18 Best Midwest (IA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, ND, NE, OH, SD, WI) Books
Midwest (IA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, ND, NE, OH, SD, WI) is a popular category for many book lovers. Our team at Speechify has curated a list of the top Midwest (IA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, ND, NE, OH, SD, WI) audiobooks everyone must read.
See the top 18 Midwest (IA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, ND, NE, OH, SD, WI) audiobooks below.
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We Are the Troopers
- By: Stephen Guinan
- Narrator: Amy Landon
- Length: 9 hours 43 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: August 30, 2022
- Language: English
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4.63(25 ratings)
4.63(25 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0027.99 USDDiscover the unlikely story of the Toledo Troopers, the winningest team in the National Women’s Football League, who won seven league championships in the 1970s–and gain full access to the players and key figures in the organization.Discover the unlikely story of the Toledo Troopers, the winningest team in the National Women’s Football League, who won seven league championships in the 1970s–and gain full access to the players and key figures in the organization.
Amid a national backdrop of the call to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, the National Women’s Football League was founded as something of a gimmick. However, the league’s star team, the Toledo Troopers, emerged to challenge traditional gender roles and amass a win-loss record never before or since achieved in American football. The players were housewives, factory workers, hairdressers, former nuns, high school teachers, bartenders, mail carriers, pilots, and would-be drill sergeants. Black, white, Latina. Mothers and daughters and aunts and sisters. But most of all, they were athletes who had been denied the opportunity to play a game they were born to play.
Before the protests and the lobbyists, before the debates and the amendments, before the marches and the mandates, there was only an obscure advertisement in a local Midwestern paper and those who answered it, women such as Lee Hollar, the only woman working the line at the Libbey glass factory; Gloria Jimenez, who grew up playing sports with her six brothers; and Linda Jefferson, one the greatest, most accomplished athletes in sports history. Stephen Guinan grew up in Toledo pulling for his hometown football team, and–in the innocence of youth–did not realize at the time what a barrier-breaking lost piece of history he was witnessing. We Are the Troopers shines light on forgotten champions who came together for the love of the game. ... Read more -
The Defender
- By: Ethan Michaeli
- Narrator: William Hughes
- Length: 22 hours 8 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2016
- Language: English
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4.31(285 ratings)
4.31(285 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0029.95 USDGiving voice to the voiceless, the Chicago Defender condemned Jim Crow, catalyzed the Great Migration, and focused the electoral power of black America. Robert S. Abbott founded the Defender in 1905, smuggled hundreds of thousands of copies into theGiving voice to the voiceless, the Chicago Defender condemned Jim Crow, catalyzed the Great Migration, and focused the electoral power of black America. Robert S. Abbott founded the Defender in 1905, smuggled hundreds of thousands of copies into the most isolated communities in the segregated South, and was dubbed a “Modern Moses,” becoming one of the first black millionaires in the process. His successor wielded the newspaper’s clout to elect mayors and presidents, including Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy, who would have lost in 1960 if not for the Defender‘s support. Along the way, its pages were filled with columns by legends like Ida B. Wells, Langston Hughes, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Drawing on dozens of interviews and extensive archival research, Ethan Michaeli constructs a revelatory narrative of race in America from the age of Teddy Roosevelt to the age of Barack Obama and brings to life the reporters who braved lynch mobs and policemen’s clubs to do their jobs.
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The Hospital
- By: Brian Alexander
- Narrator: Nick Landrum
- Length: 14 hours 51 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: March 09, 2021
- Language: English
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4.27(1055 ratings)
4.27(1055 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0032.99 USDAn intimate, heart wrenching portrait of one small hospital that reveals the magnitude of America’s health care crises. “With his signature gut-punching prose, Alexander breaks our hearts as he opens our eyes to America’sAn intimate, heart wrenching portrait of one small hospital that reveals the magnitude of America’s health care crises.
