
Why War?
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Narrated by:
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Dennis Kleinman
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By:
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Richard Overy
About this listen
Why has war been such a consistent presence throughout the human past? A leading historian explains, drawing on rich examples and keen insight.
Richard Overy is not the first scholar to take up the title question. In 1931, at the request of the League of Nations, Albert Einstein asked Sigmund Freud to collaborate on a short work examining whether there was "a way of delivering mankind from the menace of war." Published the next year as a pamphlet entitled Why War?, it conveyed Freud's conclusion that the "death drive" made any deliverance impossible—the psychological impulse to destruction was universal in the animal kingdom. The global wars of the later 1930s and 1940s seemed ample evidence of the dismal conclusion.
A preeminent historian of those wars, Overy brings vast knowledge to the title question and years of experience unraveling the knotted motivations of war. His approach is to separate the major drivers and motivations, and consider the ways each has contributed to organized conflict. They range from the impulses embedded in human biology and psychology, to the incentives to conflict developed through cultural evolution, to competition for resources. The discussions show remarkable range, delving deep into the Neolithic past, through the twentieth-century world wars, and up to the current conflict in Ukraine.
©2024 Richard Overy (P)2024 KaloramaListeners also enjoyed...
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- An Introduction
- By: Ed Sikov
- Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Film Studies is a concise and indispensable introduction to the formal study of cinema. Ed Sikov offers a step-by-step curriculum for the appreciation of all types of narrative cinema, detailing the essential elements of film form and systematically training the spectator to be an active listener and critic. He treats a number of fundamental factors in filmmaking, including editing, composition, lighting, the use of color and sound, and narrative.
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Lovely read.
- By Dewey Gallegos on 08-12-23
By: Ed Sikov
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Active Measures
- The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare
- By: Thomas Rid
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 14 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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We live in the age of disinformation - of organized deception. Spy agencies pour vast resources into hacking, leaking, and forging data, often with the goal of weakening the very foundation of liberal democracy: trust in facts. Thomas Rid, a renowned expert on technology and national security, was one of the first to sound the alarm, even before the 2016 election. But this is not new. The story of modern disinformation begins with the clash between communism and capitalism after the Russian Revolution.
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Grounding book for COVID 19 Media
- By fjness on 05-12-20
By: Thomas Rid
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Into the Cold Blue
- My World War II Journeys with the Mighty Eighth Air Force
- By: John Homan, Jared Frederick - contributor
- Narrated by: Eric Torres
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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A born daredevil, John Homan joined the Army Air Forces after the Pearl Harbor attack. By 1944, he was co-piloting a B-24 Liberator over Nazi Germany, raining death and destruction on the enemy. This first-person account of his harrowing missions—chronicling deadly flights through skies of red-hot flak bursts and airmen bailing out with parachutes aflame—will leave listeners staggered by the determination and grit of World War II aviators.
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My Father Journey
- By Charlie on 08-24-24
By: John Homan, and others
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Pax
- War and Peace in Rome's Golden Age
- By: Tom Holland
- Narrated by: Tom Holland
- Length: 14 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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The Pax Romana has long been shorthand for the empire’s golden age. Stretching from Caledonia to Arabia, Rome ruled over a quarter of the world’s population. It was the wealthiest and most formidable state in the history of humankind. Pax is a captivating narrative history of Rome at the height of its power. From the gilded capital to realms beyond the frontier, historian Tom Holland shows ancient Rome in all its glory
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Great book!
- By Mic on 09-27-23
By: Tom Holland
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The Gates of Europe
- A History of Ukraine
- By: Serhii Plokhy
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 15 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Ukraine is currently embroiled in a tense fight with Russia to preserve its territorial integrity and political independence. But today's conflict is only the latest in a long history of battles over Ukraine's territory and its existence as a sovereign nation. As the award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy argues in The Gates of Europe, we must examine Ukraine's past in order to understand its present and future.
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An extraordinarily good book
- By Specs2789 on 03-01-23
By: Serhii Plokhy
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The Human Tide
- How Population Shaped the Modern World
- By: Paul Morland
- Narrated by: Zeb Soanes
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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The rise and fall of the British Empire; the emergence of America as a superpower; the ebb and flow of global challenges from Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Soviet Russia. These are the headlines of history, but they cannot be properly grasped without understanding the role that population has played. The Human Tide shows how periods of rapid population transition - a phenomenon that first emerged in the British Isles but gradually spread across the globe - shaped the course of world history.
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dry
- By Ralph C. on 05-02-19
By: Paul Morland
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China's World View
- Demystifying China to Prevent Global Conflict
- By: David Daokui Li
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Writing in response to the growing anti-Chinese sentiment and alarmed by the threat of war, Dr. David Daokui Li pulls from his wealth of firsthand experience to demystify contemporary Chinese society and advocate for understanding between China and the West. In this urgently needed and fascinating book, he explains the inner workings of a rising superpower to help the world understand how it works-and how to work with it.
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The spirit of this book is critically important.
- By Mike Turner on 06-21-24
By: David Daokui Li
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Hiroshima
- The Last Witnesses (Embers, Book 1)
- By: M. G. Sheftall
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 17 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In this vividly rendered historical narrative, M. G. Sheftall layers the stories of hibakusha—the Japanese word for atomic bomb survivors—in harrowing detail, to give a minute-by-minute report of August 6, 1945, in the leadup and aftermath of the world-changing bombing mission of Paul Tibbets, Enola Gay, and Little Boy.
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EXCELLENT
- By JK on 04-29-25
By: M. G. Sheftall
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Resistance
- The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945
- By: Halik Kochanski
- Narrated by: Jennifer M. Dixon
- Length: 46 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Uneven in quality of depiction of various areas
- By K. T. Jukic on 05-17-23
By: Halik Kochanski
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Index, a History of The
- A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age
- By: Dennis Duncan
- Narrated by: Neil Gardner
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Most of us give little thought to the back of the book - it's just where you go to look things up. But as Dennis Duncan reveals in this delightful and witty history, hiding in plain sight is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. In the pages of the index, we might find "Butchers, to be avoided", or "Cows that shite Fire", or even catch "Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne". Here, for the first time, is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past.
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Maybe a book that should be read rather than listened to
- By Amazon Customer on 11-09-22
By: Dennis Duncan
What listeners say about Why War?
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 01-23-25
War is Peace
We can not escape the paradox of war and peace and thus must remain slaves to an inescapable fate.
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- Tyler
- 10-20-24
Encyclopedic style, lots of analysis
Engrossing by teaching. Not a novel but willing to keep throwing lots of examples from history at you to elaborate on each chapter’s purpose. And this was done with care for the readers time and was certainly well thought thru. Each chapter is an aspect of why war is enmeshed in who we are(as species, individuals, groups, etc).
If u want to jump from fascinating anecdotes to sweeping historical insights then this is the book for u.
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