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The Glory and the Dream
- A Narrative History of America, 1932 - 1972
- Narrated by: Jeff Riggenbach
- Length: 57 hrs and 23 mins
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Publisher's summary
This great time capsule of a book captures the abundant popular history of the United States from 1932 to 1972. It encompasses politics, military history, economics, the lively arts, science, fashion, fads, social change, sexual mores, communications, graffiti...everything and anything indigenous that can be captured in print.
The Glory and the Dream chronicles the progress of life in the United States, from the time William Manchester and his generation reached the beginning of awareness in the desperate summer of '32 to President Nixon's Second Inaugural Address and the opening scenes of Watergate. Masterfully compressing four crowded decades of our history, Manchester relives the epic, significant, or just memorable events that befell the generation of Americans whose lives pivoted between the America before and the America after the Second World War.
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In chronicling the adventurous life of legendary CIA operative Edward Lansdale, The Road Not Taken definitively reframes our understanding of the Vietnam War. In this epic biography of Edward Lansdale (1908-1987) best-selling historian Max Boot demonstrates how Lansdale pioneered a "hearts and mind" diplomacy, first in the Philippines, then in Vietnam. It was a visionary policy that, as Boot reveals, was ultimately crushed by America's giant military bureaucracy.
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An honest look at Vietnam Nam and USA
- By Catherine on 01-16-18
By: Max Boot
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Candy Bombers
- By: Andrei Cherny
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 24 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Acclaimed author Andrei Cherny tells the gripping saga of a rag-tag band of Americans - with limited resources and little hope for success - keeping West Berliners alive in the face of Soviet tyranny, winning the hearts and minds of former enemies, and giving the world a shining example of fundamental goodness.
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Wonderful Story, Well-Read
- By Alex on 10-07-09
By: Andrei Cherny
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American Midnight
- The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis
- By: Adam Hochschild
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 15 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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From legendary historian Adam Hochschild, a groundbreaking reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threated by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labor
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Disturbing yet Reassuring
- By Sams95 on 11-18-22
By: Adam Hochschild
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The Path to Power
- The Years of Lyndon Johnson
- By: Robert A. Caro
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 40 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the story of the rise to national power of a desperately poor young man from the Texas Hill Country. The Path to Power reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and ambition that set LBJ apart. It follows him from the Hill Country to New Deal Washington, from his boyhood through the years of the Depression to his debut as Congressman, his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate, and his attainment, nonetheless, at age 31, of the national power for which he hungered.
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The Best of all Biographies
- By David C. Daggett on 12-14-13
By: Robert A. Caro
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1920
- The Year of Six Presidents
- By: David Pietrusza
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 20 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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The presidential election of 1920 was among history's most dramatic. Six once-and-future presidents--Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, and Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt--jockeyed for the White House. With voters choosing between Wilson's League of Nations and Harding's front-porch isolationism, the 1920 election shaped modern America.
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A fascinating view into the US at the end of WWI
- By D. Littman on 12-31-09
By: David Pietrusza
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1968
- The Year That Rocked the World
- By: Mark Kurlansky
- Narrated by: Christopher Cazenove
- Length: 16 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In this monumental new book, award-winning author Mark Kurlansky has written his most ambitious work to date: a singular and ultimately definitive look at a pivotal moment in history.
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Don't let this reader near a foreign word
- By Eugene on 05-22-04
By: Mark Kurlansky
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No Ordinary Time
- Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II
- By: Doris Kearns Goodwin
- Narrated by: Nelson Runger
- Length: 39 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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No Ordinary Time describes how the isolationist and divided United States of 1940 was unified under the extraordinary leadership of Franklin Roosevelt to become the preeminent economic and military power in the world.
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Great at 1.5 speed
- By Brett on 01-04-13
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Bobby Kennedy
- The Making of a Liberal Icon
- By: Larry Tye
- Narrated by: Marc Cashman
- Length: 19 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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History remembers Robert F. Kennedy as a racial healer, a tribune for the poor, and the last progressive knight of a bygone era of American politics. But Kennedy's enshrinement in the liberal pantheon was actually the final stage of a journey that had its beginnings in the conservative 1950s. In Bobby Kennedy, Larry Tye peels away layers of myth and misconception to paint a complete portrait of this singularly fascinating figure.
