Listen to New Full Audiobooks in History, The Americas

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/656228 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Graveyard of the Pacific: Shipwreck and Survival on America’s Deadliest Waterway

Author: Randall Sullivan

Narrator: Lynch Travis

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 12 minutes

Release date: June 6, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Off the coast of Oregon, the Columbia River flows into the Pacific Ocean and forms the Columbia River Bar: a watery collision so turbulent and deadly that it’s nicknamed the Graveyard of the Pacific. Two thousand ships have been wrecked on the bar since the first European ship dared to try to cross it. Since then, the commercial importance of the Columbia River has only grown, but despite the construction of jetties on either side, the bar remains treacherous. When Randall Sullivan and a friend set out to cross the bar in a two-man kayak, they’re met with skepticism and concern. But on a clear day in July 2021, when the tides and weather seem right, they embark. As they plunge through the currents that have taken so many lives, Randall commemorates the brave sailors that made the crossing before him—including his own abusive father, a sailor himself who also once dared to cross the bar—and reflects on toxic masculinity, fatherhood, and what drives men to extremes. Rich with exhaustive research and propulsive narrative, Graveyard of the Pacific follows historical shipwrecks through the moment-by-moment details that often determined whether sailors would live or die, exposing the ways in which boats, sailors, and navigation have changed over the decades. As he makes his way across the bar, floating above the wrecks and across the same currents that have taken so many lives, Randall Sullivan faces the past, both in his own life and on the Columbia River Bar.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/652180 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West

Author: Calder Walton

Narrator: Dugald Bruce-Lockhart

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 20 hours 22 minutes

Release date: June 6, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Foreign Policy Best Book of 2023 Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2023 The “riveting” (The Economist), secret story of the hundred-year intelligence war between Russia and the West with lessons for our new superpower conflict with China. Spies is the history of the secret war that Russia and the West have been waging for a century. Espionage, sabotage, and subversion were the Kremlin’s means to equalize the imbalance of resources between the East and West before, during, and after the Cold War. There was nothing “unprecedented” about Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. It was simply business as usual, new means used for old ends. The Cold War started long before 1945. But the West fought back after World War II, mounting its own shadow war, using disinformation, vast intelligence networks, and new technologies against the Soviet Union. Spies is a “deeply researched and artfully crafted” (Fiona Hill, deputy assistant to the US President) story of the best and worst of mankind: bravery and honor, treachery and betrayal. The narrative shifts across continents and decades, from the freezing streets of St. Petersburg in 1917 to the bloody beaches of Normandy; from coups in faraway lands to present-day Moscow where troll farms, synthetic bots, and weaponized cyber-attacks being launched woefully unprepared West. It is about the rise and fall of Eastern superpowers: Russia’s past and present and the global ascendance of China. Mining hitherto secret archives in multiple languages, Calder Walton shows that the Cold War started earlier than commonly assumed, that it continued even after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, and that Britain and America’s clandestine struggle with the Soviet government provided key lessons for countering China today. This “authoritative, sweeping” (Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize­–winning author of Embers of War) history, combined with practical takeaways for our current great power struggles, make Spies a unique and essential addition to the history of the Cold War and the unrolling conflict between the United States and China that will dominate the 21st century.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/648042 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Say Anarcha: A Young Woman, a Devious Surgeon, and the Harrowing Birth of Modern Women's Health

Author: J. C. Hallman

Narrator: Ariel Blake, Peter Ganim

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 19 hours 17 minutes

Release date: June 6, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

A compelling reckoning with the birth of women’s health that illuminates the sacrifices of a young woman who changed the world only to be forgotten by it—until now For more than a century, Dr. J. Marion Sims was hailed as the “father of modern gynecology.” He founded a hospital in New York City and had a profitable career treating gentry and royalty in Europe, becoming one of the world’s first celebrity surgeons. Statues were built in his honor, but he wasn’t the hero he had made himself appear to be. Sims’s greatest medical claim was the result of several years of experimental surgeries—without anesthesia—on a young enslaved woman known as Anarcha; his so-called cure for obstetric fistula forever altered the path of women’s health. One medical text after another hailed Anarcha as the embodiment of the pivotal role that Sims played in the history of surgery. Decades later, a groundswell of women objecting to Sims’s legacy celebrated Anarcha as the “mother of gynecology.” Little was known about the woman herself. The written record would have us believe Anarcha disappeared; she did not. Through tenacious research, J. C. Hallman has unearthed the first evidence of Anarcha’s life that did not come from Sims’s suspect reports. Hallman reveals that after helping to spark a patient-centered model of care that continues to improve women’s lives today, Anarcha lived on as a midwife, nurse, and “doctor woman.” Say Anarcha excavates history, deconstructing the biographical smoke screen of a surgeon who has falsely been enshrined as a medical pioneer and bringing forth a heroic Black woman to her rightful place at the center of the creation story of modern women’s health care. A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt & Company.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/630953 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Battle of Ink and Ice: A Sensational Story of News Barons, North Pole Explorers, and the Making of Modern Media

