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Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/517922 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela Author: William Neuman Narrator: Michael Manuel Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 46 minutes Release date: March 15, 2022 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: —Named Foreign Affairs Best Books of 2022 and the National Endowment for Democracy Notable Books of 2022 —Winner of the 2022 Cornelius Ryan Award of the Overseas Press Club of America for the best nonfiction book on international affairs —Foreign Affairs Best Books of 2022 —National Endowment for Democracy Notable Books of 2022 'Richly reported...a thorough and important history.' -Tim Padgett, The New York Times A nuanced and deeply-reported account of the collapse of Venezuela, and what it could mean for the rest of the world. Today, Venezuela is a country of perpetual crisis—a country of rolling blackouts, nearly worthless currency, uncertain supply of water and food, and extreme poverty. In the same land where oil—the largest reserve in the world—sits so close to the surface that it bubbles from the ground, where gold and other mineral resources are abundant, and where the government spends billions of dollars on public works projects that go abandoned, the supermarket shelves are bare and the hospitals have no medicine. Twenty percent of the population has fled, creating the largest refugee exodus in the world, rivaling only war-torn Syria’s crisis. Venezuela’s collapse affects all of Latin America, as well as the United States and the international community. Republicans like to point to Venezuela as the perfect example of the emptiness of socialism, but it is a better model for something else: the destructive potential of charismatic populist leadership. The ascent of Hugo Chávez was a precursor to the emergence of strongmen that can now be seen all over the world, and the success of the corrupt economy he presided over only lasted while oil sold for more than $100 a barrel. Chávez’s regime and policies, which have been reinforced under Nicolás Maduro, squandered abundant resources and ultimately bankrupted the country. Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse is a fluid combination of journalism, memoir, and history that chronicles Venezuela’s tragic journey from petro-riches to poverty. Author William Neuman witnessed it all firsthand while living in Caracas and serving as the New York Times Andes Region Bureau Chief. His book paints a clear-eyed, riveting, and highly personal portrait of the crisis unfolding in real time, with all of its tropical surrealism, extremes of wealth and suffering, and gripping drama. It is also a heartfelt reflection of the country’s great beauty and vibrancy—and the energy, passion, and humor of its people, even under the most challenging circumstances. A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/527279 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War Author: Deborah Cohen Narrator: Suzanne Toren Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 18 hours 52 minutes Release date: March 15, 2022 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.33 of Total 3 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: WINNER OF THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE • A prize-winning historian’s “effervescent” (The New Yorker) account of a close-knit band of wildly famous American reporters who, in the run-up to World War II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism “High-speed, four-lane storytelling . . . Cohen’s all-action narrative bursts with colour and incident.”—Financial Times NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITH BOOK PRIZE AND THE RALPH WALDO EMERSON AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE PROSE AWARD ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, NPR, BookPage, Booklist They were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on wooden saddles, sometimes gliding through countries in the splendor of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers, and Balkan gun-runners, and then knocked back doubles late into the night. Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is the extraordinary story of John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson. In those tumultuous years, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler and Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi, and helped shape what Americans knew about the world. Alongside these backstage glimpses into the halls of power, they left another equally incredible set of records. Living in the heady afterglow of Freud, they subjected themselves to frank, critical scrutiny and argued about love, war, sex, death, and everything in between. Plunged into successive global crises, Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheean, and Thompson could no longer separate themselves from the turmoil that surrounded them. To tell that story, they broke long-standing taboos. From their circle came not just the first modern account of illness in Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud—a memoir about his son’s death from cancer—but the first no-holds-barred chronicle of a marriage: Sheean’s Dorothy and Red, about Thompson’s fractious relationship with Sinclair Lewis. Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century felt up close.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/531080 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It's Different Than You Think) Author: Reshma Saujani Narrator: Reshma Saujani Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 50 minutes Release date: March 15, 2022 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER The founder of Girls Who Code and bestselling author of Brave, Not Perfect confronts the “big lie” of corporate feminism and presents a bold plan to address the burnout and inequity harming America’s working women today. We told women that to break glass ceilings and succeed in their careers, all they needed to do is dream big, raise their hands, and lean in. But data tells a different story. Historic numbers of women left their jobs in 2021, resulting in their lowest workforce participation since 1988. Women’s unemployment rose to nearly fifteen percent, and globally women lost over $800 billion in wages. Fifty-one percent of women say that their mental health has declined, while anxiety and depression rates have skyrocketed. In this urgent and rousing call to arms, Reshma Saujani dismantles the myth of “having it all” and lifts the burden we place on individual women to be primary caregivers, and to work around a system built for and by men. The time has come, she argues, for innovative corporate leadership, government intervention, and sweeping culture shift; it’s time to Pay Up. Through powerful data and personal narrative, Saujani shows that the cost of inaction—for families, for our nation’s economy, and for women themselves—is too great to ignore. She lays out four key steps for creating lasting change: empower working women, educate corporate leaders, revise our narratives about what it means to be successful, and advocate for policy reform. Both a direct call to action for business leaders and a pragmatic set of tools for women themselves, Pay Up offers a bold vision for change as America defines the future of work.