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Absorbing
- By Jean on 01-18-17
By: Larry Tye
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Virtually all Americans above a certain age hold strong opinions about Douglas MacArthur. They either worship him or despise him. Now, in this superb book, one of our most outstanding writers, after a meticulous three-year examination of the record, presents his startling insights about the man. The narrative is gripping, because the general's life was fascinating. It is moving, because he was a man of vision. It ends, finally, in tragedy, because his character, though majestic, was tragically flawed.
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A Great American
- By Charlotte A. Hu on 05-19-13
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Winston Churchill is perhaps the most important political figure of the 20th century. His great oratory and leadership during the Second World War were only part of his huge breadth of experience and achievement. Studying his life is a fascinating way to imbibe the history of his era and gain insight into key events that have shaped our time.
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Superb - Review of Both Volume I & Volume II
- By Wolfpacker on 01-23-09
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This fine biography of H. L. Mencken tells of how he rose to his unique position as comic genius and pre-eminent critic of American culture. It is the story of a man whose massive power of invective inspired and infuriated his contemporaries and whose popularity and unpopularity mounted with the frenzied pace of the 1920s.
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A Revelation
- By Margaret H on 08-20-10
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BIG CHUNK MISSING
- By Ian on 06-12-17
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As the world still reeled from the tragic and historic events of November 22, 1963, William Manchester set out, at the request of the Kennedy family, to create a detailed, authoritative record of President John F. Kennedy's death, including the days immediately preceding and following the assassination.
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The best war memoir ever
- By Doug on 05-31-07
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American Caesar
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Virtually all Americans above a certain age hold strong opinions about Douglas MacArthur. They either worship him or despise him. Now, in this superb book, one of our most outstanding writers, after a meticulous three-year examination of the record, presents his startling insights about the man. The narrative is gripping, because the general's life was fascinating. It is moving, because he was a man of vision. It ends, finally, in tragedy, because his character, though majestic, was tragically flawed.
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Winston Churchill is perhaps the most important political figure of the 20th century. His great oratory and leadership during the Second World War were only part of his huge breadth of experience and achievement. Studying his life is a fascinating way to imbibe the history of his era and gain insight into key events that have shaped our time.
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Superb - Review of Both Volume I & Volume II
- By Wolfpacker on 01-23-09
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This fine biography of H. L. Mencken tells of how he rose to his unique position as comic genius and pre-eminent critic of American culture. It is the story of a man whose massive power of invective inspired and infuriated his contemporaries and whose popularity and unpopularity mounted with the frenzied pace of the 1920s.
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A Revelation
- By Margaret H on 08-20-10
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One Brief Shining Moment
- Remembering Kennedy
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Manchester recalls in intimate detail everything from family gatherings at Hyannis Port, to grueling campaign trips, and quiet evenings alone with the president in the White House family quarters. The resulting portrait provides listeners with myriad anecdotes and insights into a life of a man that bristled with vigor, competitiveness, and an unflagging drive for excellence, and shone with elegance, intelligence, and compassion.
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Well Done
- By History on 04-16-24
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A World Lit Only by Fire
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From tales of chivalrous knights to the barbarity of trial by ordeal, no era has been a greater source of awe, horror, and wonder than the Middle Ages. In handsomely crafted prose and with the grace and authority of his extraordinary gift for narrative history, William Manchester leads us from a civilization tottering on the brink of collapse to the grandeur of its rebirth, the Renaissance.
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Ruined by the narrator
- By Wallen on 02-28-09
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The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the 10 years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. Halberstam offers portraits of not only the titans of the age: Eisenhower, Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon; but also of Harley Earl, who put fins on cars; Dick and Mac McDonald and Ray Kroc, who mass-produced the American hamburger; Kemmons Wilson, who placed his Holiday Inns along the nation's roadsides; and more.
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one of the very best
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Extraordinary
- By Josey Wales on 12-03-22
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Controversy, and Other Essays in Journalism, 1950-1975
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The writing of Death of a President, William Manchester's award-winning account of President Kennedy's assassination, is the topic of the title essay in this collection, as it was a controversy like few others, pitting one of the most prominent historians of the day against Jackie Kennedy, the most famous and private widow in the world. The essay provides an insider's account of the struggle to see the book published.