Author: Darrell Hartman

Narrator: Mack Sanderson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 43 minutes

Release date: June 6, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

New York Times Book Review’s '100 Notable Books of 2023' 'Absolutely gripping… a perfectly splendid read—I highly, highly recommend it” -- Douglas Preston, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Lost City of the Monkey God A sixty-year saga of frostbite and fake news that follows the no-holds-barred battle between two legendary explorers to reach the North Pole, and the newspapers which stopped at nothing to get–and sell–the story. In the fall of 1909, a pair of bitter contests captured the world’s attention. The American explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook both claimed to have discovered the North Pole, sparking a vicious feud that was unprecedented in international scientific and geographic circles. At the same time, the rivalry between two powerful New York City newspapers—the storied Herald and the ascendant Times—fanned the flames of the so-called polar controversy, as each paper financially and reputationally committed itself to an opposing explorer and fought desperately to defend him. The Herald was owned and edited by James Gordon Bennett, Jr., an eccentric playboy whose nose for news was matched only by his appetite for debauchery and champagne. The Times was published by Adolph Ochs, son of Jewish immigrants, who’d improbably rescued the paper from extinction and turned it into an emerging powerhouse. The battle between Cook and Peary would have enormous consequences for both newspapers, and help to determine the future of corporate media.  BATTLE OF INK AND ICE presents a frank portrayal of Arctic explorers, brave men who both inspired and deceived the public. It also sketches a vivid portrait of the newspapers that funded, promoted, narrated, and often distorted their exploits. It recounts a sixty-year saga of frostbite and fake news, one that culminates with an unjustly overlooked chapter in the origin story of the modern New York Times. By turns tragic and absurd, BATTLE OF INK AND ICE brims with contemporary relevance, touching as it does on themes of class, celebrity, the ever-quickening news cycle, and the benefits and pitfalls of an increasingly interconnected world. Above all, perhaps, its cast of characters testifies—colorfully and compellingly—to the ongoing role of personality and publicity in American cultural life as the Gilded Age gave way to the twentieth century—the American century.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/669777 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: This Is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration

Author: Melanie Newport

Narrator: Faith Connor

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 0 minutes

Release date: May 30, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

While state and federal prisons like Attica and Alcatraz occupy a central place in the national consciousness, most incarceration in the US occurs within the walls of local jails. In This Is My Jail, Melanie D. Newport situates the late twentieth-century escalation of mass incarceration in a longer history of racialized, politically repressive jailing. Centering the political actions of people until now overlooked—jailed people, wardens, corrections officers, sheriffs, and the countless community members who battled over the functions and impact of jails—Newport shows how local, grassroots contestation shaped the rise of the carceral state. As ground zero for struggles over criminal justice reform, jails in Chicago and Cook County were models for jailers and advocates across the nation who aimed to redefine jails as institutions of benevolent transformation. From a slave sale on the jail steps to new jail buildings to electronic monitoring, from therapy to job training, these efforts further criminalized jailed people and diminished their capacity to organize for their civil rights. With prisoners as famous as Al Capone, Dick Gregory, and Harold Washington, and a place in culture ranging from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle to B. B. King's Live in Cook County Jail, This Is My Jail places jails at the heart of twentieth-century urban life and politics.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/668831 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644 – 1865

Author: Sean M. Kelley

Narrator: Christopher Douyard

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 15 hours 52 minutes

Release date: May 30, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The first telling of the unknown story of America's two-hundred-year history as a slave-trading nation A total of 305,000 enslaved Africans arrived in the New World aboard American vessels over a span of two hundred years as American merchants and mariners sailed to Africa and to the Caribbean to acquire and sell captives. Using exhaustive archival research, including many collections that have never been used before, historian Sean M. Kelley argues that slave trading needs to be seen as integral to the larger story of American slavery. Engaging with both African and American history and addressing the trade over time, Kelley examines the experience of captivity, drawing on more than a hundred African narratives to offer a portrait of enslavement in the regions of Africa frequented by American ships. Kelley also provides a social history of the two American ports where slave trading was most intensive, Newport and Bristol, Rhode Island. In telling this tragic, brutal, and largely unknown story, Kelley corrects many misconceptions while leaving no doubt that Americans were a nation of slave traders.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/650999 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Into the Amazon: The Life of Cândido Rondon, Trailblazing Explorer, Scientist, Statesman, and Conservationist

