Benjamin Franklin's Last Bet
The Favorite Founder's Divisive Death, Enduring Afterlife, and Blueprint for American Prosperity
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Benjamin Franklin's Last Bet
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Narrated by:
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Donald Corren
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By:
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Michael Meyer
About this listen
The incredible story of Benjamin Franklin’s parting gift to the working-class people of Boston and Philadelphia—a deathbed wager that captures the Founder’s American Dream and his lessons for our current, conflicted age.
Benjamin Franklin was not a gambling man. But at the end of his illustrious life, the Founder allowed himself a final wager on the survival of the United States: a gift of two thousand pounds to Boston and Philadelphia, to be lent out to tradesmen over the next two centuries to jump-start their careers. Each loan would be repaid with interest over ten years. If all went according to Franklin’s inventive scheme, the accrued final payout in 1991 would be a windfall.
In Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet, Michael Meyer traces the evolution of these twin funds as they age alongside America itself, bankrolling woodworkers and silversmiths, trade schools and space races. Over time, Franklin’s wager was misused, neglected, and contested—but never wholly extinguished. With charm and inquisitive flair, Meyer shows how Franklin’s stake in the “leather-apron” class remains in play to this day, and offers an inspiring blueprint for prosperity in our modern era of growing wealth disparity and social divisions.
©2022 Michael Meyer (P)2022 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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Titan is the first full-length biography based on unrestricted access to Rockefeller’s exceptionally rich trove of papers. A landmark publication full of startling revelations, the book indelibly alters our image of this most enigmatic capitalist. Born the son of a flamboyant, bigamous snake-oil salesman and a pious, straitlaced mother, Rockefeller rose from rustic origins to become the world’s richest man by creating America’s most powerful and feared monopoly, Standard Oil. Branded "the Octopus" by legions of muckrakers, the trust refined and marketed nearly 90 percent of the oil produced in America.
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5 out of 5 stars
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He makes Bill Gates look like a Pauper!
- By Rick on 11-04-13
By: Ron Chernow
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Taking on the Trust
- The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller
- By: Steve Weinberg
- Narrated by: Pam Ward
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 70
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 52
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 52
Long before the rise of mega-corporations like Wal-Mart and Microsoft, Standard Oil controlled the oil industry with a monopolistic force unprecedented in American business history. Undaunted by the ruthless power of its owner, John D. Rockefeller, a fearless and ambitious reporter named Ida Minerva Tarbell confronted the company known simply as "The Trust".
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4 out of 5 stars
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Annoying Narrator
- By Nate on 04-03-15
By: Steve Weinberg
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Coolidge
- By: Amity Shlaes
- Narrated by: Terence Aselford
- Length: 21 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 929
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 819
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 811
Calvin Coolidge, president from 1923 to 1929, never rated highly in polls, and history has remembered the decade in which he served as an extravagant period predating the Great Depression. Now Amity Shlaes provides a fresh look at the 1920s and its elusive president, showing that the mid-1920s was in fact a triumphant period that established our modern way of life: The nation electrified, Americans drove their first cars, and the federal deficit was replaced with a surplus.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Silent Cal
- By Jean on 02-19-13
By: Amity Shlaes
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Ida M. Tarbell
- The Woman Who Challenged Big Business - and Won!
- By: Emily Arnold McCully
- Narrated by: Emily Arnold McCully
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 47
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 42
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 41
Born in 1857 and raised in oil country, Ida M. Tarbell was one of the first investigative journalists and probably the most influential in her time. Her series of articles on the Standard Oil Trust, a complicated business empire run by John D. Rockefeller, revealed to readers the underhanded, even illegal practices that had led to Rockefeller's success.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent!
