Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/807803 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Our Lady of the World's Fair: Bringing Michelangelo's 'Pieta' to Queens in 1964

Author: Ruth D. Nelson

Narrator: Elizabeth Wiley

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 21 minutes

Release date: September 15, 2024

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Driven by different motives, Robert Moses and Francis Cardinal Spellman had the same vision: to display Michelangelo's masterpiece, the Pietà, in the Vatican's pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair in New York City. As Ruth D. Nelson gracefully showcases, Moses believed this blockbuster would guarantee the fair's financial success. At the same time, Spellman, Archbishop of New York and the spiritual leader of Cold War America's Catholic community, hoped that at a time of domestic strife and global conflict, the Pietà's presence would have a positive spiritual impact on the nation. Although the fair did not turn out to be the financial bonanza that Moses expected, the Pietà drew record crowds of the faithful, art lovers, and the curious. Nelson's fascinating uncovering of the intensive planning that went into designing the pavilion, transporting the art piece across the Atlantic, and coordinating Pope Paul VI's visit to New York in 1965—the first papal visit to the Western Hemisphere—demonstrates the sheer scale and opportunity of the two men's endeavors. Our Lady of the World's Fair depicts the skepticism and fierce criticism that faced the two New York power brokers. Rather than letting the negative weigh them down, they united and called on every resource at their disposal to make this unlikely cultural coup possible.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/790594 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Reagan: His Life and Legend

Author: Max Boot

Narrator: Graham Winton

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 32 hours 7 minutes

Release date: September 10, 2024

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 2

Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

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).The story begins not in star-studded Hollywood but in the cradle of the Midwest, smalltown Illinois, where Reagan was born in 1911 to Nelle Clyde Wilson, a devoted Disciples of Christ believer, and Jack Reagan, a struggling, alcoholic salesman. Boot vividly creates a portrait of a handsome young man, indeed a much-vaunted lifeguard, whose early successes mirrored those of Horatio Alger. And contextualizing Reagan’s life against American history, Boot re-creates the world in which Reagan transitioned from local Iowa sportscaster to budding screen actor. The world of Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1950s would prove significant, not only in Reagan’s coming-of-age in such classics as Knute Rockne and Kings Row but during the twilight of his film career, when he played opposite a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo, and then his eventual emergence as a television host of General Electric Theater, which established his bona fides as one of the leading conservative voices of the time. Indeed, the leap to California governor in 1966 seemed almost preordained, in which Reagan became a bellwether for a nation in the throes of a generational shift.Reagan’s 1980 presidential election augured a shift that continues into this century. Boot writes not as a partisan but as a historian seeking to set the story straight. He explains how Reagan was not only an ideologue but also a supreme pragmatist who signed pro-abortion and gun control bills as governor, cut deals with Democrats in both Sacramento and Washington, and befriended Mikhail Gorbachev to help end the Cold War. A master communicator, Reagan revived America’s spirits after the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. But Boot also shows how Reagan was armored in obliviousness. He traces Reagan’s opposition to civil rights over forty years, reveals how he neglected the exploding AIDS epidemic, and details how America experienced a level of income inequality not seen since the Gilded Age.With its revelatory insights, Reagan: His Life and Legend is no apologia, depicting a man with a good-versus-evil worldview derived from his moralistic upbringing and Hollywood westerns. Providing fresh examinations of “trickle-down economics,” the Cold War’s end, the Iran-Contra affair, as well as a nuanced portrait of Reagan’s family, this definitive biography is as compelling a presidential biography as any in recent decades.“This is a timely and fascinating book, just what we need to understand, and perhaps transcend, our current age of political paralysis and polarization. Understanding Reagan is key to understanding our politics today.”—Walter Isaacson, author of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/778208 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land

