
The Torchlight List
Around the World in 200 Books
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Narrated by:
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Anthony Haden Salerno
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By:
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Jim Flynn
About this listen
A brilliant road map for discovering history, science, civilization, and the human condition, this engaging record recommends must-hear books: those so revealing about times and places that they take the listener beyond day-to-day concerns into a magic realm of knowledge and imagination. From Arthur Koestler's take on the universe and Barbara Tuchman's view on 14th-century life to F. Scott Fitzgerald's impressions of American morality and Robert Fisk's analysis of the West's history of intervention in the Middle East, this engaging account is an idiosyncratic and endlessly interesting tour of the world through literature.
©2013 Jim Flynn (P)2013 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Few would question that Albert Camus (1913-1960), novelist, playwright, philosopher and journalist, is a major cultural icon. His widely quoted works have led to countless movie adaptions, graphic novels, pop songs, and even t-shirts. In this Very Short Introduction, Oliver Gloag chronicles the inspiring story of Camus' life. From a poor fatherless settler in French-Algeria to the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Gloag offers a comprehensive view of Camus' major works and interventions.
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A glimmer of hope
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lifelong coverage of his life.
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The Compleat Gentleman, Third Revised Edition
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
At a time of astonishing confusion about what it means to be a man, Brad Miner has recovered the oldest and best ideal of manhood: the gentleman. Reviving a thousand-year tradition of chivalry, honor, and heroism, The Compleat Gentleman provides the essential model for 21st-century masculinity.
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too political
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The Devil’s Pleasure Palace
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the aftermath of World War II, America stood alone as the world's premier military power. Yet its martial confidence contrasted vividly with its sense of cultural inferiority. Still looking to a defeated and dispirited Europe for intellectual and artistic guidance, burgeoning transnational elite in New York and Washington embraced not only the war's refugees but many of their ideas as well, and nothing has proven more pernicious than those of the Frankfurt School and its reactionary philosophy of "critical theory".
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I tried but I finally couldn't take it anymore
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Fracture
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- Length: 17 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When the Great War ended in 1918, the West was broken. Religious faith, patriotism, and the belief in human progress had all been called into question by the mass carnage experienced by both sides. Shell-shocked and traumatized, the West faced a world it no longer recognized: The old order had collapsed, replaced by an age of machines. The world hurtled forward on gears and crankshafts, and terrifying new ideologies arose from the wreckage of past belief.
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Lots of good trivia information
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By: Philipp Blom
Editorial reviews
Jim Flynn begins The Torchlight List: Around the World in 200 Books with an account of an uncle who read by "torchlight" on a boat during World War I. Flynn’s book provides a reading map for those who want to transform their lives through the written word.
Given a relaxed performance by Anthony Haden Salerno, The Torchlight List mixes canonical works of literature like Leo Tolstoy's War And Peace and Anna Karenina with more eclectic reading material, like Evolution in Action by Julian Huxley and The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Each entry is given a concise, insightful gloss by Flynn.
With an avuncular tone, Salerno conveys the wisdom and intellectual curiosity of Flynn’s writing.