The Americas category has 777 audiobooks on Listento.it, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 2,631 ratings. The most-rated is Endurance.
Canada
Summary
Canada is not one nation, but three: English Canada, Quebec, and First Nations. Yet as a country Canada is very successful, in part because it maintains national diversity through bilingualism, multiculturalism, and federalism. Alongside this contemporary openness Canada also has its own history to contend with; with a legacy of broken treaties and residential schools for its Indigenous peoples, making reconciliation between Canada and First Nations an ongoing journey, not a destination. Drawing on history, politics, and literature, this very short introduction starts at the end of the last ice age, when the melting of the ice sheets opened the northern half of North America to Indigenous peoples, and covers up to today's anthropogenic climate change, and Canada's climate politics. Donald Wright emphasizes Canada's complexity and diversity as well as its different identities and its commitment to rights, and explores its historical relationship to Great Britain, and its ongoing relationship with the United States. Finally, he examines Canada's northern realities and its northern identities.
©2020 Donald Wright (P)2020 Tantor
The Ultimate Cigar Book: 4th Edition
Summary
First published in 1993, The Ultimate Cigar Book has become a classic in its field, and is generally credited with having helped launch the current cigar-smoking craze. It has been reprinted numerous times in the United States, and is now sold worldwide. No other book contains as much detailed and factual information on virtually every facet of cigar making and cigar smoking. Now we present an audio edition of the beloved fourth edition for the audio-loving aficionado of the future! Forget 1492. This book starts out in B.C. (Before Columbus) and transports the cigar enthusiast on a fun and fact-filled adventure into virtually every realm of today’s popular and growing cigar-smoking pastime. Written by one of the most knowledgeable and internationally-celebrated pipe and cigar authors of our time, Richard Carleton Hacker’s well-known wit and wisdom will keep the listener enthralled with every minute, as he takes you on an information-packed would tour of cigars. Starting off with a history of cigar smoking, the author then shows us how cigars are made today (handmade, handrolled, and machine-made), divulges the secrets of finding the "perfect" cigar, and discusses the ritual of smoking and how to properly care for and store our cigars. From there the book lists a number of innovative cigar accessories, suggests which beers, wines, whiskeys, brandies, and cognacs go with what cigars, enlightens us with a chapter on cigar-smoking celebrities, and concludes with the world’s first International Compendium of virtually every cigar brand known today, complete with histories and observations on taste, according to the author’s HPH (Highly Prejudiced Hacker-Scale) ratings. If that was not enough, there is even a dictionary of CigarSpeak! The Ultimate Cigar Book is the most comprehensive, factual, and up-to-date book for the cigar smoker or for those who just want to learn more about the fascinating and popular world of cigar smoking. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©1993, 1996, 2000, 2015 Richard Carleton Hacker (P)2019 Echo Point Books & Media, LLC
Mornings on Horseback
Summary
From the number-one New York Times best-selling author of John Adams Winner of the 1982 National Book Award for Biography, Mornings on Horseback is the brilliant biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt. Hailed as a masterpiece by Newsday, it is the story of a remarkable little boy - seriously handicapped by recurrent and nearly fatal attacks of asthma - and his struggle to manhood. His father - the first Theodore Roosevelt, "Greatheart" - is a figure of unbounded energy, enormously attractive and selfless, a god in the eyes of his small, frail namesake. His mother - Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt - is a Southerner and celebrated beauty. Mornings on Horseback spans 17 years, from 1869, when little "Teedie" is 10, to 1886, when he returns from the West a "real life cowboy" to pick up the pieces of a shattered life and begin anew, a grown man, whole in body and spirit. This is a tale about family love and family loyalty... about courtship, childbirth and death, fathers and sons... about gutter politics and the tumultuous Republican Convention of 1884... about grizzly bears, grief and courage, and "blessed" mornings on horseback at Oyster Bay or beneath the limitless skies of the Badlands.
