Discover the Best Audio Stories in History, The Americas

Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/382245 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/382245] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own Author: Eddie S. Glaude Narrator: Eddie S. Glaude Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 44 minutes Release date: June 30, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.26 of Total 42 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 7 Genres: The Americas Publisher's Summary: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A powerful study of how to bear witness in a moment when America is being called to do the same.”—Time James Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights movement to force America to confront its lies about race. What can we learn from his struggle in our own moment?   One of the Best Books of the Year: Time, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune • One of Esquire’s Best Biographies of All Time • Winner of the Stowe Prize • Shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice   “Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.”—James Baldwin   Begin Again is one of the great books on James Baldwin and a powerful reckoning with America’s ongoing failure to confront the lies it tells itself about race. Just as in Baldwin’s “after times,” argues Eddie S. Glaude Jr., when white Americans met the civil rights movement’s call for truth and justice with blind rage and the murders of movement leaders, so in our moment were the Obama presidency and the birth of Black Lives Matter answered with the ascendance of Trump and the violent resurgence of white nationalism.   In these brilliant and stirring pages, Glaude finds hope and guidance in Baldwin as he mixes biography—drawn partially from newly uncovered Baldwin interviews—with history, memoir, and poignant analysis of our current moment to reveal the painful cycle of Black resistance and white retrenchment. As Glaude bears witness to the difficult truth of racism’s continued grip on the national soul, Begin Again is a searing exploration of the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.

Team of Five: The Presidents Club in the Age of Trump by Kate Andersen Brower

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/373938 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/373938] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Team of Five: The Presidents Club in the Age of Trump Author: Kate Andersen Brower Narrator: Erin Bennett Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 50 minutes Release date: May 19, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.87 of Total 15 Ratings of Narrator: 4.2 of Total 5 Genres: The Americas Publisher's Summary: From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Residence and First Women—also a New York Times bestseller—comes a poignant, news-making look at the lives of the five former presidents in the wake of their White House years, including the surprising friendships they have formed through shared perspective and empathy. After serving the highest office of American government, five men—Jimmy Carter, the late George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—became members of the world’s most exclusive fraternity. In Team of Five, Kate Andersen Brower goes beyond the White House to uncover what, exactly, comes after the presidency, offering a glimpse into the complex relationships of these five former presidents, and how each of these men views his place in a nation that has been upended by the Oval Office’s current, norm-breaking occupant, President Donald Trump. With an empathetic yet critical eye and firsthand testimony from the Carters, Donald Trump, and the top aides, friends, and family members of the five former presidents, Team of Five takes us inside the exclusive world of these powerful men and their families, including the unlikely friendship between George W. Bush and Michelle Obama, the last private visits Bill Clinton and Barack Obama shared with George H. W. Bush, and the Obamas’ flight to Palm Springs after Donald Trump’s inauguration. This insightful, illuminating book overflows with anecdotes about how the ex-presidents are working to combat President Trump’s attempts to undo the achievements and hard work accomplished during their own terms. Perhaps most poignantly, Team of Five sheds light on the inherent loneliness and inevitable feelings of powerlessness and frustration that come with no longer being the most important person in the world, but a leader with only symbolic power. There are ways, though, that these men, and their wives, have become powerful political and cultural forces in American life, even as so-called “formers.” Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

The Princess and the Prophet: The Secret History of Magic, Race, and Moorish Muslims in America by Jacob Dorman