Author: Rebecca Nagle

Narrator: Rebecca Nagle

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 14 minutes

Release date: September 10, 2024

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

A New Yorker Best Book of 2024 • An Esquire Best Book of Fall 2024 • Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction ‘Breathtaking… a triumph' NOREEN MASUD ‘A fascinating book and an important one’ WASHINGTON POST A powerful work of reportage and American history that braids together the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation’s earliest days, and a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land more than a century later. Before 2020, American Indian reservations made up roughly 55 million acres of land in the United States. By contrast, nearly 200 million acres are reserved for National Forests – in the emergence of the United States as a nation, the government set aside more land for trees than for Indigenous peoples. In the 1830s, Muscogee people were rounded up by the US military at gunpoint and forced into exile halfway across the continent. At the time, they were promised this new land would be theirs for as long as the grass grew and the waters ran. But that promise was not kept. When Oklahoma was created on top of Muscogee land, the new state claimed their reservation no longer existed. Over a century later, a Muscogee citizen was sentenced to death for murdering another Muscogee citizen on tribal land. His defense attorneys argued that the murder occurred on the reservation of his tribe, and therefore Oklahoma didn’t have the jurisdiction to execute him. Oklahoma asserted that the reservation no longer existed. In the summer of 2020, the Supreme Court settled the dispute. Its ruling would ultimately underpin multiple reservations covering almost half the land in Oklahoma, including the author’s own Cherokee Nation. Here Rebecca Nagle recounts the generations long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma. By chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance, By the Fire We Carry stands as a landmark work of American history

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/776354 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Highest Calling: Conversations on the American Presidency

Author: David M. Rubenstein

Narrator: Jonathan Darman, Ted Widmer, Amity Shlaes, Kai Bird, Candice Millard, Peter Baker, Jeffrey Frank, Richard Norton Smith, Franklin Foer, Douglas Bradburn, Fredrik Logevall, Stewart McLaurin, Susan Eisenhower, David M. Rubenstein, David Marchick, Lindsey Chervinsky, Timothy J. Naftali, Maggie Haberman, James Baker III, Michael Beschloss, Bill Clinton, Douglas Brinkley, Annette Gordon-Reed, Ron Chernow, Hillary Rodham Clinton

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 19 hours 3 minutes

Release date: September 10, 2024

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 2 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 2 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the New York Times bestselling author of The American Story and How to Lead and host of PBS’s History with David Rubenstein—David Rubenstein interviews living American presidents and top historians and journalists who reflect on the US presidency, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Maggie Haberman, Ron Chernow, and more. For years, bestselling author David M. Rubenstein has distilled the contours of American democracy through conversations with noted leaders and historians. In The Highest Calling, he offers an enlightening overview of arguably the single most important position in the world: the American presidency. Blending history and anecdote, Rubenstein chronicles the journeys of the presidents who have defined America as it exists now, what they envision for its future, and their legacy on the world stage. Drawing from his own experience in the Carter administration, he engages in dialogues with our nation’s presidents and the historians who study them. Get exclusive access to fresh perspectives, including: -Original interviews with most of the living US presidents -Interviews with noted presidential historians like Annette Gordon-Reed, Ron Chernow, Candice Millard, and more Through “chatty, insightful, and enlightening” (The Wall Street Journal) analysis, Rubenstein captures our country’s most prominent leaders, the political genius and frays of the presidential role, and the wisdom that emerges from it.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/817822 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Sangamon Story: Selected Readings from Francis Grierson's, The Valley of Shadows

Author: Francis Grierson

Narrator: Kirk Laughead

Format: Abridged Audiobook

Length: 2 hours 37 minutes

Release date: September 6, 2024

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Francis Grierson's, The Valley of Shadows, is truly a lost American classic. Written at the dawn of the twentieth century, the author has remarkably captured his adventures and observations as a child growing up on the prairies of Illinois in the years leading up the Civil War, in a region that was neither North nor South; neither for slavery nor against it; and how their small family farm became an unscheduled stop on the Underground Railroad. Written in an authentic vernacular of the time, and populated by larger than life characters, Grierson has woven a tale of excitement and mystery, set in a second Garden of Eden of wildlife and nature. The prose and dialogue is like Shakespeare of the prairie. It reads like a cross between Tom Sawyer and Uncle Tom's Cabin, and stands out among all of the other books written about that era. What people are saying: “It has a quality not to be found in any other writing about the Civil War;' 'Its prose is alive, strong, subtle, of warm color, almost overpowering;' 'No one can read it, without finding new enlightenment about our past.”

