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.
Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse
Summary
A line-up of the dirty dealers and defenders of the indefensible who are definitely not "making America great again" Donald Trump has assembled a rogue's gallery of alt-right hatemongers, crony capitalists, immigrant bashers, and climate-change deniers to run the American government. To survive the next four years, we the people need to know whose hands are on the levers of power. And we need to know how to challenge their abuses. John Nichols, veteran political correspondent at the Nation, has been covering many of these deplorables for decades. Sticking to the hard facts and unafraid to dig deep into the histories and ideologies of the people who make up Trump's inner circle, Nichols delivers a clear-eyed and complete guide to this wrecking-crew administration.
©2017 John Nichols (P)2018 Hachette Audio
The Lavender Scare
Summary
In Cold War America, Senator Joseph McCarthy enjoyed tremendous support in the fight against what he called atheistic communism. But that support stemmed less from his wild charges about communists than his more substantiated charges that "sex perverts" had infiltrated government agencies. Although now remembered as an attack on suspected disloyalty, McCarthyism introduced "moral values" into the American political arsenal. Warning of a spreading homosexual menace, McCarthy and his Republican allies learned how to win votes. Winner of three book awards, The Lavender Scare masterfully traces the origins of contemporary sexual politics to Cold War hysteria over national security. Drawing on newly declassified documents and interviews with former government officials, historian David Johnson chronicles how the myth that homosexuals threatened national security determined government policy for decades, ruined thousands of lives, and pushed many to suicide. As Johnson shows, this myth not only outlived McCarthy but, by the 1960s, helped launch a new civil rights struggle.
©2004 David K. Johnson (P)2019 Tantor
Afghanistan
Summary
Afghanistan, a landlocked country in Central Asia, has improbably been at the center of international geopolitics for four decades. After the Soviet Union invaded in 1980, Afghanistan descended into an unending conflict that featured at various points most of the world's major powers. In the mid-1990s, the country entered a new phase, when the Taliban took power and imposed order based on a harsh, repressive version of Islamic law. Infamously, the sheltered Osama bin Laden, whose attack on 9/11 of the Twin Towers ushered in the global war on terror, drew tens of thousands of American troops to the country, where they remain today. In Afghanistan: What Everyone Needs to Know, leading scholar Barnett R. Rubin provides an overview of this complicated nation. After providing a concise history of Afghanistan, he explores the various peoples and cultures of the country and its relations with neighbors like Pakistan and Iran. He also provides an authoritative overview of the conflicts that have plagued the country since the Soviet invasion. Both wide-ranging and pithy, this book explains why Afghanistan matters and what its possible future might look like.
©2020 Oxford University Press (P)2020 Tantor
The Diversity Bonus
Summary
How businesses and other organizations can improve their performance by tapping the power of differences in how people think. What if workforce diversity is more than simply the right thing to do in order to make society more integrated and just? What if diversity can also improve the bottom line of businesses and other organizations facing complex challenges in the knowledge economy? It can. And The Diversity Bonus shows how and why. Scott Page, a leading thinker, writer, and speaker whose ideas and advice are sought after by corporations, nonprofits, universities, and governments around the world, makes a clear and compellingly pragmatic case for diversity and inclusion. He presents overwhelming evidence that teams that include different kinds of thinkers outperform homogenous groups on complex tasks, producing what he calls "diversity bonuses". These bonuses include improved problem solving, increased innovation, and more accurate predictions - all of which lead to better performance and results. Page shows that various types of cognitive diversity - differences in how people perceive, encode, analyze, and organize the same information and experiences - are linked to better outcomes. He then describes how these cognitive differences are influenced by other kinds of diversity, including racial and gender differences - in other words, identity diversity. Identity diversity, therefore, can also produce bonuses. Drawing on research in economics, psychology, computer science, and many other fields, The Diversity Bonus also tells the stories of people and organizations that have tapped the power of diversity to solve complex problems. And the book includes a challenging response from Katherine Phillips of the Columbia Business School. The result changes the way we think about diversity in the workplace - and far beyond it. Author bio: Scott E. Page is the Leonid Hurwicz Collegiate Professor of complex systems, political science, and economics at the University of Michigan and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies and Diversity and Complexity (both Princeton). He has been a featured speaker at Davos as well as at organizations such as Google, Bloomberg, BlackRock, Boeing, and NASA.