“With his signature gut-punching prose, Alexander breaks our hearts as he opens our eyes to America’s deep-rooted sickness and despair by immersing us in the lives of a small town hospital and the people it serves. ” —Beth Macy, bestselling author of Dopesick
By following the struggle for survival of one small-town hospital, and the patients who walk, or are carried, through its doors, The Hospital takes listeners into the world of the American medical industry in a way no audiobook has done before. Americans are dying sooner, and living in poorer health. Alexander argues that no plan will solve America’s health crisis until the deeper causes of that crisis are addressed.
Bryan, Ohio’s hospital, is losing money, making it vulnerable to big health systems seeking domination and Phil Ennen, CEO, has been fighting to preserve its independence. Meanwhile, Bryan, a town of 8,500 people in Ohio’s northwest corner, is still trying to recover from the Great Recession. As local leaders struggle to address the town’s problems, and the hospital fights for its life amid a rapidly consolidating medical and hospital industry, a 39-year-old diabetic literally fights for his limbs, and a 55-year-old contractor lies dying in the emergency room. With these and other stories, Alexander strips away the wonkiness of policy to reveal Americans’ struggle for health against a powerful system that’s stacked against them, but yet so fragile it blows apart when the pandemic hits. Culminating with COVID-19, this audiobook offers a blueprint for how we created the crisis we’re in.
A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press
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“A brilliantly imaginative and creative way of telling the story of today’s America and the roots of what ails it, through the travails of a small-town hospital. In The Hospital, Brian Alexander does again so well what he did in Glass House–telling the big story from the small place.”
—Sam Quinones, author of Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic -
Truman
- By: David McCullough
- Narrator: Nelson Runger
- Length: 54 hours 12 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2011
- Language: English
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4.14(81428 ratings)
4.14(81428 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0099.95 USDThe Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Harry S. Truman, whose presidency included momentous events from the atomic bombing of Japan to the outbreak of the Cold War and the Korean War, told by America’s beloved and distinguished historian.TheThe Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Harry S. Truman, whose presidency included momentous events from the atomic bombing of Japan to the outbreak of the Cold War and the Korean War, told by America’s beloved and distinguished historian.
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The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters–Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson–and dramatic events. In this riveting biography, acclaimed historian David McCullough not only captures the man–a more complex, informed, and determined man than ever before imagined–but also the turbulent times in which he rose, boldly, to meet unprecedented challenges. The last president to serve as a living link between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Truman’s story spans the raw world of the Missouri frontier, World War I, the powerful Pendergast machine of Kansas City, the legendary Whistle-Stop Campaign of 1948, and the decisions to drop the atomic bomb, confront Stalin at Potsdam, send troops to Korea, and fire General MacArthur. Drawing on newly discovered archival material and extensive interviews with Truman’s own family, friends, and Washington colleagues, McCullough tells the deeply moving story of the seemingly ordinary “man from Missouri” who was perhaps the most courageous president in our history. -
Truman
- By: David McCullough
- Narrator: David McCullough
- Length: 5 hours 35 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 1992
- Language: English
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4.14(81428 ratings)
4.14(81428 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0015.95 USDThe Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Harry S. Truman, whose presidency included momentous events from the atomic bombing of Japan to the outbreak of the Cold War and the Korean War, told by America’s beloved and distinguishedThe Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Harry S. Truman, whose presidency included momentous events from the atomic bombing of Japan to the outbreak of the Cold War and the Korean War, told by America’s beloved and distinguished historian.
... Read more
The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson—and dramatic events. In this riveting biography, acclaimed historian David McCullough not only captures the man—a more complex, informed, and determined man than ever before imagined—but also the turbulent times in which he rose, boldly, to meet unprecedented challenges. The last president to serve as a living link between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Truman’s story spans the raw world of the Missouri frontier, World War I, the powerful Pendergast machine of Kansas City, the legendary Whistle-Stop Campaign of 1948, and the decisions to drop the atomic bomb, confront Stalin at Potsdam, send troops to Korea, and fire General MacArthur. Drawing on newly discovered archival material and extensive interviews with Truman’s own family, friends, and Washington colleagues, McCullough tells the deeply moving story of the seemingly ordinary “man from Missouri” who was perhaps the most courageous president in our history. -
The Boys in the Bunkhouse
- By: Dan Barry
- Narrator: Fred Sanders
- Length: 9 hours 44 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: May 17, 2016
- Language: English
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4.14(1274 ratings)
4.14(1274 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.004.99 USDWith this Dickensian tale from America’s heartland, New York Times writer and columnist Dan Barry tells the harrowing yet uplifting story of the exploitation and abuse of a resilient group of men with intellectual disability, and the heroicWith this Dickensian tale from America’s heartland, New York Times writer and columnist Dan Barry tells the harrowing yet uplifting story of the exploitation and abuse of a resilient group of men with intellectual disability, and the heroic efforts of those who helped them to find justice and reclaim their lives.