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/813620 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin

Author: John D'Emilio

Narrator: Scott R. Pollak

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 20 hours 3 minutes

Release date: September 5, 2024

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Before Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin was working to bring the civil rights movement to the forefront of America's consciousness. A teacher to King, an international apostle of peace, and the organizer of the historic 1963 March on Washington, he brought Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence to America and helped launch the civil rights movement. Nonetheless, Rustin has been largely erased by history, in part because he was an African American homosexual. Acclaimed historian John D'Emilio tells the full and remarkable story of Rustin's intertwined lives: his pioneering and public persona and his oblique and stigmatized private self. It was in the tumultuous 1930s that Bayard Rustin came of age, getting his first lessons in politics through the Communist Party and the unrest of the Great Depression. A Quaker and a radical pacifist, he went to prison for refusing to serve in World War II, only to suffer a sexual scandal. Freed from prison after the war, Rustin threw himself into the early campaigns of the civil rights and anti-nuclear movements until an arrest for sodomy nearly destroyed his career. For years after, Rustin assumed a less public role, even though his influence was everywhere. Not until Rustin's crowning achievement as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington would he finally emerge from the shadows that homophobia cast over his career. Rustin remained until his death in 1987 committed to the causes of world peace, racial equality, and economic justice. Based on more than a decade of archival research and interviews with dozens of surviving friends and colleagues of Rustin's, Lost Prophet is a triumph. Rustin emerges as a hero of the black freedom struggle and a singularly important figure in the lost gay history of the mid-20th century. John D'Emilio's compelling narrative rescues a forgotten figure and brings alive a time of great hope and great tragedy in the not-so-distant past. Produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont. ©2004 John D'Emilio.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/827810 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Malört: The Redemption of a Revered and Reviled Spirit

Author: Josh Noel

Narrator: Brandon Pollock

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 31 minutes

Release date: September 3, 2024

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Malört may be the worst thing you'll ever taste. Known primarily for its intense bitterness, the infamous Chicago liqueur has been compared to 'a forest fire, if the forest was made of earwax.' Yet lurking in the horror and the mockery lies the truth of Malört: we keep going back for more. For nearly a hundred years, we've gone back. Jeppson's Malört could have died a hundred deaths in that time. Its survival wasn't always a given. There were cultural shifts and fortunate timing that helped transform a drink rooted in centuries-old Swedish tradition into the American sensation it is today. Malört is a story of love, relationships, and how one generation finds meaning where generations before did not. Author and beer expert Josh Noel unpacks a uniquely American tale, equal parts culture, business, and personal relationships—involving secret love, federal prison, a David vs. Goliath court battle, and the 2018 sale of Jeppson's Malört, which made Pat Gabelick, a seventy-five-year-old Chicago woman who spent much of her life as a legal secretary, into an unlikely millionaire. Malört isn't just the story of one brazen liquor—it is the story of modern tastes and cultural shifts.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/813856 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: No Haven: The Connecticut Mob and the Rise of America's Model City

