Listen to New Full Audiobooks in History, The Americas

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/646973 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: American Phoenix: John Quincy and Louisa Adams, the War of 1812, and the Exile that Saved American Independence

Author: Jane Hampton Cook

Narrator: Kate Wisniewski

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 16 hours 48 minutes

Release date: August 15, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

John Quincy and Louisa Adams’s unexpected journey that changed everything. American Phoenix is the sweeping, riveting tale of a grand historic adventure across forbidding oceans and frozen tundra—from the bustling ports and towering birches of Boston to the remote reaches of pre-Soviet Russia, from an exile in arctic St. Petersburg to resurrection and reunion among the gardens of Paris. Upon these varied landscapes this Adams and his Eve must find a way to transform their banishment into America’s salvation. Author, historian, and national media commentator Jane Hampton Cook breathes life into once-obscure history, weaving a meticulously researched biographical tapestry that reads like a gripping novel. With the arc and intrigue of Shakespearean drama in a Jane Austen era, American Phoenix is a timely yet timeless addition to the recent renaissance of works on the founding Adams family, from patriarchs John and Abigail to the second-generation of John Quincy and Louisa and beyond. Cook has crafted not only a riveting narrative but also an easy-to-understand history filled with fly-on-the-wall vignettes from 1812 and its hardscrabble, freedom-hungry people. While unveiling vivid portrayals of each character—a colorful assortment of heroes and villains, patriots and pirates, rogues and rabble-rousers—she paints equally fresh, intimate portraits of both John Quincy and Louisa Adams. Cook artfully reveals John Quincy’s devastation after losing the job of his dreams, battle for America’s need to thrive economically, and sojourn to secure his homeland’s survival as a sovereign nation. She reserves her most detailed brushstrokes for the inner struggles of Louisa, using this quietly inspirational woman’s own words to amplify her fears, faith, and fortitude along a deeply personal, often heart-rending journey. Cook’s close-up perspective shows how this American couple’s Russian destination changed US destiny.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/668836 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia

Author: Carolyn Woods Eisenberg

Narrator: Susan Ericksen

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 29 hours 35 minutes

Release date: August 8, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Fire and Rain is a compelling, meticulous narrative of the way national security decisions formed at the highest levels of government affect the lives of individuals at home and abroad. By drawing these connections, Carolyn Woods Eisenberg brings to life policy decisions about Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, conveying their significance to a new generation of readers. She breaks fresh ground in contextualizing Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's decisions within a wider institutional and societal framework. Drawing upon a vast collection of declassified documents, Eisenberg presents an important reinterpretation of the Nixon Administration's relations with the Soviet Union and China vis a vis the war in Southeast Asia. She argues that in their desperate effort to overcome, or at least overshadow, their failure in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger made major concessions to both nations in the field of arms control, their response to the India-Pakistan war, and the diplomacy surrounding Taiwan—much of this secret. A half-century after the Paris Peace Conference marking the withdrawal of US troops and advisors from Vietnam and foreign troops from Laos and Cambodia, Fire and Rain is a dramatic account of geopolitical decision making, civil society, and the human toll of the war on the people of Southeast Asia.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/650355 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Highways and Heartaches: How Ricky Skaggs, Marty Stuart, and Children of the New South Saved the Soul of Country Music

