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The Great Bridge
- The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge
- Narrated by: Nelson Runger
- Length: 27 hrs and 24 mins
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Our New "OLD MAN ELOQUENT" Rides Again
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By: David McCullough
Publisher's summary
This monumental book tells the enthralling story of one of the greatest accomplishments in our nation's history, the building of what was then the longest suspension bridge in the world. The Brooklyn Bridge rose out of the expansive era following the Civil War, when Americans believed all things were possible.
So daring a concept as spanning the East River to join two great cities required vision and dedication of the kind that went into building Europe's great cathedrals. During 14 years of construction, the odds against success seemed overwhelming. Thousands of people were put to work. Bodies were crushed and broken, lives lost, notorious political empires fell, and surges of public doubt constantly threatened the project. But the story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge is not just the saga of an engineering miracle; it is a sweeping narrative of the social climate of the time, replete with heroes and rascals who helped either to construct or to exploit the great enterprise.
The Great Bridge is also the story of a remarkable family, the Roeblings, who conceived and executed the audacious engineering plan at great personal cost. Without John Roebling's vision, his son Washington's skill and courage, and Washington's wife Emily's dedication, the bridge we know and cherish would never have been built.
Like the engineering marvel it describes, The Great Bridge, republished on the 40th anniversary of its initial publication, has stood the test of time.
Please note: The Great Bridge (Unabridged) is available for just one credit until June 20, 2012, after which point it will be priced at two credits.
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In many ways, Henry Ford's story is well-known; in many more ways, it is not. Richard Snow masterfully weaves together a fascinating narrative of Ford's rise to fame through his greatest invention, the Model T. A highly pleasurable listen, filled with scenes and incidents from Ford's life, I Invented the Modern Age shows Richard Snow at the height of his powers as a popular historian and reclaims from history Henry Ford, the remarkable man who, indeed, invented the modern world as we know it.
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A Complicated Man
- By Jean on 11-23-13
By: Richard Snow
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Last Train to Paradise
- Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad That Crossed an Ocean
- By: Les Standiford
- Narrated by: Del Roy
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The paths of the great American robber barons were paved with riches, and though ordinary citizens paid for them, they also profited. Les Standiford, author of the John Deal thrillers, tells how the man who turned Florida's swamps into the playgrounds of the rich performed the almost superhuman feat of building a railroad from the mainland to Key West at the turn of the century.
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A Pleasant Surprise
- By Roy on 04-05-09
By: Les Standiford
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Empires of Light
- Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World
- By: Jill Jonnes
- Narrated by: Chris Sorensen
- Length: 16 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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In the final decades of the 19th century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America's Gilded Age - Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse - battled as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empires of Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death, and hard-eyed Wall Street millionaires.
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Get the book vs audio version
- By DuPont on 06-15-17
By: Jill Jonnes
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Water to the Angels
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- By: Les Standiford
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The author of Last Train to Paradise tells the story of the largest public water project ever created - William Mulholland's Los Angeles aqueduct - a story of Gilded Age ambition, hubris, greed, and one determined man whose vision shaped the future and continues to impact us today.
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Water challenges never end
- By John Matel on 04-10-15
By: Les Standiford
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- By: Erik Larson
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In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men: Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication. Their lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.
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Reader cannot read
- By Bob on 12-08-07
By: Erik Larson
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Dark Tide
- The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919
- By: Stephen Puleo
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
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Around noon on January 15, 1919, a group of firefighters were playing cards in Boston's North End when they heard a tremendous crash. It was like, "a roaring surf," one of them said later. Like, "a runaway two-horse team smashing through a fence," said another. A third firefighter jumped up from his chair to look out a window - "Oh my God!" he shouted to the other men, "Run!" A 50-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses had just collapsed on Boston's waterfront, disgorging its contents as a 15-foot-high wave of molasses that at its outset traveled at 35 miles an hour.
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INTERESTING STORY - ABOUT 2x TOO LONG
- By The Louligan on 09-07-14
By: Stephen Puleo
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A Crack in the Edge of the World
- America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
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San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative informative look at the tumultuous subterranean world that produces earthquakes, the planet's most sudden and destructive force. In the early morning hours of April 18, 1906, San Francisco and a string of towns to its north-northwest and the south-southeast were overcome by an enormous shaking that was compounded by the violent shocks of an earthquake, registering 8.25 on the Richter scale.
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7 Hours and 45 minutes . . .
- By Tim on 12-09-05
By: Simon Winchester
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Nothing Like It in the World
- The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869
- By: Stephen E. Ambrose
- Narrated by: Jeffrey DeMunn
- Length: 15 hrs and 37 mins
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Nothing Like It in the World is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise comes to life. The U.S. government pitted two companies - the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads - against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. As its peak the work force approached the size of Civil War armies, with as many as 15,000 workers on each line. The surveyors, the men who picked the route, lived off buffalo, deer, and antelope.