©2017 Princeton University Press (P)2017 Recorded Books
Bring Back Our Girls
Summary
What happens after you click Tweet? The heart-stopping definitive account of the mission to rescue hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls whose abduction ignited a global social media campaign and a dramatic worldwide intervention. In the spring of 2014, millions of Twitter users, including some of the world’s most famous people, unwittingly helped turn a group of 276 schoolgirls abducted by a little-known Islamist sect into a central prize in the global War on Terror by retweeting a call for their release: #BringBackOurGirls. With just four words, their tweets launched an army of would-be liberators. Soldiers and drones, spies, mercenaries, and glory hunters descended into an obscure conflict that few understood, in a remote part of Nigeria that had barely begun to use the internet. When hostage talks and military intervention failed, the schoolgirls were forced to take survival into their own hands. As their days in captivity dragged into years, the young women learned to withstand hunger, disease, and torment, and became witnesses and victims of unspeakable brutality. Many of the girls were Christians who refused to take the one path offered them - converting to their captors' fundamentalist creed. In secret, they sang hymns and kept a diary, relying on their faith and friendships to stay alive. Bring Back Our Girls unfolds across four continents, from the remote forests of Northern Nigeria to the White House; from clandestine meetings in Khartoum safe houses to century-old luxury hotels on picturesque lakes in the Swiss Alps. A 21st-century story that plumbs the promise and peril of an era whose politics are fueled by the power of hashtag advocacy, this urgent and engrossing work of investigative journalism reveals the unpredictable interconnectedness of our butterfly-wings world, where a few days of online activism can bring years of offline consequences for people continents away. 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.
©2021 Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers
366 Days in Abraham Lincoln's Presidency
Summary
For the first time ever, the intimate thoughts and political decisions of Abraham Lincoln’s entire presidency - day by day. In a startlingly innovative format, journalist Stephen A. Wynalda has constructed a painstakingly detailed day-by-day breakdown of president Abraham Lincoln’s decisions in office - including his signing of the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862; his signing of the legislation enacting the first federal income tax on August 5, 1861; and more personal incidents like the day his 11-year-old son, Willie, died. Revealed are Lincoln’s private frustrations on September 28, 1862, as he wrote to vice president Hannibal Hamlin, “The North responds to the [Emancipation] proclamation sufficiently with breath; but breath alone kills no rebels.” 366 Days in Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency includes fascinating facts like how Lincoln hated to hunt but loved to fire guns near the unfinished Washington monument, how he was the only president to own a patent, and how he recited Scottish poetry to relieve stress. As Scottish historian Hugh Blair said, “It is from private life, from familiar, domestic, and seemingly trivial occurrences, that we most often receive light into the real character.” Covering 366 nonconsecutive days (including a leap day) of Lincoln’s presidency, this is a rich, exciting new perspective of our most famous president. This is a must-have edition for any historian, military history or civil war buff, or listener of biographies.
©2010 Stephen A. Wynalda (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
"Citizen Kane" and American Politics
Summary
This book examines important themes about American politics the film Citizen Kane provokes. Citizen Kane is widely believed by many critics to be the greatest movie of all time. What about the film resonates so deeply with those who can appreciate great art and film? And also for this book, what does Citizen Kane say about American politics, power, and who gains influence in America?
©2021 Thomas Winterbottom (P)2021 Thomas Winterbottom
Anarchy & the Philosophy of Anarchism Collection
Summary
Anarchism claims that there's no need for a state and that it would be better to have a society without central government. Anarchists dislike the authority of the state, but the dream of the stateless society is not a simple matter. The Anarchy & The Philosophy of Anarchism Collection includes: Book one: The 1902 essay collection Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution by the Russian naturalist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin explores the role of mutually beneficial cooperation and reciprocity in the animal kingdom and human societies. It is an argument against theories of social Darwinism that emphasize competition and survival of the fittest and against the romantic views of writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau who thought that cooperation was motivated by universal love. Book two: The Conquest of Bread is an 1892 book by the Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin. It first appeared as a series of articles in the French anarchist journal Le Révolté. Kropotkin points out what he considers to be the defects of the economic systems of feudalism and capitalism and why he believes they thrive on and maintain poverty and scarcity. Book three: An Appeal to the Young is a passionate tract by Peter Kropotkin that was translated from Russian in 1884 by HM Hyndman. The next year it was published in San Francisco with the title To Young People by the International Workingman’s Association (IWMA) in a translation by Marie LeCompte. The pamphlet is imbued with a fierce morality and by times earnest, scathing, condemnatory, and passionate. Book four: Law and Authority, by Kropotkin, advocates a communist society free from central government. A classic statement of anarchist thought, it considers prisons as “schools of crime” and presents an anarchist critique of the law and the criminal justice system. The text is much easier to understand than for example the works of Bakunin, and the argument is clearly stated for easy digestion. Kropotkin's argument is hard to dispute despite it being so simple. Book five: Anarchism and Other Essays is a 1910 collection of essays outlining Emma Goldman's anarchist views on various topics, most notably the oppression of women and perceived shortcomings of first-wave feminism. It also sets out her views on prisons, political violence, sexuality, religion, nationalism, and art theory for a fascinating look into revolutionary issues at the turn of the century. Book six: My Further Disillusionment in Russia, in which Emma Goldman tells of her visit to Russia in 1919 where she witnessed the aftermath of the Revolution firsthand. Disgusted by the actions of the communist dictatorship, she left the country in 1921 and reported her eyewitness accounts in two books - My Disillusionment in Russia and My Further Disillusionment in Russia. She exposed the political harassment and forced labor inflicted on the people, the rampant opportunism in the Soviet government, the persecution of anarchists and others, and the government's use of deportation as a political weapon. She also describes the type of visitors who came to "study the Revolution". There were the naïve idealists, the journalists who were wined and dined by the communists and spread propaganda afterward, and a third type that became agents of the ruling party.
Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks
Border and Rule
Summary
Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of the conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change that are generating mass dispossession worldwide. Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders divide the international working class and consolidate imperial, capitalist, and racist nationalist rule. Illuminating the brutal mechanics of state formation, Walia exposes US border policy as a product of violent territorial expansion, settler-colonialism, enslavement, and gendered racial ideology. Further, she compellingly details how "Fortress Europe" and "White Australia" are using immigration diplomacy and externalized borders to maintain a colonial present, how temporary labor migration in the Arab Gulf states and Canada is central to citizenship regulation and labor control, and how racial violence is escalating deadly nationalism in the US, Israel, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and across Europe, while producing a disaster of statelessness for millions elsewhere.
©2021 Harsha Walia (P)2021 Tantor
Memoirs and Political Observations of a Midwestern W.A.S.P.
Summary
The memoir portion of the book covers my Christian upbringing (first to eighth grades at St John’s Lutheran), my military experience, being stationed in three European countries where I learned two additional languages, travels to more than 25 countries in more than three continents, 60 years of study and training as a martial artist - which included completion in the US and Germany - nearly 48 years as a career police officer, and nearly 15 years as an associate professor of political science. The rest of the book discusses and evaluates politicians and political parties by Christian/biblical values. Listeners should evaluate the politicians and parties they support by putting them against the Christian yardstick. If they fail to measure up or violate biblical teachings and/or the Ten Commandments, they should seriously consider a change. Continuing to support these politicians make the supporter complicit in their sinful nature and conduct.
©2019 Michael A. Sullenger (P)2021 Michael A. Sullenger
The Crisis of Islam
Summary
In his first book since What Went Wrong? Bernard Lewis examines the historical roots of the resentments that dominate the Islamic world today and that are increasingly being expressed in acts of terrorism. He looks at the theological origins of political Islam and takes us through the rise of militant Islam in Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, examining the impact of radical Wahhabi proselytizing, and Saudi oil money, on the rest of the Islamic world. The Crisis of Islam ranges widely through 13 centuries of history, but in particular it charts the key events of the twentieth century leading up to the violent confrontations of today: the creation of the state of Israel, the Cold War, the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, the Gulf War, and the September 11th attacks on the United States. While hostility toward the West has a long and varied history in the lands of Islam, its current concentration on America is new. So too is the cult of the suicide bomber. Brilliantly disentangling the crosscurrents of Middle Eastern history from the rhetoric of its manipulators, Bernard Lewis helps us understand the reasons for the increasingly dogmatic rejection of modernity by many in the Muslim world in favor of a return to a sacred past. Based on his George Polk Award-winning article for The New Yorker, The Crisis of Islam is essential listening for anyone who wants to know what Usama bin Ladin represents and why his murderous message resonates so widely in the Islamic world.
