Jill Lepore has narrated 4 audiobooks on Listento.it by 1 author, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 31 ratings. The most-rated is These Truths.
These Truths
Summary
In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. The American experiment rests on three ideas - "these truths", Jefferson called them - political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, "[O]n a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching", writes Jill Lepore in a groundbreaking investigation into the American past that places truth itself at the center of the nation's history. In riveting prose, These Truths tells the story of America, beginning in 1492, to ask whether the course of events has proven the nation's founding truths or belied them. "A nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history", Lepore writes, finding meaning in those very contradictions as she weaves American history into a majestic tapestry of faith and hope, of peril and prosperity, of technological progress and moral anguish. A spellbinding chronicle filled with arresting sketches of Americans from John Winthrop and Frederick Douglass to Pauli Murray and Phyllis Schlafly, These Truths offers an authoritative new history of a great, and greatly troubled, nation.
©2018 Jill Lepore (P)2018 Recorded Books
The Secret History of Wonder Woman
Summary
A riveting work of historical detection revealing that the origins of one of the world’s most iconic superheroes hides within it a fascinating family story - and a crucial history of 20th-century feminism. Wonder Woman, created in 1941, is the most popular female superhero of all time. Aside from Superman and Batman, no superhero has lasted as long or commanded so vast and wildly passionate a following. Like every other superhero, Wonder Woman has a secret identity. Unlike every other superhero, she has also has a secret history. Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman's creator. Beginning in his undergraduate years at Harvard, Marston was influenced by early suffragists and feminists, starting with Emmeline Pankhurst, who was banned from speaking on campus in 1911, when Marston was a freshman. In the 1920s, Marston and his wife, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, brought into their home Olive Byrne, the niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the most influential feminists of the 20th century. The Marston family story is a tale of drama, intrigue, and irony. In the 1930s, Marston and Byrne wrote a regular column for Family Circle celebrating conventional family life, even as they themselves pursued lives of extraordinary nonconformity. Marston, internationally known as an expert on truth - he invented the lie detector test - lived a life of secrets, only to spill them on the pages of Wonder Woman. The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a tour de force of intellectual and cultural history. Wonder Woman, Lepore argues, is the missing link in the history of the struggle for women’s rights - a chain of events that begins with the women's suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later.
©2014 Jill Lepore (P)2014 Random House Audio
This America
Summary
From the best-selling author of These Truths, a work that examines the dilemma of nationalism and the erosion of liberalism in the 21st century. At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Harvard historian Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America. Since the end of the Cold War, Lepore writes, American historians have largely retreated from the idea of "the nation", in part because postmodernism has corroded faith in grand narratives, and in part because the rise of political nationalism has rendered it suspect and unpalatable. Bucking this trend, however, Lepore argues forcefully that the nation demands scrutiny. Without an honest reckoning with America's collective past, we will be at the mercy of unscrupulous demagogues who spin their own version of the national story for their own purposes. "When serious historians abandon the study of the nation", Lepore tellingly writes, "nationalism doesn't die. Instead, it eats liberalism." A trenchant work of political philosophy as well as a reclamation of America's national history, This America asks us to look our nation's sovereign past square in the eye to reveal not only a history of contradictions, but a path of promise for the future. Cover art © 2019 Estate of Arcola Pettway / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
©2019 Jill Lepore (P)2019 Random House Audio
Joe Gould's Teeth
Summary
From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the long-lost longest book ever written, a century-old manuscript called The Oral History of Our Time. Joe Gould, a madman, believed he was the most brilliant historian of the 20th century. So did some of his friends, a group of modernist writers and artists that included E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound. Gould began his life's work before the First World War, announcing that he intended to write down nearly everything anyone ever said to him. "I am trying to preserve as much detail as I can about the normal life of everyday people," he explained, because "as a rule, history does not deal with such small fry." By 1942, when The New Yorker published a profile of Gould written by the reporter Joseph Mitchell, Gould's manuscript had grown to more than nine million words. But when Gould died in 1957 in a mental hospital, the manuscript was nowhere to be found. Then, in 1964, in "Joe Gould's Secret", a second profile, Mitchell claimed that The Oral History of Our Time had been, all along, merely a figment of Gould's imagination. Lepore, unpersuaded, decided to find out. Joe Gould's Teeth is a Poe-like tale of detection, madness, and invention. Digging through archives all over the country, Lepore unearthed evidence that The Oral History of Our Time did in fact once exist. Relying on letters, scraps, and Gould's own diaries and notebooks - including volumes of his lost manuscript - Lepore argues that Joe Gould's real secret had to do with sex and the color line, with modernists' relationship to the Harlem Renaissance, and, above all, with Gould's terrifying obsession with the African American sculptor Augusta Savage. In ways that even Gould himself could not have imagined, what Gould wrote down really is a history of our time: unsettling and ferocious.
©2016 Jill Lepore (P)2016 Random House Audio