- By AKA1 on 03-16-19
-
Young Benjamin Franklin
- The Birth of Ingenuity
- By: Nick Bunker
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 17 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 33
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 28
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 28
From his early career as a printer and journalist to his scientific work and his role as a founder of a new republic, Benjamin Franklin has always seemed the inevitable embodiment of American ingenuity. But in his youth, he had to make his way through a harsh colonial world, where he fought many battles with his rivals, but also with his wayward emotions. Taking Franklin to the age of 41, when he made his first electrical discoveries, Bunker goes behind the legend to reveal the sources of his passion for knowledge.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Good Book but LOTS of Names
- By Tim on 10-31-19
By: Nick Bunker
-
The Forgotten Man
- By: Amity Shlaes
- Narrated by: Terence Aselford
- Length: 14 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,113
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 714
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 716
It's difficult today to imagine how America survived the Great Depression. Only through the stories of the common people who struggled during that era can we really understand how the nation endured. In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression. Rejecting the old emphasis on the New Deal, she turns to the neglected and moving stories of individual Americans, and shows how they helped establish the steadfast character we developed as a nation.
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5 out of 5 stars
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a story of forgotten times
- By Debb Robinson on 10-11-07
By: Amity Shlaes
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Signing Their Lives Away
- The Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence
- By: Denise Kiernan, Joseph D'Agnese
- Narrated by: Susan Larkin
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 56
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 50
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 50
In the summer of 1776, fifty-six men risked their lives and livelihood to defy King George III and sign the Declaration of Independence - yet how many of them do we actually remember? Signing Their Lives Away introduces listeners to the eclectic group of statesmen, soldiers, slaveholders, and scoundrels who signed this historic document - and the many strange fates that awaited them. Some prospered and rose to the highest levels of United States government, while others had their homes and farms seized by British soldiers.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Mediocre and a bit snarky.
- By Marte Risher on 07-23-15
By: Denise Kiernan, and others
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The Story of America
- Essays on Origins
- By: Jill Lepore
- Narrated by: Colleen Devine
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 61
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 52
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 53
In The Story of America, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore investigates American origin stories - from John Smith's account of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address - to show how American democracy is bound up with the history of print. Over the centuries, Americans have read and written their way into a political culture of ink and type. Part civics primer, part cultural history, The Story of America excavates the origins of everything from the paper ballot and the Constitution to the I.O.U. and the dictionary.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Fun Read on Historical Subjects
- By Jim on 08-31-13
By: Jill Lepore
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The Rockefellers
- By: Peter Collier, David Horowitz
- Narrated by: Michael Anthony
- Length: 30 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 109
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 56
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Story4 out of 5 stars 57
Against a richly detailed backdrop of history, the story of this unique American family unfolds. It begins with John D. Rockefeller Sr., who amassed a fortune amid the muck and disorder of the Pennsylvania oil fields and left his son to deal with the public outcry.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Too Long
- By Rohit on 05-25-07
By: Peter Collier, and others
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Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
- By: Walter Isaacson
- Narrated by: Nelson Runger
- Length: 24 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 8,829
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 7,748
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 7,714
Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us - an ambitious urban entrepreneur who rose up the social ladder, from leather-aproned shopkeeper to dining with kings. In best-selling author Walter Isaacson's vivid and witty full-scale biography, we discover why Franklin turns to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind his new-fangled spectacles. In Benjamin Franklin, Isaacson shows how Franklin defines both his own time and ours. The most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Good book, not crazy about the narrator
- By Cathi on 07-20-13
By: Walter Isaacson
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Captive of the Labyrinth
- Sarah L. Winchester, Heiress to the Rifle Fortune
- By: Mary Jo Ignoffo
- Narrated by: Nan McNamara
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 89
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 81
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 80
The first full-length biography of Sarah Winchester, the subject of the movie Winchester starring Helen Mirren, now available for the first time in audio. Since her death in 1922, Sarah Winchester has been perceived as a mysterious, haunted figure. After inheriting a vast fortune upon the death of her husband in 1881, Sarah purchased a simple farmhouse in San José, California. She began building additions to the house and continued construction on it for the next twenty years. A hostile press cast Sarah as the conscience of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company—a widow shouldering responsibility for the many deaths caused by the rifle that brought her riches. She was accused of being a ghost-obsessed spiritualist, and to this day it is largely believed that the extensive construction she executed on her San José house was done to appease the ghouls around her. But was she really as guilt-ridden and superstitious as history remembers her? When Winchester’s home was purchased after her death, it was transformed into a tourist attraction. The bizarre, sprawling mansion and the enigmatic nature of Winchester’s life were exaggerated by the new owners to generate publicity for their business. But as the mansion has become more widely known, the person of Winchester has receded from reality, and she is only remembered for squandering her riches to ward off disturbed spirits.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Facts to Silence the Myths