Author: Michael Streissguth

Narrator: Jaime Lincoln Smith

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 50 minutes

Release date: August 8, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

In this enlightening and entertaining book, experience the evolution of country music, from the 1970s Appalachian hillbilly chitlin' circuit to the 1980s country music boom that paved the way for modern Americana. In a dim clearing off a county road in Kentucky sits a sagging outdoor stage buried in moss and dead leaves.  It used to be the centerpiece of carnival-like Sunday afternoons where local guitarists, fiddlers and mandolin players hammered out old mountain ballads and legends from the dawn of country music performed their classic hits. Most of the musicians who showed up have long since passed, but Nashville stars Ricky Skaggs and Marty Stuart survive.  They were barely teenagers in the early 1970s when they visited this stage in the care of legends Ralph Stanley and Lester Flatt, respectively. Skaggs and Stuart followed their bosses to dozens of stages throughout Appalachia and deeper into the American southland.  They were the children, absorbing the wondrous music and strange dramas around them as they became innovators and living symbols of country music. Highways and Heartaches takes readers on the rural circuit Skaggs and Stuart traveled, where an acoustic sound first assembled by masters such as Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, and Mother Maybelle Carter ruled the day. The young men were heirs to a bluegrass tradition transmitted to them early in life. One part mountain soul and another African American–influenced rhythm, the music they received was alternately celebrated and neglected in the more than fifty years after the two met in 1971, but since then it has never stopped evolving and influencing the wider American culture thanks to Skaggs and Stuart and other actors in this book, such as Jerry Douglas, Tony Rice, Keith Whitley, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt. Riveting portraits of Johnny Cash, Ralph Stanley, Lester Flatt and other heartland-born figures emerge, too.   Molded by forces in postwar southern culture such as racial conflict, fringe politics, evangelicalism, growing federal government influence, and stubborn patterns of Appalachian living and thinking, Skaggs and Stuart injected the spirit of bluegrass into their hard-wrought experiments in mainstream country music later in life, fueling the profitability and credibility of the fabled genre. Skaggs’s new traditionalism of the 1980s, integrating mountain instruments with elements of contemporary country music, created a new sound for the masses and placed him in the vanguard of Nashville’s recording artists while Stuart embraced seminal influences and attitudes from the riches of American culture to produce a catalog of significant recordings.   Skaggs and Stuart’s friendship took years to jell, but their similar pathways reveal a shared dedication to the soul of country music and highlight the curious day-to-day experiences of two lads growing up on the demanding rural route in bluegrass culture. Their journeys—populated by grizzled mentors, fearsome undertows, and cultural upheaval—influenced their creativity and, ultimately, cut life-giving tributaries in the ungainly, eternal story of country music.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/650339 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Ira Hayes: The Akimel O'odham Warrior, World War II, and the Price of Heroism

Author: Tom Holm

Narrator: Shaun Taylor Corbett

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 18 minutes

Release date: August 1, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The gripping, forgotten tale of Ira Hayes—a Native American icon and World War II legend who famously helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima but spent the latter half of his life haunted by being a war hero. IRA HAYES tells the story of Ira Hamilton Hayes from the perspective of a Native American combat veteran of the Vietnam generation. Hayes, along with five other Marines, was captured in Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph of raising the stars and stripes on Mount Suribachi during the battle for the Japanese Island of Iwo Jima. The photograph was the inspiration and model for the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington.  Between the time he helped raise that flag and his death—and beyond—he was the subject of more newspaper columns than any other Native person. He was hailed as a hero and maligned as a chronic alcoholic unable to take care of himself. IRA HAYES explores these fluctuating views of Ira Hayes. It reveals that they were primarily the product of American misconceptions about Native people, the nature of combat, and even alcoholism. Like most surviving veterans of combat, Ira did not think of himself as a heroic figure. There can be no doubt that Ira suffered from PTSD, which is a compound of survivor’s guilt, the shock of seeing death, especially of one’s friends, and the isolation brought on by feeling that no one could understand what he had been through. Ira’s life has been a subject of two motion pictures and a television drama. All these dramas sympathize with him, but ultimately fail to see his binge drinking as his way of temporarily escaping the melancholy, the rage he felt, his sense of betrayal, and the sheer boredom of peacetime.  IRA HAYES breaks apart the complexities of Ira’s short life in honor of all Native veterans who have been to war in the service of the United States. This is equally their story.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/649117 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Flirting with Danger: The Mysterious Life of Marguerite Harrison, Socialite Spy

Author: Janet Wallach

Narrator: Saskia Maarleveld

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 31 minutes

Release date: August 1, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR'S CHOICE 'A compelling story that pulsates with the energy of a thriller'—The Wall Street Journal 'Suspense, élan and a generous helping of glamour: Think George Smiley in a mink-trimmed coat.'—The New York Times Book Review The true story of socialite Marguerite Harrison, who spied for U.S. military intelligence in Russia and Germany in the fraught period between the world wars Born a privileged child of America’s Gilded Age, Marguerite Harrison rebelled against her mother’s ambitions, married the man she loved, was widowed at thirty-seven, and set off on a life of adventure. Hired as a society reporter, when America entered World War I she applied to Military Intelligence to work as a spy. She arrived in Berlin immediately after the Armistice and befriended the enemy, dining with aristocrats and dancing with socialists. Late into the night she wrote prescient reports on the growing power of the German right. Sent to Moscow, she sneaked into Russia to observe the results of the Bolshevik Revolution. Although she carried press credentials she was caught and imprisoned as an American spy. Terrified when told her only way out was to spy for the Cheka, she became a double agent, aiming to convince the Russian rulers she was working for them while striving to stay loyal to her country. In Germany and Russia, Harrison saw the future—a second war with Germany, a cold war with the Soviets—but her reports were ignored by many back home. Over a decade, Harrison’s mysterious adventures took her to Europe, Baghdad, and the Far East, as a socialite, secret agent, and documentary filmmaker. Janet Wallach captures Harrison’s daring and glamour in this stranger-than-fiction history of a woman drawn to the impossible.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/659769 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump