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Churchill's history of the Second World War is, and will remain, the definitive work. Lucid, dramatic, remarkable for its breadth and sweep and for its sense of personal involvement, it is universally acknowledged as a magnificent reconstruction.
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Brilliant! Only Churchill could have done this.
- By John M on 10-30-08
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Founding Partisans
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To the framers of the Constitution, political parties were a fatal threat to republican virtues. They had suffered the consequences of partisan politics in Britain before the American Revolution, and they wanted nothing similar for America. Yet parties emerged even before the Constitution was ratified, and they took firmer root in the following decade. In Founding Partisans, master historian H. W. Brands has crafted a fresh and lively narrative of the early years of the republic as the Founding Fathers fought one another with competing visions of what our nation would be.
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Very educational
- By Mark Mears on 02-21-24
By: H. W. Brands
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Grant
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Splendid Biography Inspires New Respect for Grant
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Called a great book worthy of a great man, this definitive biography of the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet in World War II is considered the best book ever written about Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. Highly respected by both the civilian and naval communities, Nimitz was sometimes overshadowed by more colorful warriors in the Pacific such as MacArthur and Halsey. Potter's lively and authoritative style fleshes out Admiral Nimitz's personality to help listeners appreciate the contributions he made as the principle architect of Japan's defeat.
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Spectacular Book
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Using portraits of America’s flawed policy makers and accounts of the forces that drove them, The Best and the Brightest reckons magnificently with the most important abiding question of our country’s recent history: Why did America become mired in Vietnam, and why did we lose? As the definitive single-volume answer to that question, this enthralling book has never been superseded. It is an American classic.
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Preparation for Ken Burns
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Grover Cleveland’s political career—a dizzying journey that saw him rise from obscure lawyer to president of the United States in just three years—was marked by contradictions. A politician of uncharacteristic honesty and principle, he was nevertheless dogged by secrets from his personal life. A believer in limited government, he pushed presidential power to its limits to combat a crippling depression, suppress labor unrest, and resist the forces of American imperialism.
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Worth the Wait!
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The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
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Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time. Described by the Chicago Tribune as "a classic", The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt stands as one of the greatest biographies of our time. The publication of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt on September 14th, 2001 marks the 100th anniversary of Theodore Roosevelt becoming president.
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Very, very good, but very, very long.
- By Mike From Mesa on 03-29-13
By: Edmund Morris
What listeners say about The Glory and the Dream
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- anonEmous
- 10-30-11
The next best thing to living through 1933-1973
There isn't much I can add to what other reviewers have already said but I still had to share my enthusiasm for what may be the best history I've read/heard of the 20th century. There are all the major developments but also minor stories that might seem anecdotal but are often representative of the ethos of the time they describe. My remembered consciousness only begins in the 1980s but I imagine that these are all the things people of those times sat around the kitchen table or the workplace water cooler talking about. The sound quality isn't very good with many glitches throughout and long stretches of distortions in chapters 15 and 26. The material was so spectacularily good though that the sound problems didn't appreciably detract from my enjoyment. Highly, highly recommended! 57 1/2 hours might seem long but at the end I just found myself wanting another 50 hours. I just wish there were a similar a-book covering the following 40 year stretch to the present.
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- Andrew S. Breza
- 08-08-16
An amazing book
I never thought a 1,600 page book could be such a joy to experience, but The Glory and the Dream offers a tight brilliant narrative that makes it hard to stop listening. As other reviewers have noted, there are occasional skips, but they should not stop you from experiencing this American classic.
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- MAC24211
- 03-06-19
Great Book
I have listen to this twice now and learned something each time. It’s well researched, paced and detailed without being slanted in any perspective.
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- philippe jacob
- 10-03-22
Instructive on contemporary USA
This book contains a wealth of details on the history of this country. Mostly the Presidents and their campaigns, but also about daily life and what people like to do, beside going to work. However Mr. Manchester, all too often, gives his own personal judgment about political events. But still the book is really worth reading (or listening).
