Robert J. Eckrich has narrated 9 audiobooks on Listento.it by 10 authors, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 3 ratings. The most-rated is American Spies.
The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths Versus Reality
Summary
This audiobook exposes the misconceptions, half-truths, and outright lies that have shaped the still dominant but largely mythical version of what happened in the White House during those harrowing two weeks of secret Cuban missile crisis deliberations. A half-century after the event it is surely time to demonstrate, once and for all, that RFK's Thirteen Days and the personal memoirs of other ExComm members cannot be taken seriously as historically accurate accounts of the ExComm meetings.
©2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University (P)2013 Redwood Audiobooks
Playing for Keeps
Summary
In the late 1850s organized baseball was a club-based fraternal sport thriving in the cultures of respectable artisans, clerks and shopkeepers, and middle-class sportsmen. Two decades later it had become an entertainment business run by owners and managers, depending on gate receipts and the increasingly disciplined labor of skilled player-employees. Playing for Keeps is an insightful, in-depth account of the game that became America's premier spectator sport for nearly a century. Reconstructing the culture and experience of early baseball through a careful reading of the sporting press, baseball guides, and the correspondence of the player-manager Harry Wright, Warren Goldstein discovers the origins of many modern controversies during the game's earliest decades. The 20th Anniversary Edition of Goldstein's classic includes information about the changes that have occurred in the history of the sport since the 1980s and an account of his experience as a scholarly consultant during the production of Ken Burns's Baseball. The book is published by Cornell University Press.
©1989, Preface 2009 Cornell University (P)2013 Redwood Audiobooks
American Spies
Summary
What's your secret? American Spies presents the stunning histories of more than forty Americans who spied against their country during the past six decades. Michael Sulick, former head of the CIA's clandestine service, illustrates through these stories - some familiar, others much less well known - the common threads in the spy cases and the evolution of American attitudes toward espionage since the onset of the Cold War. After highlighting the accounts of many who have spied for traditional adversaries such as Russian and Chinese intelligence services, Sulick shows how spy hunters today confront a far broader spectrum of threats not only from hostile states but also substate groups, including those conducting cyberespionage. Sulick reveals six fundamental elements of espionage in these stories: the motivations that drove them to spy; their access and the secrets they betrayed; their tradecraft, i.e., the techniques of concealing their espionage; their exposure; their punishment; and, finally, the damage they inflicted on America's national security.
©2013 Georgetown University Press (P)2014 Redwood Audiobooks
How to Prepare for the Medical Boards
Summary
Studying for major medical exams can be a confusing and stressful task. In How to Prepare for the Medical Boards, third-year medical students Adeleke T. Adesina and Farook W. Taha present a useful guide for medical students studying for both the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) Step 1 and the Comprehensive Osteopathic Medical Licensing Exam (COMLEX) Level I. Using a system-based learning method, How to Prepare for the Medical Boards provides a plan to study for the major topics tested on the board exams and suggests a unique approach to reading and keeping mental notes. It discusses the use of First Aid for the USMLE Step 1 and question banks in the preparation process. A bonus chapter addresses how to survive medical school's rigorous education requirements and the most ancient ways to maximize education while still enjoying life. Based on personal experience, Adesina and Taha help medical students discover the secrets, learn the rules, and avoid common costly mistakes when preparing for and taking important national medical board examinations. These students have developed a unique stepwise approach to help students score above 95 on their medical boards.
©2013 Dr. Adeleke Adesina and Dr. Farook Taha (P)2013 Dr. Adeleke Adesina and Dr. Farook Taha
Come Fly with Us
Summary
Come Fly with Us is the story of an elite group of space travelers who flew as members of many space shuttle crews from pre-Challenger days to Columbia in 2003. Not part of the regular NASA astronaut corps, these professionals known as “payload specialists” came from a wide variety of backgrounds and were chosen for an equally wide variety of scientific, political, and national security reasons. Melvin Croft and John Youskauskas focus on this special fraternity of spacefarers and their individual reflections on living and working in space. Relatively unknown to the public and often flying only single missions, these payload specialists give the reader an unusual perspective on the experience of human spaceflight. The authors also bring to light NASA’s struggle to integrate the wide-ranging personalities and professions of these men and women into the professional astronaut ranks. While Come Fly with Us relates the experiences of the payload specialists up to and including the Challenger tragedy, the authors also detail the later high-profile flights of a select few, including Barbara Morgan, John Glenn (who returned to space at the age of seventy-seven), and Ilan Ramon of Israel aboard Columbia on its final, fatal flight, STS-107. The book is published by University of Nebraska Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.