In the tiny Iowa farm town of Atalissa, dozens of men, all with intellectual disability and all from Texas, lived in an old schoolhouse. Before dawn each morning, they were bussed to a nearby processing plant, where they eviscerated turkeys in return for food, lodging, and $65 a month. They lived in near servitude for more than thirty years, enduring increasing neglect, exploitation, and physical and emotional abuse–until state social workers, local journalists, and one tenacious labor lawyer helped these men achieve freedom.
Drawing on exhaustive interviews, Dan Barry dives deeply into the lives of the men, recording their memories of suffering, loneliness and fleeting joy, as well as the undying hope they maintained despite their traumatic circumstances. Barry explores how a small Iowa town remained oblivious to the plight of these men, analyzes the many causes for such profound and chronic negligence, and lays out the impact of the men’s dramatic court case, which has spurred advocates–including President Obama–to push for just pay and improved working conditions for people living with disabilities.
A luminous work of social justice, told with compassion and compelling detail, The Boys in the Bunkhouse is more than just inspired storytelling. It is a clarion call for a vigilance that ensures inclusion and dignity for all.
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We Had a Little Real Estate Problem
- By: Kliph Nesteroff
- Narrator: Kliph Nesteroff
- Length: 9 hours 34 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2021
- Language: English
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4.1(1738 ratings)
4.1(1738 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0023.99 USDA Best Book of 2021 by NPR and Esquire From Kliph Nesteroff, “the human encyclopedia of comedy” (VICE), comes the important and underappreciated story of Native Americans and comedy.It was one of the most reliable jokes in CharlieA Best Book of 2021 by NPR and Esquire
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From Kliph Nesteroff, “the human encyclopedia of comedy” (VICE), comes the important and underappreciated story of Native Americans and comedy.
It was one of the most reliable jokes in Charlie Hill’s stand-up routine: “My people are from Wisconsin. We used to be from New York. We had a little real estate problem.”
In We Had a Little Real Estate Problem, acclaimed comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff focuses on one of comedy’s most significant and little-known stories: how, despite having been denied representation in the entertainment industry, Native Americans have influenced and advanced the art form.
The account begins in the late 1880s, when Native Americans were forced to tour in wild west shows as an alternative to prison. (One modern comedian said it was as “if a Guantanamo detainee suddenly had to appear on X-Factor.”) This is followed by a detailed look at the life and work of seminal figures such as Cherokee humorist Will Rogers and Hill, who in the 1970s was the first Native American comedian to appear The Tonight Show.
Also profiled are several contemporary comedians, including Jonny Roberts, a social worker from the Red Lake Nation who drives five hours to the closest comedy club to pursue his stand-up dreams; Kiowa-Apache comic Adrianne Chalepah, who formed the touring group the Native Ladies of Comedy; and the 1491s, a sketch troupe whose satire is smashing stereotypes to critical acclaim. As Ryan Red Corn, the Osage member of the 1491s, says: “The American narrative dictates that Indians are supposed to be sad. It’s not really true and it’s not indicative of the community experience itself…Laughter and joy is very much a part of Native culture.”
Featuring dozens of original interviews and the exhaustive research that is Nesteroff’s trademark, We Had a Little Real Estate Problem is a powerful tribute to a neglected legacy. -
Holding Back the River
- By: Tyler J. Kelley
- Narrator: Samantha Desz
- Length: 9 hours 10 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2021
- Language: English
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4.05(63 ratings)
4.05(63 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.99 USDA revelatory work of reporting on the men and women wrestling to harness and preserve America’s most vital natural resource: our rivers.The Mississippi. The Missouri. The Ohio. America’s rivers are the very lifeblood of our country. WeA revelatory work of reporting on the men and women wrestling to harness and preserve America’s most vital natural resource: our rivers.
