Listen to New Full Audiobooks in History, The Americas

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/671369 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual

Author: Central Intelligence Agency

Narrator: John Riddle

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 4 hours 13 minutes

Release date: July 3, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Released by the Freedom of Information Act. This document is a thorough description of how the CIA recommends interrogating a subject. To get the information that is needed there is nothing withheld short of torture. For example in 'Threats and Fears,' the CIA authors note that 'the threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. The threat to inflict pain, for example, can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain.' Under the subheading 'Pain,' the guidelines discuss the theories behind various thresholds of pain, and recommend that a subject's 'resistance is likelier to be sapped by pain which he seems to inflict upon himself' such rather than by direct torture. The report suggests forcing the detainee to stand at attention for long periods of time. A section on sensory deprivations suggests imprisoning detainees in rooms without sensory stimuli of any kind, 'in a cell which has no light,' for example.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/670888 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: An Infinite Fountain of Light: Jonathan Edwards for the Twenty-First Century

Author: George M. Marsden

Narrator: Tim Danko

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 5 hours 1 minute

Release date: June 27, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

For perspective on our own times and how we got here, it helps to listen to wise guides from other eras. In An Infinite Fountain of Light, the renowned American historian George Marsden illuminates the landscape with wisdom from one such mentor: Jonathan Edwards. Drawing on his deep expertise on Edwards and American culture, Marsden explains where Edwards stood within his historical context and sets forth key points of his complex thought. By also considering Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield, two of Edwards's most influential contemporaries, Marsden unpacks the competing cultural and religious impulses that have shaped our times. In contrast, Edwards offered us an exhilarating view of the centrality of God's beauty and love. Christians' love for God, he taught, can be the guiding love of our lives, opening us to transformative joy and orienting all our lesser loves. There is an infinite fullness of all possible good in God, a fullness of every perfection, of all excellency and beauty, and of infinite happiness, wrote Edwards. This infinite fountain of light should, diffusing its excellent fullness, pour forth light all around. With Marsden's guidance, listeners will discover how Edwards's insights can renew our own vision of the divine, of creation, and of ourselves.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/637380 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: White House by the Sea: A Century of the Kennedys at Hyannis Port

Author: Kate Storey

Narrator: Kathe Mazur

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 27 minutes

Release date: June 27, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.6 of Total 10

Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 3

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

“Impeccably researched…captivating!” —Elin Hilderbrand * “A well-paced history.” —The New York Times Book Review * “Fascinating…with new details and well-sourced reporting.” —Associated Press NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! The intimate, multigenerational story of the Kennedy family as seen through their Hyannis Port compound on Cape Cod—the iconic place where they’ve celebrated, mourned, and bonded—based on more than a hundred in-depth interviews by a Rolling Stone editor and journalist Kate Storey. Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, is synonymous with the Kennedy family. It is where, for a hundred years, America’s most storied political family has come to celebrate, bond, play, and grieve. It is also the setting of so many events we remember: JFK giving his presidential acceptance speech, Jackie speaking with a Life magazine reporter just days after her husband’s assassination, Senator Edward Kennedy seeking refuge after the Chappaquiddick crash, Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger tying the knot—and even Conor Kennedy courting pop star Taylor Swift. Anyone who has lived in, worked at, or visited the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port has had a front-row view to history. Now, with extraordinary access to the Kennedy family—and featuring more than fifty rarely-seen images—journalist Kate Storey gives us a remarkably intimate and poignant look at the rhythms of an American dynasty. Drawing from a wealth of conversations with family members, friends, neighbors, household and security staff, Storey presents a rich and textured account of the Kennedys’ lives in their summer refuge. From the 1920s, when Rose and Joseph P. Kennedy rented then bought a home known as The Malcolm Cottage, to today, when many Kennedys have purchased their own homes surrounding what’s now called The Big House, this book delivers many surprising revelations across the decades, including what matriarch Rose considered the family’s greatest tragedy, the rivalrous relationship between brothers Jack and Joe, details about Jackie’s life at the compound, and previously unknown glimpses into JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s loving and ill-fated relationship. “Engaging and…intimate anecdotes that often stand in contrast to predominant, media-created perceptions...Readers will come away with new insights and due appreciation for this uniquely American dynasty” (Booklist, starred review).

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/631021 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad

