
The Race to the Future
8000 Miles to Paris – The Adventure That Accelerated the Twentieth Century
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed

Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $17.49
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Kassia St. Clair
-
By:
-
Kassia St. Clair
About this listen
The racers battle over steep inclines, through narrow mountain passages, and across the arid Gobi Desert. Competitors endure torrential rain and choking dust. There are barely any roads, and petrol is almost impossible to find.
More than its many adventures, the Peking-to-Paris Motor Challenge took place on the precipice of a new world. As the twentieth century dawned, imperial regimes in China and Russia were crumbling, paving the way for the rise of communist ones. The electric telegraph was rapidly transforming modern communication, and with it, the news media, commerce, and politics. Suspended between the old and the new, the Peking-to-Paris, as bestselling historian Kassia St. Clair writes, became a critical tipping point.
A gripping, immersive narrative of the race, The Race to the Future sets the drivers' derring-do (and occasional cheating) against the backdrop of a larger geopolitical and technological race to the future. Interweaving events from the fall of the Qing dynasty to the departure of the horse economy and the rise of gendered marketing, St. Clair shows how the Peking-to-Paris provided an impetus for profound social, cultural, and industrial change, while masterfully capturing the mounting tensions between nations and empires-all building up to the cataclysmic event that changed everything: the First World War.
©2023 Kassia St. Clair (P)2024 HighBridge, a division of Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
-
Tequila Wars
- Jose Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico
- By: Ted Genoways
- Narrated by: Andrew Joseph Perez
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the dawn of the twentieth century, José Cuervo inherited his family's humble distillery, La Rojeña, in the Tequila Valley. Within a decade, it would become Mexico's leading producer of tequila. But when the Mexican Revolution erupted, a charge of treason and a death threat against him by Pancho Villa forced Cuervo to flee. In Tequila Wars, award-winning author Ted Genoways restores Cuervo to his place as a key player in Mexico's formative period. Before the revolution, Cuervo's acclaim spread worldwide, and once war broke out, Cuervo remained an impresario, kingmaker, and cultural force.
-
-
The writing was heavy on descriptions but light on historical content.
- By George Q. Bissonnette on 06-06-25
By: Ted Genoways
-
The Golden Thread
- How Fabric Changed History
- By: Kassia St. Clair
- Narrated by: Helen Johns
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From colorful 30,000-year-old threads found on the floor of a Georgian cave to the Indian calicoes that sparked the Industrial Revolution, The Golden Thread weaves an illuminating story of human ingenuity. Design journalist Kassia St. Clair guides us through the technological advancements and cultural customs that would redefine human civilization - from the fabric that allowed mankind to achieve extraordinary things (traverse the oceans and shatter athletic records) and survive in unlikely places (outer space and the South Pole).
-
-
Excellent for those interested in textiles
- By Adeliese Baumann on 12-14-19
By: Kassia St. Clair
-
Ocean
- A History of the Atlantic Before Columbus
- By: John Haywood
- Narrated by: Ben Eagle
- Length: 18 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A dazzling and ambitious history of the pre-Columbian Atlantic seas, Ocean is a story that begins with the formation of the mid-Atlantic ridge some 200 million years ago and ends with the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century, providing a template for the methods used by the Spanish in their colonization of the New World.
-
-
Prehistory of the Atlantic
- By Sarah C on 03-14-25
By: John Haywood
-
Stolen Pride
- Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right
- By: Arlie Russell Hochschild
- Narrated by: Ellen Archer
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For all the attempts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we've ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. What happens, Arlie Russell Hochschild asks, when a proud people in a hard-hit region suffer the deep loss of pride and are confronted with a powerful political appeal that makes it feel "stolen"? Hochschild's research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation.