©2007 David McCullough (P)2011 Simon & Schuster
Brazil: A Biography
Summary
For many Americans, Brazil is a land of contradictions: vast natural resources and entrenched corruption; extraordinary wealth and grinding poverty; beautiful beaches and violence-torn favelas. Brazil occupies a vivid place in the American imagination, and yet it remains largely unknown. In an extraordinary journey that spans 500 years, from European colonization to the 2016 Summer Olympics, Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling's Brazil offers a rich, dramatic history of this complex country. The authors not only reconstruct the epic story of the nation, but follow the shifting byways of food, art, and popular culture; the plights of minorities; and the ups and downs of economic cycles. Drawing on a range of original scholarship in history, anthropology, political science, and economics, Schwarcz and Starling reveal a long process of unfinished social, political, and economic progress and struggle, a story in which the troubled legacy of the mixing of races and postcolonial political dysfunction persists to this day.
©2018 Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling (P)2019 Tantor
Deep Descent
Summary
On a foggy July evening in 1956, the Italian cruise liner Andrea Doria, bound for New York, was struck broadside by another vessel. In eleven hours, she would sink nearly 250 feet to the murky Atlantic Ocean floor. Thanks to a daring rescue operation, only 51 of more than 1,700 people died in the tragedy. But the Andrea Doria is still taking lives. Considered the Mt. Everest of diving, the Andrea Doria is the ultimate deepwater wreck challenge. Over the years, a small but fanatical group of extreme scuba divers have investigated the Andrea Doria, pushing themselves to the very limits of human endurance to explore her - and not all have returned. Diver Kevin McMurray takes you inside this elite club with a hard, honest look at those who go deeper, farther, and closer to the edge than others would ever dream. Deep Descent is the riveting true story of the human spirit overcoming human frailty and of fearsome, mortal risks traded for a hard-core adrenaline rush. Chronicling these adventures in his dramatic narrative, McMurray draws us deeper into the cold heart of the unforgiving sea, giving us a powerful vision of a place to which few will ever have the skills - or the courage - to go.
©2002 Kevin F. McMurray (P)2018 Brilliance Audio Inc., all rights reserved
The Klondike Stampede
Summary
Gold was discovered in the Klondike in August 16, 1896. When news of the discovery arrived in Seattle and San Francisco the following year it triggered one of the largest gold rushes in the history of North America. Tappan Adney, a young writer and photographer who worked for Harper's Weekly, set out on a journey to uncover and record what it was like in the Klondike stampede. This audiobook is a fascinating portrayal of adventurers and prospectors who descended on the Yukon during this extraordinary event in the late 19th century. Adney explains in vivid detail the treacherous route that these gold-hunters were forced to make in order to make it to the Yukon. The White and Chilkoot Passes were fatal for many who attempted to get through them with poor equipment. He stayed in Dawson, where the gold rush was centered, from October 2nd through to September 16th the following year. While there he interviewed men and women who hoped to make their fortune, observed the community that had seemingly sprung up overnight, and recorded in detail how the prospectors searched for gold.