Author: Paul Bleakley

Narrator: Joe Barrett

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 56 minutes

Release date: September 3, 2024

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

With Boston to the north and New York City to the south, Connecticut's history of organized crime is often overlooked. This is the untold story of New Haven's illegal past. One of America's most historic and enduring cities, New Haven has wrangled with a perpetual identity struggle, torn between worlds that occasionally converged in chaos and violence. In the 1930s, Connecticut became a region where Mafia families like the Genoveses, Gambinos, Colombos, and Patriarcas shared turf—working together with enough profits to go around or descending into open war to rival that experienced in any major city. Central to this conflict were three men who were, at different times, cautious allies or sworn nemeses. Representing the Genoveses, Midge Renault reigned supreme thanks to his reputation for wanton violence. Meanwhile, Colombo capo Ralph 'Whitey' Tropiano maintained a lower profile, which belied his reputation as a vicious killer. But it was his lieutenant, Billy 'The Wild Guy' Grasso, who ultimately rose to the top after joining the New England Patriarca Family, enjoying a short rule that ended with a murder plot that left him on the wrong end of a bullet.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/805193 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Some Nightmares Are Real: The Haunting Truth Behind Alabama’s Supernatural Tales

Author: Kelly Kazek

Narrator: Courtney Patterson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 3 hours 15 minutes

Release date: September 3, 2024

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Dark secrets lurk beneath the sleepy surface of Alabama. Ghosts and grisly creatures haunt the towns and forests. In the great Southern ghost-story tradition, famed Alabama storyteller Kelly Kazek weaves a gothic tapestry of ten stories drawn from real people and legendary creatures, cursed places, and harrowing events. Each story or legend takes listeners to a different place in Alabama. Learn about the bestial Wolf Woman who terrified Mobilians in the haunted old port city. In the city of Huntsville, visit the Dead Children's Playground in gloomy Maple Hill Cemetery. In Jacksonville, feel the cold grip of the Old Mill Witch, rumored to protect the workers at the rickety cotton yarn mill. Hear about the mysterious green light that drifts along the Alabama River in the Black Belt hamlet of Gee's Bend and learn about the role the Gee's Bend Ferry played in the Civil Rights Movement. Unlike most ghost-story collections, Some Nightmares Are Real includes facts, historical resources, and information about how to visit the locations. These contemporary stories embrace a beloved Southern folkloric tradition for a new generation of young readers. The tales will terrify and ensnare ghost-story lovers of all ages. So settle in, pull the covers up tight, and maybe turn on the light, because the truth is: Some Nightmares Are Real.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/768817 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad

Author: Raymond G. Dobard, Jacqueline L. Tobin

Narrator: Leon Nixon, Janina Edwards

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 5 hours 33 minutes

Release date: September 3, 2024

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

"There are five square knots on the quilt every two inches apart. They escaped on the fifth knot on the tenth pattern and went to Ontario, Canada. The monkey wrench turns the wagon wheel toward Canada on a bear's paw trail to the crossroads--" And so begins the fascinating story that was passed down from generation to generation in the family of Ozella McDaniel Williams. But what appears to be a simple story that was handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter is actually much, much more than that. In fact, it is a coded message steeped in African textile traditions that provides a link between slave-made quilts and the Underground Railroad. In 1993, author Jacqueline Tobin visited the Old Market Building in the historic district of Charleston, South Carolina, where local craftspeople sell their wares. Amid piles of beautiful handmade quilts, Tobin met African American quilter Ozella Williams and the two struck up a conversation. With the admonition to "write this down," Williams began to tell a fascinating story that had been handed down from her mother and grandmother before her. As Tobin sat in rapt attention, Williams began to describe how slaves made coded quilts and then used them to navigate their escape on the Underground Railroad. But just as quickly as she started, Williams stopped, informing Tobin that she would learn the rest when she was "ready." During the three years it took for Williams's narrative to unfold--and as the friendship and trust between the two women grew--Tobin enlisted Raymond Dobard, Ph.D., an art history professor and well-known African American quilter, to help provide the historical context behind what Williams was describing. Now, based on Williams's story and their own research, Tobin and Dobard, in what they call "Ozella's Underground Railroad Quilt Code," offer proof that some slaves were involved in a sophisticated network that melded African textile traditions with American quilt practices and created a potent result: African American quilts with patterns that conveyed messages that were, in fact, essential tools for escape along the Underground Railroad.