Author: Tamara J. Walker

Narrator: Tamara J. Walker, Marisha Tapera

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 18 minutes

Release date: June 20, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • An award-winning author charts the poignant global journeys of African Americans as she explores her own transatlantic family odyssey in Beyond the Shores, a powerful history of living abroad while Black.   “By exploring the life of Black expats, creatives, and activists, Beyond the Shores enhances the stories of migration to reveal how race is lived in the United States and abroad.”—Marcia Chatelain, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of South Side Girls Part historical exploration, part travel memoir, Beyond the Shores reveals poignant histories of a diverse group of African Americans who have left the United States over the course of the past century. Together, the interwoven stories highlight African Americans’ complicated relationship to the United States and the world at large.   Beyond the Shores is not just about where African Americans stayed or where they ate when they traveled but also about why they left in the first place and how they were treated once they reached their destinations. Drawing on years of research, Dr. Tamara J. Walker chronicles their experiences in atmospheric detail, taking readers from well-known capital cities to more unusual destinations like Yangiyul, Uzbekistan, and Kabondo, Kenya. She follows Florence Mills, the would-be Josephine Baker of her day, in Paris, and Richard Wright, the author turned actor and filmmaker, in Buenos Aires. Throughout Beyond the Shores, she relays tender stories of adventurous travelers, including a group of gifted Black crop scientists in the 1930s, a housewife searching for purpose in the 1950s, a Peace Corps volunteer discovering his identity in the 1970s, and her own grandfather, who, after losing his eye fighting in World War II and returning to a country that showed no signs of honoring his sacrifice, set out with his wife and children on a circuitous journey that sent them back and forth across the Atlantic. Tying these tales together is Walker’s personal account of her family’s, and her own, experiences abroad—in France, Brazil, Argentina, Austria, and beyond.   By sharing the accounts of those who escaped the racism of the United States to try their hands at life abroad, Beyond the Shores shines a light on the meaning of home and the search for a better life.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/637381 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation

Author: Rachel Louise Martin

Narrator: Megan Tusing, Janina Edwards

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 0 minutes

Release date: June 13, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

A “masterful” (Taylor Branch) and “striking” (The New Yorker) portrait of a small town living through tumultuous times, this propulsive piece of forgotten civil rights history—about the first school to attempt court-ordered desegregation in the wake of Brown v. Board—will forever change how you think of the end of racial segregation in America. In graduate school, Rachel Martin was sent to a small town in the foothills of the Appalachians, where locals wanted to build a museum to commemorate the events of September 1956, when Clinton High School became the first school in the former Confederacy to attempt court mandated desegregation. But not everyone wanted to talk. As one founder of the Tennessee White Youth told her, “Honey, there was a lot of ugliness down at the school that year; best we just move on and forget it.” For years, Martin wondered what it was some white residents of Clinton didn’t want remembered. So, she went back, eventually interviewing over sixty townsfolk—including nearly a dozen of the first students to desegregate Clinton High—to piece together what happened back in 1956: the death threats and beatings, picket lines and cross burnings, neighbors turned on neighbors and preachers for the first time at a loss for words. The National Guard rushed to town, along with national journalists like Edward R. Morrow and even evangelist Billy Graham. But that wasn’t the most explosive secret Martin learned... In A Most Tolerant Little Town, Rachel Martin weaves together over a dozen perspectives in an intimate, kaleidoscopic portrait of a small town living through a turbulent turning point for America. The result is at once a “gripping” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) mystery and a moving piece of forgotten civil rights history, rendered “with precision, lucidity and, most of all, a heart inured to false hope” (The New York Times). You may never before have heard of Clinton, Tennessee—but you won’t be forgetting the town anytime soon.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/631083 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Devils Will Get No Rest: FDR, Churchill, and the Plan That Won the War

Author: James B. Conroy

Narrator: Fred Sanders

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 13 hours 19 minutes

Release date: June 13, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Written with “a cinematic sense of urgency and realism” (Evan Osnos, National Book Award–winning author), this is the first full account of the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, the secret ten-day parlay in Morocco where FDR, Churchill, and their divided high command hammered out a winning strategy at the tipping point of World War II. The Devils Will Get No Rest is a “vivid and engaging” (Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize­­–winning author) character-driven account of the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, an Anglo-American clash over military strategy that produced a winning plan when World War II could have gone either way. Churchill called it the most important Allied conclave of the war. Until now, it has never been explored in a full-length book. In a secret, no-holds-barred, ten-day debate in a Moroccan warzone, protected by British marines and elite American troops, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton Jr., Sir Alan Brooke, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Sir Harold Alexander, and their military peers questioned each other’s competence, doubted each other’s visions, and argued their way through choices that could win or lose the war. You will be treated to a master class in strategy by the legendary statesmen, generals, and admirals who overcame their differences, transformed their alliance from a necessity to a bond, forged a war-winning plan, and glimpsed the postwar world.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/631006 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Never Give Up: A Prairie Family's Story

Author: Tom Brokaw

Narrator: Lincoln Hoppe

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 3 hours 21 minutes

Release date: June 13, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

In this moving story, the New York Times bestselling author of The Greatest Generation chronicles the values and lessons he absorbed from his parents and other people who worked hard to build lives on the prairie during the first half of the twentieth century. “A spare, elegant masterpiece.”—Ken Burns Tom’s father, Red, left school in the second grade to work in the family hotel—the Brokaw House, established in Bristol, South Dakota, by R. P. Brokaw in 1883. Eventually, through work on construction jobs, Red developed an exceptional talent for machines. Tom’s mother, Jean, was the daughter of a farmer who lost everything during the Great Depression. They met after a high school play, when Jean played the lead and Red fell in love with her from the audience. Although they didn’t have much money early in their marriage, especially once they had three boys at home, Red’s philosophy of “Never give up” served them well. His big break came after World War II, when he went to work for the Army Corps of Engineers building great dams across the Missouri River, magnificent structures like the Fort Randall and the Gavins Point dams. Late in life, Red surprised his family by recording his memories of the hard times of his early life, reflections that inspired this book. Tom Brokaw is known as one of the most successful people in broadcast journalism. Throughout his legendary career, Brokaw has always asked what we can learn from world events and from our history. Within Never Give Up is one answer, a portrait of the resilience and respect for others at the heart of one American family’s story.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/630989 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church