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/525054 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Left Behind: The Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality Author: Lily Geismer Narrator: Christine Lakin Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 12 hours 55 minutes Release date: March 1, 2022 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: The 40-year history of how Democrats chose political opportunity over addressing inequality—and how the poor have paid the price For decades, the Republican Party has been known as the party of the rich: arguing for “business-friendly” policies like deregulation and tax cuts. But this incisive political history shows that the current inequality crisis was also enabled by a Democratic Party that catered to the affluent. The result is one of the great missed opportunities in political history: a moment when we had the chance to change the lives of future generations and were too short-sighted to take it. Historian Lily Geismer recounts how the Clinton-era Democratic Party sought to curb poverty through economic growth and individual responsibility rather than asking the rich to make any sacrifices. Fueled by an ethos of “doing well by doing good,” microfinance, charter schools, and privately funded housing developments grew trendy. Though politically expedient and sometimes profitable in the short term, these programs fundamentally weakened the safety net for the poor. ​This piercingly intelligent book shows how bygone policy decisions have left us with skyrocketing income inequality and poverty in America and widened fractures within the Democratic Party that persist to this day.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/529846 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior Author: Ric Prado Narrator: Scott Brick Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 12 hours 40 minutes Release date: March 1, 2022 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.32 of Total 28 Ratings of Narrator: 4.75 of Total 4 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: A memoir by the highest-ranking covert warrior to lift the veil of secrecy and offer a glimpse into the shadow wars that America has fought since the Vietnam Era. Enrique Prado found himself in his first firefight at age seven. The son of a middle-class Cuban family caught in the midst of the Castro Revolution, his family fled their war-torn home for the hope of a better life in America. Fifty years later, the Cuban refugee retired from the Central Intelligence Agency as the CIA equivalent of a two-star general. Black Ops is the story of Ric’s legendary career that spanned two eras, the Cold War and the Age of Terrorism. Operating in the shadows, Ric and his fellow CIA officers fought a little-seen and virtually unknown war to keep USA safe from those who would do it harm. After duty stations in Central, South America, and the Philippines, Black Ops follows Ric into the highest echelons of the CIA’s headquarters at Langley, Virginia. In late 1995, he became Deputy Chief of Station and co-founding member of the Bin Laden Task Force. Three years later, after serving as head of Korean Operations, Ric took on one of the most dangerous missions of his career: re-establish a once-abandoned CIA station inside a hostile nation long since considered a front line of the fight against Islamic terrorism. He and his team carried out covert operations and developed assets that proved pivotal in the coming War on Terror. A harrowing memoir of life in the shadowy world of assassins, terrorists, spies and revolutionaries, Black Ops is a testament to the courage, creativity and dedication of the Agency’s Special Activities Group and its elite shadow warriors. A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/521861 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century Author: Moisés Naím Narrator: Larry Herron Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 11 minutes Release date: February 22, 2022 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: Moisés Naím’s The Revenge of Power is an urgent, thrilling, and original look at the future of democracy. It illuminates one of the most important battles of our time: the future of freedom and how to contain and defeat the autocrats mushrooming around the world. In his New York Times bestselling book The End of Power, Moisés Naím examined power-diluting forces. In The Revenge of Power, Naím turns to the trends, conditions, and behaviors that are contributing to the concentration of power, and to the clash between those forces that weaken power and those that strengthen it. He concentrates on the three “P”s—populism, polarization, and post-truths. All of which are as old as time, but are combined by today’s autocrats to undermine democratic life in new and frightening ways. Power has not changed. But the way people go about gaining it and using it has been transformed. The Revenge of Power connects the dots between global events and political tactics that, when taken together, show a profound and often stealthy transformation in power and politics worldwide. Using the best available data and insights taken from recent research in the social sciences, Naím reveals how, on close examination, the same set of strategies to consolidate power pop up again and again in places with vastly different political, economic, and social circumstances, and offers insights about what can be done to ensure that freedom and democracy prevail. The outcomes of these battles for power will determine if our future will be more autocratic or more democratic. These outcomes will, in turn, depend on the capacity of our democracies to survive the attacks and dirty tricks of autocratic leaders bent on weakening the checks and balances that limit their power. Naím addresses the questions at the heart of the matter: What are, in practice, those attacks and tricks? Why is power concentrating in some places while in others it is fragmenting and degrading? And the big question: What is the future of freedom? A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/525597 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India's Freedom Author: Ramachandra Guha Narrator: Vidish Athavale Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 18 hours 18 minutes Release date: February 22, 2022 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: An extraordinary history of resistance and the fight for Indian independence—the little-known story of seven foreigners to India who joined the movement fighting for freedom from British colonial rule. Rebels Against the Raj tells the story of seven people who chose to struggle for a country other than their own: foreigners to India who across the late 19th to late 20th century arrived to join the freedom movement fighting for independence from British colonial rule.   