Public Domain (P)2018 Tantor
A History of the Cuban Revolution
Summary
A History of the Cuban Revolution presents a concise socio-historical account of the Cuban Revolution of 1959, an event that continues to spark debate 50 years later.Balances a comprehensive overview of the political and economic events of the revolution with a look at the revolution’s social impactProvides a lively, on-the-ground look at the lives of ordinary peopleFeatures both U.S. and Cuban perspectives to provide a complete and well-rounded look at the revolution and its repercussionsEncourages students to understand history through the viewpoint of individuals living itSelected as a 2011 Outstanding Academic Title by Choice
©2011 Aviva Chomsky (P)2013 Audible Ltd
Isaac's Storm
Summary
At the dawn of the 20th century, a great confidence suffused America. Isaac Cline was one of the era's new men, a scientist who believed he knew all there was to know about the motion of clouds and the behavior of storms. The idea that a hurricane could damage the city of Galveston, Texas, where he was based, was to him preposterous, "an absurd delusion." It was 1900, a year when America felt bigger and stronger than ever before. Nothing in nature could hobble the gleaming city of Galveston, then a magical place that seemed destined to become the New York of the Gulf. That August, a strange, prolonged heat wave gripped the nation and killed scores of people in New York and Chicago. Odd things seemed to happen everywhere: A plague of crickets engulfed Waco. The Bering Glacier began to shrink. Rain fell on Galveston with greater intensity than anyone could remember. Far away, in Africa, immense thunderstorms blossomed over the city of Dakar, and great currents of wind converged. A wave of atmospheric turbulence slipped from the coast of western Africa. Most such waves faded quickly. This one did not. In Cuba, America's overconfidence was made all too obvious by the Weather Bureau's obsession with controlling hurricane forecasts, even though Cuba's indigenous weathermen had pioneered hurricane science. As the bureau's forecasters assured the nation that all was calm in the Caribbean, Cuba's own weathermen fretted about ominous signs in the sky. A curious stillness gripped Antigua. Only a few unlucky sea captains discovered that the storm had achieved an intensity no man alive had ever experienced. In Galveston, reassured by Cline's belief that no hurricane could seriously damage the city, there was celebration. Children played in the rising water. Hundreds of people gathered at the beach to marvel at the fantastically tall waves and gorgeous pink sky, until the surf began ripping the city's beloved beachfront apart. Within the next few hours Galveston would endure a hurricane that to this day remains the nation's deadliest natural disaster. In Galveston alone at least 6,000 people, possibly as many as 10,000, would lose their lives, a number far greater than the combined death toll of the Johnstown Flood and 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. And Isaac Cline would experience his own unbearable loss. Meticulously researched and vividly written, Isaac's Storm is based on Cline's own letters, telegrams, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the hows and whys of great storms. Ultimately, however, it is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets nature's last great uncontrollable force. As such, Isaac's Storm carries a warning for our time.
©2011 Erik Larson (P)2020 Random House Audio
Traitor to His Class
Summary
A sweeping, magisterial biography of the man generally considered the greatest president of the 20th century, admired by Democrats and Republicans alike. Traitor to His Class sheds new light on FDR's formative years; his remarkable willingness to champion the concerns of the poor and disenfranchised; and his combination of political genius, firm leadership, and matchless diplomacy in saving democracy in America during the Great Depression and the American cause of freedom in World War II. Drawing on archival materials, public speeches, personal correspondence, and accounts by family and close associates, acclaimed best-selling historian and biographer H. W. Brands offers a compelling and intimate portrait of Roosevelt's life and career. Brands explores the powerful influence of FDR's dominating mother and the often tense and always unusual partnership between FDR and his wife, Eleanor, and her indispensable contributions to his presidency. Most of all, the book traces in breathtaking detail FDR's revolutionary efforts with his New Deal legislation to transform the American political economy in order to save it, his forceful and cagey leadership before and during World War II, and his lasting legacy in creating the foundations of the postwar international order. Traitor to His Class brilliantly captures the qualities that have made FDR a beloved figure to millions of Americans.
©2008 H. W. Brands (P)2008 Books on Tape
Anarchism and Other Essays
Summary
Among the men and women prominent in the public life of early 20th-century America there are but few whose names are mentioned as often as that of Emma Goldman. Yet the real Emma Goldman is almost quite unknown. The sensational press has surrounded her name with so much misrepresentation and slander, it would seem almost a miracle that, in spite of this web of calumny, the truth breaks through and a better appreciation of this much maligned idealist begins to manifest itself. Here are powerful, penetrating, prophetic essays on direct action, the role of minorities, prison reform, puritan hypocrisy, and violence.
Public Domain (P)2010 Audible, Inc.