©2003 Bernard Lewis (P)2003 Random House Audio
Firebrand: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the MAGA Revolution
Summary
In a scathingly funny account of his time in the Washington swamp, Florida firebrand Matt Gaetz, one of President Trump’s key supporters in Congress, gleefully skewers the enemies of the MAGA revolution and lays out his own vision for the future of the populist movement. “This book is your invitation to the front lines of our fight. Join me with ideas, energy, images, and stories. This is not my chronological diary. You can watch me on television for that. This is how we prevail with joy - and exactly how an exciting president is leading the way against all odds.” (Congressman Matt Gaetz)
©2020 Congressman Matt Gaetz (P)2020 Post Hill Press
Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution
Summary
This 1902 essay collection by the Russian naturalist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin explore the role of mutually beneficial cooperation and reciprocity in the animal kingdom and human societies. It is an argument against theories of social Darwinism that emphasize competition and survival of the fittest, and against the romantic views of writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau who thought that cooperation was motivated by universal love.
Public Domain (P)2019 Museum Audiobooks
The Black Church
Summary
From the New York Times best-selling author of Stony the Road and one of our most important voices on the African-American experience, a powerful new history of the Black church in America as the Black community's abiding rock and its fortress. The companion book to the upcoming PBS series. For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, segregated West Virginia town, the church was his family and his community's true center of gravity. Within those walls, voices were lifted up in song to call forth the best in each other, and to comfort each other when times were at their worst. In this book, his tender and magisterial reckoning with the meaning of the Black church in American history, Gates takes us from his own experience onto a journey across more than 400 years and spanning the entire country. At road's end, we emerge with a new understanding of the centrality of the Black church to the American story - as a cultural and political force, as the center of resistance to slavery and White supremacy, as an unparalleled incubator of talent, and as a crucible for working through the community's most important issues, down to today. In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black church has always been more than a sanctuary; it's been a place to nourish the deepest human needs and dreams of the African-American community. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: From the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meeting houses were subject to surveillance, and often destruction. So it continued, long after slavery's formal eradication; church burnings and church bombings by the Ku Klux Klan and others have always been a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the struggle for equality for the African-American community. The past often isn't even past - Dylann Roof committed his slaughter in Charleston's Emanuel AME Church 193 years after the church was first burned down by whites following a thwarted slave rebellion. But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the vital center of the civil rights movement, and produced many of its leaders, from the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., on, but at the same time there have always been churches and sects that eschewed a more activist stance, even eschewed worldly political engagement altogether. That tension can be felt all the way to the Black Lives Matter movement and the work of today. Still and all, as a source of strength and a force for change, the Black church is at the center of the action at every stage of the American story, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear. *This audiobook includes a PDF of the Appendix and Acknowledgments from the book. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2021 Henry Louis Gates (P)2021 Penguin Audio
Lucky
Summary
The inside story of the historic 2020 presidential election and Joe Biden’s harrowing ride to victory, from the number-one New York Times best-selling authors of Shattered, the definitive account of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Almost no one thought Joe Biden could make it back to the White House - not Donald Trump, not the two dozen Democratic rivals who sought to take down a weak front-runner, not the mega-donors and key endorsers who feared he could not beat Bernie Sanders, not even Barack Obama. The story of Biden’s cathartic victory in the 2020 election is the story of a Democratic Party at odds with itself, torn between the single-minded goal of removing Donald Trump and the push for a bold progressive agenda that threatened to alienate as many voters as it drew. In Lucky, New York Times best-selling authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes use their unparalleled access to key players inside the Democratic and Republican campaigns to unfold how Biden’s nail-biting run for the presidency vexed his own party as much as it did Trump. Having premised his path on unlocking the Black vote in South Carolina, Biden nearly imploded before he got there after a relentless string of misfires left him freefalling in polls and nearly broke. Allen and Parnes brilliantly detail the remarkable string of chance events that saved him, from the botched Iowa caucus tally that concealed his terrible result, to the pandemic lockdown that kept him off the stump, where he was often at his worst. More powerfully, Lucky unfolds the pitched struggle within Biden’s general election campaign to downplay the very issues that many Democrats believed would drive voters to the polls, especially in the wake of Trump’s response to nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd. Even Biden’s victory did not salve his party’s wounds; instead, it revealed a surprising, complicated portrait of American voters and crushed Democrats’ belief in the inevitability of a blue wave. A thrilling masterpiece of political reporting, Lucky is essential listening for understanding the most important election in American history and the future that will come of it.
