Listen to Best Full Audiobooks in History, The Americas

The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/292051 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/292051] to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Best and the Brightest Author: David Halberstam Narrator: Mark Bramhall Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 37 hours 4 minutes Release date: May 9, 2017 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.33 of Total 21 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2 Genres: The Americas Publisher's Summary: David Halberstam’s masterpiece, the defining history of the making of the Vietnam tragedy, with a new Foreword by Senator John McCain. 'A rich, entertaining, and profound reading experience.”—The New York Times Using portraits of America’ s flawed policy makers and accounts of the forces that drove them, The Best and the Brightest reckons magnificently with the most important abiding question of our country’ s recent history: Why did America become mired in Vietnam, and why did we lose? As the definitive single-volume answer to that question, this enthralling book has never been superseded. It is an American classic. Praise for The Best and the Brightest “The most comprehensive saga of how America became involved in Vietnam. . . . It is also the Iliad of the American empire and the Odyssey of this nation’s search for its idealistic soul. The Best and the Brightest is almost like watching an Alfred Hitchcock thriller.”—The Boston Globe “Deeply moving . . . We cannot help but feel the compelling power of this narrative. . . . Dramatic and tragic, a chain of events overwhelming in their force, a distant war embodying illusions and myths, terror and violence, confusions and courage, blindness, pride, and arrogance.”—Los Angeles Times “A fascinating tale of folly and self-deception . . . [An] absorbing, detailed, and devastatingly caustic tale of Washington in the days of the Caesars.”—The Washington Post Book World “Seductively readable . . . It is a staggeringly ambitious undertaking that is fully matched by Halberstam’s performance. . . . This is in all ways an admirable and necessary book.”—Newsweek “A story every American should read.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America by Mark Sundeen

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/280278 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/280278] to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America Author: Mark Sundeen Narrator: Mark Sundeen Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 51 minutes Release date: January 10, 2017 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.17 of Total 12 Ratings of Narrator: 4.5 of Total 2 Genres: The Americas Publisher's Summary: “An in-depth and compelling account of diverse Americans living off the grid.” —Los Angeles Times The radical search for the simple life in today’s America. On a frigid April night, a classically trained opera singer, five months pregnant, and her husband, a former marine biologist, disembark an Amtrak train in La Plata, Missouri, assemble two bikes, and pedal off into the night, bound for a homestead they've purchased, sight unseen. Meanwhile, a horticulturist, heir to the Great Migration that brought masses of African Americans to Detroit, and her husband, a product of the white flight from it, have turned to urban farming to revitalize the blighted city they both love. And near Missoula, Montana, a couple who have been at the forefront of organic farming for decades navigate what it means to live and raise a family ethically.    A work of immersive journalism steeped in a distinctively American social history and sparked by a personal quest, The Unsettlers traces the search for the simple life through the stories of these new pioneers and what inspired each of them to look for -- or create -- a better existence. Captivating and clear-eyed, it dares us to imagine what a sustainable, ethical, authentic future might actually look like.

The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story by Douglas Preston

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/279752 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/279752] to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story Author: Douglas Preston Narrator: Bill Mumy Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 30 minutes Release date: January 3, 2017 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.81 of Total 64 Ratings of Narrator: 4.4 of Total 15 Genres: The Americas Publisher's Summary: The #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, named one of the best books of the year by The Boston Globe and National Geographic: acclaimed journalist Douglas Preston takes readers on a true adventure deep into the Honduran rainforest in this riveting narrative about the discovery of a lost civilization -- culminating in a stunning medical mystery. Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God-but then committed suicide without revealing its location. Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization. Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. But it wasn't until they returned that tragedy struck: Preston and others found they had contracted in the ruins a horrifying, sometimes lethal-and incurable-disease. Suspenseful and shocking, filled with colorful history, hair-raising adventure, and dramatic twists of fortune, THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD is the absolutely true, eyewitness account of one of the great discoveries of the twenty-first century.

Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/280188 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/280188] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community Author: Robert D. Putnam Narrator: Arthur Morey Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 21 hours 5 minutes Release date: December 13, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.75 of Total 8 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: The Americas Publisher's Summary: *The basis for the documentary Join or Die—now streaming on Netflix!* Updated to include a new chapter about the influence of social media and the Internet—the 20th anniversary edition of Bowling Alone remains a seminal work of social analysis, and its examination of what happened to our sense of community remains more relevant than ever in today’s fractured America. Twenty years, ago, Robert D. Putnam made a seemingly simple observation: once we bowled in leagues, usually after work; but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolized a significant social change that became the basis of the acclaimed bestseller, Bowling Alone, which The Washington Post called “a very important book” and Putnam, “the de Tocqueville of our generation.” Bowling Alone surveyed in detail Americans’ changing behavior over the decades, showing how we had become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures, whether it’s with the PTA, church, clubs, political parties, or bowling leagues. In the revised edition of his classic work, Putnam shows how our shrinking access to the “social capital” that is the reward of communal activity and community sharing still poses a serious threat to our civic and personal health, and how these consequences have a new resonance for our divided country today. He includes critical new material on the pervasive influence of social media and the internet, which has introduced previously unthinkable opportunities for social connection—as well as unprecedented levels of alienation and isolation. At the time of its publication, Putnam’s then-groundbreaking work showed how social bonds are the most powerful predictor of life satisfaction, and how the loss of social capital is felt in critical ways, acting as a strong predictor of crime rates and other measures of neighborhood quality of life, and affecting our health in other ways. While the ways in which we connect, or become disconnected, have changed over the decades, his central argument remains as powerful and urgent as ever: mending our frayed social capital is key to preserving the very fabric of our society.

Of a Fire on the Moon by Norman Mailer

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/278568 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/278568] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Of a Fire on the Moon Author: Norman Mailer Narrator: MacLeod Andrews Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 17 hours 33 minutes Release date: December 6, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.5 of Total 6 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 3 Genres: The Americas Publisher's Summary: For many, the moon landing was the defining event of the twentieth century. So it seems only fitting that Norman Mailer—the literary provocateur who altered the landscape of American nonfiction—wrote the most wide-ranging, far-seeing chronicle of the Apollo 11 mission. A classic chronicle of America’s reach for greatness in the midst of the Cold War, Of a Fire on the Moon compiles the reportage Mailer published between 1969 and 1970 in Life magazine: gripping firsthand dispatches from inside NASA’s clandestine operations in Houston and Cape Kennedy; technical insights into the magnitude of their awe-inspiring feat; and prescient meditations that place the event in human context as only Mailer could.