Category: Audio Books

Free Download How Documentaries Went Mainstream: A History, 1960-2022 (Audiobook)
English | June 06, 2023 | ASIN: B0C5S5FF29 | M4B@64 kbps | 8h 42m | 257 MB
Author: Nora Stone | Narrator: Emily Durante
Since the 1960s, documentary films have moved closer to the mainstream, thanks to the popularity of rockumentaries, association with the independent film movement, support from public and cable television, and the rise of streaming video services. Documentary films have become reliable earners at the US box office and ubiquitous on streaming platforms, while historically they existed on the margins of mainstream media.
The growing commercialization of documentary film has not gone unnoticed, but it has not been sufficiently explained. Streaming and the growing interest in reality TV are usually offered as explanations whenever a documentary enters the cultural conversation or breaks a box-office record, but neither of those causes grapple with the overlapping causal mechanisms that commercialized documentary film. How Documentaries Went Mainstream provides a more comprehensive and meaningful periodization of the commercialization of documentary film. Although the commercial ascension of documentary films might seem meteoric, it is the culmination of decades-long efforts that have developed and fortified the audience for documentary features. Author Nora Stone refines rough explanations of these efforts through a robust history of the market for documentary films, using knowledge of film economics and the norms of industry discourse to tell a richer story.

Free Download House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0CMV8ZV13 | 2024 | 13 hours and 6 minutes | M4B@128 kbps | 714 MB
Author: Justine Firnhaber-Baker
Narrator: Justine Firnhaber-Baker
One of the great epics of Europe’s history, the story of the rise and rise of the Capetian dynasty, dominates the Middle Ages. Starting in the tenth century from an insecure foothold around Paris, the Capetians built a nation that stretched from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and from the Rhône to the Pyrenees. They founded practices and institutions that endured until the Revolution, transformed Paris from a muddy backwater to a splendid metropole, and popularized the fleur-de-lys, the lily, as the emblem of France. Time and again, their opponents woefully misjudged who they were up against, as through guile, ruthlessness, luck and marriage the Capetians disposed of them all. This is their story, the story of the most powerful kingdom in Christendom.

Free Download Horror for Weenies: Everything You Need to Know About the Films You’re Too Scared to Watch (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0DF92WVYW | 2024 | 9 hours and 19 minutes | M4B@64 kbps | 264 MB
Author: Emily C. Hughes
Narrator: Cassidy Brown
You don’t have to miss out just because you don’t like to be frightened! Stop trying to read nonsensical Wikipedia Description summaries (we know you’re doing it), and let an expert tell you everything you need to know about the most influential horror films of the past sixty years-without a single jump scare or a drop of gore. With a rundown of the history and significance of horror cinema, explanations of common tropes, and detailed entries on twenty-five important movies ranging from Night of the Living Dead to The Blair Witch Project to Get Out, Horror for Weenies will turn even the scarediest of cats into a confident connoisseur. Each entry includes: a detailed Description summary, with enough jokes that it won’t freak you out; smart, illuminating analysis of the film’s themes and cultural significance; descriptions of iconic scenes you definitely do not want to look at; and talking points for impressing even the biggest scary-movie buffs. Horror for Weenies is the first installment in the Outsider’s Guide series, which offers highly listenable crash courses in major cultural phenomena, so you can catch the references and understand the big deal. Never get left out of a conversation again!

Free Download Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0CS3S3WX9 | 2024 | 7 hours and 52 minutes | M4B@64 kbps | 227 MB
Author: Jamil Zaki
Narrator: Jamil Zaki
Cynicism is making us sick; Stanford Psychologist Dr. Jamil Zaki has the cure-a "ray of light for dark days. For thousands of years, people have argued about whether humanity is selfish or generous, cruel or kind. But recently, our answers have changed. In 1972, half of Americans agreed that most people can be trusted; by 2018, only a third did. Different generations, genders, religions, and political parties can’t seem to agree on anything, except that they all think human virtue is evaporating. Cynicism is a perfectly understandable response to a world full of injustice and inequality. But in many cases, it is misplaced. Dozens of studies find that people fail to realize how kind, generous, and open-minded others really are.

Free Download Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0CR4J1MZ2 | 2024 | 21 hours and 47 minutes | M4B@64 kbps | 628 MB
Author: Richard Beck
Narrator: Patrick Harrison
A groundbreaking history of how the decades-long war on terror changed virtually every aspect of American life, from the erosion of citizenship down to the cars we bought and TV we watched-by an acclaimed n+1 writer. For twenty years after September 11, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. With all of the military violence occurring overseas even as the threat of sudden mass death permeated life at home, Americans found themselves living in two worlds at the same time. In one of them, soldiers fought overseas so that nothing at home would have to change at all. In the other, life in the United States took on all kinds of unfamiliar shapes, changing people’s sense of themselves, their neighbors, and the strangers they sat next to on airplanes. In Homeland, Richard Beck delivers a gripping exploration of how much the war changed life in the United States and explains why there is no going back. Though much has been made of the damage that Donald Trump did to the American political system.

