The Politics & Government category has 4,793 audiobooks on Listento.it, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 40,708 ratings. The most-rated is A Promised Land.
Oprah's Angels
Summary
At the edge of Houston sits a community like no other: 65 petite, pastel houses inhabited by survivors of Hurricane Katrina and built by one of the most famous people in the world, Oprah Winfrey. The community, funded with $10 million of Oprah's money just a few months after Katrina, is made up of 65 families picked by nonprofit Habitat for Humanity. All pay around $400 a month in mortgage to live there. The houses are nearly identical. Their furnishings were selected by Nate Berkus, and paid for by Oprah's television sponsors. Angel Lane is not only a place, but an idea. It's the idea that people like Lynell McFarland, a 54-year-old nursing assistant, could find better work and a better life for her daughter outside New Orleans; that people like Coleen Walters could overcome the loss of her husband and home through the construction of a new one. Angel Lane is the embodiment of a theory that tragedy - like the systemic urban poverty of New Orleans, and the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina - can turned into opportunity, that lemons can be made into lemonade. For the last 10 years, the 65 families of Angel Lane have been living proof of this idea, and proof of its severe limitations. In Oprah's Angels, on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, reporter Peter Moskowitz brings us into the homes of the residents of Angel's Lane who have settled in Houston to find better jobs, less crime, and a new sense of identity. But the people living here also live with Katrina's continued wake - they have mental anguish, resentment over how the US government treated them, and questions about what life could have been like were it not for the man-made failures that allowed Katrina to do so much damage. Mostly, they just miss home. Peter Moskowitz is a writer and journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. He's written for Al Jazeera America, The Guardian, Vice, Gawker, The New Republic, and many others. He's writing a book about gentrification if four US cities: New York, San Francisco, Detroit and New Orleans.
©2015 Peter Moskowitz (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
Last Days of the Pharaoh
Summary
Two days before the collapse of Hosni Mubarak's regime in Egypt, one man gathered the courage to tell the president the truth: he would be killed in his palace if he did not step down. What came next revealed the bitter power struggles atop the most populous country in the Middle East at its most vulnerable moment in six decades. But it was too late. As street protests swelled into the hundreds of thousands across the country, decision-making at the highest levels broke down and Mubarak fled to the resort city of Sharm el Sheikh. This is the inside story of the final days of Egypt's modern-day pharaoh, who ruled with near autocratic powers for three decades before being forced to resign on February 11, 2011. Cairo-based journalist Bradley Hope interviewed more than two dozen eyewitnesses, from current and former officials to Mubarak's long-time make-up artist, to tell the dramatic story of the president's downfall.
©2012 Bradley Hope (P)2017 Audible, Inc.
The Trial of Adolf Hitler
Summary
February 26, 1924 was the first day of the greatly anticipated high treason trial that would galvanize Germany - but few in the courtroom that morning anticipated that the leading defendant, General Erich Ludendorff, whose risky offensives during World War I doomed Germany to defeat, would soon be eclipsed by the private first class at his side, Adolf Hitler. Hitler was charged with treason after unsuccessfully trying to seize power in the notorious Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923. Before the trial, Hitler was only a minor, if ambitious, local party leader. Yet, once the proceedings began, his days of relative obscurity were over. Including never-before-published sources, this richly informed, day-by-day account shows how Hitler metamorphosed into a mesmerizing demagogue and used his trial as a stage for Nazi propaganda. Chilling in the hypothetical questions it raises, The Trial of Adolf Hitler illuminates our understanding of Hitler's path to power.
©2017 David King (P)2017 Dreamscape Media, LLC
We Will Shoot Back
Summary
A bold and exciting historical narrative of the armed resistance of Black soldiers of the Mississippi Freedom Movement In We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Akinyele Omowale Umoja argues that armed resistance was critical to the Southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement. Intimidation and fear were central to the system of oppression in most of the Deep South. To overcome the system of segregation, Black people had to overcome fear to present a significant challenge to White domination. As the civil rights movement developed, armed self-defense and resistance became a significant means by which the descendants of enslaved Africans overturned fear and intimidation and developed different political and social relationships between Black and White Mississippians. This riveting historical narrative reconstructs the armed resistance of Black activists, their challenge of racist terrorism, and their fight for human rights.
