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Nervous Systems
- Brain Science in the Early Cold War
- Narrated by: Graham Halstead
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
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Publisher's Summary
In this eye-opening chronicle of scientific research on the brain in the early Cold War era, the acclaimed historian Andreas Killen traces the complex circumstances surrounding the genesis of our present-day fascination with this organ.
The 1950s were a transformative, even revolutionary decade in the history of brain science. Using new techniques for probing brain activity and function, researchers in neurosurgery, psychiatry, and psychology achieved dramatic breakthroughs in the treatment of illnesses like epilepsy and schizophrenia, as well as the understanding of such faculties as memory and perception. Memory was the site of particularly startling discoveries. As one researcher wrote to another in the middle of that decade, “Memory was the sleeping beauty of the brain—and now she is awake.” Collectively, these advances prefigured the emergence of the field of neuroscience at the end of the twentieth century.
But the 1950s also marked the beginning of the Cold War and a period of transformative social change across Western society. These developments resulted in unease and paranoia. Mysterious new afflictions—none more mystifying than “brainwashing”—also appeared at this time. Faced with the discovery that, as one leading psychiatrist put it, “the human personality is not as stable as we often assume,” many researchers in the sciences of brain and behavior joined the effort to understand these conditions. They devised ingenious and sometimes transgressive experimental methods for studying and proposing countermeasures to the problem of Communist mind control. Some of these procedures took on a strange life of their own, escaping the confines of the research lab to become part of 1960s counterculture. Much later, in the early 2000s, they resurfaced in the War on Terror.
These stories, often told separately, are brought together by the historian Andreas Killen in this chronicle of the brain’s mid-twentieth-century emergence as both a new research frontier and an organ whose integrity and capacities—especially that of memory—were imagined as uniquely imperiled in the 1950s. Nervous Systems explores the anxious context in which the mid-century sciences of the brain took shape and reveals the deeply ambivalent history that lies behind our contemporary understanding of this organ.
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Pacifists who fought against the Second World War faced insurmountable odds—but their resistance, philosophy, and strategies fostered a tradition of activism that shaped America right up to the present day. In this provocative and deeply researched work of history, Akst takes listeners into the wild, heady, and uncertain times of America on the brink of a world war, following four fascinating resisters and their daring exploits: David Dellinger, Dorothy Day, Dwight MacDonald, and Bayard Rustin.
By: Daniel Akst
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The Magick of Physics
- Uncovering the Fantastical Phenomena in Everyday Life
- By: Felix Flicker
- Narrated by: Barnaby Edwards
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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If you were to present the feats of modern science to someone from the past, those feats would surely be considered magic. Theoretical physicist Felix Flicker proves that they are indeed magic—just familiar magic. The name for this magic is “condensed matter physics.” Most people haven’t heard of the field, yet more than a third of physicists identify as condensed matter researchers, making it the most active area in the subject—with good reason. Flicker teases out the magical threads that run through our daily lives.
By: Felix Flicker
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Heritage and Hoop Skirts
- How Natchez Created the Old South
- By: Paul Hardin Kapp
- Narrated by: Chris Abernathy
- Length: 12 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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For over eighty years, tourists have flocked to Natchez, Mississippi, seeking the "Old South," but what they encounter is invention: a pageant and rewrite of history first concocted during the Great Depression. Paul Hardin Kapp explores how meaning is assigned to place and how meaning evolves over time. In showing how and why the Natchez buildings of the "Old South" were first preserved, commercialized, and transformed into a brand, this volume makes a much-needed contribution to debates over the meaning attached to cultural patrimony.
By: Paul Hardin Kapp
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Changing How We Choose
- The New Science of Morality
- By: A. David Redish
- Narrated by: Graham Rowat
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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In Changing How We Choose, David Redish makes a bold claim: science has "cracked" the problem of morality. Redish argues that moral questions have a scientific basis, and that morality is best viewed as a technology—a set of social and institutional forces that create communities and drive cooperation. This means that some moral structures are better than others and that the moral technologies we use have real consequences on whether we make our societies better or worse places for the people living within them.
By: A. David Redish
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Reagan's Revolution
- The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All
- By: Craig Shirley
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 18 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Craig Shirley relays intriguing, never-before-told anecdotes about Reagan, his staff, the campaign, the media, and the national parties and shows how Reagan, instead of following the lead of the ever-weakening Republican party, brought the party to him and almost single-handedly revived it.
By: Craig Shirley
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The War of the Running Dogs
- How Malaya Defeated the Communist Guerillas 1948-1960
- By: Noel Barber
- Narrated by: Roger Davis
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Only three short years after the end of the Japanese occupation, war came again to Malaya. The Chinese-backed guerrillas called it the War of the Running Dogs—their contemptuous term for those in Malaya who remained loyal to the British. The British Government referred to this bloody and costly struggle as the 'Malayan Emergency'. Yet it was a war that lasted twelve years and cost thousands of lives. By the time it was over Malaya had obtained its independence—but on British, not on Chinese or Communist terms.
By: Noel Barber
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The Lionkeeper of Algiers
- How an American Captive Rose to Power in Barbary and Saved His Homeland from War
- By: Des Ekin
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1785, a young American named James Leander Cathcart is kidnapped at sea and carried as prisoner to the maverick North African statelet of Algiers. The piratical corsairs of Algiers have decided to exploit the vulnerability of the United States by seizing its mariners and holding them for ransom. Today, the name of James Leander Cathcart has been all but forgotten.
