Land of Desire
Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture
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Land of Desire
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Narrated by:
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Teri Schnaubelt
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By:
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William R. Leach
About this listen
This monumental work of cultural history was nominated for a National Book Award. It chronicles America's transformation, beginning in 1880, into a nation of consumers, devoted to a cult of comfort, bodily well-being, and endless acquisition.
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Excellent
- By Brad on 05-03-15
By: Steve Fraser
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Korea
- The Impossible Country
- By: Daniel Tudor
- Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
- Length: 13 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 134
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 113
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 112
Long overshadowed by Japan and China, South Korea is a small country that happens to be one of the great national success stories of the postwar period. From a failed state with no democratic tradition, ruined and partitioned by war, and sapped by a half-century of colonial rule, South Korea transformed itself in just 50 years into an economic powerhouse and a democracy that serves as a model for other countries. With no natural resources and a tradition of authoritarian rule, Korea managed to accomplish a second Asian miracle.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Amazing book
- By Antoine on 12-14-18
By: Daniel Tudor
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New York, New York, New York
- Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
- By: Thomas Dyja
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy, Thomas Dyja - introduction
- Length: 17 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 164
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 143
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 141
Dangerous, filthy, and falling apart, garbage piled on its streets and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble; New York’s terrifying, if liberating, state of nature in 1978 also made it the capital of American culture. Over the next thirty-plus years, though, it became a different place - kinder and meaner, richer and poorer, more like America and less like what it had always been.
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5 out of 5 stars
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OMG...right on 👍👍👍👍👍
- By howie wine on 04-04-21
By: Thomas Dyja
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The Library
- A Fragile History
- By: Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett
- Length: 15 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 57
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 52
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 50
Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes, or filled with bean bags and children’s drawings - the history of the library is rich, varied, and stuffed full of incident.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Stays on point
- By Alex on 04-29-23
By: Andrew Pettegree, and others
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"The Rest of Us"
- The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews
- By: Stephen Birmingham
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 18 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 37
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 32
The wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who swept into New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by way of Ellis Island were not welcomed by the Jews who had arrived decades before. These refugees from czarist Russia and the Polish shtetls who came to America to escape pogroms and persecution were considered barbaric, uneducated, and too steeped in the traditions of the "old country" to be accepted by the more refined and already well-established German-Jewish community. But the new arrivals were tough, passionate, and determined.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Book 3 of 3
- By Etoile NEOhio on 11-15-22
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Sun, Sin, Suburbia
- The History of Modern Las Vegas Revised and Expanded
- By: Geoff Schumacher
- Narrated by: Douglas R. Pratt
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 57
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 47
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 47
Las Vegas is gambling's mecca - Sin City the Entertainment Capital of the World with 40 million visitors a year. But that's just part of the story. This carefully documented history tracks the rise of Las Vegas from its vital role in World War II, of the Rat Pack era of the 50s, the explosive growth of the 90s, and it's colossal collapse in the post 2008 real-estate crash. It offers a history of the iconic Strip, but also profiles the neighborhoods where over 2 million people live.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Good History of Vegas - old, modern and mundane
- By Amazon Customer on 06-13-14
By: Geoff Schumacher
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The Europeans
- Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture
- By: Orlando Figes
- Narrated by: James Langton
- Length: 21 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 39
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 29
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Story5 out of 5 stars 29
At the center of the book is a poignant love triangle: the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev; the Spanish prima donna Pauline Viardot, with whom Turgenev had a long and intimate relationship; and her husband Louis Viardot, an art critic, theater manager, and republican activist. Together, Turgenev and the Viardots acted as a kind of European cultural exchange - they either knew or crossed paths with Delacroix, Berlioz, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, the Schumanns, Hugo, Flaubert, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, among many other towering figures.
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5 out of 5 stars
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DO LISTEN TO THIS BOOK!!!
- By JK on 10-28-21
By: Orlando Figes
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China, Inc.
- By: Ted C. Fishman
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 315
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 75
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Story4 out of 5 stars 78
China today is visible everywhere: In the news, in the economic pressures battering America, in the workplace, and in every trip to the store. Provocative, timely, and essential, this dramatic account of China's growing dominance as an industrial super-power by journalist Ted C. Fishman explains how the profound shift in the global economic order has occurred, and why it already affects us all.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Just read the Amazon reviews befor buying it ...