©2013 New York University (P)2021 Tantor
The Dressmaker of Khair Khana
Summary
The life Kamila Sidiqi had known changed overnight when the Taliban seized control of the city of Kabul. After receiving a teaching degree during the civil war - a rare achievement for any Afghan woman - Kamila was subsequently banned from school and confined to her home. When her father and brother were forced to flee the city, Kamila became the sole breadwinner for her five siblings. Armed only with grit and determination, she picked up a needle and thread and created a thriving business of her own. The Dressmaker of Khair Khana tells the incredible true story of this unlikely entrepreneur who mobilized her community under the Taliban. Former ABC Newsreporter Gayle Tzemach Lemmon spent years on the ground reporting Kamila's story, and the result is an unusually intimate and unsanitized look at the daily lives of women in Afghanistan. These women are not victims; they are the glue that holds families together; they are the backbone and the heart of their nation. Afghanistan's future remains uncertain as debates over withdrawal timelines dominate the news. The Dressmaker of Khair Khana moves beyond the headlines to transport you to an Afghanistan you have never seen before. This is a story of war, but it is also a story of sisterhood and resilience in the face of despair. Kamila Sidiqi's journey will inspire you, but it will also change the way you think about one of the most important political and humanitarian issues of our time.
©2011 Gayle Tzemach Lemmon (P)2011 HarperCollins Publishers
Great Speeches by the Presidents of the United States, 1933 - 2015
Summary
A day that will live in infamy.... Nothing to fear but fear itself.... Ask not what your country can do for you.... Ich bin ein Berliner.... Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. From Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Barack Obama, this collection features original speeches by the presidents of the United States. These are actual historic recordings, the sound quality represents the available audio technology of the era, and varies by recording.
Public Domain (P)2016 SpeechWorks, a division of SoundWorks, Inc.
Calhoun
Summary
A new biography of the intellectual father of Southern secession - the man who set the scene for the Civil War, and whose political legacy still shapes America today. John C. Calhoun is among the most notorious and enigmatic figures in American political history. First elected to Congress in 1810, Calhoun went on to serve as secretary of war and vice president. But he is perhaps most known for arguing in favor of slavery as a "positive good" and for his famous doctrine of "state interposition", which laid the groundwork for the South to secede from the Union - and arguably set the nation on course for civil war. Calhoun has catapulted back into the public eye in recent years, as the strain of radical politics he developed has found expression once again in the tactics and extremism of the modern Far Right. In this revelatory biographical study, historian Robert Elder shows that Calhoun is crucial for understanding the political climate in which we find ourselves today. By excising him from the mainstream of American history, we have been left with a distorted understanding of our past and no way to explain our present.
©2021 Robert Elder (P)2021 Hachette Audio
Franklin Roosevelt
Summary
Explore how FDR went from almost dying at birth to leading the United States through the Great Depression and World War II As the 32nd president of the United States of America, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a common household name in both his home country and the world. Known as the man who led the United States through the Great Depression and World War II, Roosevelt was a leader and a statesman, a scholar, and a politician. Franklin D. Roosevelt is the only president to have served for three consecutive terms and voted in for a fourth, a fact that allows him to stand out among the long list of American presidents. Outside of his role as president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt lived a full life. He was a father and a son, a husband and a career man. He was a bank officer and attended prestigious universities - Harvard University and Columbia University Law School - before practicing law. Additionally, he served as vice president for the Fidelity and Deposit Company. Perhaps most famously, Roosevelt served as governor of New York and president of the United States while he suffered from polio. Instead of allowing the disease to keep him from living a full life, he went above and beyond, training himself to walk without the power of his legs so that his voters would not know that he suffered in any capacity. What this audiobook aims to do is determine who Franklin D. Roosevelt was as a person outside of the spotlight. This audiobook wants to answer questions about this man. How did he interact with his wife and family? What were his exploits and his vices? His favored hobbies? Franklin Roosevelt: A Captivating Guide to the Life of FDR is an outline of Franklin D. Roosevelt's life that not only gives a brief overview of his best-known feats but also provides a glimpse into who he was as a person. Listen to this audiobook now to learn more about FDR!
©2017 Captivating History (P)2017 Captivating History
Shadowlands
Summary
Bloomsbury presents Shadowlands by Anthony McCann, read by David Baerwald. Los Angeles Times best seller. An 'epic exploration' of the 2016 right-wing Oregon Occupation - 'an excellent microcosm by which we might better understand our difficult national history and distressing political moment.' (Maggie Nelson). In 2016, a group of armed, divinely inspired right-wing protestors led by Ammon Bundy occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the high desert of eastern Oregon. Encamped in the shadowlands of the republic, insisting that the federal government had no right to own public land, the occupiers were seen by a divided country as either dangerous extremists dressed up as cowboys, or as heroes insisting on restoring the rule of the Constitution. From the Occupation’s beginnings to the trials of the occupiers in federal court in downtown Portland and their tumultuous aftermaths, Shadowlands is the resonant, multifaceted story of one of the most dramatic flashpoints in the year that gave us Donald Trump. Sharing the expansive stage with the occupiers are a host of others - Native American tribal leaders, public-lands ranchers, militia members, environmentalists, federal defense attorneys, and Black Lives Matter activists -each contending in their different ways with the meaning of the American promise of liberty. Gathering into its vortex the realities of social media technology, history, religion, race and the environment - this piercing work by Anthony McCann offers us a combination of beautiful writing and high-stakes analysis of our current cultural and political moment. Shadowlands is a clarifying, exhilarating story of a nation facing an uncertain future and a murky past in a time of great collective reckoning.