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/381159 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/381159] to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Princess and the Prophet: The Secret History of Magic, Race, and Moorish Muslims in America Author: Jacob Dorman Narrator: Chris Ruen Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 28 minutes Release date: March 3, 2020 Genres: The Americas Publisher's Summary: The just-discovered story of how two enigmatic circus performers and the cultural ferment of the Gilded Age sparked the Black Muslim movement in America Delving into new archives and uncovering fascinating biographical narratives, secret rituals, and hidden identities, historian Jacob Dorman explains why thousands of Americans were enthralled by the Islamic Orient, and why some came to see Islam as a global antiracist movement uniquely suited to people of African descent in an era of European imperialism, Jim Crow segregation, and officially sanctioned racism. The Princess and the Prophet tells the story of the Black Broadway performer who, among the world of Arabian acrobats and equestrians, Muslim fakirs, and Wild West shows, discovered in Islam a greater measure of freedom and dignity, and a rebuttal to the racism and parochialism of white America. Overturning the received wisdom that the prophet was born on the East Coast, Dorman has discovered that Noble Drew Ali was born Walter Brister in Kentucky. With the help of his wife, a former lion tamer and “Hindoo” magician herself, Brister renamed himself Prophet Noble Drew Ali and founded the predecessor of the Nation of Islam, the Moorish Science Temple of America, in the 1920s. With an array of profitable businesses, the “Moors” built a nationwide following of thousands of dues-paying members, swung Chicago elections, and embedded themselves in Chicago’s dominant Republican political machine at the height of Prohibition racketeering, only to see their sect descend into infighting in 1929 that likely claimed the prophet’s life. This fascinating untold story reveals that cultures grow as much from imagination as inheritance, and that breaking down the artificial silos around various racial and religious cultures helps to understand not only America’s hidden past but also its polycultural present.

Russians Among Us: Sleeper Cells, Ghost Stories, and the Hunt for Putin’s Spies by Gordon Corera

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/358568 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/358568] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Russians Among Us: Sleeper Cells, Ghost Stories, and the Hunt for Putin’s Spies Author: Gordon Corera Narrator: Derek Perkins Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 12 hours 49 minutes Release date: February 18, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.5 of Total 6 Genres: The Americas Publisher's Summary: With intrigue that rivals the best le Carre novels, Russians Among Us tells the urgent story of Russia’s espionage efforts against the United States and the West from the end of the Cold War to the present Spies have long been a source of great fascination in the world of fiction, but sometimes the best spy stories happen in real life. Russians Among Us tells the full story of Putin’s escalating espionage campaign in the West, the Russian ‘deep cover’ spies who penetrated the US and the years-long FBI hunt to capture them. This book also details the recruitment, running, and escape of one of the most important spies of modern times, a man who worked inside the heart of Russian intelligence. In this thrilling account Corera tracks not only the history, but the astonishing evolution of Russian espionage, including the use of ‘cyber illegals’ who continue to manipulate us today and pose a significant threat to the 2020 election. Like a scene from the TV drama The Americans, in the summer of 2010 a group of Russian deep cover sleeper agents were arrested. It was the culmination of a decade-long investigation, and ten people, including Anna Chapman, were swapped for four people held in Russia. At the time it was seen simply as a throwback to the Cold War. But that would prove to be a costly mistake. It was a sign that the Russian threat had never gone away and more importantly, it was shifting into a much more disruptive new phase. Today, the danger is clearer than ever following the poisoning in the UK of one of the spies who was swapped, Sergei Skripal, and the growing evidence of Russian interference in American life.  Russians Among Us describes for the first time the story of deep cover spies in America and the FBI agents who tracked them. In intimate and riveting detail, it reveals new information about today’s spies—as well as those trying to catch them and those trying to kill them.

A Black Women's History of the United States by Kali Nicole Gross, Daina Ramey Berry

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/380258 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/380258] to listen full audiobooks. Title: A Black Women's History of the United States Series: #5 of REVISIONING HISTORY Author: Kali Nicole Gross, Daina Ramey Berry Narrator: Janina Edwards Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 2 minutes Release date: February 4, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.5 of Total 16 Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 4 Genres: The Americas Publisher's Summary: The award-winning Revisioning American History series continues with this “groundbreaking new history of Black women in the United States” (Ibram X. Kendi)—the perfect companion to An Indigenous People’s History of the United States and An African American and Latinx History of the United States. An empowering and intersectional history that centers the stories of African American women across 400+ years, showing how they are—and have always been—instrumental in shaping our country. In centering Black women’s stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women’s unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today. A Black Women’s History of the United States reaches far beyond a single narrative to showcase Black women’s lives in all their fraught complexities. Berry and Gross prioritize many voices: enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law. The result is a starting point for exploring Black women’s history and a testament to the beauty, richness, rhythm, tragedy, heartbreak, rage, and enduring love that abounds in the spirit of Black women in communities throughout the nation.