©2021 Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (P)2021 Random House Audio
From Oligarchy to Republicanism
Summary
On December 4, 1865, members of the 39th United States Congress walked into the Capitol Building to begin their first session after the end of the Civil War. They understood their responsibility to put the nation back on the path established by the American Founding Fathers. The moment when the Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress remade the nation and renewed the law is in a class of rare events. The Civil War should be seen in this light. In From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction, Forrest A. Nabors shows that the ultimate goal of the Republican Party, the war, and Reconstruction was the same. This goal was to preserve and advance republicanism as the American founders understood it, against its natural, existential enemy: oligarchy. The principle of natural equality justified American republicanism and required abolition and equal citizenship. Likewise, slavery and discrimination on the basis of color stand on the competing moral foundation of oligarchy, the principle of natural inequality, which requires ranks. This book presents a shared analysis of the slave South, synthesized from the writings and speeches of the Republicans who served in the 38th, 39th or 40th Congress from 1863-1869. The account draws from their writings and speeches dated before, during, and after their service in Congress. Nabors shows how the Republican majority, charged with the responsibility of reconstructing the South, understood the South. Winner of the American Political Science Association's Political Thought Book Award. “A masterpiece - forceful, persuasive, and enlightening in the extreme… the best book ever written on Reconstruction.” (Paul Rahe, Hillsdale College) “This path-breaking, passionately argued study frames Reconstruction rightly for the first time.” (Will Morrisey, author of Self-Government, the American Theme)
©2017 The Curators of the University of Missouri (P)2021 Redwood Audiobooks
Della gentilezza e del coraggio
Summary
La qualità della vita democratica scaturisce innanzitutto dalla capacità di porre e di porsi buone domande, dalla capacità di dubitare. E questo vale tanto per chi il potere ce l'ha quanto, forse soprattutto, per chi apparentemente non ce l'ha. Cioè noi. Perché i cittadini hanno un potere nascosto, che li distingue dai sudditi e che deriva proprio dall'esercizio della critica e dunque della sorveglianza. In queste pagine Gianrico Carofiglio, con la sua scrittura affilata e la sua arte di narratore, ci accompagna in un viaggio nel tempo e nello spazio e costruisce un sommario di regole - o meglio suggerimenti - per una nuova pratica della convivenza civile. Una pratica che nasce dall'accettazione attiva dell'incertezza e della complessità del mondo ed elabora gli strumenti di un agire collettivo laico, tollerante ed efficace. Partendo dagli insegnamenti dei maestri del lontano Oriente e passando per i moderni pensatori della politica, scopriamo un nuovo senso per parole antiche e fondamentali, prima fra tutte la parola gentilezza. Non c'entra nulla con le buone maniere, né con l'essere miti, ma disegna un nuovo modello di uomo civile, che accetta il conflitto e lo pratica secondo regole, in una dimensione audace e non distruttiva. Per questo la gentilezza, insieme al coraggio, diventa una dote dell'intelligenza, una virtù necessaria a trasformare il mondo. E contrastare tutte le forme di esercizio opaco del potere diventa un'attività sovversiva, che dovrà definire l'oggetto della nostra azione, della nostra ribellione. "Gentilezza insieme a coraggio significa prendersi la responsabilità delle proprie azioni e del proprio essere nel mondo, accettare la responsabilità di essere umani." Un inedito, avvincente manuale di istruzioni per l'uso delle parole, del dubbio, del potere. Un grande romanziere racconta la passione civile, l'amore per le idee, le imprevedibili possibilità della politica. Un breviario denso, lieve e necessario.
©2020 Rosaria Carpinelli Consulenze Editoriali Srl (P)2020 Audible Studios
American Sphinx
Summary
For a man who insisted that life on the public stage was not what he had in mind, Thomas Jefferson certainly spent a great deal of time in the spotlight - and not only during his active political career. After 1809, his longed-for retirement was compromised by a steady stream of guests and tourists who made of his estate at Monticello a virtual hotel, as well as by more than one thousand letters per year, most from strangers, which he insisted on answering personally. In his twilight years Jefferson was already taking on the luster of a national icon, which was polished off by his auspicious death (on July 4, 1896); and in the subsequent 17 decades of his celebrity - now verging, thanks to virulent revisionists and television documentaries, on notoriety - has been inflated beyond recognition of the original person. For the historian Joseph J. Ellis, the experience of writing about Jefferson was "as if a pathologist, just about to begin an autopsy, has discovered that the body on the operating table was still breathing." In American Sphinx, Ellis sifts the facts shrewdly from the legends and the rumors, treading a path between vilification and hero worship in order to formulate a plausible portrait of the man who still today "hover[s] over the political scene like one of those dirigibles cruising above a crowded football stadium, flashing words of inspiration to both teams". For, at the grass roots, Jefferson is no longer liberal or conservative, agrarian or industrialist, pro- or anti-slavery, privileged or populist. He is all things to all people. His own obliviousness to incompatible convictions within himself (which left him deaf to most forms of irony) has leaked out into the world at large - a world determined to idolize him despite his foibles. From Ellis we learn that Jefferson sang incessantly under his breath; that he delivered only two public speeches in eight years as president, while spending 10 hours a day at his writing desk; that sometimes his political sensibilities collided with his domestic agenda, as when he ordered an expensive piano from London during a boycott (and pledged to "keep it in storage"). We see him relishing such projects as the nailery at Monticello that allowed him to interact with his slaves more palatably, as pseudo-employer to pseudo-employees. We grow convinced that he preferred to meet his lovers in the rarefied region of his mind rather than in the actual bedchamber. We watch him exhibiting both great depth and great shallowness, combining massive learning with extraordinary naïveté, piercing insights with self-deception on the grandest scale. We understand why we should neither beatify him nor consign him to the rubbish heap of history, though we are by no means required to stop loving him. He is Thomas Jefferson, after all - our very own sphinx.
