him.
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Great
- By Anonymous User on 02-05-23
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Never Alone
- Prison, Politics, and My People
- By: Natan Sharansky, Gil Troy
- Narrated by: Natan Sharansky, Gil Troy, Peter Lownds
- Length: 22 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1977, Natan Sharansky, a leading activist in the democratic dissident movement in the Soviet Union and the movement for free Jewish emigration, was arrested by the KGB. He spent nine years as a political prisoner, convicted of treason against the state. Never Alone reveals how Sharansky's years in prison, many spent in harsh solitary confinement, prepared him for a very public life after his release. As an Israeli politician and the head of the Jewish Agency, Sharansky brought extraordinary moral clarity and uncompromising, often uncomfortable, honesty.
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Fantastic
- By Danna Azrieli on 02-06-21
By: Natan Sharansky, and others
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Twelve Who Ruled
- The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution
- By: R. R. Palmer, Isser Woloch - foreword
- Narrated by: David Stifel
- Length: 17 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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The Reign of Terror continues to fascinate scholars as one of the bloodiest periods in French history, when the Committee of Public Safety strove to defend the first Republic from its many enemies, creating a climate of fear and suspicion in revolutionary France. R. R. Palmer's fascinating narrative follows the Committee's deputies individually and collectively, recounting and assessing their tumultuous struggles in Paris and their repressive missions in the provinces.
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A Warning
- By Josh Rowe on 03-20-21
By: R. R. Palmer, and others
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A New World Begins
- The History of the French Revolution
- By: Jeremy D. Popkin
- Narrated by: Pete Cross, Jeremy D. Popkin
- Length: 21 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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The principles of the French Revolution remain the only possible basis for a just society - even if, after more than 200 years, they are more contested than ever before. In A New World Begins, Jeremy D. Popkin offers a riveting account of the revolution that puts the listener in the thick of the debates and the violence that led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a new society.
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Narration
- By Kindle Customer on 04-26-22
By: Jeremy D. Popkin
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Inventing Japan [Modern Library Chronicles]
- By: Ian Buruma
- Narrated by: Nelson Runger
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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LA Times Book Award winner and expert on the past and present Japan, Ian Buruma examines the transformation of a country. Following Japan's history from its opening to the West in 1853 to its hosting of the 1964 Olympics, Buruma focuses on how figures such as Commodore Matthew Perry, Douglas MacArthur, and Emperor Mitsushito helped shape this complex country.
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Excellent Primer on Modern Japan
- By John Pavliga on 06-13-06
By: Ian Buruma
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The Inevitability of Tragedy
- Henry Kissinger and His World
- By: Barry Gewen
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 18 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Few public officials have provoked such intense controversy as Henry Kissinger. During his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, he came to be admired and hated in equal measure. Notoriously, he believed that foreign affairs ought to be based primarily on the power relationships of a situation, not simply on ethics. He went so far as to argue that under certain circumstances America had to protect its national interests even if that meant repressing other countries' attempts at democracy.
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Interesting but rambles
- By K on 02-17-21
By: Barry Gewen
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The Mighty and the Almighty
- Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs
- By: Madeleine Albright
- Narrated by: Madeleine Albright
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Does America have a special mission, derived from God, to bring liberty and democracy to the world? How much influence does the Christian right have over U.S. foreign policy? And how should America deal with violent Islamist extremists? Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of State and best-selling author of Madam Secretary, offers a thoughtful and often surprising look at the role of religion in shaping America's approach to the world.
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The point??
- By Thomas on 11-04-06