©2019 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska (P)2020 Redwood Audiobooks
How to Learn and Memorize Latin Vocabulary
Summary
If you'd like to improve your ability to learn Latin vocabulary by as much as 100%, 200%, even 300% (or more)...using simple memory techniques that you can learn in 15-20 minutes (or less), then this may be the most important audiobook that you will ever hear. Believe it or not, it really doesn't matter if you think you have a good memory or not. Every day that you are not using this simple vocabulary memorization system, you are literally stealing from yourself the joy of being able to read, speak and recall an abundance of Latin vocabulary as you easily expand the natural abilities of your mind.
©2013 Anthony Metivier (P)2014 Anthony Metivier
The Air Force Way of War
Summary
On December 18, 1972, more than 100 US B-52 bombers flew over North Vietnam to initiate Operation Linebacker II. During the next 11 days, 16 of these planes were shot down and another four suffered heavy damage. These losses soon proved so devastating that Strategic Air Command was ordered to halt the bombing. The US Air Force's poor performance in this and other operations during Vietnam was partly due to the fact that they had trained their pilots according to methods devised during World War II and the Korean War, when strategic bombers attacking targets were expected to take heavy losses. Warfare had changed by the 1960s, but the USAF had not adapted. Between 1972 and 1991, however, the Air Force dramatically changed its doctrines and began to overhaul the way it trained pilots through the introduction of a groundbreaking new training program called "Red Flag." In The Air Force Way of War, Brian D. Laslie examines the revolution in pilot instruction that Red Flag brought about after Vietnam. The program's new instruction methods were dubbed "realistic" because they prepared pilots for real-life situations better than the simple cockpit simulations of the past. In addition to discussing the program's methods, Laslie analyzes the way its graduates actually functioned in combat during the 1980s and '90s in places such as Grenada, Panama, Libya, and Iraq.
©2015 The University Press of Kentucky (P)2015 Redwood Audiobooks
The Rise and Fall of Intelligence
Summary
This sweeping history of the development of professional, institutionalized intelligence examines the implications of the fall of the state monopoly on espionage today and beyond. During the Cold War, only the alliances clustered around the two superpowers maintained viable intelligence endeavors, whereas a century ago, many states could aspire to be competitive at these dark arts. Today, larger states have lost their monopoly on intelligence skills and capabilities as technological and sociopolitical changes have made it possible for private organizations and even individuals to unearth secrets and influence global events. Historian Michael Warner addresses the birth of professional intelligence in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century and the subsequent rise of US intelligence during the Cold War. He brings this history up to the present day as intelligence agencies used the struggle against terrorism and the digital revolution to improve capabilities in the 2000s. Throughout, the audiobook examines how states and other entities use intelligence to create, exploit, and protect secret advantages against others, and emphasizes how technological advancement and ideological competition drive intelligence, improving its techniques and creating a need for intelligence and counterintelligence activities to serve and protect policymakers and commanders. The world changes intelligence and intelligence changes the world. This sweeping history of espionage and intelligence will be a welcomed by practitioners, students, and scholars of security studies, international affairs, and intelligence, as well as general audiences interested in the evolution of espionage and technology.
©2014 Georgetown University Press (P)2014 Redwood Audiobooks
A People's History of Baseball
Summary
In A People's History of Baseball, Mitchell Nathanson probes the less well-known but no less meaningful other side of baseball: episodes not involving equality, patriotism, heroism, and virtuous capitalism, but power - how it is obtained, and how it perpetuates itself. Through the growth and development of baseball Nathanson shows that, if only we choose to look for it, we can see the petty power struggles as well as the large and consequential ones that have likewise defined our nation. By offering a fresh perspective on the firmly embedded tales of baseball as America, a new and unexpected story emerges of both the game and what it represents. Exploring the founding of the National League, Nathanson focuses on the newer Americans who sought club ownership to promote their own social status in the increasingly closed caste of 19th-century America. His take on baseball’s racial integration that began with Branch Rickey’s "Great Experiment" reveals the debilitating effects of the harsh double standard that resulted, requiring a Black player to have unimpeachable character merely to take the field in a Major League game, a standard no White player was required to meet. Told with passion and occasional outrage, A People's History of Baseball challenges the perspective of the well-known, deeply entrenched, hyper-patriotic stories of baseball and offers an incisive alternative history of America's much-loved national pastime.
©2012 University of Illinois Press (P)2014 Redwood Audiobooks