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The Mississippi. The Missouri. The Ohio. America’s rivers are the very lifeblood of our country. We need them for nourishing crops, for cheap bulk transportation, for hydroelectric power, for fresh drinking water. Rivers are also part of our mythology, our collective soul; they are Mark Twain, Led Zeppelin, and the Delta Blues. But as infrastructure across the nation fails and climate change pushes rivers and seas to new heights, we’ve arrived at a critical moment in our battle to tame these often-destructive forces of nature.
Tyler J. Kelley spent two years traveling the heartland, getting to know the men and women whose lives and livelihoods rely on these tenuously tamed streams. On the Illinois-Kentucky border, we encounter Luther Helland, master of the most important–and most decrepit–lock and dam in America. This old dam at the end of the Ohio River was scheduled to be replaced in 1998, but twenty years and $3 billion later, its replacement still isn’t finished. As the old dam crumbles and commerce grinds to a halt, Helland and his team must risk their lives, using steam-powered equipment and sheer brawn, to raise and lower the dam as often as ten times a year.
In Southeast Missouri, we meet Twan Robinson, who lives in the historically Black village of Pinhook. As a super-flood rises on the Mississippi, she learns from her sister that the US Army Corps of Engineers is going to blow up the levee that stands between her home and the river. With barely enough notice to evacuate her elderly mother and pack up a few of her own belongings, Robinson escapes to safety only to begin a nightmarish years-long battle to rebuild her lost community.
Atop a floodgate in central Louisiana, we’re beside Major General Richard Kaiser, the man responsible for keeping North America’s greatest river under control. Kaiser stands above the spot where the Mississippi River wants to change course, abandoning Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and following the Atchafalaya River to the sea. The daily flow of water from one river to the other is carefully regulated, but something else is happening that may be out of Kaiser and the Corps’ control.
America’s infrastructure is old and underfunded. While our economy, society, and climate have changed, our levees, locks, and dams have not. Yet to fix what’s wrong will require more than money. It will require an act of imagination. “With meticulous research and insightful analysis” (Publishers Weekly), Holding Back the River brings us into the lives of the Americans who grapple with our mighty rivers and, through their stories, suggests solutions to some of the century’s greatest challenges. -
Little Brother
- By: Ben Westhoff
- Narrator: Dan Bittner
- Length: 8 hours 10 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: May 24, 2022
- Language: English
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4.03(157 ratings)
4.03(157 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0024.99 USDThis intimate exploration of race and inequality in America tells the story of a journalist’s long-time relationship with his mentee, Jorell Cleveland, through the Big Brothers Big Sisters program and investigates Jorell’s tragic fatalThis intimate exploration of race and inequality in America tells the story of a journalist’s long-time relationship with his mentee, Jorell Cleveland, through the Big Brothers Big Sisters program and investigates Jorell’s tragic fatal shooting.
In 2005, soon after Ben Westhoff moved to St. Louis, he joined the Big Brothers Big Sisters program and was paired with Jorell Cleveland. Ben was twenty-eight, a white college grad from an affluent family. Jorell was eight, one of nine children from a poor, African American family living in nearby Ferguson. But the two instantly connected. Ben and Jorell formed a bond stronger than nearly any other in their lives. When Ben met the woman who’d become his wife, she observed that Ben and Jorell were “a package deal.” They were brothers.
In the summer of 2016, Jorell was shot at point blank range in broad daylight in the middle of the street, yet no one was charged in his death. Ben grappled with mourning Jorell, but also with a feeling of responsibility. As Jorell’s mentor, what could he have done differently? As a journalist, he had reported on gang life, interviewed crime kingpins, and even infiltrated drug labs in China. But now, he was investigating the life and death of someone he knew personally and examining what he did and did not know about his friend. Learning the truth about Jorell and the man who killed him required Ben to uncover a heartbreaking cycle of poverty, poor education, drug trafficking, and violence. Little Brother brilliantly combines a deeply personal history with a true-crime narrative that exposes the realities of life in communities like Ferguson all around the country.