-
-
Gripping and insightful
- By Marianna Grossman on 12-27-24
-
The Secret Lives of Color
- By: Kassia St. Clair
- Narrated by: Kassia St. Clair
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Secret Lives of Color tells the unusual stories of 75 fascinating shades, dyes, and hues. From blonde to ginger, the brown that changed the way battles were fought to the white that protected against the plague, Picasso’s blue period to the charcoal on the cave walls at Lascaux, acid yellow to kelly green, and from scarlet women to imperial purple, these surprising stories run like a bright thread throughout history. In this book, Kassia St. Clair has turned her lifelong obsession with colors and where they come from into a unique study of human civilization.
-
-
More about pigments than social history
- By Jason Toon on 12-13-20
By: Kassia St. Clair
-
Taking Manhattan
- The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America
- By: Russell Shorto
- Narrated by: Russell Shorto
- Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1664, England decided to invade the Dutch-controlled city of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, had dreams of empire, and their archrivals, the Dutch, were in the way. But Richard Nicolls, the military officer who led the English flotilla bent on destruction, changed his strategy once he encountered Peter Stuyvesant, New Netherland’s canny director general.
-
-
I really appreciated how the author continually related the past to what we see today.
- By Jaelyn Dean on 05-22-25
By: Russell Shorto
-
Tequila Wars
- Jose Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico
- By: Ted Genoways
- Narrated by: Andrew Joseph Perez
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the dawn of the twentieth century, José Cuervo inherited his family's humble distillery, La Rojeña, in the Tequila Valley. Within a decade, it would become Mexico's leading producer of tequila. But when the Mexican Revolution erupted, a charge of treason and a death threat against him by Pancho Villa forced Cuervo to flee. In Tequila Wars, award-winning author Ted Genoways restores Cuervo to his place as a key player in Mexico's formative period. Before the revolution, Cuervo's acclaim spread worldwide, and once war broke out, Cuervo remained an impresario, kingmaker, and cultural force.
-
-
The writing was heavy on descriptions but light on historical content.
- By George Q. Bissonnette on 06-06-25
By: Ted Genoways
-
The Golden Thread
- How Fabric Changed History
- By: Kassia St. Clair
- Narrated by: Helen Johns
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From colorful 30,000-year-old threads found on the floor of a Georgian cave to the Indian calicoes that sparked the Industrial Revolution, The Golden Thread weaves an illuminating story of human ingenuity. Design journalist Kassia St. Clair guides us through the technological advancements and cultural customs that would redefine human civilization - from the fabric that allowed mankind to achieve extraordinary things (traverse the oceans and shatter athletic records) and survive in unlikely places (outer space and the South Pole).
-
-
Excellent for those interested in textiles
- By Adeliese Baumann on 12-14-19
By: Kassia St. Clair
-
Ocean
- A History of the Atlantic Before Columbus
- By: John Haywood
- Narrated by: Ben Eagle
- Length: 18 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A dazzling and ambitious history of the pre-Columbian Atlantic seas, Ocean is a story that begins with the formation of the mid-Atlantic ridge some 200 million years ago and ends with the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century, providing a template for the methods used by the Spanish in their colonization of the New World.
-
-
Prehistory of the Atlantic
- By Sarah C on 03-14-25
By: John Haywood
-
Stolen Pride
- Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right
- By: Arlie Russell Hochschild
- Narrated by: Ellen Archer
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For all the attempts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we've ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. What happens, Arlie Russell Hochschild asks, when a proud people in a hard-hit region suffer the deep loss of pride and are confronted with a powerful political appeal that makes it feel "stolen"? Hochschild's research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation.
-
-
Gripping and insightful
- By Marianna Grossman on 12-27-24
-
The Secret Lives of Color
- By: Kassia St. Clair
- Narrated by: Kassia St. Clair
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Secret Lives of Color tells the unusual stories of 75 fascinating shades, dyes, and hues. From blonde to ginger, the brown that changed the way battles were fought to the white that protected against the plague, Picasso’s blue period to the charcoal on the cave walls at Lascaux, acid yellow to kelly green, and from scarlet women to imperial purple, these surprising stories run like a bright thread throughout history. In this book, Kassia St. Clair has turned her lifelong obsession with colors and where they come from into a unique study of human civilization.
