Listen to New Full Audiobooks in History, The Americas

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/666321 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Hitchcock's Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director's Dark Obsession

Author: Laurence Leamer

Narrator: Sharmila Devar

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 29 minutes

Release date: October 10, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Bestselling author of Capote’s Women Laurence Leamer shares an engrossing account of the enigmatic director Alfred Hitchcock that finally puts the dazzling actresses he cast in his legendary movies at the center of the story. Alfred Hitchcock was fixated—not just on the dark, twisty stories that became his hallmark, but also by the blond actresses who starred in many of his iconic movies. The director of North by Northwest, Rear Window, and other classic films didn’t much care if they wore wigs, got their hair coloring out of a bottle, or were the rarest human specimen—a natural blonde—as long as they shone with a golden veneer on camera. The lengths he went to in order to showcase (and often manipulate) these women would become the stuff of movie legend. But the women themselves have rarely been at the center of the story, until  now. In Hitchcock’s Blondes, bestselling biographer Laurence Leamer offers an intimate journey into the lives of eight legendary actresses whose stories helped chart the course of the troubled, talented director’s career—from his early days in the British film industry, to his triumphant American debut, to his Hollywood heyday and beyond. Through the stories of June Howard-Tripp, Madeleine Carroll, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Janet Leigh, Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint, and Tippi Hedren—who starred in fourteen of Hitchcock’s most notable films and who bore the brunt of his fondness and sometimes fixation—we can finally start to see the enigmatic man himself. After all, “his” blondes (as he thought of them) knew the truths of his art, his obsessions and desires, as well as  anyone. From the acclaimed author of Capote’s Women comes an intimate, revealing, and thoroughly modern look at both the enduring art created by a man obsessed…and the private toll that fixation took on the women in his orbit.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/665580 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Big Time: How the 1970s Transformed Sports in America

Author: Michael Maccambridge

Narrator: Sean Runnette

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 17 hours 49 minutes

Release date: October 10, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 1 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

A captivating chronicle of the pivotal decade in American sports, when the games invaded prime time, and sports moved from the margins to the mainstream of American culture. Every decade brings change, but as Michael MacCambridge chronicles in THE BIG TIME, no decade in American sports history featured such convulsive cultural shifts as the 1970s. So many things happened during the decade—the move of sports into prime-time television, the beginning of athletes’ gaining a sense of autonomy for their own careers, integration becoming—at least within sports—more of the rule than the exception, and the social revolution that brought females more decisively into sports, as athletes, coaches, executives, and spectators. More than politicians, musicians or actors, the decade in America was defined by its most exemplary athletes. The sweeping changes in the decade could be seen in the collective experience of Billie Jean King and Muhammad Ali, Henry Aaron and Julius Erving, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Joe Greene, Jack Nicklaus and Chris Evert, among others, who redefined the role of athletes and athletics in American culture. The Seventies witnessed the emergence of spectator sports as an ever-expanding mainstream phenomenon, as well as dramatic changes in the way athletes were paid, portrayed, and packaged. In tracing the epic narrative of how American sports was transformed in the Seventies, a larger story emerges: of how America itself changed, and how spectator sports moved decisively on a trajectory toward what it has become today, the last truly “big tent” in American culture.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/655139 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: To Rescue the Constitution: George Washington and the Fragile American Experiment

Author: Bret Baier

Narrator: Bret Baier

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 38 minutes

Release date: October 10, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.27 of Total 11

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Instant New York Times Bestseller #1 New York Times bestselling author Bret Baier reveals how George Washington saved the Constitution–and the American experiment ''To Rescue The Constitution is a masterful exploration of the electrifying struggle to unite a young United States.'' —Jay Winik A sweeping narrative ranging from the unsettled early American frontier and the battlefields of the Revolution to the history-making clashes within Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, Bret Baier’s To Rescue the Constitution dramatically illuminates the life of George Washington, the Founder who did more than perhaps any other individual to secure the future of the United States. George Washington rescued the nation three times: first by leading the Continental Army to victory in the Revolutionary War, second by presiding over the Constitutional Convention that set the blueprint for the United States and ushering the Constitution through a fractious ratification process, and third by leading the nation as its first president. There is no doubt that the struggling new nation needed to be rescued—and that Washington was the only American who could bring them together. After the victorious War of Independence, when a spirit of unity and patriotism might have been expected, instead the nation fractured. The states were no more than a loosely knit and contentious confederation, with no strong central union. It was an urgent matter that led to the calling of a Constitutional Convention to meet in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787. Setting aside his plan to retire to Mount Vernon, Washington agreed to be a delegate at Philadelphia. There he was unanimously elected president of the convention. After successfully bringing the Constitution into being, Washington then sacrificed any hope of returning to private life by accepting the unanimous election to be the nation’s first president. Washington was not known for brilliant oratory or prose, but his quiet, steady leadership gave life to the Constitution by showing how it should be enacted. In this vivid and moving portrait of America’s early struggles, Baier captures the critical moments when Washington’s leadership brought the nation from the brink of collapse. Baier exposes an early America that is grittier and far more divided than is often portrayed—one we can see reflected in today’s conflicts.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/669404 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: While Idaho Slept: The Hunt for Answers in the Murders of Four College Students

