One Small Decision That Changed Everything
The Unexpected Choices That Changed History Forever
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One Small Decision That Changed Everything
Narrated by:
AI Voice Matthew Barton
Buy Now for $12.32
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Narrated by:
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AI Voice Matthew Barton
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By:
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Matthew Barton
This title uses virtual voice narration
Virtual voice is computer-generated narration for audiobooks.
Summary
On a hot Sunday morning in June 1914, a chauffeur in Sarajevo turned right when he should have gone straight on. He stopped the car and began to back up. It took a few seconds. Within five weeks, Europe was at war.
One Small Decision tells twenty true stories of moments like that one, when an ordinary person, with no idea they were standing at a turning point, made a call that changed everything that followed. In these pages you'll meet:
• Stanislav Petrov, alone in a bunker south of Moscow just after midnight in 1983, staring at a red screen that read "launch" and deciding the machine was wrong
• Vasily Arkhipov, aboard the Soviet submarine B-59 in October 1962, as American depth charges exploded around a boat carrying a nuclear torpedo
• Ernest Shackleton, with Endurance locked in the ice of the Weddell Sea and twenty-eight men depending on his next choice
• The radio operators of the Titanic, who received the first ice warning at nine o'clock on the morning of April 14, 1912
• Ignaz Semmelweis, who asked his students in a Vienna maternity clinic to rinse their hands in chlorine water and cut deaths in his clinic from more than eighteen mothers in every hundred to about two
You'll also stand beside Alexander Fleming as he looks twice at a ruined dish, hear the fumbled press conference that opened the Berlin Wall, and follow a young woman at a lighthouse in the west of Ireland whose weather reading helped push back D-Day.
Matthew Barton tells each story minute by minute, from inside the moment, and then steps back to show everything else that had to be in place for that moment to matter. Along the way he clears out the legends. There was no sandwich in Sarajevo. Shackleton never placed that famous advertisement. Nobody on Apollo 13 said "Houston, we have a problem." Every quotation in the book comes from a letter, a diary, a court record, a recorded tape, an official inquiry or someone who was there.
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