©1997 Joseph J. Ellis (P)2021 Random House Audio
12 Seconds of Silence
Summary
The riveting story of the American scientists, tinkerers, and nerds who solved one of the biggest puzzles of World War II - and developed one of the most powerful weapons of the war 12 Seconds of Silence is the remarkable, lost story of how a ragtag group of American scientists overcame one of the toughest problems of World War II: shooting things out of the sky. Working in a secretive organization known as Section T, a team of physicists, engineers, and everyday Joes and Janes took on a devilish challenge. To help the Allies knock airplanes out of the air, they created one of the world’s first “smart weapons”. Against overwhelming odds and in a race against time, mustering every scrap of resource, ingenuity, and insight, the scientists of Section T would eventually save countless lives, rescue the city of London from the onslaught of a Nazi superweapon, and help bring about the Axis defeat. A holy grail sought after by Allied and Axis powers alike, their unlikely innovation ranks with the atomic bomb as one of the most revolutionary technologies of the Second World War. Until now, their tale was largely untold. For fans of Erik Larson and Ben Macintyre, set amidst the fog of espionage, dueling spies, and the dawn of an age when science would determine the fate of the world, 12 Seconds of Silence is a tribute to the extraordinary wartime mobilization of American science and the ultimate can-do story. Narrated by Chris Mayers.
©2020 Jamie Holmes (P)2020 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
Not Free America
Summary
Not Free America is a call to all Americans to take back our constitutional freedoms and break free of “our abusive relationship with our government”. Mike Donovan’s groundbreaking work on behalf of personal liberties has made him an object of fascination on both the right and the left. In this groundbreaking book, Mike Donovan, the CEO of Nexus Services, calls out the elites who wield power in our country - not only the elites at the federal level, but the elites who exert control over us in our states and counties, our cities and towns. Not Free America is a passionate call to all freedom-loving Americans to take back our constitutional freedoms and break free of what he calls “our abusive relationship with our government”. Donovan details how the “wholesale shredding of the Bill of Rights” started long before the concurrent crises of COVID-19 and the protests and violence that followed the murder of George Floyd. Not Free America shows us how those events were used by forces in our local, state, and federal governments that had systematically been abridging our rights for decades. These rights, Mike reminds us, are God-given rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. As the pastor of the First Christian Church Universalist in Harrisonburg, Virginia, Mike Donovan is far from your quiet country clergyman. A fierce warrior with the spirit of God and the tough skin of a lawyer, he has dedicated his life to protecting liberty and preserving individual rights, serving the underserved, and ministering to those who are overlooked in our broken society. Indeed, there are aspects to his past and present that make him an easy target for judgment from all directions. But Mike Donovan hides from nothing: He openly embraces the faults of his past and dedicates his present to creating a future that helps others move past their own unfortunate pasts. Born to a poor family in Page County, Virginia, he found himself at a young age convicted of writing bad checks, resulting in multiple felonies for which he served seven months in the county jail. But the time he served didn’t break him; it helped make him the man he is today: a man of the law and a man of God who believes with all his heart and soul in the possibility of redemption and the power of moving beyond past mistakes. He also came out of that experience knowing he needed to make a difference for others who found themselves in the same place he’d just been. Not content to talk the talk, Mike Donovan walks the walk in the footsteps of the Jesus who said “I was in prison and you came to visit me.... Whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me.” Not Free America shows us how to do all that for America and for our children. The book ends with “The Liberty Pledge”: an agreement listeners will make stating that they will vote only for lawmakers who agree to uphold the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment.
©2020 Mike Donovan (P)2020 Simon & Schuster Audio