©2019 Anthony McCann (P)2019 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
West of Kabul, East of New York
Summary
The day after the World Trade Center was destroyed, Tamim Ansary sent an anguished e-mail to 20 friends, discussing the attack from his perspective as an Afghan American. The message reached millions. Born to an Afghan father and American mother, Ansary grew up in the intimate world of Afghan family life but emigrated to San Francisco thinking he'd left Afghan culture behind forever. At the height of the Iranian Revolution, however, he took a harrowing journey through the Islamic world, and in the years that followed, he struggled to unite his divided self and to find a place in his imagination where his Afghan and American identities might meet. Here, in his own words, is one man's passionate personal journey through two cultures in conflict.
©2002 Tamim Ansary (P)2006 Blackstone Audio Inc.
A World Safe for Democracy
Summary
A sweeping account of the rise and evolution of liberal internationalism in the modern era For 200 years, the grand project of liberal internationalism has been to build a world order that is open, loosely rules-based, and oriented toward progressive ideas. Today this project is in crisis, threatened from the outside by illiberal challengers and from the inside by nationalist-populist movements. This timely book offers the first full account of liberal internationalism’s long journey from its 19th-century roots to today’s fractured political moment. Creating an international “space” for liberal democracy, preserving rights and protections within and between countries, and balancing conflicting values such as liberty and equality, openness and social solidarity, and sovereignty and interdependence - these are the guiding aims that have propelled liberal internationalism through the upheavals of the past two centuries. G. John Ikenberry argues that in a 21st century marked by rising economic and security interdependence, liberal internationalism - reformed and reimagined - remains the most viable project to protect liberal democracy. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2020 G. John Ikenberry (P)2020 Audible, Inc.
Great Society
Summary
The New York Times best-selling author of The Forgotten Man and Coolidge offers a stunning revision of our last great period of idealism, the 1960s, with burning relevance for our contemporary challenges. "Great Society is accurate history that reads like a novel, covering the high hopes and catastrophic missteps of our well-meaning leaders." (Alan Greenspan) Today, a battle rages in our country. Many Americans are attracted to socialism and economic redistribution, while opponents of those ideas argue for purer capitalism. In the 1960s, Americans sought the same goals many seek now: an end to poverty, higher standards of living for the middle class, a better environment, and more access to health care and education. Then, too, we debated socialism and capitalism, public sector reform versus private sector advancement. Time and again, whether under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or Richard Nixon, the country chose the public sector. Yet, the targets of our idealism proved elusive. What’s more, Johnson’s and Nixon’s programs shackled millions of families in permanent government dependence. Ironically, Shlaes argues, the costs of entitlement commitments made a half century ago preclude the very reforms that Americans will need in coming decades. In Great Society, Shlaes offers a powerful companion to her legendary history of the 1930s, The Forgotten Man, and shows that in fact there was scant difference between two presidents we consider opposites: Johnson and Nixon. Just as technocratic military planning by "the Best and the Brightest" made failure in Vietnam inevitable, so planning by a team of the domestic best and brightest guaranteed fiasco at home. At once history and biography, Great Society sketches moving portraits of the characters in this transformative period, from US Presidents to the visionary UAW leader Walter Reuther, the founders of Intel, and Federal Reserve chairmen William McChesney Martin and Arthur Burns. Great Society casts new light on other figures, too, from Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, to the socialist Michael Harrington and the protest movement leader Tom Hayden. Drawing on her classic economic expertise and deep historical knowledge, Shlaes upends the traditional narrative of the era, providing a damning indictment of the consequences of thoughtless idealism with striking relevance for today. Great Society captures a dramatic contest with lessons both dark and bright for our own time. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2019 Amity Shlaes (P)2019 HarperAudio
Munich 1972
Summary
Set against the backdrop of the turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s, this compelling audiobook provides the first comprehensive history of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, notorious for the abduction of Israeli Olympians by Palestinian terrorists and the hostages' tragic deaths after a botched rescue mission by the German police. Drawing on a wealth of newly available sources from the time, eminent historian David Clay Large explores the 1972 festival in all its ramifications. He interweaves the political drama surrounding the Games with the athletic spectacle in the arena of play, itself hardly free of controversy. Writing with flair and an eye for telling detail, Large brings to life the stories of the indelible characters who epitomized the Games. Key figures range from the city itself, the visionaries who brought the Games to Munich against all odds, and of course to the athletes themselves, obscure and famous alike. With the Olympic movement in constant danger of terrorist disruption, and with the fortieth anniversary of the 1972 tragedy upon us in 2012, the Munich story is more timely than ever.
