Access Top-Rated Full Audiobooks in History, The Americas

The Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War by Andreas Killen

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/415752 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/415752] to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War Author: Andreas Killen Narrator: Graham Halstead Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 52 minutes Release date: March 21, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: The Americas Publisher's Summary: In this eye-opening chronicle of scientific research on the brain in the early Cold War era, the acclaimed historian Andreas Killen traces the complex circumstances surrounding the genesis of our present-day fascination with this organ. The 1950s were a transformative, even revolutionary decade in the history of brain science. Using new techniques for probing brain activity and function, researchers in neurosurgery, psychiatry, and psychology achieved dramatic breakthroughs in the treatment of illnesses like epilepsy and schizophrenia, as well as the understanding of such faculties as memory and perception. Memory was the site of particularly startling discoveries. As one researcher wrote to another in the middle of that decade, “Memory was the sleeping beauty of the brain—and now she is awake.” Collectively, these advances prefigured the emergence of the field of neuroscience at the end of the twentieth century. But the 1950s also marked the beginning of the Cold War and a period of transformative social change across Western society. These developments resulted in unease and paranoia. Mysterious new afflictions—none more mystifying than “brainwashing”—also appeared at this time. Faced with the discovery that, as one leading psychiatrist put it, “the human personality is not as stable as we often assume,” many researchers in the sciences of brain and behavior joined the effort to understand these conditions. They devised ingenious and sometimes transgressive experimental methods for studying and proposing countermeasures to the problem of Communist mind control. Some of these procedures took on a strange life of their own, escaping the confines of the research lab to become part of 1960s counterculture. Much later, in the early 2000s, they resurfaced in the War on Terror. These stories, often told separately, are brought together by the historian Andreas Killen in this chronicle of the brain’s mid-twentieth-century emergence as both a new research frontier and an organ whose integrity and capacities—especially that of memory—were imagined as uniquely imperiled in the 1950s. Nervous Systems explores the anxious context in which the mid-century sciences of the brain took shape and reveals the deeply ambivalent history that lies behind our contemporary understanding of this organ.

A Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump by Rachael Bade, Karoun Demirjian

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/420391 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/420391] to listen full audiobooks. Title: A Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump Author: Rachael Bade, Karoun Demirjian Narrator: Courtney Patterson Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 17 hours 35 minutes Release date: October 18, 2022 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 1 of Total 1 Genres: The Americas Publisher's Summary: A revealing, behind-the-scenes examination of how Congress twice fumbled its best chance to hold accountable a president many considered one of the most dangerous in American history. The definitive—and only—insider account of both Trump impeachments, as told by the two reporters on the front lines covering them for The Washington Post and Politico. In a riveting account that flips the script on what readers think they know about the two impeachments of Donald Trump, Rachael Bade and Karoun Demirjian reveal how—and why—congressional oversight failed when it was needed most. Unchecked weaves a vivid narrative of how House Democrats under the lead of a cautious speaker, Nancy Pelosi, hesitated for months to stand up to Trump—and then pulled punches in their effort to oust him in a misguided effort to protect themselves politically. What they left on the cutting room floor would come back to haunt them, as Republicans seized on their missteps to whip an uneasy GOP rank-and-file into line behind Donald Trump, abandoning their scruples to defend a president who some privately believed had indeed abused his power. Even after Trump incited a mob to violently attack the Capitol—a day the authors recount in minute-by-minute, stunning detail — Democrats pressured their own investigators to forego a thorough investigation in the name of safeguarding the Biden agenda. And Republicans, fearful of repelling a base they needed for re-election, missed their best moment to turn their backs on a leader they secretly agreed was destructive to democracy. Sourced from hundreds of interviews with all the key players, the authors of Unchecked pull back the curtain on how both parties pursued political expediency over fact-finding. The end result not only emboldened Trump, giving him room for a political comeback, but also undermined Congress by rendering toothless their most powerful check on a president: the power of impeachment. A dramatic and at times crushing work of investigative reporting, Unchecked is both a gripping page-turner of political intrigue and a detailed case study for historians and political scientists searching for answers about the unravelling of checks and balances that have governed American democracy for centuries.  Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted by Jeremy W. Peters