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Population: 485
- By: Michael Perry
- Narrator: Michael Perry
- Length: 7 hours 0 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: June 30, 2005
- Language: English
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3.93(4418 ratings)
3.93(4418 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0021.99 USDMike Perry’s extraordinary and thoughtful account of meeting the people of his small hometown by joining the fire and rescue team was a breakout hit that “swells with unadorned heroism” (USA Today) Welcome to New Auburn, WisconsinMike Perry’s extraordinary and thoughtful account of meeting the people of his small hometown by joining the fire and rescue team was a breakout hit that “swells with unadorned heroism” (USA Today)
Welcome to New Auburn, Wisconsin (population: 485) where the local vigilante is a farmer’s wife armed with a pistol and a Bible, the most senior member of the volunteer fire department is a cross-eyed butcher with one kidney and two ex-wives (both of whom work at the only gas station in town), and the back roads are haunted by the ghosts of children and farmers. Michael Perry loves this place. He grew up here, and now-after a decade away-he has returned.
Unable to polka or repair his own pickup, his farm-boy hands gone soft after years of writing, Mike figures the best way to regain his credibility is to join the volunteer fire department. Against a backdrop of fires and tangled wrecks, bar fights and smelt feeds, he tells a frequently comic tale leavened with moments of heartbreaking delicacy and searing tragedy.
Tracing his calls on a map in the little firehouse, he sees “a dense, benevolent web, spun one frantic zigzag at a time” from which the story of a tiny town emerges.
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Roll Red Roll
- By: Nancy Schwartzman
- Narrator: Nancy Schwartzman
- Length: 8 hours 20 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: July 12, 2022
- Language: English
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3.92(222 ratings)
3.92(222 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0024.99 USDAn incisive narrative about a teen rape case that divided a Rust Belt town, exposing the hostile and systemic undercurrents that enable sexual violence, and spotlighting ways to make change. In football-obsessed Steubenville, Ohio, on a summer nightAn incisive narrative about a teen rape case that divided a Rust Belt town, exposing the hostile and systemic undercurrents that enable sexual violence, and spotlighting ways to make change.
In football-obsessed Steubenville, Ohio, on a summer night in 2012, an incapacitated sixteen-year-old girl was repeatedly assaulted by members of the “Big Red” high school football team. They took turns documenting the crime and sharing on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The victim, Jane Doe, learned the details via social media at a time when teens didn’t yet understand the lasting trail of their digital breadcrumbs. Crime blogger Alexandria Goddard, along with hacker collective Anonymous, exposed the photos, Tweets, and videos, making this the first rape case ever to go viral and catapulting Steubenville onto the national stage.
Filmmaker Nancy Schwartzman spent four years embedded in the town, documenting the case and its reverberations. Ten years after the assault, Roll Red Roll is the culmination of that research, weaving in new interviews and personal reflections to take readers beyond Steubenville to examine rape culture in everything from sports to teen dynamics. Roll Red Roll explores the factors that normalize sexual assault in our communities. Through inter-views with sportswriter David Zirin, victim’s rights attorney Gloria Allred and more, Schwartzman untangles the societal norms in which we too often sacrifice our daughters to protect our sons. With the Steubenville case as a flashpoint that helped spark the #MeToo movement, a decade later, Roll Red Roll focuses on the perpetrators and asks, can our society truly change? ... Read more -
Wild Bill
- By: Tom Clavin
- Narrator: Johnny Heller
- Length: 8 hours 51 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: February 05, 2019
- Language: English
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3.89(1286 ratings)
3.89(1286 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.99 USD“The first thing you will notice about this engaging and delightful biography is that [Narrator Johnny Heller] sounds like a character actor who moseyed off the set of an old-fashioned oater. His voice is a little scratchy, a little seasoned“The first thing you will notice about this engaging and delightful biography is that [Narrator Johnny Heller] sounds like a character actor who moseyed off the set of an old-fashioned oater. His voice is a little scratchy, a little seasoned and perfectly suits this biography of larger-than-life Bill Hickok and his pals, from Calamity Jane to Buffalo Bill Cody and General Custer.” —The Berkshire Edge
This program includes a bonus interview with the author.The definitive true story of Wild Bill, the first lawman of the Wild West, by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dodge City.