©2012 Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Trust Me: The True Story of Confession Killer Henry Lee Lucas
Summary
On June 5, 1983, Henry Lee Lucas was arrested for the unauthorised possession of a handgun. The police believed that he was linked to the disappearance of two females, so they used the opportunity to apply pressure and encourage a confession. After four days in custody, Lucas confessed to killing the two women.
What transpired in the following months was both peculiar and fascinating. Lucas confessed to murdering, raping, and mutilating hundreds more women with his friend and lover, Ottis Toole, whilst under the influence of a satanic cult.
But there were hidden depths to the revelations. Upon further inspection, investigators found that Lucas confessed to crimes that directly contradicted others, casting doubt over what was fact and fiction.
Lucas had the answers. Could they uncover the truth?
Trust Me is a dramatic and gripping account of one of the most bizarre and gruesome true crime stories in American history. Ryan Green’s riveting narrative draws the listener into the real-live horror experienced by the victims and has all the elements of a classic thriller.
Caution: This book contains descriptive accounts of abuse and violence. If you are especially sensitive to this material, it might be advisable not to listen to this book.
©2019 Ryan Green (P)2019 Ryan Green
Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution
Summary
Average Americans were the true framers of the Constitution. Woody Holton upends what we think we know of the Constitution's origins by telling the history of the average Americans who challenged the framers of the Constitution and forced on them the revisions that produced the document we now venerate. The framers who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 were determined to reverse America's post-Revolutionary War slide into democracy. They believed too many middling Americans exercised too much influence over state and national policies. That the framers were only partially successful in curtailing citizen rights is due to the reaction, sometimes violent, of unruly average Americans. If not to protect civil liberties and the freedom of the people, what motivated the framers? In Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, Holton provides the startling discovery that the primary purpose of the Constitution was, simply put, to make America more attractive to investment. The linchpin to that endeavor was taking power away from the states and ultimately away from the people. In an eye-opening interpretation of the Constitution, Holton captures how the same class of Americans that produced Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts (and rebellions in damn near every other state) produced the Constitution we now revere. Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution is a 2007 National Book Award finalist for nonfiction.
©2007 Woody Holton (P)2018 Tantor
A Human Algorithm
Summary
A groundbreaking narrative on the urgency of ethically designed AI and a guidebook to reimagining life in the era of intelligent technology A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are examines the immense impact intelligent technology will have on humanity. These machines, while challenging our personal beliefs and our socio-economic world order, also have the potential to transform our health and well-being, alleviate poverty and suffering, and reveal the mysteries of intelligence and consciousness. International human rights attorney Flynn Coleman deftly argues that it is critical we instill values, ethics, and morals into our robots, algorithms, and other forms of AI. Equally important, we need to develop and implement laws, policies, and oversight mechanisms to protect us from tech's insidious threats. To realize AI's transcendent potential, Coleman advocates for inviting a diverse group of voices to participate in designing our intelligent machines and using our moral imagination to ensure that human rights, empathy, and equity are core principles of emerging technologies. Ultimately, A Human Algorithm is a clarion call for building a more humane future and moving conscientiously into a new frontier of our own design.
©2019 Flynn Coleman (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Let Freedom Ring
Summary
Devoting special attention to 9/11, the war on terror, and the continuing threat we face at home and abroad, Sean Hannity makes clear that the greatest challenge Americans have to overcome may not be an attack from overseas, but the slow compromising of our national character. And he asks why, particularly in this time of war, we should entrust our future to the voices of the Left, the very people who have spent decades ravaging so many of our core values and traditions? Our nation, as Hannity reminds us, was founded on the idea of freedom. And in order to protect our freedoms, he argues, we must stand vigilant against liberal attempts to compromise our strengths. From our military and intelligence forces to our borders and airports to our unified commitment to root out terrorists at home and abroad, he reveals how our strongest lines of defense have come under attack, by left-wing voices within our government, media, schools, and elsewhere. And he shows how even domestic issues like taxation, education, patriotism, and the family have been exploited by liberals with their own agendas, with potentially disatrous results.