- By Carmen Gibson on 03-07-24
By: Mary Jo Ignoffo
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Benjamin Franklin: A Captivating Guide to an American Polymath and a Founding Father of the United States of America
- By: Captivating History
- Narrated by: Desmond Manny
- Length: 3 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 34
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 32
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 32
Benjamin Franklin was a Founding Father of America and had an enormous impact on America as it is today. In addition to that, there are many little-known facts about the man who is Benjamin Franklin. Unlike many of the other Founding Fathers, he started out in humble circumstances. From a young age, Benjamin Franklin fought for the rights of America at home and abroad. Yet, he bore the burdens of leadership and never shirked nor faltered in his mission. His greatest asset was his charm and friendliness, but he had his detractors as well and felt the emotional impact of that.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent Audiobook
- By Jaxon Jordon on 02-10-19
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Black Titan
- A.G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire
- By: Carol Jenkins
- Narrated by: Susan Spain
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 460
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 395
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 395
A.G. Gaston, the poor grandson of slaves, was born in the Deep South in 1892. Over the course of his extraordinary life, he amassed a fortune of over $130 million and a vast business empire. The story of his remarkable life is written with eloquence and grace by his niece, an Emmy¿ Award-winning journalist and her daughter, who holds degrees from Yale and Harvard.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Black Gold = Standing Ovation
- By 2Fresh on 01-20-16
By: Carol Jenkins
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Twilight at Monticello
- The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson
- By: Alan Pell Crawford
- Narrated by: James Boles
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 100
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 54
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 55
Much has been written about Thomas Jefferson, with good reason: His life was a great American drama, one of the greatest, played out in compelling acts. He was the architect of our democracy, a visionary chief executive who expanded this nation's physical boundaries to unimagined lengths.
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4 out of 5 stars
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After Leaving Office
- By Roy on 09-23-10
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Neither Snow nor Rain
- A History of the United States Postal Service
- By: Devin Leonard
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 67
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 58
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 58
Few institutions are as loved, as loathed, and as historically important as the United States Postal Service, the subject of this landmark century-spanning social, political, and economic history. The United States Postal Service is a wondrous American creation. Seven days a week, its army of 300,000 letter carriers delivers 513 million pieces of mail, 40 percent of the world's volume. It is far more efficient than any other mail service - more than twice as efficient as the Japanese and easily outpacing the Germans and British. And the USPS has a storied history.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Woa!, the post office's history is America
- By anon on 12-06-16
By: Devin Leonard
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Lincoln's Boys
- John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image
- By: Joshua Zeitz
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 71
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 65
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 66
Lincoln's official secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay, enjoyed more access, witnessed more history, and knew Lincoln better than anyone outside of the president's immediate family. Hay and Nicolay were the gatekeepers of the Lincoln legacy. They read poetry and attendeded the theater with the president, commiserated with him over Union army setbacks, and plotted electoral strategy.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Best Publicists since Mathew, Mark, Luke, & John
- By James on 04-06-15
By: Joshua Zeitz
-
John Quincy Adams
- Militant Spirit
- By: James Traub
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 25 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 736
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 650
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 644
John Quincy Adams was the last of his kind - a Puritan from the age of the Founders who despised party and compromise yet dedicated himself to politics and government. The son of John Adams, he was a brilliant ambassador and secretary of state, a frustrated president at a historic turning point in American politics, and a dedicated congressman who literally died in office - at the age of 80, in the House of Representatives, in the midst of an impassioned political debate.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Best narrator of all the audio books I've listened
- By grimm79 on 12-12-17
By: James Traub
-
New World Coming
- The 1920s and the Making of Modern America
- By: Nathan Miller
- Narrated by: Lloyd James
- Length: 18 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 128
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 88
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 88
Jazz. Bootleggers. Flappers. Talkies. Model T Fords. Lindbergh's history-making flight over the Atlantic. The 1920s was also the decade of the hard-won vote for women, racial injustice, censorship, social conflict, and the birth of organized crime.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
My High School History Class Never Told
- By Charles Stembridge on 06-29-04
By: Nathan Miller
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Good history, idiot author.