In July 1865, “Wild Bill” Hickok shot and killed Davis Tutt in Springfield, MO–the first quick-draw duel on the frontier. Thus began the reputation that made him a marked man to every gunslinger in the Wild West.
James Butler Hickock was known across the frontier as a soldier, Union spy, scout, lawman, gunfighter, gambler, showman, and actor. He crossed paths with General Custer and Buffalo Bill Cody, as well as Ben Thompson and other young toughs gunning for the sheriff with the quickest draw west of the Mississippi.
Wild Bill also fell in love–multiple times–before marrying the true love of his life, Agnes Lake, the impresario of a traveling circus. He would be buried however, next to fabled frontierswoman Calamity Jane.
Even before his death, Wild Bill became a legend, with fiction sometimes supplanting fact in the stories that surfaced. Once, in a bar in Nebraska, he was confronted by four men, three of whom he killed in the ensuing gunfight. A famous Harper’s Magazine article credited Hickok with slaying 10 men that day; by the 1870s, his career-long kill count was up to 100.
The legend of Wild Bill has only grown since his death in 1876, when cowardly Jack McCall famously put a bullet through the back of his head during a card game. Bestselling author Tom Clavin has sifted through years of western lore to bring Hickock fully to life in this rip-roaring, spellbinding true story.
“[Narrator Johnny Heller] ensures that Western aficionados will enjoy listening to the life of Wild Bill” — AudioFile Magazine
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The Worlds the Shawnees Made
- By: Stephen Warren
- Narrator: Tom Weiner
- Length: 10 hours 19 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2014
- Language: English
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3.83(48 ratings)
3.83(48 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0022.95 USDIn 1779, Shawnees from Chillicothe, a community in the Ohio country, told the British, “We have always been the frontier.” Their statement challenges an oft-held belief that American Indians derive their unique identities fromIn 1779, Shawnees from Chillicothe, a community in the Ohio country, told the British, “We have always been the frontier.” Their statement challenges an oft-held belief that American Indians derive their unique identities from longstanding ties to native lands. By tracking Shawnee people and migrations from 1400 to 1754, Stephen Warren illustrates how Shawnees made a life for themselves at the crossroads of empires and competing tribes, embracing mobility and often moving willingly toward violent borderlands. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Shawnees ranged over the eastern half of North America and used their knowledge to foster notions of pan-Indian identity that shaped relations between Native Americans and settlers in the revolutionary era and beyond.
Warren’s deft analysis makes clear that Shawnees were not anomalous among native peoples east of the Mississippi. Through migration, they and their neighbors adapted to disease, warfare, and dislocation by interacting with colonizers as slavers, mercenaries, guides, and traders. These adaptations enabled them to preserve their cultural identities and resist coalescence without forsaking their linguistic and religious traditions.
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The Harder You Work, the Luckier You Get
- By: Joe Ricketts
- Narrator: Danny Campbell
- Length: 10 hours 45 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2019
- Language: English
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3.79(116 ratings)
3.79(116 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0023.99 USDJoe Ricketts, founder of TD Ameritrade, shares the epic inside story of how a working-class kid from the Nebraska prairie took on Wall Street’s clubby brokerage business, busted it open, and walked away a billionaire. Joe Ricketts always hadJoe Ricketts, founder of TD Ameritrade, shares the epic inside story of how a working-class kid from the Nebraska prairie took on Wall Street’s clubby brokerage business, busted it open, and walked away a billionaire.