Polio
Summary
Pulitzer Prize, History, 2006This comprehensive and gripping narrative covers all the challenges, characters, and controversies in America's relentless struggle against polio. Funded by philanthropy and grassroots contributions, Salk's killed-virus vaccine (1954) and Sabin's live-virus vaccine (1961) began to eradicate this dreaded disease. Author David M. Oshinsky, a multiple New York Times Notable Book winner and University of Texas professor, is a leading American political and cultural historian.
©2005 David M. Oshinsky (P)2007 Recorded Books
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Annotated)
Summary
This is a special bicentennial edition of Douglass' most famous book, which has been published by his direct descendants through Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives (FDFI). It contains a never-before publicized pencil drawing of Douglass on the cover that was created by his grandson Joseph Douglass. Joseph is the grandfather of Nettie Washington Douglass, who serves as chairwoman for FDFI. She is Douglass' great-great-granddaughter and Washington's great-granddaughter. The foreword of this edition is written by Kenneth B. Morris, Jr., Nettie's eldest son, who describes in more detail his historical kinship to the Douglass and Washington legacies. Bryan Stevenson, author of the New York Times best-seller Just Mercy, writes a brilliant introduction to this bicentennial edition. In his piece, Stevenson connects the challenges faced by Douglass with the most problematic social injustices of our time such as mass incarceration, racial inequality, and police violence. The Library of Congress named Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass one of the 88 books that shaped America. Published in 1845, his first autobiography became an instant best-seller, putting his life in danger since he had escaped slavery just seven years earlier. Narrative helped change the course of the US abolitionist movement in the mid-19th century and has been changing the lives of readers ever since.
©2017 Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives (P)2018 Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives
Origins and Ideologies of the American Revolution
Summary
The years between 1760 and 1800 rocked the Western world. These were the years when colonists on the eastern fringes of a continent converted the ideals of Enlightenment thought first into action, then into an actual form of government. Now you can learn why this happened and how the colonists did it - in a series of 48 insightful lectures from an award-winning teacher and author. Professor Mancall brings to life not only the famous but also the little-remembered colonists who were caught up in the debates over rights and power, liberties and empire. It is a story of immense importance and rich discoveries. And because he presents original source materials, including examples of how events were reported and interpreted, you'll more readily grasp the evolution of ideas, the competing pressures, and the misunderstandings - not only in the time leading up to the Revolution, and during the years it was being fought, but afterwards, as well. That's when the victorious colonists came to learn that in achieving freedom from Great Britain, they had simply traded one set of problems for another. They still had to cope with the extraordinarily difficult task of crafting a workable government - one that could support their ideals of how citizens and government should relate to each other - and achieving respect and success among other nations. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2006 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2006 The Great Courses
My Life as an Indian
Summary
Beautiful, tender, haunting, and full of excitement, this is the memoir of famed author, explorer, Glacier Park guide, trader, and historian of the Blackfoot Indians, James Willard Schultz. With the Blackfoot woman, whom he deeply loved, from 1880 to 1903, Schultz lived the life of a Blackfoot Indian with Nat-ah-ki and her people. During this time, he began writing for magazines, at times running a trading post, and working as a guide in the West. He met historian, writer, and naturalist George Bird Grinnell, who encouraged him to write this heartfelt and important memoir. As an ethnography of a people and a time it is invaluable. Though he would marry again, Schultz eventually went back to live near the Native peoples he'd come to love and is buried in the traditional ground of Nat-ah-ki's people. You won't read another memoir like it. Every memoir of the American West provides us with another view of the migration that changed the country forever.
