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The Devil's Best Trick
- How the Face of Evil Disappeared
- Narrated by: Lane Hakel
- Length: 13 hrs and 13 mins
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Publisher's summary
How we explain the evils of the world, and the darkest parts of ourselves, has preoccupied humans throughout history. A sweeping and comprehensive search for the origins of belief in a Satanic figure across the centuries, The Devil’s Best Trick is a keen investigation into the inescapable reality of evil and the myriad ways we attempt to understand it. Instructive, riveting, and unnerving, this is a profound rumination on crime, violence, and the darkness in all of us.
In The Devil’s Best Trick, Randall Sullivan travels to Catemaco, Mexico, to participate in the “Hour of the Witches,” an annual ceremony in which hundreds of people congregate in the jungle south of Vera Cruz to negotiate terms with El Diablo. He takes us through the most famous and best-documented exorcism in American history, which lasted four months. And, woven throughout, he delivers original reporting on the shocking story of a small town in Texas that, one summer in 1988, unraveled into paranoia and panic after a seventeen-year-old boy was found hanging from the branch of a horse apple tree and rumors about Satanic worship and cults spread throughout the wider community.
Sullivan also brilliantly melds historical, religious, and cultural conceptions of evil: from the Book of Job to the New Testament to the witch hunts in Europe in the 15th through 17th centuries to the history of the devil-worshipping “Black Mass” ceremony and its depictions in 19th-century French literature. He brings us through to the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s and the story of one brutal serial killer, pondering the psychology of evil. He weaves in writings by John Milton, William Blake, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and many more, among them Charles Baudelaire, from whose work Sullivan took the title of the book.
Nimble and expertly researched, The Devil’s Best Trick brilliantly melds cultural and historical commentary and a suspenseful true-crime narrative. Randall Sullivan, whose reportage and narrative skill has been called “extraordinary” and “enthralling” by Rolling Stone, takes on a bold task in this book that is both biography of the Devil and a look at how evil manifests in the world.
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Story
From the moment he took office as governor in 1928 to the day an assassin’s bullet cut him down in 1935, Huey Long wielded all but dictatorial control over the state of Louisiana. A man of shameless ambition and ruthless vindictiveness, Long orchestrated elections, hired and fired thousands at will, and deployed the state militia as his personal police force. And yet, paradoxically, as governor and later as senator, Long did more good for the state’s poor and uneducated than any politician before or since. Outrageous demagogue or charismatic visionary?
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Hidden in Plain View
- A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad
- By: Jacqueline L. Tobin, Raymond G. Dobard
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 1993, author Jacqueline Tobin visited the Old Market Building in the historic district of Charleston, South Carolina, where local craftspeople sell their wares. Amid piles of beautiful handmade quilts, Tobin met African American quilter Ozella Williams and the two struck up a conversation. With the admonition to "write this down," Williams began to tell a fascinating story that had been handed down from her mother and grandmother before her.
By: Jacqueline L. Tobin, and others
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Vertigo
- The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany
- By: Harald Jähner
- Length: 14 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Out of the ashes of the First World War, Germany launched an unprecedented political project: its first democratic government. The Weimar Republic, named for the city where it was established, endured for only fifteen years before it was toppled by the insurgent Nazi Party in 1933. In Vertigo, prizewinning historian Harald Jähner tells the Republic’s full story, capturing a nation caught in a whirlwind of uncertainty and struggling toward a better future.
By: Harald Jähner
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The Empire of Climate
- A History of An Idea
- By: David N. Livingstone
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 19 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Scientists, journalists, and politicians increasingly tell us that human impacts on climate constitute the single greatest threat facing our planet and may even bring about the extinction of our species. Yet behind these anxieties lies an older, much deeper fear about the power that climate exerts over us. The Empire of Climate traces the history of this idea and its pervasive influence over how we interpret world events and make sense of the human condition, from the rise and fall of ancient civilizations to the afflictions of the modern psyche.
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Alexander at the End of the World
- The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great
- By: Rachel Kousser
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
By 330 B.C.E., Alexander the Great had reached the pinnacle of success. Or so it seemed. He had defeated the Persian ruler Darius III and seized the capital city of Persepolis. His exhausted and traumatized soldiers were ready to return home to Macedonia. Yet Alexander had other plans. He was determined to continue heading east to Afghanistan in search of his ultimate goal: to reach the end of the world.
By: Rachel Kousser
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Into Unknown Skies
- An Unlikely Team, a Daring Race, and the First Flight Around the World
- By: David Randall
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Through larger-than-life characters, treacherous landings, disease, and ultimately triumph, Into Unknown Skies demonstrates how one race returned America to aviation greatness. A story of underdog teammates, bold exploration, and American ingenuity, Into Unknown Skies is an untold adventure tale showing the power of flight to bring the world together.
By: David Randall
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A Hell of a Storm
- The Battle for Kansas, the End of Compromise, and the Coming of the Civil War (t)
- By: David S. Brown
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In A Hell of a Storm, Brown brings history to life in a way that resonates with the events of present. Through chapters on Lincoln, Emerson, Stowe, Thoreau, and Tubman, along with a cast of presidents, poets, abolitionists, and black emigrationists, Brown weaves a political, cultural, and literary history that chronicles the Republican party’s creation and rise, the collapse of antebellum compromises, and the coming of the Civil War, all topics that mirror current discussions about polarization in our nation today.
By: David S. Brown
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The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic
- Reconstruction, 1860-1920
- By: Manisha Sinha
- Narrated by: Deepa Samuel
- Length: 17 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A sweeping narrative that remakes our understanding of perhaps the most consequential period in American history, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic shows how the great contest of that age is also the great contest of our age—and serves as a necessary reminder of how young and fragile our democracy truly is.
By: Manisha Sinha
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Massacre in the Clouds
- An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History
- By: Kim A. Wagner
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In March 1906, American soldiers on the island of Jolo in the southern Philippines surrounded and killed 1000 local men, women, and children, known as Moros, on top of an extinct volcano. The so-called ‘Battle of Bud Dajo’ was hailed as a triumph over an implacable band of dangerous savages, a “brilliant feat of arms” according to President Theodore Roosevelt. Some contemporaries, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Mark Twain, saw the massacre for what it was, but they were the exception and the U.S. military authorities successfully managed to bury the story.
By: Kim A. Wagner