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Our Kindred Creatures
- How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals
- Narrated by: Tanis Parenteau
- Length: 13 hrs and 46 mins
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Publisher's summary
A compassionate, sweeping history of the transformation in American attitudes toward animals by the best-selling authors of Rabid
Over just a few decades at the end of the nineteenth century, the United States underwent a moral revolution on behalf of animals. Before the Civil War, their suffering had rarely been discussed; horses pulling carriages and carts were routinely beaten in public view, and dogs were pitted against each other for entertainment and gambling. But in 1866, a group of activists began a dramatic campaign to change the nation’s laws and norms, and by the century’s end, most Americans had adopted a very different way of thinking and feeling about the animals in their midst.
In Our Kindred Creatures, Bill Wasik, editorial director of The New York Times Magazine, and veterinarian Monica Murphy offer a fascinating history of this crusade and the battles it sparked in American life. On the side of reform were such leaders as George Angell, the inspirational head of Massachusetts’s animal-welfare society and the American publisher of the novel Black Beauty; Henry Bergh, founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; Caroline White of Philadelphia, who fought against medical experiments that used live animals; and many more, including some of the nation’s earliest veterinarians and conservationists. Caught in the movement’s crosshairs were transformational figures in their own right: animal impresarios such as P.T. Barnum, industrial meat barons such as Philip D. Armour, and the nation’s rising medical establishment, all of whom put forward their own, very different sets of modern norms about how animals should be treated.
In recounting this remarkable period of moral transition—which, by the turn of the twentieth century, would give birth to the attitudes we hold toward animals today—Wasik and Murphy challenge us to consider the obligations we still have to all our kindred creatures.
Cover painting: Peaceable Kingdom, 1834 (detail) by Edward Hicks. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Critic reviews
“Our Kindred Creatures is the most elegantly written, rigorously researched, and morally nuanced portrait of America's early animal advocates I've ever read. More important, it's the story of how widespread social change happens. Anyone who cares about human-animal relationships should put this book at the very top of their reading list.”—Bronwen Dickey, author of Pit Bull
“A colorful menagerie of characters fills this radiant history of the tumultuous first three decades (1866-1896) of America’s animal welfare movement… a scintillating overview of how animals earned legal rights and moral sympathy in the latter half of the 19th century.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review*
“Extensively researched... Of obvious appeal to animal lovers, this engaging account will also resonate with readers who enjoy in-depth looks at the history and shaping of contemporary American values.”—Kathleen McBroom, Booklist, starred review*
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Covert City
- The Cold War and the Making of Miami
- By: Vince Houghton, Eric Driggs
- Narrated by: Eric Driggs, Vince Houghton
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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The Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the most dramatic and dangerous period of the Cold War. What's less well known is that the city of Miami, mere miles away, was a pivotal, though less well known, part of Cold War history. With its population of Communist exiles from Cuba, its strategic value for military operations, and its lax business laws, Miami was an ideal environment for espionage. Covert City tells the history of how the entire city of Miami was constructed in the image of the US-Cuba rivalry.
By: Vince Houghton, and others
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The Light Eaters
- How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth
- By: Zoë Schlanger
- Narrated by: Zoë Schlanger
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival. In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies to blend into their surroundings, store useful memories that inform their life cycle, and trick animals into behaving to their benefit, to name just a few remarkable talents.
By: Zoë Schlanger
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The Siege
- A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special-Forces Operation That Shocked the World
- By: Ben Macintyre
- Length: 13 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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True-life espionage master Ben Macintyre takes listeners on a thrilling tick-tock recounting one of the most daring rescue attempts of our time. As the American hostage crisis in Iran boiled into its seventh month in the spring of 1980, six heavily armed gunman barged into the Iranian Embassy in London, taking twenty-six hostages. What followed over the next six days was an increasingly tense standoff, one that threatened at any moment to spill into a bloodbath.
By: Ben Macintyre
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I Just Keep Talking
- A Life in Essays
- By: Nell Irvin Painter
- Narrated by: Nell Irvin Painter
- Length: 17 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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From the New York Times bestselling author of The History of White People and Old in Art School, a finalist for the NBCC Award, comes a comprehensive new collection of essays spanning art, politics, and the legacy of racism that shapes American history as we know it. These essays resist easy answers in favor of complexity, the inescapable sense of our country’s potential thwarted by its failures. This collection will surely solidify Painter’s place among the finest critics and writers of the last half century.