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- Ryan Baumbach
- 11-09-22
Two things that stand out
Probably my favorite thing about the book is the periodic elaboration of slang terms of each decade. Reading about things like that makes those who came before us more human and real as opposed to mythological figures that we are far removed from. Also enjoyed the luminaries that the author inserted throughout the book from the various eras that may not be as well known but were significant in their own way to the time.
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- Ted
- 06-11-14
Breezy, enjoyable popular history--if a bit biased
Giving Manchester his due, this book is remarkably listenable and compelling, and Jeff Riggenbach reads it superbly; it's clear he's the perfect match for the author. As a result, just as a good book is hard to put down, I found this audiobook is awfully hard to switch off.
Yet it frequently left me feeling annoyed... And its flaws and omissions are not confined to the many places where the audio skips (as mentioned by other commenters); in fact, those skips seem relatively minor annoyances, when you consider how many hours of good listening you get for just one credit. For me, the bigger annoyances are those of Manchester's biases and emphasis.
As it happens, I read this book around fifteen or twenty years ago. At the time, I loved it. As in his multivolume Churchill biography and the assorted magazine essays I'm familiar with, Manchester had an amazing gift for lively, brisk, readable, colorful popular history spiced with memorable quotes and well-chosen details (all of which probably set him apart from his fellow academics). Subsequently, however, I've read a good deal more twentieth-century U.S. history, and Manchester's biases in this book -- his left-of-center politics, rather uncritical adulation of unions, slightly sentimental affection for working stiffs, scorn for businessmen and disdain for Republicans (whom he tends to caricature), worship of FDR, and penchant for breezy generalizations about the American people and their opinions, from bobby-soxers to G.I.'s -- seemed more glaring this time around, and more irritating. I sometimes felt as if I were listening to a sort of scholarly Joe Biden (and that's not a good thing) or a medley of Time magazine essays (also not a good thing).
I was also irritated by the very chapters I remember devouring with the greatest pleasure the first time around: those that focus on World War II. Any book that encompasses this much history is bound to be a bit superficial, but Manchester's treatment of many key aspects of the war seems almost inexcusably hasty. The Fall of France, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz are barely alluded to (though for some reason Julie Andrews receives three mentions); the Battle of Midway -- one of the most crucial events of the war, and easily one of the most dramatic -- is described in two or three paragraphs, and somewhat confusingly at that. (His much lengthier coverage of Pearl Harbor is also a little confusing, though still gripping.) Because Manchester himself fought in the Pacific, we get plenty of that side of the war, plus a very skillful account of the Manhattan Project and the dropping of the bombs. But D-Day, Omaha Beach and all, gets -- astonishingly -- just a few sentences; so does the Battle of the Bulge (which is personally disappointing, since my father fought in it); Market Garden isn't even mentioned; and yet the intricacies of Franklin Roosevelt's medical history, the various worrisome signs of his failing health, his behavior at his final public appearances, the feelings of his doctors and various colleagues and relatives, the minute-by-minute events leading up to his death, the memories of various people as to what they were doing when they learned of it, the exact wording of the news flashes, the minutiae of his funeral and its press coverage -- all are treated in endless, almost microscopic detail.
In sum, Manchester was a wonderfully gifted writer, and his talent makes anything he chooses to talk about in this breezy, colorful, lively narrative fairly enjoyable. But in the end you're likely to come away with a somewhat distorted picture.
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8 people found this helpful
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Overall
- S. Gilford
- 03-16-10
A story of WWII told with honesty and perspective
This book is a masterpiece. It is an honest story of a very personal war fought by a young Marine in the WWII Pacific told by a writer who excels at his craft of writing history and who after a lifetime of telling the stories of others now tells his own. He manages to evoke immediacy and endow it with perspective.
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- amused observer
- 07-19-14
Parts
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
Yes, I would. The book itself is great and the narration isn't bad played at half-speed. However, why the hell would you present a book of this length, and this many parts, without labeling the parts so that when finished with one part, you don't have to hunt for the next?
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- Boondocker
- 05-22-21
Great book full of America at its best and worst
Fascinating book enjoy everything about it
And it’s length makes it even better
There are no flaws that make a difference
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- Phil
- 12-04-21
Excellent in every way.
this is a very comprehensive history of the United States from 1932 to 1972. Except for the adulation of Ralph Nader (grifter) it seemed both objective and thorough. Superb narrator as well.
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