- By Dan on 08-10-05
By: Ted C. Fishman
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Behemoth
- A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World
- By: Joshua B. Freeman
- Narrated by: Stephen Bowlby
- Length: 13 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 246
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 209
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 207
We live in a factory-made world: modern life is built on three centuries of advances in factory production, efficiency, and technology. But giant factories have also fueled our fears about the future since their beginnings, when William Blake called them "dark Satanic mills". Many factories that operated over the last two centuries - such as Homestead, River Rouge, and Foxconn - were known for the labor exploitation and class warfare they engendered, not to mention the environmental devastation caused by factory production.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Get rid of the fake accents
- By J. R. Valery on 03-13-18
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The LEGO Story
- How a Little Toy Sparked the World’s Imagination
- By: Jens Andersen
- Narrated by: Peter Cross
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 56
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 50
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 50
It’s estimated that each year between eighty and ninety million children around the globe are given a box of LEGO, while up to ten million adults buy sets for themselves. Yet LEGO is much more than a dizzying number of plastic bricks that can be put together and combined in countless ways. LEGO is also a vision of the significance of what play can mean for humanity.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great book! Don't miss this
- By hgpilot - MM on 04-27-23
By: Jens Andersen
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The Wealth and Poverty of Nations
- Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
- By: David S. Landes
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 21 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 54
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 46
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 46
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations is David S. Landes' acclaimed, best-selling exploration of one of the most contentious and hotly debated questions of our time: Why do some nations achieve economic success while others remain mired in poverty? The answer, as Landes definitively illustrates, is a complex interplay of cultural mores and historical circumstance.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A detailed explanation
- By Kaarlis on 12-07-21
By: David S. Landes
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Cheap
- The High Cost of Discount Culture
- By: Ellen Ruppel Shell
- Narrated by: Lorna Raver
- Length: 11 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 94
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 49
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Story4 out of 5 stars 47
From the shuttered factories of the rust belt to the look-alike strip malls of the sun belt---and almost everywhere in between---America has been transformed by its relentless fixation on low price. This pervasive yet little examined obsession is arguably the most powerful and devastating market force of our time---the engine of globalization, outsourcing, planned obsolescence, and economic instability in an increasingly unsettled world.
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4 out of 5 stars
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You Get What You Pay For?
- By Roy on 07-26-09
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A Fierce Discontent
- The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920
- By: Michael McGerr
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 13 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 71
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 59
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 58
The Progressive Era witnessed the nation's most convulsive upheaval, a time of radicalism far beyond the Revolution or anything since. In response to the birth of modern America, one small group of middle-class Americans seized control of the nation and attempted to remake society from bottom to top. They accomplished an astonishing range of triumphs, yet the progressive movement collapsed as the war came to an end amid race riots, strikes, high inflation, and a frenzied Red scare.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A well balanced take
- By Ryan Mooney on 04-17-21
By: Michael McGerr
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Narrative Economics
- How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events
- By: Robert J. Shiller
- Narrated by: Susan Osman, Robert J. Shiller - introduction
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 450
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 359
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Story4 out of 5 stars 357
Spread through the public in the form of popular stories, ideas can go viral and move markets - whether it's the belief that tech stocks can only go up or that housing prices never fall. Whether true or false, stories like these - transmitted by word of mouth, by the news media, and increasingly by social media - drive the economy by driving our decisions about how and where to invest, how much to spend and save, and more. But despite the obvious importance of such stories, most economists have paid little attention to them. Narrative Economics sets out to change that.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Such boring narration (returned)
- By William J Brown on 10-08-19
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Bourgeois Equality
- How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World
- By: Deirdre N. McCloskey
- Narrated by: Marguerite Gavin
- Length: 29 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 41
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 35
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Story5 out of 5 stars 35
Few economists or historians write like McCloskey - her ability to invest the facts of economic history with the urgency of a novel, or of a leading case at law, is unmatched. She summarizes modern economics and modern economic history with verve and lucidity yet sees through to the really big scientific conclusion. Not matter, but ideas. Big books don't come any more ambitious or captivating than Bourgeois Equality.
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5 out of 5 stars
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How the world got rich
- By Andrew Cooper-Sansone on 01-26-23