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Joe Ricketts always had the gift of seeing what others missed. The son of a house builder, he started life as a part-time janitor, but by the age of thirty-three he saw the chance to challenge the big brokerage firms by offering Americans an inexpensive way to take control of their own stock trading. Nowadays, we take for granted that Main Street is playing right there on Wall Street, but Ricketts made that happen. His company, begun with $12,500 borrowed from friends and family, took off like a rocket thanks to an early embrace of digital technology and irreverent marketing. But Ameritrade also faced a series of near-disasters: the SEC almost shut him down; his partners tried to force him out because of his relentless risk-taking; penny brokers swindled the company; the crash of 1989 nearly cost him everything; and he was almost shut down again when a customer committed massive fraud. By the time of the dot-com bust, he had proven that his strategy based on frontier values could survive just about anything.
The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get offers a view inside Joe Ricketts’ mind, giving readers a visceral understanding of how entrepreneurs think and act differently from the rest of us–how they see the horizon where we just see a spreadsheet. As unvarnished as the prairie he comes from, Ricketts also talks honestly about his shortcomings as a manager, the career sacrifices his wife made for his business, the complexity of being a father, and the pain of splitting with his mentor and of his brother’s death from AIDS. Overcoming these and other challenges, he built a company now worth $30 billion.
A must-read for anyone who’s ever dreamed of starting their own business, The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get is the ultimate only-in-America story. -
Dodge City
- By: Tom Clavin
- Narrator: John Bedford Lloyd
- Length: 13 hours 11 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: February 28, 2017
- Language: English
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3.78(2365 ratings)
3.78(2365 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0026.99 USDDodge City, Kansas, is a place of legend. The town that started as a small military site exploded with the coming of the railroad, cattle drives, eager miners, settlers, and various entrepreneurs passing through to populate the expanding West.Dodge City, Kansas, is a place of legend. The town that started as a small military site exploded with the coming of the railroad, cattle drives, eager miners, settlers, and various entrepreneurs passing through to populate the expanding West. Before long, Dodge City’s streets were lined with saloons and brothels and its populace was thick with gunmen, horse thieves, and desperadoes of every sort. By the 1870s, Dodge City was known as the most violent and turbulent town in the West.
Enter Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. Young and largely self-trained men, the lawmen led the effort that established frontier justice and the rule of law in the American West, and did it in the wickedest place in the United States. When they moved on, Wyatt to Tombstone and Bat to Colorado, a tamed Dodge was left in the hands of Jim Masterson. But before long Wyatt and Bat, each having had a lawman brother killed, returned to that threatened western Kansas town to team up to restore order again in what became known as the Dodge City War before riding off into the sunset.
#1 New York Times bestselling author Tom Clavin’s Dodge City tells the true story of their friendship, romances, gunfights, and adventures, along with the remarkable cast of characters they encountered along the way (including Wild Bill Hickock, Jesse James, Doc Holliday, Buffalo Bill Cody, John Wesley Hardin, Billy the Kid, and Theodore Roosevelt) that has gone largely untold–lost in the haze of Hollywood films and western fiction, until now.
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Once In A Great City
- By: David Maraniss
- Narrator: David Maraniss
- Length: 13 hours 39 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2015
- Language: English
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3.77(1386 ratings)
3.77(1386 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0023.99 USD“A fascinating political, racial, economic, and cultural tapestry” (Detroit Free Press), Once in a Great City is a tour de force from David Maraniss about the quintessential American city at the top of its game: Detroit in 1963.Detroit“A fascinating political, racial, economic, and cultural tapestry” (Detroit Free Press), Once in a Great City is a tour de force from David Maraniss about the quintessential American city at the top of its game: Detroit in 1963.
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Detroit in 1963 is on top of the world. The city’s leaders are among the most visionary in America: Grandson of the first Ford; Henry Ford II; Motown’s founder Berry Gordy; the Reverend C.L. Franklin and his daughter, the incredible Aretha; Governor George Romney, Mormon and Civil Rights advocate; car salesman Lee Iacocca; Police Commissioner George Edwards; Martin Luther King. The time was full of promise. The auto industry was selling more cars than ever before. Yet the shadows of collapse were evident even then.