Of the seven, four were British, two American, and one Irish. Four men, three women. Before and after being jailed or deported they did remarkable and pioneering work in a variety of fields: journalism, social reform, education, the emancipation of women, environmentalism. This book tells their stories, each renegade motivated by idealism and genuine sacrifice; each connected to Gandhi, though some as acolytes where others found endless infuriation in his views; each understanding they would likely face prison sentences for their resistance, and likely live and die in India; each one leaving a profound impact on the region in which they worked, their legacies continuing through the institutions they founded and the generations and individuals they inspired.   Through these entwined lives, wonderfully told by one of the world’s finest historians, we reach deep insights into relations between India and the West, and India’s story as a country searching for its identity and liberty beyond British colonial rule.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/525622 to listen full audiobooks. Title: America Second: How America's Elites Are Making China Stronger Author: Isaac Stone Fish Narrator: William Demeritt Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 28 minutes Release date: February 15, 2022 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: A timely, provocative exposé of American political and business leadership’s deep ties to China: a network of people who believe they are doing the right thing—at a profound and often hidden cost to U.S. interests. The past few years have seen relations between China and the United States shift, from enthusiastic economic partners, to wary frenemies, to open rivals. Americans have been slow to wake up to the challenges posed by the Chinese Communist Party. Why did this happen? And what can we do about it?   In America Second, Isaac Stone Fish traces the evolution of the Party’s influence in America. He shows how America’s leaders initially welcomed China’s entry into the U.S. economy, believing that trade and engagement would lead to a more democratic China. And he explains how—although this belief has proved misguided--many of our businesspeople and politicians have become too dependent on China to challenge it.   America Second exposes a deep network of Beijing’s influence in America, built quietly over the years through prominent figures like former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright, Disney chairman Bob Iger, and members of the Bush family. And it shows how to fight that influence–without being paranoid, xenophobic, or racist. This is an authoritative and important story of corruption and good intentions gone wrong, with serious implications not only for the future of the United States, but for the world at large.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/525642 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir Author: Karen Cheung Narrator: Karen Cheung Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 3 minutes Release date: February 15, 2022 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: A boldly rendered—and deeply intimate—account of Hong Kong today, from a resilient young woman whose stories explore what it means to survive in a city teeming with broken promises. “[A] pulsing debut . . . about what it means to find your place in a city as it vanishes before your eyes.”—The New York Times Book Review ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post Hong Kong is known as a place of extremes: a former colony of the United Kingdom that now exists at the margins of an ascendant China; a city rocked by mass protests, where residents rally—often in vain—against threats to their fundamental freedoms. But it is also misunderstood, and often romanticized. Drawing from her own experience reporting on the politics and culture of her hometown, as well as interviews with musicians, protesters, and writers who have watched their home transform, Karen Cheung gives us a rare insider’s view of this remarkable city at a pivotal moment—for Hong Kong and, ultimately, for herself. Born just before the handover to China in 1997, Cheung grew up questioning what version of Hong Kong she belonged to. Not quite at ease within the middle-class, cosmopolitan identity available to her at her English-speaking international school, she also resisted the conservative values of her deeply traditional, often dysfunctional family. Through vivid and character-rich stories, Cheung braids a dual narrative of her own coming of age alongside that of her generation. With heartbreaking candor, she recounts her yearslong struggle to find reliable mental health care in a city reeling from the traumatic aftermath of recent protests. Cheung also captures moments of miraculous triumph, documenting Hong Kong’s vibrant counterculture and taking us deep into its indie music and creative scenes. Inevitably, she brings us to the protests, where her understanding of what it means to belong to Hong Kong finally crystallized. An exhilarating blend of memoir and reportage, The Impossible City charts the parallel journeys of both a young woman and a city as they navigate the various, sometimes contradictory paths of coming into one’s own. LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/525634 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Founders' Fortunes: How Money Shaped the Birth of America Author: Willard Sterne Randall Narrator: Steve Hendrickson Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 15 minutes Release date: February 8, 2022 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: An illuminating financial history of the Founding Fathers, revealing how their personal finances shaped the Constitution and the new nation In 1776, upon the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers concluded America’s most consequential document with a curious note, pledging “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.” Lives and honor did indeed hang in the balance, yet just what were their fortunes? How much did the Founders stand to gain or lose through independence? And what lingering consequences did their respective financial stakes have on liberty, justice, and the fate of the fledgling United States of America? In this landmark account, historian Willard Sterne Randall investigates the private financial affairs of the Founders, illuminating like never before how and why the Revolution came about. The Founders’ Fortunes uncovers how these leaders waged war, crafted a constitution, and forged a new nation influenced in part by their own financial interests. In an era where these very issues have become daily national questions, the result is a remarkable and insightful new understanding of our nation’s bedrock values.