Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives by Alice Loxton

Only in America: Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer by Richard Bernstein

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/697157 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/697157] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Only in America: Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer Author: Richard Bernstein Narrator: Suzanne Toren Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 16 minutes Release date: October 8, 2024 Genres: World Publisher's Summary: A probing biography of world-renowned Jewish singer and actor Al Jolson and the history of his performance in and the making of The Jazz Singer Al Jolson, born Asa Yoelson, immigrated from a shtetl in Lithuania to the United States in 1894 after his father secured a job as a rabbi in Washington, D.C. A poor, Yiddish-speaking newcomer navigating a racially segregated and antisemitic America, young Jolson dreamed of becoming a star, and he did. Thanks to his immense talent and his knack for assimilating into new environments, by the time he reached his twenties he was the most famous and highly paid entertainer in America, making almost $5,000 a week at a time when the average American made $800 a year. Jolson’s public adoration and widespread acceptance as a star marked the beginning of an enriching cultural transformation, a moment when the American mind opened up to ethnic and racial differences, widening the gap of acceptability. And yet Jolson himself, despite being ferociously ambitious and gigantically talented, was crippled by insecurity, often nervous to the point of collapse, prisoner to his many vices. Through Jolson, Bernstein simultaneously breaks open the history and legacy of the cultural sensation The Jazz Singer. Not only was The Jazz Singer the first feature length film with synchronized music and dialogue, but it was also taboo smashing in its content: The Jazz Singer is all about Jews, Orthodox and otherwise. Bernstein expounds on the making of The Jazz Singer, what the film meant then and now, introducing the many individuals involved in its production, including Samson Raphaelson, a young Jewish writer whose short story was the basis for the movie; the four Warner brothers, who made a fortune off it; and George Jessel, Jolson’s rival and the star of Raphaelson's stage adaptation of his short story. In the background emerges a picture of old Hollywood in the Roaring Twenties: cutthroat and greedy yet visionary and progressive. And while The Jazz Singer represented the future in many ways, it also dredged up the worst of the past, including Jolson’s use of blackface, common at the time. At once a tale of the Judaizing of American culture and an acknowledgment of the challenges to come, Only in America is a glistening examination of a man at the center of a watershed moment in the arts.

Hope I Get Old Before I Die: Why rock stars never retire by David Hepworth

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/705353 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/705353] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Hope I Get Old Before I Die: Why rock stars never retire Author: David Hepworth Narrator: David Hepworth Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 43 minutes Release date: September 5, 2024 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: World Publisher's Summary: Brought to you by Penguin. From the author of Abbey Road comes the story of how enduring rock icons like Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen and many more have remained in the ever changing music game. When Paul McCartney closed Live Aid in July 1985 we thought he was rock's Grand Old Man. He was forty-three years old. As the forty years since have shown he - and many others of his generation - were just getting started. This was the time when live performance took over from records. The big names of the 60s and 70s exploited the age of spectacle that Live Aid had ushered in to enjoy the longest lap of honour in the history of humanity, continuing to go strong long after everyone else had retired. Hence this is a story without precedent, a story in which Elton John plays a royal funeral, Mick Jagger gets a knighthood, Bob Dylan picks up the Nobel Prize, the Beatles become, if anything, bigger than the Beatles and it's beginning to look as though all of the above will, thanks to the march of technology, be playing Las Vegas for ever. ©2024 David Hepworth (P)2024 Penguin Audio

No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust by Chris Heath

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/697199 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/697199] to listen full audiobooks. Title: No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust Author: Chris Heath Narrator: Vas Eli Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 21 hours 14 minutes Release date: September 3, 2024 Genres: World Publisher's Summary: A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • This by turns shattering and hope-giving account of prisoners who dug their way to freedom from the Nazis is both a stunning escape narrative and an object lesson in the ways we remember and continually forget the particulars of the Holocaust. No Road Leading Back is the remarkable story of a dozen prisoners who escaped from the site where more than 70,000 Jews were shot in the Lithuanian forest of Ponar after the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe in 1941. Anxious to hide the incriminating evidence of the murders, the S.S. later in the war enslaved a group of Jews to exhume every one of the bodies and incinerate them all in a months-long labor—an episode whose specifics are staggering and disturbing, even within the context of the Holocaust. From within that dire circumstance emerges the improbable escape made by some of the men, who dug a tunnel with bare hands and spoons while they were trapped and guarded day and night—an act not just of bravery and desperation but of awesome imagination. Based on first-person accounts of the escapees and on each scrap of evidence that has been documented, repressed, or amplified since, this book resurrects their lives, while also providing a complex, urgent analysis of why their story has rarely been told, and never accurately. Heath explores the cultural use and misuse of Holocaust testimony and the need for us to face it—and all uncomfortable historical truths—with honesty and accuracy.

Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood by Helen Charman

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/701054 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/701054] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood Author: Helen Charman Narrator: Helen Charman Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 13 hours 7 minutes Release date: August 29, 2024 Genres: World Publisher's Summary: Brought to you by Penguin. Motherhood is a political state. Helen Charman makes a radical case for what liberated mothering could be, and tells the story of what motherhood has been, from the 1970s to the 2010s. When we talk about motherhood and politics together, we usually talk about isolated moments - the policing of breastfeeding, or the cost of childcare. But this is not enough: we need to understand motherhood itself as an inherently political state, one that has the potential to pose a serious challenge to the status quo. In Mother State, Helen Charman uses this provocative insight to write a new history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women's Liberation and ending with austerity, the book follows mothers' fights for an alternative future. Alongside the mother figures that loom large in British culture, from Margaret Thatcher to Kat Slater, we meet communities of lesbian squatters, anti-nuclear campaigners, the wives of striking miners and teenage mothers protesting housing cuts: groups who believed that if you want to nourish your children, you have to nourish the world around them, too. Here we see a world where motherhood is not a restrictive identity but a state of possibility. 'Mother' ceases to be an individual responsibility, and becomes an expansive collective term to organise under, for people of any gender, with or without children of their own. It begins with an understanding: that to mother is a political act. ©2024 Helen Charman (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives by Alice Loxton

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/710813 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/710813] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives Author: Alice Loxton Narrator: Alice Loxton Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 26 minutes Release date: August 15, 2024 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: World Publisher's Summary: Read by the author, Alice Loxton. Biggest books to look out for in 2024 – The Guardian 'Loxton is the next big thing in history' – Dan Snow At eighteen, your life is full of of what-ifs and why-nots. You have everything to look forward to – unless you’ve got the plague. From a young Elizabeth Tudor, the orphan facing deadly intrigue at court, to a teenage Richard Burton, the rugby-obsessed son of a Welsh miner, historian Alice Loxton explores Britain’s past through the lives of eighteen figures at this crucial age. How do you make a living in Georgian London with no arms or legs? What would you do if a world war interrupted your university studies? With plenty of wit and insight, Eighteen invites readers to join an eclectic cast of young Britons across the nation and throughout its history, to find out what makes us who we are. Filled with fascinating stories of royalty, explorers, writers and entertainers, Eighteen asks what lessons we can learn for modern Britain. 'A whirlwind of historical energy . . . one of the brightest new stars of popular history' – Dan Jones