Author: Miles Taylor

Narrator: Miles Taylor

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 57 minutes

Release date: July 18, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.57 of Total 23

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 4

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The author behind the “eye-popping” (CNN) #1 New York Times bestseller A Warning presents an urgent look at how our deeply divided nation is setting the stage for “The Next Trump.” Donald Trump will be president again, whether he is on the ballot or not. That is because Trumpism is overtaking the Republican Party and will mount a vigorous comeback, potentially in the hands of a savvier successor. This prophecy will come true, according to Miles Taylor, if we do not learn the lessons of the recent past. With the 2024 election approaching, the formerly “Anonymous” official is back with bombshell revelations and a sobering national forecast. Through interviews with dozens of ex-Trump aides and government leaders, Taylor predicts what could happen inside “Trump 2.0,” the White House of a more competent and more formidable copycat. What sounds like a political thriller—from shadowy presidential powers and CIA betrayals to angry henchmen and assassination plots—is instead America’s political reality, as Taylor uses untold stories to shed light on the ex-President’s unfulfilled plans, the dark forces haunting our lives, and how we can thwart the rise of extremism in the United States. Blowback is also a surprisingly emotional and self-critical portrait of a dissenter, whose own unmasking provides a vivid warning about what happens when we hide the truth from others and, most importantly, ourselves.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/631088 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

Author: Neil Howe

Narrator: Neil Howe

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 20 hours 29 minutes

Release date: July 18, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.47 of Total 19

Ratings of Narrator: 4.67 of Total 3

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The visionary behind the bestselling phenomenon The Fourth Turning looks once again to America’s past to predict our future in this startling and hopeful prophecy for how our present era of civil unrest will resolve over the next ten years—and what our lives will look like once it has. Twenty-five years ago, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss dazzled the world with a provocative new theory of American history. Looking back at the last 500 years, they’d uncovered a distinct pattern: modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting roughly eighty to one hundred years, the length of a long human life, with each cycle composed of four eras—or “turnings”—that always arrive in the same order and each last about twenty years. The last of these eras—the fourth turning—was always the most perilous, a period of civic upheaval and national mobilization as traumatic and transformative as the New Deal and World War II, the Civil War, or the American Revolution. Now, right on schedule, our own fourth turning has arrived. And so Neil Howe has returned with an extraordinary new prediction. What we see all around us—the polarization, the growing threat of civil conflict and global war—will culminate by the early 2030s in a climax that poses great danger and yet also holds great promise, perhaps even bringing on America’s next golden age. Every generation alive today will play a vital role in determining how this crisis is resolved, for good or ill. Illuminating, sobering, yet ultimately empowering, The Fourth Turning Is Here takes you back into history and deep into the collective personality of each living generation to make sense of our current crisis, explore how all of us will be differently affected by the political, social, and economic challenges we’ll face in the decade to come, and reveal how our country, our communities, and our families can best prepare to meet these challenges head-on.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/649110 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Lexington: The Extraordinary Life and Turbulent Times of America's Legendary Racehorse