-
-
More about pigments than social history
- By Jason Toon on 12-13-20
By: Kassia St. Clair
-
Taking Manhattan
- The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America
- By: Russell Shorto
- Narrated by: Russell Shorto
- Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1664, England decided to invade the Dutch-controlled city of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, had dreams of empire, and their archrivals, the Dutch, were in the way. But Richard Nicolls, the military officer who led the English flotilla bent on destruction, changed his strategy once he encountered Peter Stuyvesant, New Netherland’s canny director general.
-
-
I really appreciated how the author continually related the past to what we see today.
- By Jaelyn Dean on 05-22-25
By: Russell Shorto
-
Knowing What We Know
- The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 14 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the creation of the first encyclopedia to Wikipedia, from ancient museums to modern kindergarten classes—this is Simon Winchester’s brilliant and all-encompassing look at how humans acquire, retain, and pass on information and data, and how technology continues to change our lives and our minds. Throughout this fascinating tour, Winchester forces us to ponder what rational humans are becoming. What good is all this knowledge if it leads to lack of thought? What is information without wisdom?
-
-
Colorful anecdotes but tiring after a while.
- By Thumb Guy on 05-03-23
By: Simon Winchester
-
The Embarrassment of Riches
- An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age
- By: Simon Schama
- Narrated by: Mike Cooper
- Length: 20 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Simon Schama explores the mysterious contradictions of the Dutch nation that invented itself from the ground up, attained an unprecedented level of affluence, and lived in constant dread of being corrupted by happiness. Drawing on a vast array of period documents and sumptuously reproduced art, Schama recreates in precise detail a nation's mental state. He tells of bloody uprisings and beached whales, of the cult of hygiene and the plague of tobacco, of thrifty housewives and profligate tulip-speculators.
-
-
Great!
- By Noe on 12-05-24
By: Simon Schama
-
The Weimar Years
- Rise and Fall 1918–1933
- By: Frank McDonough
- Narrated by: Paul McGann
- Length: 19 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Established in 1918–19, in the wake of Germany’s catastrophic defeat in the First World War and the revolution that followed swiftly on its heels, the Weimar Republic ushered in widespread social reform, a radical cultural flowering and the most democratic conditions the German people had ever known. The Weimar Years is a vivid narrative of a dramatic period in German history. Year by year, from 1918 to 1933, Frank McDonough covers the major events in both domestic and foreign policy and the personalities who shaped them, together with developments in music, art, theatre and literature.
-
-
Depth
- By Amazon Customer on 02-02-24
By: Frank McDonough
-
Resistance
- The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945
- By: Halik Kochanski
- Narrated by: Jennifer M. Dixon
- Length: 46 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It's almost shocking to think that now, more than seventy years after the Nazi surrender in 1945, there is not a single volume that has attempted to unify the resistance movements that convulsed Europe during the brutal years of occupation. In her extraordinary work, Resistance, Halik Kochanski does just that, creating a prodigiously researched account that becomes the first to bring these disparate histories into a single narrative.
-
-
Uneven in quality of depiction of various areas
- By K. T. Jukic on 05-17-23
By: Halik Kochanski
-
The Chief
- The Life of William Randolph Hearst
- By: David Nasaw
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 30 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
William Randolph Hearst, known to his staff as the "Chief", was a brilliant business strategist and a man of prodigious appetites. By the 1930s, he controlled the largest publishing empire in the United States, including 28 newspapers, the Cosmopolitan Picture Studio, radio stations, and 13 magazines. He quickly learned how to use this media stronghold to achieve unprecedented political power. In The Chief, David Nasaw presents an intimate portrait of the man famously characterized in the classic film Citizen Kane.