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/449892 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/449892] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted Author: Jeremy W. Peters Narrator: Jeremy W. Peters Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 13 hours 46 minutes Release date: February 8, 2022 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.2 of Total 5 Genres: The Americas Publisher's Summary: NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • How did the party of Lincoln become the party of Trump? From an acclaimed political reporter for The New York Times comes the definitive story of the mutiny that shattered American politics. “A bracing account of how the party of Lincoln and Reagan was hijacked by gadflies and grifters who reshaped their movement into becoming an anti-democratic cancer that attacked the U.S. Capitol.”—Joe Scarborough An epic narrative chronicling the fracturing of the Republican Party, Jeremy Peters’s Insurgency is the story of a party establishment that believed it could control the dark energy it helped foment—right up until it suddenly couldn’t. How, Peters asks, did conservative values that Republicans claimed to cherish, like small government, fiscal responsibility, and morality in public service, get completely eroded as an unshakable faith in Donald Trump grew to define the party? The answer is a tale traced across three decades—with new reporting and firsthand accounts from the people who were there—of populist uprisings that destabilized the party. The signs of conflict were plainly evident for anyone who cared to look. After Barack Obama’s election convinced many Republicans that they faced an existential demographics crossroads, many believed the only way to save the party was to create a more inclusive and diverse coalition. But party leaders underestimated the energy and popular appeal of those who would pull the party in the opposite direction. They failed to see how the right-wing media they hailed as truth-telling was warping the reality in which their voters lived. And they did not understand the complicated moral framework by which many conservatives would view Trump, leading evangelicals and one-issue voters to shed Republican orthodoxy if it delivered a Supreme Court that would undo Roe v. Wade. In this sweeping history, Peters details key junctures and episodes to unfurl the story of a revolution from within. Its architects had little interest in the America of the new century but a deep understanding of the iron will of a shrinking minority. With Trump as their polestar, their gamble paid greater dividends than they’d ever imagined, extending the life of far-right conservatism in United States domestic policy into the next half century.

New York's Finest: Stories of the NYPD and the Hero Cops Who Saved the City by Michael Daly

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/429042 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/429042] to listen full audiobooks. Title: New York's Finest: Stories of the NYPD and the Hero Cops Who Saved the City Author: Michael Daly Narrator: Michael Daly, P.J. Ochlan Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 14 hours 14 minutes Release date: December 7, 2021 Genres: The Americas Publisher's Summary: The gritty, true blue story of two remarkable cops and an equally extraordinary nurse who provided the spirit and smarts that transformed Fear City into the safest big city in America. NEW YORK'S FINEST is the story of a city's transformation through the tireless efforts of Detective Steven McDonald, Nurse Justiniano, Jack Maple, and a host of hero cops—including the great niece of Jazz Age great Josephine Baker—the finest of The Finest. The son and grandson of cops, Officer McDonald was shot and paralyzed from the neck down while on patrol in 1986. The doctors said that if he did survive, he would be better off dead. It was then he came under the care of one Nurse Nina Justiniano. Where the teenage gunman was produced by the worst of Harlem's social ills, she personified its many graces, rescuing Steven from despair and urging him to transcend hate and bitterness. McDonald was then promoted to detective at the urging of NYPD Deputy Commissioner Jack Maple, a postal worker's son who sported a bow tie, Homburg hat, and two-tone shoes as he implemented transformative crime-fighting strategies to deter violent subway robberies. Coming up in the force, Maple had been routinely mocked for imagining the impossible: that Times Square would one day be a destination for families and tourists. Now, resentments and tensions are mounting in the same neighborhoods that most benefited from the careful consideration of officers like McDonald and Maple. But as NEW YORK'S FINEST illustrates, their legacies, and those of people like Nurse Justiniano, may well rescue New York City from its present state of unrest and struggle in the wake of protests and the pandemic.

Buses Are a Comin': Memoir of a Freedom Rider by Charles Person, Richard Rooker

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/430884 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/430884] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Buses Are a Comin': Memoir of a Freedom Rider Author: Charles Person, Richard Rooker Narrator: Landon Woodson Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 4 minutes Release date: April 27, 2021 Genres: The Americas Publisher's Summary: 'Narrator Landon Woodson does a masterful job delivering Person's audiobook--which is both Person's own coming-of-age story and the story of a nation trying to reckon with racism...This important audiobook is shared exquisitely by Woodson.' -- AudioFile Magazine A firsthand exploration of the cost of boarding the bus of change to move America forward—written by one of the Civil Rights Movement's pioneers. At 18, Charles Person was the youngest of the original Freedom Riders, key figures in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement who left Washington, D.C. by bus in 1961, headed for New Orleans. This purposeful mix of black and white, male and female activists—including future Congressman John Lewis, Congress of Racial Equality Director James Farmer, Reverend Benjamin Elton Cox, journalist and pacifist James Peck, and CORE field secretary Genevieve Hughes—set out to discover whether America would abide by a Supreme Court decision that ruled segregation unconstitutional in bus depots, waiting areas, restaurants, and restrooms nationwide. Two buses proceeded through Virginia, North and South Carolina, to Georgia where they were greeted by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and finally to Alabama. There, the Freedom Riders found their answer: No. Southern states would continue to disregard federal law and use violence to enforce racial segregation. One bus was burned to a shell, its riders narrowly escaping; the second, which Charles rode, was set upon by a mob that beat several riders nearly to death. Buses Are a Comin’ provides a front-row view of the struggle to belong in America, as Charles Person accompanies his colleagues off the bus, into the station, into the mob, and into history to help defeat segregation’s violent grip on African American lives. It is also a challenge from a teenager of a previous era to the young people of today: become agents of transformation. Stand firm. Create a more just and moral country where students have a voice, youth can make a difference, and everyone belongs. A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press 'Shot through with vivid details of beatdowns, arrests, and awe-inspiring bravery, this inspirational account captures the magnitude of what the early civil rights movement was up against.” -- Publishers Weekly, starred review 'A vital story, this memoir is also an instructive gift to future generations fighting for change.” -- Kirkus, starred review