Author: J. Reuben Appelman

Narrator: Gary Bennett

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 6 hours 33 minutes

Release date: October 3, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The author of the acclaimed true-crime memoir, The Kill Jar, tells the inside story of the “University of Idaho Murders,” offering a memorable, thoughtful dive into our societal fascination with true crime, the media’s seeming blood-frenzy, and the future of homicide investigations, while cultivating an intimate look into the minds and hearts of the victims and their suspected killer alike.  Just after 4:00 am on November 13, 2022, four University of Idaho students were viciously stabbed to death in an off-campus house. The killings would shake the small blue-collar college town of Moscow, Idaho, dominate mainstream news coverage, and become a social media obsession, drawing millions of clicks and views. While a reticent Moscow Police Department, the FBI, and the Idaho State Police searched for the killer, unending conjecture and countless theories blazed online, in chatrooms and platforms from Reddit and YouTube to Facebook and TikTok. For more than a month, the clash of armchair investigators and law enforcement professionals raged, until a suspect—a 28-year-old Ph.D. candidate studying criminology—was arrested at his family home 2,500 miles away in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania on the day before New Year’s Eve. While Idaho Slept is a thought-provoking, literary chronicle of a small-town murder investigation blistering beneath the unceasing light of international interest, as traditional investigators, citizen sleuths, and the true-crime media acted—sometimes together, often in conflict—to uncover the truth. As J. Reuben Appelman brings this terrible crime into focus, he humanizes the four victims, examining the richness of their lives, dissects the mind and motivations of their presumed killer, and explores the world of northern Idaho, a rugged, deeply conservative stronghold steeped in Christian values and American patriotism.  Going deep inside the case, Appelman addresses a crucial question: With so many millions of citizens armed by access and hungry to take part in a true crime hunt of their own, has the nature of homicide investigations permanently changed? Rising above the sensational, While Idaho Slept illuminates the intrinsic connection between today’s media, citizen sleuths, our societal mania for murder tales, and an impatient public’s insatiable appetite for spectacle as never before. Running beneath, the pulse of the story is a heartbreaking narrative of the people we love, the dreams we all share, and the uncertain time left for sharing them.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/666332 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance

Author: Rebecca Clarren

Narrator: Rebecca Clarren

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 26 minutes

Release date: October 3, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Winner of the Will Rogers Medallion Award for Western Nonfiction Finalist for The Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize Shortlisted for The William Saroyan International Prize A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year 'Sharply insightful . . . A monumental piece of work.'—The Boston Globe An award-winning author investigates the entangled history of her Jewish ancestors' land in South Dakota and the Lakota, who were forced off that land by the United States government Growing up, Rebecca Clarren only knew the major plot points of her tenacious immigrant family’s origins. Her great-great-grandparents, the Sinykins, and their six children fled antisemitism in Russia and arrived in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, ultimately settling on a 160-acre homestead in South Dakota. Over the next few decades, despite tough years on a merciless prairie and multiple setbacks, the Sinykins became an American immigrant success story. What none of Clarren’s ancestors ever mentioned was that their land, the foundation for much of their wealth, had been cruelly taken from the Lakota by the United States government. By the time the Sinykins moved to South Dakota, America had broken hundreds of treaties with hundreds of Indigenous nations across the continent, and the land that had once been reserved for the seven bands of the Lakota had been diminished, splintered, and handed for free, or practically free, to white settlers. In The Cost of Free Land, Clarren melds investigative reporting with personal family history to reveal the intertwined stories of her family and the Lakota, and the devastating cycle of loss of Indigenous land, culture, and resources that continues today. With deep empathy and clarity of purpose, Clarren grapples with the personal and national consequences of this legacy of violence and dispossession. What does it mean to survive oppression only to perpetuate and benefit from the oppression of others? By shining a light on the people and families tangled up in this country’s difficult history, The Cost of Free Land invites readers to consider their own culpability and what, now, can be done.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/666330 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America