-
-
Fascinating but
- By Michael on 02-17-22
By: David Nasaw
-
Sailing the Graveyard Sea
- The Deathly Voyage of the Somers, the U.S. Navy's Only Mutiny, and the Trial That Gripped the Nation
- By: Richard Snow
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On December 16, 1842, the US brig-of-war Somers dropped anchor in the New York Harbor at the end of a voyage intended to teach a group of adolescents the rudiments of naval life. But this routine exercise ended in catastrophe. Commander Alexander Slidell Mackenzie came ashore claiming he had prevented a mutiny that would have left him and his officers dead. Some of the thwarted mutineers were being held under guard, but three had already been hanged at sea.
-
-
the day to day brutality
- By L. Lombard on 01-15-24
By: Richard Snow
-
The Greatest Nobodies of History
- Minor Characters from Major Moments
- By: Adrian Bliss
- Narrated by: Adrian Bliss, Beth Rylance, Sebastian Humphreys, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The lives of Leonardo da Vinci, Henry VIII, and Queen Victoria fill bookshelves and fascinate scholars all over the world. But little attention is given to the ferret who posed for the Renaissance master, the servant who oversaw the Tudor’s toilet time, or the famous horse who thrilled the miserable old monarch. These supporting cast members have been waiting in the wings for too long, and Adrian Bliss thinks it’s high time they join their glory-hogging contemporaries in the spotlight. Fortunately, now they can.
-
-
Nothing like his video comedy
- By Jono on 11-14-24
By: Adrian Bliss
-
Reagan
- His Life and Legend
- By: Max Boot
- Narrated by: Graham Winton
- Length: 32 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this “monumental and impressive” biography, Max Boot, the distinguished political columnist, illuminates the untold story of Ronald Reagan, revealing the man behind the mythology. Drawing on interviews with over one hundred of the fortieth president’s aides, friends, and family members, as well as thousands of newly available documents, Boot provides “the best biography of Ronald Reagan to date” (Robert Mann).
-
-
Has An Agenda
- By CC on 01-07-25
By: Max Boot
-
Silent Spring Revolution
- John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening
- By: Douglas Brinkley
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
- Length: 29 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
New York Times bestselling author and acclaimed presidential historian Douglas Brinkley chronicles the rise of environmental activism during the Long Sixties (1960-1973), telling the story of an indomitable generation that saved the natural world under the leadership of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon.
-
-
Need one more book...
- By Chuck Wofford on 02-23-23
By: Douglas Brinkley
-
American Civil Wars
- A Continental History, 1850-1873
- By: Alan Taylor
- Narrated by: Graham Winton
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights. Taylor relies on vivid characters to carry the story, from Joseph Hooker, whose timidity in crisis was exploited by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Union defeat at Chancellorsville, to Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black abolitionists whose critical work in Canada and the United States advanced emancipation and the enrollment of Black soldiers in Union armies.
-
-
fascinating!
- By Brandon Marken on 07-12-24
By: Alan Taylor
-
Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party
- How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World
- By: Edward Dolnick
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Celebrated storyteller and historian Edward Dolnick leads us through a compelling true adventure as the paleontologists of the first half of the 19th century puzzled their way through the fossil record to create the story of dinosaurs we know today. The tale begins with Mary Anning, a poor, uneducated woman who had a sixth sense for finding fossils buried deep inside cliffs; and moves to a brilliant, eccentric geologist named William Buckland.
-
-
Wonderful narration of an awesome history
- By BB on 09-26-24
By: Edward Dolnick
-
Poland 1939
- The Outbreak of World War II
- By: Roger Moorhouse
- Narrated by: Roger Moorhouse
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For Americans, World War II began in December of 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor; but for Poland, the war began on September 1, 1939, when Hitler's soldiers invaded, followed later that month by Stalin's Red Army. The conflict that followed saw the debut of many of the features that would come to define the later war-blitzkrieg, the targeting of civilians, ethnic cleansing, and indiscriminate aerial bombing-yet it is routinely overlooked by historians.
-
-
Always Overlooked
- By C. G. Telcontar on 05-27-21
By: Roger Moorhouse
Interesting story
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.