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A tragic waste
- By Joshua Tretakoff on 04-11-03
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Rising Tide
- The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America
- By: John M. Barry
- Narrated by: Barry Grizzard
- Length: 4 hrs and 48 mins
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An American epic of science, politics, race, honor, high society, and the Mississippi River, Rising Tide tells the riveting and nearly forgotten story of the greatest natural disaster this country has ever known, the Mississippi flood of 1927. The river inundated the homes of nearly one million people, helped elect Huey Long governor and made Herbert Hoover president, drove hundreds of thousands of blacks north, and transformed American society and politics forever.
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Where is the rest of the book?
- By Susie on 10-21-13
By: John M. Barry
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Very Poorly Abridged
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i would prefer david reading it
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Front Seat on History
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An outstanding biography
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Over the course of his distinguished career, David McCullough has spoken before Congress, colleges and universities, historical societies, and other esteemed institutions. Now, at a time of self-reflection in America following a bitter election campaign that has left the country divided, McCullough has collected some of his most important speeches in a brief volume designed to identify important principles and characteristics that are particularly American.
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Our New "OLD MAN ELOQUENT" Rides Again
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Emily's fight for women's suffrage is put on hold and her life transformed when Wash, the chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge, is injured on the job. Untrained for the task, but under his guidance, she assumes his role, despite stern resistance and overwhelming obstacles. Lines blur as Wash's vision becomes her own, and when he is unable to return to the job, Emily is consumed by it. But as the project takes shape under Emily's direction, she wonders whose legacy she is building - hers or her husband's.
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A Fluffy Missed Opportunity
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His father conceived of the Brooklyn Bridge, but after John Roebling's sudden death, Washington Roebling built what has become one of American's most iconic structures - as much a part of New York as the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. Yet, as recognizable as the bridge is, its builder is too often forgotten - and his life is of interest far beyond his chosen field. It is the story of immigrants, of the frontier, of the greatest crisis in American history, and of the making of the modern world.
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Monumental
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Nothing Like It in the World is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise comes to life. The U.S. government pitted two companies - the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads - against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. As its peak the work force approached the size of Civil War armies, with as many as 15,000 workers on each line. The surveyors, the men who picked the route, lived off buffalo, deer, and antelope.
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A tragic waste
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The pioneering advocate of wilderness preservation, John Muir (1838-1914) was influential in the creation of many national parks.
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What listeners say about The Great Bridge
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Tim
- 06-01-12
An Historian and not a Novelist
I have to disagree to most of the negative reviews from other readers that have posted on The Great Bridge. David McCullough is a historian and not a novelist. He does not write stories with happy endings with complex plots. McCullough writes American history with proven facts.
That being said, The Great Bridge is an awesome story about our engineering, infrastructure, corruption, and American pride. The book is very interesting because it really happened and the Brooklyn Bridge is still standing after 129 years.
Even Hollywood takes tribute to the Brooklyn Bridge in movies. As the world freezes, or aliens conquer the planet, the bridge still stands as a symbol of pride.
I really hope that David McCullough will write on the Hoover Dam next. There are other authors that covered this topic, but I can only imagine that they are not complete.
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64 people found this helpful
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- Ohad
- 09-02-15
Another Outstanding McCullough
I have already listened to "Truman", "The Wright Brothers", and "The Johnstown Flood". Obviously, I am a McCullough fan. Listening to a story written by him is like sitting down with a wise old man, (I imagine my own Grandfather), saying: "Sit down with me for a while, and I'm going to tell you a story so incredible, you won't believe it's real". This is certainly true of "The Great Bridge". Who knew that the story of a bridge being built could be so fascinating? McCullough's great strength, I believe, is his ability to paint a striking portrait of people and their unique time. This book will teleport you to Brooklyn in the 1870's. The descriptions of the people, places, and events provide a striking image of America at that time, and the audacity of the people involved in such a monumental undertaking. This text provides fascinating insight into Gilded Age politics, engineering know-how, and raw human emotion; both dazzling, and painful.
Although the engineering behind the bridge is expressed in layman's terms, I found myself on Google, looking at pictures from the period and technical drawings of "the great caisson"; the engineering masterpiece that is the foundation of the bridge. This is a complex piece of structural engineering that is difficult to understand without a visual. Nevertheless, drawings are readily available online, and I recommend a listener pause the story and look at those to get a better sense of how it all comes together. It is incredible to think that work began on the bridge in 1869, and that it's foundations are so strong that it has required virtually no maintenance since then. It's unbelievable to think that the people working on the bridge could never imagine that it would someday be used by automobiles, yet it is so well built, that only minimal changes had to be made to it when it was converted from trolley use to car use. The world of 1869 is so different from ours, yet the bridge remains relatively unchanged, and will likely remain so. That is its genius, and that is what makes it a monument to American ingenuity and imagination. To listen to this book is to truly understand the scale of such an undertaking--and the obsession of one man (Washington A. Roebling)--in its creation.