Author: Steve Inskeep

Narrator: Steve Inskeep

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 57 minutes

Release date: October 3, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.5 of Total 4

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

An instant New York Times bestseller A nuanced exploration of Abraham Lincoln’s political acumen, illuminating a great politician’s strategy in a country divided—and lessons for our own disorderly present In 1855, with the United States at odds over slavery, the lawyer Abraham Lincoln wrote a note to his best friend, the son of a Kentucky slaveowner. Lincoln rebuked his friend for failing to oppose slavery. But he added: “If for this you and I must differ, differ we must,” and said they would be friends forever. Throughout his life and political career, Lincoln often agreed to disagree. Democracy demanded it, since even an adversary had a vote. The man who went on to become America’s sixteenth president has assumed many roles in our historical consciousness, but most notable is that he was, unapologetically, a politician. And as Steve Inskeep argues, it was because he was willing to engage in politics—meeting with critics, sometimes working with them and other times outwitting them—that he was able to lead a social revolution.   In Differ We Must, Inskeep illuminates Lincoln’s life through sixteen encounters, some well-known, some obscure, but all imbued with new significance. As the host of NPR’s Morning Edition for almost two decades, Inskeep has mastered the art of bridging divides and building constructive debate in interviews; here, he brings his skills to bear on a prior master, forming a fresh and compelling narrative of Lincoln’s life. With rich detail and enlightening commentary, Inskeep expands our understanding of a politician who held strong to his moral compass while navigating between corrosive political factions, one who began his career in the minority party and not only won the majority but succeeded in uniting a nation.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/665581 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: In the Shadow of Fear: America and the World in 1950

Author: Nick Bunker

Narrator: Rich Miller

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 13 hours 36 minutes

Release date: October 3, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

An evocative portrait of a divided America at the dawn of the Cold War     Halfway through the twentieth century, the United States towered over the world in industrial might. After winning the 1948 election, Harry Truman hoped to use this economic strength to build on FDR’s achievements with new liberal reforms. But then, in just ten months between September 1949 and June 1950, the president’s ambitions were overtaken by events that left the country gripped by rage and fear. The Soviets tested an atomic bomb, Mao’s army swept through China, and at home Truman faced labor unrest and a Republican Party desperate for power.      In the Shadow of Fear is an innovative and gripping history of this pivotal moment. Recounting the launch of Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade, the defeat of Truman’s liberal program, and the start of the Korean War, prizewinning historian Nick Bunker shows us a polarized nation facing crises at home and abroad—a story with deep resonances today.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/651115 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post

Author: Martin Baron

Narrator: Liev Schreiber

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 16 hours 32 minutes

Release date: October 3, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 4

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

This program features a prologue and epilogue read by the author. A monumental work of nonfiction that gives a first-row seat to the epic power struggle between politics, money, media, and tech—for fans of Maggie Haberman's Confidence Man and Jane Mayer's Dark Money. Marty Baron took charge of The Washington Post newsroom in 2013, after nearly a dozen years leading The Boston Globe. Just seven months into his new job, Baron received explosive news: Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, would buy the Post, marking a sudden end to control by the venerated family that had presided over the paper for 80 years. Just over two years later, Donald Trump won the presidency. Now, the capital’s newspaper, owned by one of the world’s richest men, was tasked with reporting on a president who had campaigned against the press as the “lowest form of humanity.” Pressures on Baron and his colleagues were immense and unrelenting, having to meet the demands of their new owner while contending with a president who waged a war of unprecedented vitriol and vengeance against the media. In the face of Trump’s unceasing attacks, Baron steadfastly managed the Post’s newsroom. Their groundbreaking and award-winning coverage included stories about Trump’s purported charitable giving, misconduct by the Secret Service, and Roy Moore’s troubling sexual history. At the same time, Baron managed a restive staff during a period of rapidly changing societal dynamics around gender and race. In Collision of Power, Baron recounts this with the tenacity of a reporter and the sure hand of an experienced editor. The result is elegant and revelatory—an urgent exploration of the nature of power in the 21st century. A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/671568 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Fear Is Just a Word: A Missing Daughter, a Violent Cartel, and a Mother's Quest for Vengeance

