Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Politics & Activism

Alice Paul has long been an elusive figure in the political history of American women. Raised by Quaker parents in Moorestown, New Jersey, she would become a passionate and outspoken leader of the woman suffrage movement. In 1913 she reinvigorated the American campaign for a constitutional suffrage amendment and, in the next seven years, dominated that campaign and drove it to victory with bold, controversial action - wedding courage with resourcefulness and self-mastery.

In the rotunda of the nation's Capital a statue pays homage to three famous 19th-century American women suffragists: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott. "Historically", the inscription beneath the marble statue notes, "these three stand unique and peerless." In fact, the statue has a glaring omission: Lucy Stone.

During World War II, Heinz Drossel saved Soviet prisoners of war and several Jews, including Marianne Hirschfeld. Again and again, he wasn't afraid to risk his own life when others' safety was at risk. Nearly all of Hirschfeld's family members were murdered by Nazis; she survived in hiding - and met Heinz again by coincidence after the war was over. They married in 1946. At that time, starting over was difficult. In the judicial service, Drossel witnessed Nazis continuing with their careers....

In Mandela, former foreign correspondent Bob Crew demystifies the icon and his legacy. After over a decade of travels in South Africa, Crew seeks truth in the unexpected details of the lives of Mandela and current South African president Jacob Zuma, comparing them to other world icons in order to bring a new understanding of their legacies to Western listeners.

The heart-pounding true story of the plot to kill the most powerful man in America. In 1892, America was on the verge of another civil war, this one over industrial slavery. It was the era of robber barons, and none was more reviled for his harsh treatment of workers than industrialist Henry Clay Frick. The deadly Homestead Steel Strike that summer had left Frick with blood on his hands, and two young, impassioned radicals thought he should pay for his crimes.

In this fresh and lively biography rich in literary analysis and new historical detail, Fred Kaplan brings into focus the dramatic life of John Quincy Adams - the little known and much misunderstood sixth president of the United States and the first son of John and Abigail Adams - and persuasively demonstrates how Adams's inspiring, progressive vision guided his life and helped shape the course of America.

Autism shakes up your world. It has changed my life and I wasn't even the one diagnosed with it. My brother's name is Ethan Wolfgang, but we call him Deets. He is one of the greatest gifts my family has ever received. And one of the most challenging.

Winston Churchill had a longer and closer relationship with the Royal Navy than any British statesman in modern times, but his record as a naval strategist and custodian of the nation's sea power has been mired in controversy since the ill-fated Dardanelles campaign in 1915. Today, Churchill is regarded by many as an inept strategist who interfered in naval operations and often overrode his professional advisers - with inevitably disastrous results.

Cathy Wilkerson, who famously escaped the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, here wrestles with the legacy of the movement, at times finding contradictions that many others have avoided: the absence of women’s voices then, and in the retelling; the incompetence and the egos; the hundreds of bombs detonated in protest which caused little loss of life but which were also ineffective in fomenting revolution.

Carla Del Ponte won international recognition as Switzerland's attorney general when she pursued cases against the Sicilian mafia. In 1999, she answered the United Nations' call to become the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. In her new role, Del Ponte confronted genocide and crimes against humanity head-on, struggling to bring to justice the highest-ranking individuals responsible for massive acts of violence in Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo.

It was November 1806. The explorers had gone without food for one day, then two. Their leader, not yet thirty, drove on, determined to ascend the great mountain. Waist deep in snow, he reluctantly turned back. But Zebulon Pike had not been defeated. His name remained on the unclimbed peak-and new adventures lay ahead of him and his republic. In Citizen Explorer, historian Jared Orsi provides the first modern biography of this soldier and explorer, who rivaled contemporaries Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

Picking America's best presidents is easy. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt usually lead the list. But choosing the nation's worst presidents requires more thought. In Star-Spangled Men, respected presidential biographer Nathan Miller puts on display those leaders who were abject failures as chief executive. With pointed humor and a deft hand, he presents a rogues' gallery of the men who dropped the presidential ball, and sometimes their pants as well.

As a young woman, Democratic congresswoman Carolyn Maloney asked her grandmother for career advice. She was shocked by the reply: "Get married." Though much has changed for women since then, more has remained the same. On a January night in 2008, Maloney and her daughter attended a Hillary Clinton rally in New Hampshire. Men in the audience held "Iron My Shirt" posters aloft. This small incident provoked outrage, but it provided an important peephole onto larger problems that women face today.

Evangelical Christianity and conservative politics are today seen as inseparable. But when Jimmy Carter, a Democrat and a born-again Christian, won the presidency in 1976, he owed his victory in part to American evangelicals, who responded to his open religiosity and his rejection of the moral bankruptcy of the Nixon Administration. Carter, running as a representative of the New South, articulated a progressive strand of American Christianity that championed liberal ideals, racial equality, and social justice - one that has almost been forgotten since.

Dean Acheson was one of the most influential Secretaries of State in U.S. history, presiding over American foreign policy during a pivotal era - the decade after World War II when the American Century slipped into high gear. During his vastly influential career, Acheson spearheaded the greatest foreign policy achievements in modern times, ranging from the Marshall Plan to the establishment of NATO. In this acclaimed biography, Robert L. Beisner paints an indelible portrait of one of the key figures of the last half-century.

In this compelling new biography, historian Niccol Capponi frees Machiavelli (1469-1527) from centuries of misinterpretation. Exploring the Renaissance city of Florence, where Machiavelli lived, Capponi reveals the man behind the legend. A complex portrait of Machiavelli emerges - at once a brilliantly skillful diplomat and a woefully inept liar; a sharp thinker and an impractical dreamer; a hard-nosed powerbroker and a risk-taking gambler; a calculating propagandist and an imprudent jokester.

An inspiring personal story by the most prominent Muslim woman activist and legislator for women’s rights in Pakistan. In the fall of 2001, a newlywed English professor took on a job editing the “women’s section” of one of Pakistan’s leading Urdu newspapers. She soon transformed pages of celebrity gossip and fashion advice into a vehicle for the investigation of the true lives of Pakistani women. News of acid attacks on hapless women, the trading of girls as currency in tribal disputes, and other abuses transformed this young mother into a fiery advocate for women’s rights.

Ervin's stories from down home in North Carolina, his reciting literary passages ranging from Shakespeare to Aesop's fables, and his earnest lectures in defense of civil liberties and constitutional government contributed to the downfall of President Nixon and earned Senator Ervin a reputation as "the last of the founding fathers.

On August 31, 1939, nearing the end of his second and presumably final term in office, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was working in the Oval Office and contemplating construction of his presidential library and planning retirement. The next day German tanks had crossed the Polish border; Britain and France had declared war. Overnight the world had changed, and FDR found himself being forced to consider a dramatically different set of circumstances.

Thomas Jefferson was an avid book-collector, a voracious reader, and a gifted writer - a man who prided himself on his knowledge of classical and modern languages and whose marginal annotations include quotations from Euripides, Herodotus, and Milton. And yet there has never been a literary life of our most literary president.