Common Ground
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 81
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In the long history of American demagogues from Huey Long to Donald Trump, never has one man caused so much damage in such a short time as Senator Joseph McCarthy. We still use "McCarthyism" to stand for outrageous charges of guilt by association, a weapon of polarizing slander. From 1950 to 1954, McCarthy destroyed many careers and even entire lives, whipping the nation into a frenzy of paranoia, accusation, loyalty oaths, and terror. When the public finally turned on him, he came crashing down, dying of alcoholism in 1957.
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In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate.
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During the 20th century, America managed to make its economic and social systems both more and more fair and more and more prosperous. A huge, secure, and contented middle class emerged. All boats rose together. But then the New Deal gave way to the Raw Deal. Beginning in the early 1970s, by means of a long war conceived of and executed by a confederacy of big business CEOs, the superrich, and right-wing zealots, the rules and norms that made the American middle class possible were undermined and dismantled.
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From the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the New York Times best seller Angler, who unearthed the deepest secrets of Edward Snowden's NSA archive, the first master narrative of the surveillance state that emerged after 9/11 and why it matters, based on scores of hours of conversation with Snowden and groundbreaking reportage in Washington, London, Moscow, and Silicon Valley.
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One of New Jersey’s seemingly innumerable quiet seaside towns, Toms River became the unlikely setting for a decades-long drama that culminated in 2001 with one of the largest legal settlements in the annals of toxic dumping. A town that would rather have been known for its Little League World Series champions ended up making history for an entirely different reason: a notorious cluster of childhood cancers scientifically linked to local air and water pollution.
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On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next 12 months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold his country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally - and willing to fight to the end. In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows how Churchill taught the British people "the art of being fearless."
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 123
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 114
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Graham and Annie have been married for nearly 30 years. A golden couple, their seemingly effortless devotion has long been the envy of their circle of friends and acquaintances. Graham is a bookseller and a big, gregarious man with large appetites - curious, eager to please, a lover of life, and the convivial host of frequent, lively parties at his and Annie’s comfortable house in Cambridge. Annie, more reserved and introspective, is a photographer.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Didn’t want it to End...
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 59
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 52
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In 2012, Dr. Karen King, a star professor at Harvard Divinity School, announced a blockbuster discovery at a scholarly conference just steps from the Vatican: She had found an ancient fragment of papyrus in which Jesus calls Mary Magdalene "my wife". As debates over the manuscript's authenticity raged, award-winning journalist Ariel Sabar set out to investigate a baffling mystery: Where did this tiny scrap of papyrus come from? His search for answers is an international detective story.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 292
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Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America's greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Story telling at its finest...
- By Chris Garrett on 11-10-19
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The Gulf
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- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 265
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 230
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 232
When painter Winslow Homer first sailed into the Gulf of Mexico, he was struck by its "special kind of providence." Indeed, the Gulf presented itself as America's sea - bound by geography, culture, and tradition to the national experience - and yet, there has never been a comprehensive history of the Gulf until now. And so, in this rich and original work that explores the Gulf through our human connection with the sea, environmental historian Jack E. Davis finally places this exceptional region into the American mythos in a sweeping history that extends from the Pleistocene age to the 21st century.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Very dry narrator
- By Elizabeth A Comminellis on 09-08-18
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Hamnet
- By: Maggie O'Farrell
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- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 546
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 497
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 496
England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old, and the young alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Riveting and engrossing historical fiction
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 2,828
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 2,508
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Everywhere acknowledged as a modern American classic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest books of the 20th century, The Power Broker is a galvanizing biography revealing not only the saga of one man's incredible accumulation of power, but the story of the shaping (and mis-shaping) of New York in the 20th century.
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5 out of 5 stars
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AMAZING read
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Publisher's Summary
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the American Book Award, the best-selling Common Ground is much more than the story of the busing crisis in Boston as told through the experiences of three families. As Studs Terkel remarked, it's "gripping, indelible...a truth about all large American cities."
Critic Reviews
"A huge and marvelous work." (Kai Erikson, The New York Times Book Review)
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What listeners say about Common Ground
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Robbins Die Hard
- 02-12-20
Rich historic context, choppy structure,
The historic, cultural and judicial context of the story is rich and puts the presentation of the events so they unfolded to the public at the time in perspective. The structure of the tale as it's told here is choppy and far too verbose and after hours of listening I could not finish listening to the book. I do not like this narrator. Why does he feel it necessary to raise his voice pointedly when reading quoted text. his intimation at those times is not consistent with the tone of the speaker.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- DB1089
- 11-10-19
"And that little girl...was me!"
Came to this hoping to understand Kamala Harris' sick burn of Joe Biden over the busing issue. Left hearing more about the history and politics of Boston than I cared for. Meticulously researched and David-Halberstam-without-the-punchy-portraits well level written. But there is so much detail at times that the issue it foregrounds is hard to make out. Still the best book I have read on busing, but it's more a heaping slice-of-life than it is a work on policy.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- FYFM
- 02-03-19
great overview of ethnic sociopolitical background
...of Boston and perhaps the US. Very thorough and thoughtful. As a liberal I found this book challenging in terms of the limits of government intervention.
1 person found this helpful