Public Domain (P)2017 Big Byte Books
Wild Ones
Summary
Field notes from an age of extinction, tracking the ever-shifting meaning of America’s animals throughout history to understand the current moment. Journalist Jon Mooallem has watched his little daughter’s world overflow with animals - butterfly pajamas, appliquéd owls - while the actual world she’s inheriting slides into a great storm of extinction. Half of all species could disappear by the end of the century, and scientists now concede that most of America’s endangered animals will survive only if conservationists keep rigging the world around them in their favor. So Mooallem ventures into the field, often taking his daughter with him, to move beyond childlike fascination and make those creatures feel more real. Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it - from Thomas Jefferson’s celebrations of early abundance to the turn-of-the-last-century origins of the teddy bear to the whale-loving hippies of the 1970s. In America, Wild Ones discovers, wildlife has always inhabited the terrain of our imagination as much as the actual land. The journey is framed by the stories of three modern-day endangered species: the polar bear, victimized by climate change and ogled by tourists outside a remote, northern town; the little-known Lange’s metalmark butterfly, foundering on a shred of industrialized land near San Francisco; and the whooping crane as it’s led on a months-long migration by costumed men in ultralight airplanes. The wilderness that Wild Ones navigates is a scrappy, disorderly place where amateur conservationists do grueling, sometimes preposterous looking work; where a marketer maneuvers to control the polar bear’s image; and Martha Stewart turns up to film those beasts for her show on the Hallmark Channel. Our most comforting ideas about nature unravel. In their place, Mooallem forges a new and affirming vision of the human animal and the wild ones as kindred creatures on an imperfect planet. With propulsive curiosity and searing wit, and without the easy moralizing and nature worship of environmental journalism’s older guard, Wild Ones merges reportage, science, and history into a humane and endearing meditation on what it means to live in, and bring a life into, a broken world.
©2013 Jon Mooallem (P)2013 Penguin Audiobooks
Herbert Hoover
Summary
“At last, a biography of Herbert Hoover that captures the man in full.... [Jeansonne] has splendidly illuminated the arc of one of the most extraordinary lives of the twentieth century.” (David M. Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Freedom from Fear) Prize-winning historian Glen Jeansonne delves into the life of our most misunderstood president, offering up a surprising new portrait of Herbert Hoover - dismissing previous assumptions and revealing a political Progressive in the mold of Theodore Roosevelt and the most resourceful American since Benjamin Franklin. Orphaned at an early age and raised with strict Quaker values, Hoover earned his way through Stanford University. His hardworking ethic drove him to a successful career as an engineer and multinational businessman. After the Great War, he led a humanitarian effort that fed millions of Europeans left destitute, arguably saving more lives than any man in history. As commerce secretary under President Coolidge, Hoover helped modernize and galvanize American industry and orchestrated the rehabilitation of the Mississippi Valley after the Great Flood of 1927. As president, Herbert Hoover became the first chief executive to harness federal power to combat a crippling global recession. Though Hoover is often remembered as a "do-nothing" president, Jeansonne convincingly portrays a steadfast leader who challenged Congress on an array of legislation that laid the groundwork for the New Deal. In addition Hoover reformed America's prisons, improved worker safety, and fought for better health and welfare for children. Unfairly attacked by Franklin D. Roosevelt and blamed for the Depression, Hoover was swept out of office in a landslide. Yet as FDR's government grew into a bureaucratic behemoth, Hoover became the moral voice of the GOP and a champion of Republican principles - a legacy reignited by Ronald Reagan and that still endures today. A compelling and rich examination of his character, accomplishments, and failings, this is the magnificent biography of Herbert Hoover we have long waited for.
©2016 Glen Jeansonne (P)2016 Penguin Audio
We've Got People
Summary
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may seem like she came from nowhere, but the movement that propelled her to office - and to global political stardom - has been building for 30 years. We’ve Got People is the story of that movement, which first exploded into public view with the largely forgotten presidential run of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a campaign that came dangerously close to winning. With the party and the nation at a crossroads, this timely and original audiobook offers new insight into how we’ve gotten where we are - and where we're headed.