Author: Kim Wickens

Narrator: Vivienne Leheny

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 16 minutes

Release date: July 11, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A vivid portrait of America’s greatest stallion, the larger-than-life men who raced and bred him, and the dramatic times in which they lived.”—Geraldine Brooks, author of Horse The powerful true story of the champion Thoroughbred racehorse who gained international fame in the tumultuous Civil War–era South, and became the most successful sire in American racing history WINNER OF THE DR. TONY RYAN BOOK AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN THOROUGHBRED RACING LITERATURE The early days of American horse racing were grueling. Four-mile races, run two or three times in succession, were the norm, rewarding horses who brandished the ideal combination of stamina and speed. The stallion Lexington, named after the city in Kentucky where he was born, possessed these winning qualities, which pioneering Americans prized.  Lexington shattered the world speed record for a four-mile race, showing a war-torn nation that the extraordinary was possible even in those perilous times. He would continue his winning career until deteriorating eyesight forced his retirement in 1855. But once his groundbreaking achievements as a racehorse ended, his role as a sire began. Horses from his bloodline won more money than the offspring of any other Thoroughbred—an annual success that led Lexington to be named America’s leading sire an unprecedented sixteen times.  Yet with the Civil War raging, Lexington’s years at a Kentucky stud farm were far from idyllic. Confederate soldiers ran amok, looting freely and kidnapping horses from the top stables. They soon focused on the prized Lexington and his valuable progeny. Kim Wickens, a lawyer and dressage rider, became fascinated by this legendary horse when she learned that twelve of Thoroughbred racing's thirteen Triple Crown winners descended from Lexington. Wickens spent years meticulously researching the horse and his legacy—and with Lexington, she presents an absorbing, exciting account that transports readers back to the raucous beginning of American horse racing and introduces them to the stallion at its heart.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/640562 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

Author: Donovan X. Ramsey

Narrator: Donovan X. Ramsey

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 33 minutes

Release date: July 11, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 4

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 3

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • A “vivid and frank” (NPR) account of the crack cocaine era and a community’s ultimate resilience, told through a cast of characters whose lives illuminate the dramatic rise and fall of the epidemic   “A master class in disrupting a stubborn narrative, a monumental feat for the fraught subject of addiction in Black communities.”—The Washington Post “A poignant and compelling re-examination of a tragic era in America history . . . insightful . . . and deeply moving.”—Bryan Stevenson, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Just Mercy FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • ONE OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY AND VULTURE’S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time, The Washington Post, NPR, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, She Reads, Electric Lit, The Mary Sue The crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s is arguably the least examined crisis in American history. Beginning with the myths inspired by Reagan’s war on drugs, journalist Donovan X. Ramsey’s exacting analysis traces the path from the last triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement to the devastating realities we live with today: a racist criminal justice system, continued mass incarceration and gentrification, and increased police brutality.   When Crack Was King follows four individuals to give us a startling portrait of crack’s destruction and devastating legacy: Elgin Swift, an archetype of American industry and ambition and the son of a crack-addicted father who turned their home into a “crack house”; Lennie Woodley, a former crack addict and sex worker; Kurt Schmoke, the longtime mayor of Baltimore and an early advocate of decriminalization; and Shawn McCray, community activist, basketball prodigy, and a founding member of the Zoo Crew, Newark’s most legendary group of drug traffickers.   Weaving together riveting research with the voices of survivors, When Crack Was King is a crucial reevaluation of the era and a powerful argument for providing historically violated communities with the resources they deserve.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/633595 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier

Author: Cw Goodyear

Narrator: Fred Sanders

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 17 hours 54 minutes

Release date: July 4, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 3

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

An “ambitious, thorough, supremely researched” (The Washington Post) biography of the extraordinary, tragic life of America’s twentieth president—James Garfield. In “the most comprehensive Garfield biography in almost fifty years” (The Wall Street Journal), C.W. Goodyear charts the life and times of one of the most remarkable Americans ever to win the Presidency. Progressive firebrand and conservative compromiser; Union war hero and founder of the first Department of Education; Supreme Court attorney and abolitionist preacher; mathematician and canalman; crooked election-fixed and clean-government champion; Congressional chieftain and gentleman-farmer; the last president to be born in a log cabin; the second to be assassinated. James Abram Garfield was all these things and more. Over nearly two decades in Congress during a polarized era—Reconstruction and the Gilded Age—Garfield served as a peacemaker in a Republican Party and America defined by divisions. He was elected to overcome them. He was killed while trying to do so. President Garfield is American history at its finest. It is about an impoverished boy working his way from the frontier to the Presidency; a progressive statesman, trying to raise a more righteous, peaceful Republic out of the ashes of civil war; the tragically imperfect course of that reformation, and the man himself; a martyr-President, whose death succeeded in nudging the country back to cleaner, calmer politics.