“Elegiac and richly detailed” (The New York Times), in Once in a Great City David Maraniss shows that before the devastating riot, before the decades of civic corruption and neglect, and white flight; before people trotted out the grab bag of rust belt infirmities and competition from abroad to explain Detroit’s collapse, one could see the signs of a city’s ruin. Detroit at its peak was threatened by its own design. It was being abandoned by the new world economy and by the transfer of American prosperity to the information and service industries. In 1963, as Maraniss captures it with power and affection, Detroit summed up America’s path to prosperity and jazz that was already past history. “Maraniss has written a book about the fall of Detroit, and done it, ingeniously, by writing about Detroit at its height….An encyclopedic account of Detroit in the early sixties, a kind of hymn to what really was a great city” (The New Yorker). -
The Haunt of Home
- By: Zachary Michael Jack
- Narrator: Tim Getman
- Length: 8 hours 26 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2021
- Language: English
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3.5(8 ratings)
3.5(8 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.95 USDWhat does it mean to deeply love a home place that haunts us still? From Mark Twain to Grant Wood to Garrison Keillor, regionalists from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age have explored the American Gothic and the homegrown fatalism that flourishesWhat does it mean to deeply love a home place that haunts us still? From Mark Twain to Grant Wood to Garrison Keillor, regionalists from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age have explored the American Gothic and the homegrown fatalism that flourishes in many of the nation’s most far-flung and forgotten places. The Haunt of Home introduces us to a cast of real-life midwestern characters grappling with the Gothic in their own lives, from promising young professionals debating the perennial “should I stay or should I go now” dilemma, to recent emigres and entrepreneurs seeking personal reinvention, to faithful boosters determined to keep their communities alive despite the odds. In The Haunt of Home Zachary Michael Jack considers the many ways a region’s abiding spirit shapes the ethos of a land and its people, offering portraits of others who, like himself, are determined to live out the unique promise and predicament of the Gothic.
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West Like Lightning
- By: Jim DeFelice
- Narrator: John Pruden
- Length: 8 hours 48 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: May 08, 2018
- Language: English
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3.4(123 ratings)
3.4(123 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.004.99 USDThe thrilling narrative history of one of the most enduring icons of the American West, the Pony Express, from the #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of American Sniper–an exciting tale of daring young men pushing limits to the extremesThe thrilling narrative history of one of the most enduring icons of the American West, the Pony Express, from the #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of American Sniper–an exciting tale of daring young men pushing limits to the extremes across the vast, rugged, and unsettled American West.
In the spring of 1860 on the eve of a civil war that threatened to tear the country apart, two Americans conceived of an audacious plan for linking the nation’s two coasts, thereby joining its present with its future. All that stood in the way was a 1,900 miles of uninhabited desert, ice-capped mountains, oceanic plains roamed by hostile Indian tribes, whitewater-choked rivers, and rugged, unsettled frontier wilderness where civilized” men where outnumbered a million to one by grizzlies, mountain lions, wolves, bison, rattlesnakes, and more. Many deemed their revolutionary scheme impossible. Run by the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company, the Pony Express as it came to be known, would use a relay system of daring horseback riders to ferry mail and small packages halfway across a continent in just ten days.
The challenges they faced were enormous, yet the Pony Express succeeded, delivering tens of thousands of letters at record speed. The service would quickly become the most direct means of communication between the Eastern United States and its Western territories, helping to firmly connect them to the Union. West Like Lightning traces the development of the Pony Express and follows it from its start in St. Joseph, Missouri–the edge of the civilized world in the mid-nineteenth century–1,500 miles west to Sacramento. Jim DeFelice–who traveled the Express’s route in his research–plumbs the legends, myths, and true facts of the service, viewing it within the context of the American story and exploring its lasting relevance today. Though the Pony Express was eclipsed by the telegraph in less than two years, it remains today an enduring symbol of American values: rugged individualism, perseverance, and speed.
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Cliff Weitzman
Cliff Weitzman is a dyslexia advocate and the CEO and founder of Speechify, the #1 text-to-speech app in the world, totaling over 100,000 5-star reviews and ranking first place in the App Store for the News & Magazines category. In 2017, Weitzman was named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list for his work making the internet more accessible to people with learning disabilities. Cliff Weitzman has been featured in EdSurge, Inc., PC Mag, Entrepreneur, Mashable, among other leading outlets.
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