9781797137360
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The Fifties audiobook

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Regular Price: 19.99 USD

The Fifties Audiobook Summary

An “exciting and enlightening revisionist history” (Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author) that upends the myth of the 1950s as a decade of conformity and celebrates a few solitary, brave, and stubborn individuals who pioneered the radical gay rights, feminist, civil rights, and environmental movements, from historian James R. Gaines.

An “enchanting, beautifully written book about heroes and the dark times to which they refused to surrender” (Todd Gitlin, bestselling author of The Sixties). In a series of character portraits, The Fifties invokes the accidental radicals–people motivated not by politics but by their own most intimate conflicts–who sparked movements for change in their time and our own. Among many others, we meet legal pathfinder Pauli Murray, who was tortured by both her mixed-race heritage and her “in between” sexuality. Through years of hard work and self-examination, she turned her demons into historic victories. Ruth Bader Ginsburg credited her for the argument that made sex discrimination unconstitutional, but that was only one of her gifts to the 21st-century feminism. We meet Harry Hay, who dreamed of a national gay rights movement as early as the mid-1940s, a time when the US, Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany viewed gay people as subversives and mentally ill. And in perhaps the book’s unlikeliest pairing, we hear the prophetic voices of Silent Spring‘s Rachel Carson and MIT’s preeminent mathematician, Norbert Wiener, who from their very different perspectives–she is in the living world, he in the theoretical one–converged on the then-heretical idea that our mastery over the natural world carried the potential for disaster. Their legacy is the environmental movement.

The Fifties is an “inspiration…[and] a reminder of the hard work and personal sacrifice that went into fighting for the constitutional rights of gay people, Blacks, and women, as well as for environmental protection” (The Washington Post). The book carries the powerful message that change begins not in mass movements and new legislation but in the lives of the decentered, often lonely individuals, who learn to fight for change in a daily struggle with themselves.

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The Fifties Audiobook Narrator

James Fouhey is the narrator of The Fifties audiobook that was written by James R. Gaines

About the Author(s) of The Fifties

James R. Gaines is the author of The Fifties

More From the Same

Subjects

The publisher of the The Fifties is Simon & Schuster Audio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is 20th Century, History, United States

Additional info

The publisher of the The Fifties is Simon & Schuster Audio. The imprint is Simon & Schuster Audio. It is supplied by Simon & Schuster Audio. The ISBN-13 is 9781797137360.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Frequently asked questions

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Audiobooks are recordings of books that are read aloud by a professional voice actor. The recordings are typically available for purchase and download in digital formats such as MP3, WMA, or AAC. They can also be streamed from online services like Speechify, Audible, AppleBooks, or Spotify.
You simply download the app onto your smart phone, create your account, and in Speechify, you can choose your first book, from our vast library of best-sellers and classics, to read for free.

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