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As 1909 dawned, the greatest jewels of exploration - set at the world's frozen extremes - lay unclaimed: the North and South Poles and the so-called "Third Pole", the pole of altitude, located in unexplored heights of the Himalaya. Before the calendar turned, three expeditions had faced death, mutiny, and the harshest conditions on the planet to plant flags at the furthest edges of the Earth.
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 774
In this absorbing, smart, and accessible blend of economic and cultural history in the vein of the works of Michael Lewis and Andrew Ross Sorkin, a financial executive and CNBC contributor examines the five most significant stock market crashes in the United States over the past century, revealing how they have defined the nation today.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A solid telling of crucial history
- By Philo on 06-17-17
By: Scott Nations
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The Faithful Executioner
- Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century
- By: Joel F. Harrington
- Narrated by: James Gillies
- Length: 9 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 699
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 640
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 634
Based on the rare and until now overlooked journal of a Renaissance-era executioner, the noted historian Joel F. Harrington's The Faithful Executioner takes us deep inside the alien world and thinking of Meister Frantz Schmidt of Nuremberg, who, during 45 years as a professional executioner, personally put to death 394 individuals and tortured, flogged, or disfigured many hundreds more. But the picture that emerges of Schmidt from his personal papers is not that of a monster. Could a man who routinely practiced such cruelty also be insightful?
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent
- By James on 03-30-18
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When Montezuma Met Cortes
- The True Story of the Meeting That Changed History
- By: Matthew Restall
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 16 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 95
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 84
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Story4 out of 5 stars 84
In 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés first met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, at the entrance to the capital city of Tenochtitlan. This introduction - the prelude to the Spanish seizure of Mexico City and to European colonization of the mainland of the Americas - has long been the symbol of Cortés' bold and brilliant military genius. Montezuma, on the other hand, is remembered as a coward who gave away a vast empire and touched off a wave of colonial invasions across the hemisphere. But is this really what happened?
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3 out of 5 stars
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Flawed, but worth it for those interested.
- By "J" on 02-16-18
By: Matthew Restall
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Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy
- Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961
- By: Nicholas Reynolds
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 525
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 478
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 473
While he was the curator of the CIA Museum, Nicholas Reynolds, a longtime military intelligence expert, began to discover tantalizing clues that suggested Ernest Hemingway's involvement in the Second World War was much more complex and dangerous than has been previously understood. Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy brings to light for the first time this riveting secret side of Hemingway's life - when he worked closely with both the American OSS and the Soviet NKVD to defeat Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
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5 out of 5 stars
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So entertaining you'd think it was fiction
- By Austin on 03-16-17
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Beverly Hills Spy
- The Double-Agent War Hero Who Helped Japan Attack Pearl Harbor
- By: Ronald Drabkin
- Narrated by: Sam Dewhurst-Phillips
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 14
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 13
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Story5 out of 5 stars 13
Frederick Rutland was an accomplished aviator, British WWI war hero, and real-life James Bond. He was the first pilot to take off and land a plane on a ship, a decorated warrior for his feats of bravery and rescue, was trusted by the admirals of the Royal Navy, had a succession of aeronautical inventions, and designed the first modern aircraft carrier. He was perhaps the most famous early twentieth-century naval aviator. Despite all of this, and due mostly to class politics, Rutland was not promoted in the new Royal Air Force in the wake of WWI.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Thoroughly riveting, well written, fabulously performed.