A word on the narrator:
Nelson Runger reads most of McCullough's works available on Audible. I first heard him read for "Truman". Since then, I associate his voice with that of Truman's own, and to some extent, with that of McCullough himself, even though the author does narrate "The Wright Brothers", such that I know McCullough's real voice. I find Runger to be a good match for such a long listen. his voice is expressive, and he can mimic the accent of the period (1869-1926) which is slightly different from our own. Now that McCullough is getting older, his own voice is quite rough, whereas Runger's is smooth and provides emphasis where needed. He pauses when appropriate, and shifts his inflection when reading for different characters. Although a text like this does not require such radical inflection shifts as does a work of fiction with lots of dialogue and many characters, I think you will find Runger an engaging listen.
I highly recommend this text.
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60 people found this helpful
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- Kathy
- 05-17-12
The Great Bridge
Parts of this book are very interesting,,,, the rest - well you have to REALLY want to understand bridge engineering and NY politics
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- Laurel
- 06-12-12
Pssst, Buddy. Wanna buy a bridge?
Any book by David McCullough lays out more material than most people want to hear. But he also tells you things you ever knew and you feel you should. Like, did you know that Brooklyn was the third largest city in the United States when this bridge was built? Or how important Brooklyn was because of it's Naval yards? Or that Brooklyn was more than a joke on radio quiz shows? And why then Yankees vs the Dodgers was such an intense rivalry?
I had read a bit about the Roebling family and that is took the entire family to get the bridge built. Yet I did not know enough to not be surprised at what I learned about other prominent characters of that time. It took a railway man to really know how important the bridge would be.
You will suffer with the Roeblings and the horrific death of the father. You will be astonished at their ignorance of the "bends." You will rejoice in their eventual triumph and gaze in awe at the opening day celebrations. At least, I did.
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- Robert
- 06-10-12
A Tour de Force of Engineering and NY Politics
It is hard to imagine that a book of this length could be written about the building of a single bridge. Indeed, 1776, McCullogh's outstanding history of the revolutionary war, is a third the length. One must conclude that McCullogh became obsessed with the bridge and the people responsible for completing one of the most unique engineering feats of the 1800's. He did exhaustive research and was the first to explore the rich archives at RPI which provide many of the details. While I wish he had spent more time on the engineering and less time on the politics, I suspect many listeners will feel quite the opposite. Regardless, this is a great historical book, and it provides more insight into life in the late 1800s than any other book I have read.
I was very sorry when this amazing story ended.
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- STEEN
- 05-20-12
Disappointed - this wasn't a novel
Unfortunately I wasn't made aware that 'The great bridge' wasn't a novel, but a historic piece. Consequently I've wasted one credit.
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11 people found this helpful
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- Clare
- 04-12-13
The Great engineer vs the politicians!
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the Brooklyn Bridge, history or engineering.
What did you like best about this story?
It is a story of many hardworking people who had vision and perseverance. It was frustrating at times to listen to the book when it was describing the politicians and their obnoxious behavior. It made the chief engineer seem that much greater that he had to deal with their insulting and costly behavior. The chief engineer suffers the "bends" and long lasting consequences in which he has to direct the bridge building through letters he dictates to his wife. She is his eyes, ears, feet and takes the physical role he is unable to.
She is the heroine of the story.
What does Nelson Runger bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
He has a firm fatherly voice that sounds as if he was there telling the story. He has feeling in his voice that communicates the suppressed anger of the engineer, the joy of the workers and onlookers, and the magic feeling of tying Brooklyn and New York together.
He has a tenderness when talking about the chief engineer's wife, who is essential to the story.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Jane
- 05-09-19
Good, but way too long
As a history major, there was much I loved about this book. That said, there were many times where I was groaning as the narrator listed yet another page or two or ten on wire specifications. Then there was the entire chapter dedicated to Emily Roebling about whom we had already learned way more than we needed to in relation to the actual subject, the Brooklyn Bridge. These are but two examples of the excess of information. It was an early book, so I will forgive the author. I have loved all the other books I've read by him.
I found the narration to be slow. Pauses were often so long that I would think I had lost my Audible connection.Upping the speed killed two birds with one stone here. I could still understand the narrator while getting through all the access information more quickly.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Patrick James
- 08-02-19
Wonderful Story
What an amazing story! I recommend this to anyone interested in American history or history of science and technology. The characters and context are built in great depth and the engineering aspects are discussed carefully.
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3 people found this helpful
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- J. M. Lawniczak
- 06-25-19
Very Detailed and Interesting
I really enjoyed this book. It is long, but it never bogged down. The minute details about the building of the bridge were interesting. Even detours into politics, e.g., Tammany Hall, were of interest. I particularly enjoyed the story thread about the bends and how medicine of the time approached the problem.
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3 people found this helpful