Author: Larry Rohter

Narrator: Gary Tiedemann

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 15 hours 51 minutes

Release date: May 30, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

A thrilling biography of the Indigenous Brazilian explorer, scientist, stateseman, and conservationist who guided Theodore Roosevelt on his journey down the River of Doubt. Cândido Rondon is by any measure the greatest tropical explorer in history. Between 1890 and 1930, he navigated scores of previously unmapped rivers, traversed untrodden mountain ranges, and hacked his way through jungles so inhospitable that even native peoples had avoided them—and led Theodore Roosevelt and his son, Kermit, on their celebrated 'River of Doubt' journey in 1913–14. Upon leaving the Brazilian Army in 1930 with the rank of a two-star general, Rondon, himself of indigenous descent, devoted the remainder of his life to not only writing about the region's flora and fauna, but also advocating for the peoples who inhabited the rainforest and lobbying for the creation of a system of national parks. Despite his many achievements—which include laying down a 1,200-mile telegraph line through the heart of the Amazon and three nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize—Rondon has never received his due. Originally published in Brazil, Into the Amazon is the first comprehensive biography of his life and remarkable career.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/631087 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Trial of the Century

Author: Gregg Jarrett

Narrator: Gregg Jarrett

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 23 minutes

Release date: May 30, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

A “masterful” (The American Spectator) history of the iconic attorney Clarence Darrow and the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Russia Hoax and Witch Hunt. Nearly a century ago, famed liberal attorney Clarence Darrow defended schoolteacher John Scopes in a blockbuster legal proceeding that brought the attention of the entire country to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee. Darrow’s seminal defense of freedom of speech helped form the legal bedrock on which our civil liberties depend today. Expertly researched, “colorful, and dramatic” (Publishers Weekly), The Trial of the Century calls upon our past to unite Americans in the defense of the free exchange of ideas, especially in this divided time.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/670900 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

Author: Melissa L. Sevigny

Narrator: Elizabeth Wiley

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 53 minutes

Release date: May 23, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.86 of Total 7

Ratings of Narrator: 4.25 of Total 4

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off to run the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious and entrepreneurial expedition leader, a zoologist, and two amateur boatmen. With its churning waters and treacherous boulders, the Colorado was famed as the most dangerous river in the world. Journalists and veteran river runners boldly proclaimed that the motley crew would never make it out alive. But for Clover and Jotter, the expedition held a tantalizing appeal: no one had yet surveyed the plant life of the Grand Canyon, and they were determined to be the first. Through the vibrant letters and diaries of the two women, science journalist Melissa L. Sevigny traces their daring forty-three-day journey down the river, during which they meticulously cataloged the thorny plants that thrived in the Grand Canyon's secret nooks and crannies. Along the way, they chased a runaway boat, ran the river's most fearsome rapids, and turned the harshest critic of female river runners into an ally. Clover and Jotter's plant list, including four new cactus species, would one day become vital for efforts to protect and restore the river ecosystem. Brave the Wild River is a spellbinding adventure of two women who risked their lives to make an unprecedented botanical survey of a defining landscape in the American West.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/652106 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic

Author: Erskine Clarke

Narrator: Langston Darby

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 29 hours 25 minutes

Release date: May 23, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Published some thirty years ago, Robert Manson Myers's Children of Pride won the National Book Award in history and went on to become a classic reference on America's slaveholding South. That book presented the letters of the prominent Presbyterian minister and plantation patriarch Charles Colcock Jones (1804–1863), whose family owned more than a hundred slaves. While extensive, these letters can provide only one part of the story of the Jones family plantations in Georgia. In this remarkable book, the religious historian Erskine Clarke completes the story, offering a narrative history of four generations of the plantations' inhabitants, white and black. Encompassing the years 1805 to 1869, Dwelling Place describes the simultaneous but vastly different experiences of slave and slave owner. This 'upstairs-downstairs' history reveals in detail how the benevolent impulses of Jones and his family became ideological supports for deep oppression, and how the slave Lizzy Jones and members of her family struggled against oppression. Through letters, plantation and church records, court documents, slave narratives, archaeological findings, and the memory of the African American community, Clarke brings to light the long-suppressed history of the slaves of the Jones plantations—a history inseparably bound to that of their white owners.