Author: Azam Ahmed

Narrator: Sheldon Romero

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 4 minutes

Release date: September 26, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

A riveting true story of a mother who fought back against the drug cartels in Mexico, pursuing her own brand of justice to avenge the kidnapping and murder of her daughter—from a global investigative correspondent for The New York Times “Azam Ahmed has written a page-turning mystery but also a stunning, color-saturated portrait of the collapse of formal justice in one Mexican town.”—Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Directorate S LONGLISTED FOR THE MOORE PRIZE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS WRITING • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: New Yorker, The Economist, Chicago Public Library Fear Is Just a Word begins on an international bridge between Mexico and the United States, as fifty-six-year-old Miriam Rodríguez stalks one of the men she believes was involved in the murder of her daughter Karen. He is her target number eleven, a member of the drug cartel that has terrorized and controlled what was once Miriam’s quiet hometown of San Fernando, Mexico, almost one hundred miles from the U.S. border. Having dyed her hair red as a disguise, Miriam watches, waits, and then orchestrates the arrest of this man, exacting her own version of justice. Woven into this deeply researched, moving account is the story of how cartels built their power in Mexico, escalated the use of violence, and kidnapped and murdered tens of thousands. Karen was just one of the many people who disappeared, and Miriam, a brilliant, strategic, and fearless woman, begged for help from the authorities and paid ransom money she could not afford in hopes of saving her daughter. When that failed, she decided that “fear is just a word,” and began a crusade to track down Karen’s killers and to help other victimized families in their search for justice. What do people do when their country and the peaceful town where they have grown up become unrecognizable, suddenly places of violence and fear? Azam Ahmed takes us into the grieving of a country and a family to tell the mesmerizing story of a brave and brilliant woman determined to find out what happened to her daughter, and to see that the criminals who murdered her were punished. Fear Is Just a Word is an unforgettable and moving portrait of a woman, a town, and a country, and of what can happen when violent forces leave people to seek justice on their own.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/669368 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

Author: Yascha Mounk

Narrator: Jd Jackson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 1 minute

Release date: September 26, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist, Financial Times, Inc., Prospect Magazine, and The Conversation “The most comprehensive and reasonable story of this shift that has yet been attempted . . . Mounk has told the story of the Great Awokening better than any other writer who has attempted to make sense of it.” —The Washington Post 'An intellectual tour de force about the origins of identity politics and the threat it presents to genuine, honest, old-fashioned liberalism.” —Bret Stephens, The New York Times “Among the most insightful and important books written in the last decade on American democracy and its current torments, because it also shows us a way out of the trap.” —Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, and coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind 'Outstanding.' —David Brooks, The New York Times One of our leading public intellectuals traces the origin of a set of ideas about identity and social justice that is rapidly transforming America—and explains why it will fail to accomplish its noble goals. For much of history, societies have violently oppressed ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. It is no surprise that many who passionately believe in social justice came to believe that members of marginalized groups need to take pride in their identity to resist injustice. But over the past decades, a healthy appreciation for the culture and heritage of minority groups has transformed into a counterproductive obsession with group identity in all its forms. A new ideology aiming to place each person’s matrix of identities at the center of social, cultural, and political life has quickly become highly influential. It stifles discourse, vilifies mutual influence as cultural appropriation, denies that members of different groups can truly understand one another, and insists that the way governments treat their citizens should depend on the color of their skin. This, Yascha Mounk argues, is the identity trap. Though those who battle for these ideas are full of good intentions, they will ultimately make it harder to achieve progress toward the genuine equality we desperately need. Mounk has built his acclaimed scholarly career on being one of the first to warn of the risks right-wing populists pose to American democracy. But, he shows, those on the left and center who are stuck in the identity trap are now inadvertent allies to the MAGA movement. In The Identity Trap, Mounk provides the most ambitious and comprehensive account to date of the origins, consequences, and limitations of so-called “wokeness.” He is the first to show how postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory forged the “identity synthesis” that conquered many college campuses by 2010. He lays out how a relatively marginal set of ideas came to gain tremendous influence in business, media, and government by 2020. He makes a nuanced philosophical case for why the application of these ideas to areas from education to public policy is proving to be so deeply counterproductive—and why universal, humanist values can best serve the vital goal of true equality. In explaining the huge political and cultural transformations of the past decade, The Identity Trap provides truth and clarity where they are needed most.