Free Download Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0CR4H57QL | 2024 | 17 hours and 6 minutes | M4B@64 kbps | 494 MB
Author: M. G. Sheftall
Narrator: Brian Nishii
The first volume in a two-book series about each of the atomic bomb drops that ended the Pacific War based on years of irreplicable personal interviews with survivors to tell a story of devastation and resilience. In this vividly rendered historical narrative, M. G. Sheftall layers the stories of hibakusha-the Japanese word for atomic bomb survivors-in harrowing detail, to give a minute-by-minute report of August 6, 1945, in the leadup and aftermath of the world-changing bombing mission of Paul Tibbets, Enola Gay, and Little Boy. These survivors and witnesses, who now have an average age over ninety years old, are quite literally the last people who can still provide us with reliable and detailed testimony about life in their cities before the bombings, tell us what they experienced on the day those cities were obliterated, and give us some appreciation of what it has entailed to live with those memories and scars during the subsequent seventy-plus years.

Free Download Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Interracial Solidarity in 1960s-70s New Left Organizing by Amy Sonnie, James Tracy, Mike Chamberlain
English | November 08, 2022 | ISBN: B0BKH6JRHW | 7 hours and 40 minutes | M4B 64 Kbps | 418 Mb
Some of the most important and little-known activists of the 1960s were poor and working-class radicals. Inspired by the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panthers, and progressive populism, they started to organize significant political struggles against racism and inequality during the 1960s and into the 1970s.
Historians of the period have traditionally emphasized the work of white college activists who courageously took to the streets to protest the war in Vietnam and continuing racial inequality. Poor and working-class whites have often been painted as spectators, reactionaries, and, even, racists. But authors James Tracy and Amy Sonnie disprove that narrative.
Through over ten years of research, interviewing activists along with unprecedented access to their personal archives, Tracy and Sonnie tell a crucial, untold story of the New Left. Their deeply sourced narrative history shows how poor and working-class individuals from diverse ethnic, rural and urban backgrounds cooperated and drew strength from one another. The groups they founded redefined community organizing, and transformed the lives and communities they touched.

Free Download Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0CZ7MQGCH | 2024 | 5 hours and 33 minutes | M4B@128 kbps | 308 MB
Author: Jacqueline L. Tobin, Raymond G. Dobard, Cuesta Benberry, Floyd Coleman, Maude Southwell Wahlman
Narrator: Janina Edwards, Leon Nixon
"There are five square knots on the quilt every two inches apart. They escaped on the fifth knot on the tenth pattern and went to Ontario, Canada. The monkey wrench turns the wagon wheel toward Canada on a bear’s paw trail to the crossroads-" And so begins the fascinating story that was passed down from generation to generation in the family of Ozella McDaniel Williams. But what appears to be a simple story that was handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter is actually much, much more than that. In fact, it is a coded message steeped in African textile traditions that provides a link between slave-made quilts and the Underground Railroad. In 1993, author Jacqueline Tobin visited the Old Market Building in the historic district of Charleston, South Carolina, where local craftspeople sell their wares. Amid piles of beautiful handmade quilts, Tobin met African American quilter Ozella Williams and the two struck up a conversation. With the admonition to "write this down," Williams began to tell a fascinating story that had been handed down from her mother and grandmother before her.

Free Download Hidden Demons: Evil Visits a Small New England Town (Audiobook)
English | January 04, 2023 | ASIN: B0BRL8NR7C | M4B@128 kbps | 7h 52m | 429 MB
Author: Margery B. Metzger | Narrator: Tom Lennon
On January 7, 1994, residents of the Berkshire Hills woke up to a typical snowy winter day in the majestic woods of Western Massachusetts. The quaint New England towns, the idyllic scenery and the people who lived there could have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting.
Rocked as imaginable evil converged on them, a pall would be cast over the region and its inhabitants for years to follow.

Free Download Hannibal: The Military Genius Who Almost Conquered Rome [TTC Audio]
English | March 24, 2023 | ASIN: B0BYTFRQR4 | M4B@128 kbps | 8h 31m | 472 MB
Lecturer: Eve MacDonald
Hannibal Barca is famous for marching an eclectic mix of troops across the Alps and into the Roman heartland during the Second Punic War. But how much do we know about the world Hannibal was born into and came of age in? About his family and their ties to the powerful port city of Carthage? About the Roman reaction to Hannibal’s wreckage and their approach to the war in general? About the Italian cities Hannibal either devastated or courted; the diverse and impressive army he built; the powerful Roman generals he confronted, bested, and often killed; and the obstacles he and his army endured the closer they came to Rome? And how much do we actually know about the real Hannibal-not the myth, but the nuanced and fallible man who lost brothers in battle, failed to succeed in a war he fought so hard to win, and died by suicide in exile-who remained a military legend.
In Hannibal: The Military Genius Who Almost Conquered Rome, get to know one of history’s most impressive generals from the political and military conflicts that defined his adolescence to the battles that made him famous. These 15 lectures will paint a portrait of not only Hannibal, but also his enemies and allies. Explore their world from the port city of Carthage and its sphere of influence to Rome and the terrains that Hannibal’s army crossed and sometimes occupied, en route on their mission of conquest. Learn about Hannibal’s family, follow his father Hamilcar on early military expeditions into Hispania and follow his brothers into battles during the Second Punic War. Accompany Carthaginian soldiers on their difficult journey across the Italian Alps, courting or confronting Roman-allied cities. Reconstruct key battles between Hannibal and a series of Roman generals, evaluating each side’s strengths, weaknesses, and strategy. And understand why Hannibal-an extremely successful general who terrified his rivals and impressed his contemporaries-ultimately lost his fight against Rome.