Author: Rachel L. Swarns

Narrator: Karen Murray

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 32 minutes

Release date: June 13, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 2

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

“An absolutely essential addition to the history of the Catholic Church, whose involvement in New World slavery sustained the Church and, thereby, helped to entrench enslavement in American society.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello and On Juneteenth New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Time, Chicago Public Library, Kirkus Reviews In 1838, a group of America’s most prominent Catholic priests sold 272 enslaved people to save their largest mission project, what is now Georgetown University. In this groundbreaking account, journalist, author, and professor Rachel L. Swarns follows one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to uncover the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States. Through the saga of the Mahoney family, Swarns illustrates how the Church relied on slave labor and slave sales to sustain its operations and to help finance its expansion. The story begins with Ann Joice, a free Black woman and the matriarch of the Mahoney family. Joice sailed to Maryland in the late 1600s as an indentured servant, but her contract was burned and her freedom stolen. Her descendants, who were enslaved by Jesuit priests, passed down the story of that broken promise for centuries. One of those descendants, Harry Mahoney, saved lives and the church’s money in the War of 1812, but his children, including Louisa and Anna, were put up for sale in 1838. One daughter managed to escape, but the other was sold and shipped to Louisiana. Their descendants would remain apart until Rachel Swarns’s reporting in The New York Times finally reunited them. They would go on to join other GU272 descendants who pressed Georgetown and the Catholic Church to make amends, prodding the institutions to break new ground in the movement for reparations and reconciliation in America. Swarns’s journalism has already started a national conversation about universities with ties to slavery. The 272 tells an even bigger story, not only demonstrating how slavery fueled the growth of the American Catholic Church but also shining a light on the enslaved people whose forced labor helped to build the largest religious denomination in the nation.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/669926 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Our Flag Was Still There: The Star Spangled Banner that Survived the British and 200 Years―And the Armistead Family Who Saved It

Author: Tom McMillan

Narrator: Robert Fass

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 47 minutes

Release date: June 6, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Our Flag Was Still There details the improbable two-hundred-year journey of the original Star-Spangled Banner—from Fort McHenry in 1814, when Francis Scott Key first saw it, to the Smithsonian—and the enduring family who defended, kept, hid, and ultimately donated the most famous flag in American history. Francis Scott Key saw the original Star-Spangled Banner flying over Baltimore’s Fort McHenry on September 14, 1814, following a twenty-five-hour bombardment by the British Navy, inspiring him to write the words to our national anthem. Torn and tattered over the years, reduced in size to appease souvenir-hunters, stuffed away in a New York City vault for the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the flag’s mere existence after two hundred years is an improbable story of dedication, perseverance, patriotism, angst, inner-family squabbles, and, yes, more than a little luck. For this unlikely feat, we have the Armistead family to thank—led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armistead, commander of Fort McHenry, who took it home after the battle in clear defiance of US Army regulations. It is only because of that quiet indiscretion that the flag survives to this day. Armistead’s descendants kept and protected their family heirloom for ninety years. The flag’s first photo was not taken until 1873, almost sixty years after Key saw it waving, and most Americans did not even know of its existence until Armistead’s grandson loaned it to the Smithsonian in 1907. Tom McMillan tells a story as no one has before. Digging deep into the archives of Fort McHenry and the Smithsonian, accessing never-before-published letters and documents, and presenting rare photos from the private collections of Armistead descendants and other sources, McMillan follows the flag on an often-perilous journey through two centuries. Our Flag Was Still There provides new insight into an intriguing period of US history, offering a “story behind the story” account of one of the country’s most treasured relics.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/662766 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Unsettled: Lord Selkirk's Scottish Colonists and the Battle for Canada's West, 1813-1816

Author: Robert Lower

Narrator: Jonathan Yen

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 34 minutes

Release date: June 6, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The fascinating story of the Red River Settlement, now Winnipeg, in the years 1813 to 1816, told with archival journals, reports, and letters Unsettled tells the story of two hundred Highlanders who flee the Scottish Clearances in 1813 to establish a settlement on the Red River in what eventually became Winnipeg. They are sponsored by the Earl of Selkirk, a man who has never been west of Montreal. Families who have never left their Highland crofts take an epic journey over ocean, up wild rivers, and through boundless wilderness, surviving disease and brutal winter only to face the determined opposition of fur barons who want no sodbusters threatening their trade and are prepared to stop at nothing to destroy their dream. The 'empty' land they've been promised is also anything but, already occupied by First Nations bands and the beginnings of that proud nation soon to be called Métis, whom they must befriend or fight. Unsettled takes you inside the experience, relying on journals, reports, and letters to bring these days of soaring hope, crushing despair, and heroic determination to life—to bring their present into ours.