Bill Thatcher has narrated 6 audiobooks on Listento.it by 7 authors, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Mission Failure.
Mission Failure
Summary
In Mission Failure, Michael Mandelbaum, one of America's leading foreign policy thinkers, provides an original, provocative, and definitive account of the ambitious but deeply flawed post-Cold War efforts to promote American values and American institutions throughout the world. In the decades before the Cold War ended, the United States used its military power to defend against threats to important American international interests or to the American homeland itself. When the Cold War concluded, however, it embarked on military interventions in places where American interests were not at stake. Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo had no strategic or economic importance for the United States, yet the US intervened in all of them for purely humanitarian reasons. Each such intervention led to efforts to transform the local political and economic systems. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq turned into similar missions of transformation. None of them achieved its aims. Mission Failure describes and explains how such missions came to be central to America's post-Cold War foreign policy, even in relations with China and Russia in the early 1990s and in American diplomacy in the Middle East, and how they all failed. Mandelbaum shows how American efforts to bring peace, national unity, democracy, and free-market economies to poor, disorderly countries ran afoul of ethnic and sectarian loyalties and hatreds as well as foundered on the absence of the historical experiences and political habits, skills, and values that Western institutions require. The history of American foreign policy in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall is, he writes, "the story of good, sometimes noble, and thoroughly American intentions coming up against the deeply embedded, often harsh, and profoundly un-American realities of places far from the United States. In this encounter the realities prevailed."
©2016 Michael Mandelbaum (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Big Stick
Summary
"Speak softly and carry a big stick", Theodore Roosevelt famously said in 1901 when the United States was emerging as a great power. It was the right sentiment, perhaps, in an age of imperial rivalry. But today many Americans doubt the utility of their global military presence, thinking it outdated, unnecessary, or even dangerous. In The Big Stick, Eliot A. Cohen - a scholar and practitioner of international relations - disagrees. He argues that hard power remains essential for American foreign policy. While acknowledging that the United States must be careful about why, when, and how it uses force, he insists that its international role is as critical as ever, and armed force is vital to that role. Cohen explains that American leaders must learn to use hard power in new ways and for new circumstances. The rise of a well-armed China, Russia's conquest of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran, and the spread of radical Islamist movements like ISIS are some of the key threats to global peace. If the United States relinquishes its position as a strong but prudent military power and fails to accept its role as the guardian of a stable world order, we run the risk of unleashing disorder, violence, and tyranny on a scale not seen since the 1930s. The United States is still, as Madeleine Albright once dubbed it, "the indispensable nation".
©2016 Eliot A. Cohen (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Night Fighter
Summary
For fans of American Sniper, the stirring account of a life of service by the “father of the US Navy SEALs” One month after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, when President John F. Kennedy pressed Congress about America’s “urgent national needs”, he named expanding US special operations forces along with putting a man on the moon. Captain William Hamilton was the officer tasked with creating the finest unconventional warriors ever seen. Merging his own experience commanding Navy Underwater Demolition Teams with expertise from Army Special Forces and the CIA, and working with his subordinate, Roy Boehm, he cast the mold for sea-, air-, and land-dispatched night fighters capable of successfully completing any mission anywhere in the world. Initially, they were used as a counter to the potential devastation of nuclear war, and later for counterterrorism and hostage rescue. His vision led to the formation of the celebrated SEAL Team 6. In this stirring, action-filled book, Hamilton tells his story for the first time. Night Fighter is a trove of true adventure from the history of the late 20th century, which Hamilton lived, from fighter pilot in the Korean War to operative for the CIA in Vietnam, Africa, Latin America, and Europe, from the Pentagon to Foggy Bottom, and from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Reagan White House’s Star Wars. Like American Sniper, here is the record of a life devoted to patriotic service.
©2016 by William H. Hamilton Jr. and Charles W. Sasser (P)2019 by Blackstone Publishing
Right Away and All at Once
Summary
Visionary business leader Greg Brenneman has written the 21st-century companion to Stephen Covey's classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Like Covey before him, Brenneman believes that true business success and personal fulfillment are two sides of the same coin. The techniques that will grow your business will also help you achieve a rich, purposeful, and integrated life. In Right Away and All at Once, Brenneman takes what he's learned from turning around or tuning up many businesses - including Continental Airlines and Burger King - and distills it into a simple, clear, five-step roadmap that anyone can follow. His five steps teach you how to prepare a succinct Go Forward plan, build a fortress balance sheet, grow your sales and profits, choose all-star servant leaders, and empower your team. For more than 30 years, Brenneman has seen these steps foster dramatic results in a variety of business environments. But 10 years ago he realized that he could apply these same business principles to improve his life and build a lasting moral legacy. He found he could make better decisions by carefully taking the most important facets of his life - faith, family, friendship, fitness, and finance - into consideration. Brenneman's inspiring examples, from both his business and life, demonstrate the astounding effects these five steps can have when you apply them right away and all at once.
©2016 Greg Brenneman (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
Call Sign Extortion 17
Summary
On August 6, 2011 - three months after members of Navy SEAL Team Six killed Osama Bin Laden - Taliban forces took down a United States helicopter, call sign Extortion 17. The attack killed the Air National Guard crew, seven unidentified members of the Afghan military, and 17 members of Navy SEAL Team Six - warrior brothers from the same team that had killed Osama Bin Laden just 90 days prior. Were the seven Afghan soldiers aboard that helicopter really undercover Taliban who either maneuvered the chopper within easy range of being shot down or sabotaged it from within? Were the SEALs sacrificed on the altar of political correctness and deliberately flown into a known Taliban hot zone? Don Brown, a former US Navy JAG officer stationed at the Pentagon and a former special assistant United States attorney, re-creates the wartime action, tells the life stories of the elite warriors our nation lost on that day and tears apart the official military explanation of the incident contained in the infamous Colt Report, which reveals either gross incompetence or a massive cover-up.
©2015 Don Brown (P)2015 Tantor
Marine!
Summary
The gripping story of an extraordinary American hero, the most decorated man in US Marine Corps history, from a New York Times best-selling author. In the glorious chronicles of the US Marine Corps, no name is more revered than that of Lt. Gen. Lewis B. "Chesty" Puller. The only fighting man to receive the Navy Cross five separate times - a military honor second only to the Congressional Medal of Honor - he was the epitome of a professional warrior. A son of the South, descendant of Robert E. Lee, and cousin to George S. Patton, Puller began his enlisted career during World War I and moved up through the ranks as he proved his battlefield mettle in Haiti and Nicaragua, with the Horse Marines in Peking, in the Pacific Theater of World War II, and in the nightmarish winter engagements of the Korean War. Fearless and seemingly indestructible, adored by the troops he championed yet forced into early retirement by a high command that resented his "lowly" beginnings and unwillingness to play politics, Puller remains one of most towering figures in American military history. Bestselling military biographer Burke Davis paints the definitive portrait of this extraordinary marine hero.
©1962 Burke Davis (P)2019 Tantor