©2019 Ryan Grim (P)2019 Ryan Grim
Destiny and Power
Summary
Number One New York Times Best Seller In this brilliant biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham chronicles the life of George Herbert Walker Bush. Named One of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post and One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • St. Louis Post-Dispatch Drawing on President Bush’s personal diaries, on the diaries of his wife, Barbara, and on extraordinary access to the 41st president and his family, Meacham paints an intimate and surprising portrait of an intensely private man who led the nation through tumultuous times. From the Oval Office to Camp David, from his study in the private quarters of the White House to Air Force One, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the first Gulf War to the end of Communism, Destiny and Power charts the thoughts, decisions, and emotions of a modern president who may have been the last of his kind. This is the human story of a man who was, like the nation he led, at once noble and flawed. His was one of the great American lives. Born into a loving, privileged, and competitive family, Bush joined the navy on his 18th birthday and at age 20 was shot down on a combat mission over the Pacific. He married young, started a family, and resisted pressure to go to Wall Street, striking out for the adventurous world of Texas oil. Over the course of three decades, Bush would rise from the chairmanship of his county Republican Party to serve as congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, head of the Republican National Committee, envoy to China, director of Central Intelligence, vice president under Ronald Reagan, and, finally, president of the United States. In retirement he became the first president since John Adams to see his son win the ultimate prize in American politics. With access not only to the Bush diaries but through extensive interviews to the former president himself, Meacham presents Bush’s candid assessments of many of the critical figures of the age, ranging from Richard Nixon to Nancy Reagan; Mao to Mikhail Gorbachev; Dick Cheney to Donald Rumsfeld; Henry Kissinger to Bill Clinton. Here is high politics as it really is but as we rarely see it. From the Pacific to the presidency, Destiny and Power charts the vicissitudes of the life of this quietly compelling American original. Meacham sheds new light on the rise of the right wing in the Republican Party, a shift that signaled the beginning of the end of the center in American politics. Destiny and Power is an affecting portrait of a man who, driven by destiny and by duty, forever sought, ultimately, to put the country first.
©2015 Jon Meacham (P)2015 Random House Audio
I Have Lived a Thousand Years
Summary
Imagine being a 13-year-old girl in love with boys, school, family - life itself. Then suddenly, in a matter of hours, your life is shattered by the arrival of a foreign army. You can no longer attend school, have possessions, talk to your neighbors. One day your family has to leave your house behind and move into a crowded ghetto, where you lose all privacy and there isn’t enough food to eat. Still you manage, somehow, to adjust. But there is much, much worse to come... This is the memoir of Elli Friedmann, who was 13 years old in March 1944, when the Nazis invaded Hungary. It describes her descent into the hell of Auschwitz, a concentration camp where, because of her golden braids, she was selected for work instead of extermination. In intimate, excruciating details she recounts what it was like to be one of the few teenage camp inmates, and the tiny but miraculous twists of fate that helped her survive against all odds. I Have Lived a Thousand Years is a searing story of cruelty and suffering, but at the same time it is a story of hope, faith, perseverance, and love. It will make you see the world in a new way - and it will make you want to change what you see.
©1997 Livia Jackson (P)2013 AudioGO
Experience and Education
Summary
Experience and Education is the best concise statement on education ever published by John Dewey, the man acknowledged to be the pre-eminent educational theorist of the twentieth century. Written more than two decades after Democracy and Education (Dewey's most comprehensive statement of his position in educational philosophy), this book demonstrates how Dewey reformulated his ideas as a result of his intervening experience with the progressive schools and in the light of the criticisms his theories had received. Analyzing both "traditional" and "progressive" education, Dr. Dewey here insists that neither the old nor the new education is adequate and that each is miseducative because neither of them applies the principles of a carefully developed philosophy of experience. Many pages of this volume illustrate Dr. Dewey's ideas for a philosophy of experience and its relation to education. He particularly urges that all teachers and educators looking for a new movement in education should think in terms of the deeped and larger issues of education rather than in terms of some divisive "ism" about education, even such an "ism" as "progressivism." His philosophy, here expressed in its most essential, most readable form, predicates an American educational system that respects all sources of experience, on that offers a true learning situation that is both historical and social, both orderly and dynamic.
©1938 Kappa Delta Pi (P)2013 Redwood Audiobooks