- By Thomas Pederson on 11-26-24
By: Ronald Drabkin
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Unthinkable
- An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains
- By: Helen Thomson
- Narrated by: Helen Thomson
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 279
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 235
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 232
A prize-winning journalist with a background in neuroscience, Helen Thomson spent years tracking down people who live with the world's most extraordinary neurological disorders - like a man who tried to break his back because his legs no longer felt like his own, and another who believed that he was dead for nine years. Not content to simply read about these cases on paper, Thomson reached out to 10 people with these afflictions, and they agreed to tell her their stories.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Very interesting
- By Ruthi on 07-01-19
By: Helen Thomson
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What's Gotten into You
- The Story of Your Body's Atoms, from the Big Bang Through Last Night's Dinner
- By: Dan Levitt
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 119
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 98
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Story5 out of 5 stars 98
Every one of us contains a billion times more atoms than all the grains of sand in the earth’s deserts. If you weigh 150 pounds, you’ve got enough carbon to make 25 pounds of charcoal, enough salt to fill a saltshaker, enough chlorine to disinfect several backyard swimming pools, and enough iron to forge a 3-inch nail. But how did these elements combine to make us human?
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5 out of 5 stars
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One of the Very Best Science Books I have Read
- By TStair on 03-20-23
By: Dan Levitt
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Miracle in Shreveport
- A Memoir of Baseball, Fatherhood, and the Stadium That Launched a Dream
- By: David Benham, Jason Benham
- Narrated by: David Benham, Jason Benham
- Length: 4 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 34
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 33
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Story5 out of 5 stars 33
Twin brothers David and Jason Benham grew up with big dreams of baseball and an even bigger trust in God. Though they attended a small high school with no baseball field, turned down a professional offer so they could attend college together, and faced more than one missed pitch and injuries, they kept dreaming, praying together on the field, and believing in God. David and Jason’s journey, from Little League to college to professional baseball and beyond, reminds us that even when we don’t know what God is up to, He’s putting together the pieces of our life’s puzzle.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A family saga of growing in the Lord, following your dreams, hard work & praying and trusting in God.
- By cheddar on 08-30-24
By: David Benham, and others
What listeners say about Benjamin Franklin's Last Bet
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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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
- Michael Smith
- 07-07-24
Another explanation of Franklin’s genius
Excellent example of Ben Franklin’s abilities. Some of the stories I’m familiar with but they add to the overall history of the last bet he made on society. He had similar thoughts on the working man to what Mike Rowe has today. Too bad politics and money hungry idiots limited the true impact that could have been felt. Great book though.
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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
- Thomas L. Wentling, Jr.
- 10-09-22
Marvelous!
Franklinophiles will delight in this very well told reprise of the man, about whom much has been written and said. The author then picks up the thread of his “afterlife” which will astound all, no matter your level of Franklin scholarship. He makes connections that have been hiding in plain site, but took the pursuit of a relentless detective to discover and organization for us in a most enjoyable fashion.
Very well done. Tom W
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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
- Charles
- 10-19-22
Many things I did not know
Benjamin Franklin’s wife operated his business for the 10 years he was out of the country. One out of five businesses were owner operated by women. TIAA college retirement was started by Carnegie. A great school in Boston remains as the unique tribute to Ben Franklin. This book weaves back-and-forth about his life. President Adams was not a fan. What a great life. Ben Franklin was the first person to run a franchise.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Peter W. Kalnin
- 04-27-24
Franklin at His Best
This is largely a recap of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin with a few stories thrown in for color. Not bad, but not the best book I have read this year.
Donald Corren does a good job narrating.
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