Richard Kluger has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators. The most-rated is Indelible Ink.
The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek
Summary
The riveting story of a dramatic confrontation between Native Americans and white settlers, a compelling conflict that unfolded in the newly created Washington Territory from 1853 to 1857. When appointed Washington's first governor, Isaac Ingalls Stevens, an ambitious military man turned politician, had one goal: to persuade (peacefully if possible) the Indians of the Puget Sound region to turn over their ancestral lands to the federal government. In return, they were to be consigned to reservations unsuitable for hunting, fishing, or grazing, their traditional means of sustaining life. The result was an outbreak of violence and rebellion, a tragic episode of frontier oppression and injustice. With his trademark empathy and scholarly acuity, Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Kluger recounts the impact of Stevens's program on the Nisqually tribe, whose chief, Leschi, sparked the native resistance movement. Stevens was determined to succeed at any cost: his hasty treaty negotiations with the Indians, marked by deceit, threat, and misrepresentation, inflamed his opponents. Leschi, resolved to save more than a few patches of his people's lush homelands, unwittingly turned his tribe and, most of all, himself into victims of the governor's relentless wrath. The conflict between these two complicated and driven men and their supporters, explosively and enormously at odds with each other, was to have echoes far into the future. Closely considered and eloquently written, The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek is a bold and long-overdue clarification of the historical record of an American tragedy, presenting, through the experiences of one tribe, the history of Native American suffering and injustice.
©2011 Richard Kluger (P)2011 Random House
Indelible Ink
Summary
The untold story of the battle to legalize free expression in America by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ashes to Ashes. The liberty of written and spoken expression has been fixed in the firmament of our social values since our nation's beginning - the government of the United States was the first to legalize free speech and a free press as fundamental rights. But when the British began colonizing the New World, strict censorship was the iron rule of the realm; any words, true or false, that were thought to disparage the government were judged a criminally subversive - and duly punishable - threat to law and order. Even after Parliament lifted press censorship late in the 17th century, printers published what they wished at their peril. So when in 1733 a small newspaper, the New York Weekly Journal, printed scathing articles assailing the new British governor, William Cosby, as corrupt and abusive, colonial New York was scandalized. The paper's publisher, an impoverished printer named John Peter Zenger with a wife and six children, in fact had no hand in the paper's vitriolic editorial content - he was only a front man for Cosby's adversaries, New York Supreme Court Chief Justice Lewis Morris and the shrewd attorney James Alexander. Zenger nevertheless became the endeavor's courageous fall guy when Cosby brought the full force of his high office down upon it. Jailed for the better part of a year, Zenger faced a jury on August 4, 1735, in a proceeding matched in importance during the colonial period only by the Salem Witch Trials. In Indelible Ink, acclaimed social historian Richard Kluger recreates in rich detail this dramatic clash of powerful antagonists that marked the beginning of press freedom in America and its role in vanquishing colonial tyranny. Here is an enduring lesson that resounds to this day on the vital importance of free public expression as the underpinning of democracy.
©2016 Richard Kluger (P)2016 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books