By: Des Ekin
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The Kneeling Man
- My Father's Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
- By: Leta McCollough Seletzky
- Narrated by: Leta McCollough Seletzky
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In the famous photograph of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of Memphis’s Lorraine Motel, one man kneeled down beside King, trying to staunch the blood from his fatal head wound with a borrowed towel. This kneeling man was a member of the Invaders, an activist group that was in talks with King in the days leading up to the murder. But he also had another identity: an undercover Memphis police officer reporting on the activities of this group, which was thought to be possibly dangerous and potentially violent. This kneeling man is Leta McCollough Seletzky’s father.
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The Quality of Mercy
- A Revolutionary Lady's Tale
- By: William Cibbarelli Ph.D.
- Narrated by: R.M. Kevan
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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The novel blends fact, fiction, and speculation about Mercy Otis Warren, a self-educated 18th century woman and accomplished dramatist, poet, pamphleteer, historian, propagandist, and consummate letter writer, preparing a fictional journal of her life.
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Lapidarium
- The Secret Lives of Stones
- By: Hettie Judah
- Narrated by: Nina Wadia
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Stones have furnished our earliest technologies and our first art materials. As jewelry and talismans, they have accompanied us in our journeys into the afterlife. We have carried stones over vast distances, erecting temples with them where we gathered to worship our gods. The earliest scientists ground and processed minerals in a centuries-long quest for a mythic stone that would prolong human life. Michelangelo climbed mountains in Tuscany searching for the sugar-white marble that would yield his sculptures.
By: Hettie Judah
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Flowers of Fire
- The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women's Rights Worldwide
- By: Hawon Jung
- Narrated by: Kathleen Li
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Since the beginning of the #MeToo movement, tens of thousands of people in South Korea have taken to the street, and many more brave individuals took a stand, to end a decades-long abortion ban and bring down powerful men accused of sexual misconduct—including a popular presidential contender. Author Hawon Jung shows the world that these women are no delicate flowers—they are trailblazing flames. Flowers of Fire takes the listener into the trenches of this fight for equality.
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Great book, subpar listening experience
- By lj82 on 05-29-23
By: Hawon Jung
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High Weirdness
- Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
- By: Erik Davis
- Narrated by: Erik Davis
- Length: 20 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality - but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America?
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High Weirdness
- By Amazon Customer on 09-17-20
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Sekret Machines: Man
- Gods, Man & War, Book 2
- By: Tom DeLonge, Peter Levenda
- Narrated by: Paul Costanzo
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Tom DeLonge and Peter Levenda continue their revelatory work in a thoroughly-researched exposé that seeks to solve the scientific mysteries of the unidentified aerial phenomenon, the UFO experiencers whose lives were changed forever, and what it means for all mankind. To this end, they have divided their study into three fields of inquiry: genetics and the ET hypothesis, consciousness, and human-machine symbiosis.
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Patronizing garbage
- By Great Scott on 12-18-19
By: Tom DeLonge, and others
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The Science of Near-Death Experiences
- By: John C. Hagan III
- Narrated by: Geoffrey Abegg
- Length: 5 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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What happens to consciousness during the act of dying? The most compelling answers come from people who almost die and later recall events that occurred while lifesaving resuscitation, emergency care, or surgery was performed. These events are now called near-death experiences (NDEs). As medical and surgical skills improve, innovative procedures can bring back patients who have traveled farther on the path to death than at any other time in history. Physicians and healthcare professionals must learn how to appropriately treat patients who report an NDE.
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Pseudoscience at its best
- By And vice versa on 08-15-20
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Psychiatry
- The Science of Lies
- By: Thomas Szasz
- Narrated by: Tom Weiner
- Length: 4 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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For more than half a century, Thomas Szasz has devoted much of his career to a radical critique of psychiatry. His latest work, Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, is a culmination of his life’s work: to portray the integral role of deception in the history and practice of psychiatry. Szasz argues that the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness stands in the same relationship to the diagnosis and treatment of bodily illness that the forgery of a painting does to the original masterpiece.
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Over four hours of rant, with lack of rationale
- By Michael on 04-11-12
By: Thomas Szasz
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The Spiritual Brain
- A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul
- By: Mario Beauregard, Denyse O'Leary
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 12 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Does religious experience come from God, or is it just the random firing of neurons in the brain? Drawing on brain research on Carmelite nuns that has attracted major media attention and provocative new research in near-death experiences, The Spiritual Brain proves that genuine, life-changing spiritual events can be documented. The authors make a convincing case for what many in science are loathe to consider: that it is God who creates our spiritual experiences, not the brain.
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interesting topic, but frustrating listen
- By Barry T on 08-27-08
By: Mario Beauregard, and others
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The Daemon
- A Guide to Your Extraordinary Secret Self
- By: Anthony Peake
- Narrated by: Anthony Peake
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Daemon: A Guide to Your Extraordinary Secret Self, Anthony Peake proposes that people consist of not one but two separate consciousnesses - everyday consciousness and that of The Daemon, a higher being that seems to possess knowledge of future events. Drawing upon phenomena such as déjà vu and near-death experiences, he explores the ways that our Daemon breaks through into our consciousness and can subconsciously impact upon our decisions.
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absolutely amazing!!
- By blueberryd on 08-19-21
By: Anthony Peake
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High Weirdness
- Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
- By: Erik Davis
- Narrated by: Erik Davis
- Length: 20 hrs and 57 mins
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A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality - but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America?
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High Weirdness
- By Amazon Customer on 09-17-20
By: Erik Davis