©2002 Sean Hannity (P)2002 HarperCollins Publishers
In Defense of Public Lands: The Case Against Privatization and Transfer
Summary
Debates continue to rage over the merits or flaws of public land and whether or not it should be privatized - or at least radically reconfigured in some way. In Defense of Public Lands offers a comprehensive refutation of the market-oriented arguments. Steven Davis passionately advocates that public land ought to remain firmly in the public’s hands. He reviews empirical data and theoretical arguments from biological, economic, and political perspectives in order to build a case for why our public lands are an invaluable and irreplaceable asset for the American people. In Defense of Public Lands briefly lays out the history and characteristics of public lands at the local, state, and federal levels while examining the numerous policy prescriptions for their privatization or, in the case of federal lands, transfer. He considers the dimensions of environmental health, markets, and valuation of public land, the tensions between collective values and individual preferences, the nature and performance of bureaucratic management, and the legitimacy of interest groups and community decision-making. Offering a fair, good faith overview of the privatizers' best arguments before refuting them, this timely book contemplates both the immediate and long-term future of our public lands.
©2018 Temple University—Of The Commonwealth system of Higher Education (P)2019 Redwood Audiobooks
The Birth of Modern Politics
Summary
The 1828 presidential election, which pitted Major General Andrew Jackson against incumbent John Quincy Adams, has long been hailed as a watershed moment in American political history. It was the contest in which an unlettered, hot-tempered southwestern frontiersman, trumpeted by his supporters as a genuine man of the people, soundly defeated a New England "aristocrat" whose education and political resume were as impressive as any ever seen in American public life. It was, many historians have argued, the country's first truly democratic presidential election. Lynn Hudson Parsons argues that it also established a pattern in which two nationally organized political parties would vie for power in virtually every state. During the election of 1828 voters were introduced to a host of novel campaign tactics, including coordinated media, get-out-the-vote efforts, fund-raising, organized rallies, opinion polling, campaign paraphernalia, ethnic voting blocs, "opposition research," and smear tactics.In The Birth of Modern Politics, Parsons shows that the Adams-Jackson contest began a national debate that is eerily contemporary, pitting those whose cultural, social, and economic values were rooted in community action for the common good against those who believed the common good was best served by giving individuals as much freedom as possible to promote their own interests. It offers fresh and illuminating portraits of both Adams and Jackson and reveals how, despite their vastly different backgrounds, they had started out with many of the same values, admired one another, and had often been allies in common causes. Both were staunch nationalists, and both shared an aversion to organized parties and "electioneering."But by 1828, caught up in a shifting political landscape, they were plunged into a competition that separated them decisively from the Founding Fathers' era and ushered in a style of politics that is still with us today.The “Pivotal Moments in American History” series seeks to unite the old and the new history, combining the insights and techniques of recent historiography with the power of traditional narrative. Each title has a strong narrative arc with drama, irony, suspense, and – most importantly – great characters who embody the human dimension of historical events. The general editors of “Pivotal Moments” are not just historians; they are popular writers themselves, and, in two cases, Pulitzer Prize winners: David Hackett Fischer, James M. McPherson, and David Greenberg. We hope you like your American History served up with verve, wit, and an eye for the telling detail!
©2009 Lynn Parsons (P)2009 Audible, Inc.
The Forgotten
Summary
The people of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, voted Democratic for decades, until Donald Trump flipped it in 2016. What happened? Named one of the "juiciest political books to come in 2018" by Entertainment Weekly. In The Forgotten, Ben Bradlee, Jr., reports on how voters in Luzerne County, a pivotal county in a crucial swing state, came to feel like strangers in their own land - marginalized by flat or falling wages, rapid demographic change, and a liberal culture that mocks their faith and patriotism. Fundamentally rural and struggling with changing demographics and limited opportunity, Luzerne County can be seen as a microcosm of the nation. In The Forgotten, Trump voters speak for themselves, explaining how they felt others were "cutting in line" and that the federal government was taking too much money from the employed and giving it to the idle. The loss of breadwinner status, and more importantly, the loss of dignity, primed them for a candidate like Donald Trump. The political facts of a divided America are stark, but the stories of the men, women, and families in The Forgotten offer a kaleidoscopic and fascinating portrait of the complex on-the-ground political reality of America today. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2018 Ben Bradlee (P)2018 Hachette Audio