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The Oligarchs
- Wealth and Power in the New Russia
- Narrated by: Steve Coulter
- Length: 22 hrs and 50 mins
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Once in Golconda is a dramatic chronicle of the breathtaking rise, devastating fall, and painstaking rebirth of Wall Street in the years between the wars. Focusing on the lives and fortunes of some of the era's most memorable traders, bankers, boosters, and frauds, John Brooks brings to vivid life all the ruthlessness, greed, and reckless euphoria of the '20s bull market, the desperation of the days leading up to the crash of '29, and the bitterness of the years that followed.
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A must read for investors
- By Brad Gillespie on 06-07-15
By: John Brooks
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The Hellhound of Wall Street
- How Ferdinand Pecora's Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance
- By: Michael Perino
- Narrated by: George K. Wilson
- Length: 14 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Hellhound of Wall Street, Michael Perino recounts in riveting detail the 1933 hearings that put Wall Street on trial for the Great Crash. Never before in American history had so many financial titans been called to account before the public, and they had come within a few weeks of emerging unscathed. By the time Ferdinand Pecora, a Sicilian immigrant and former New York prosecutor, took over as chief counsel, the investigation had dragged on ineffectively for nearly a year and was universally written off as dead....
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Great Story
- By Lynn on 03-22-11
By: Michael Perino
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The Money Culture
- By: Michael Lewis
- Narrated by: Alexander Cendese
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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The 1980s was the most outrageous and turbulent era in the financial market since the crash of ’29, not only on Wall Street but around the world. Michael Lewis, as a trainee at Salomon Brothers in New York and as an investment banker and later financial journalist, was uniquely positioned to chronicle the ambition and folly that fueled the decade. In these trenchant, often hilarious true tales we meet the colorful movers and shakers who commanded the headlines and rewrote the rules.
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Not the normal great Michael Lewis
- By Me on 05-12-12
By: Michael Lewis
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The Asylum
- The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market
- By: Leah McGrath Goodman
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 16 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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They were a band of outsiders unable to get jobs with New York's gilded financial establishment. They would go on to corner the world's multitrillion-dollar oil market, reaping unimaginable riches while bringing the economy to its knees. Meet the self-anointed kings of the New York Mercantile Exchange. In some ways, they are everything you would expect them to be: a secretive, members-only club of men and women who live lavish lifestyles; cavort with politicians, strippers, and celebrities; and blissfully jacked up oil prices to nearly $150 a barrel while profiting off the misery of the working class.
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A far better book than its come-on implies
- By Philo on 01-05-14
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The Looting Machine
- Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth
- By: Tom Burgis
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
The trade in oil, gas, gems, metals, and rare earth minerals wreaks havoc in Africa. During the years when Brazil, India, China, and the other "emerging markets" have transformed their economies, Africa's resource states remained tethered to the bottom of the industrial supply chain. While Africa accounts for about 30 percent of the world's reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals and 14 percent of the world's population, its share of global manufacturing stood in 2011 exactly where it stood in 2000: at 1 percent.
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Frightening, Fascinating, Fatiguing
- By Scott on 07-29-18
By: Tom Burgis
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Fear City
- New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics
- By: Kim Phillips-Fein
- Narrated by: Pam Ward
- Length: 12 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible. How could the country's largest metropolis fail? How could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt? Yet the city was indeed billions of dollars in the red, with no way to pay back its debts. Bankers and politicians alike seized upon the situation as evidence that social liberalism, which New York famously exemplified, was unworkable.
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Thanks for writing this book!!
- By G. A. Rivera on 08-14-21
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The Man Without a Face
- The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
- By: Masha Gessen
- Narrated by: Masha Gessen
- Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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The Man Without a Face is the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to its own people and to the world.
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A Preview of Authoritarianism in the USA
- By Jimmy O on 06-08-19
By: Masha Gessen
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The Alchemists
- Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire
- By: Neil Irwin
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 14 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Neil Irwin’s The Alchemists is a gripping account of the most intense exercise in economic crisis management we’ve ever seen, a poker game in which the stakes have run into the trillions of dollars. The book begins in, of all places, Stockholm, Sweden, in the 17th century, where central banking had its rocky birth, and then progresses through a brisk but dazzling tutorial on how the central banker came to exert such vast influence over our world, from its troubled beginnings to the age of Greenspan, bringing the listener into the present with a marvelous handle on how these figures and institutions became what they are.
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Couldn't Listen to this narrator
- By Donald on 07-23-13
By: Neil Irwin
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The New Deal
- A Modern History
- By: Michael Hiltzik
- Narrated by: Traber Burns
- Length: 19 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
As America struggles with an economic debacle akin to the Great Depression, nothing could be timelier than an authoritative account of the New Deal, masterfully written by Michael Hiltzik, author of the acclaimed history of the Hoover Dam, Colossus.
In this richly peopled, vividly rendered narrative, Hiltzik describes how the urgent short-term relief measures of Franklin Roosevelt’s Hundred Days evolved into a transformative concept of the federal role in American life.
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Another Excellent New Deal History
- By R.S. on 12-19-11
By: Michael Hiltzik
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Confidence Men
- Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President
- By: Ron Suskind
- Narrated by: James Lurie
- Length: 22 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The hidden history of Wall Street and the White House comes down to a single American concept: confidence. Both centers of power, New York and Washington, learned how to manufacture it - until August 2007, when that confidence began to crumble. Ron Suskind here tells the story of what happened next, as Wall Street struggled to save itself while a man with little experience and soaring rhetoric emerged from obscurity to usher in "a new era of responsibility".
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Insightful, but...
- By Ray on 10-29-11
By: Ron Suskind
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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
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Performance
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Story
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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My High School History Class Never Told
- By Charles Stembridge on 06-29-04
By: Nathan Miller
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A History of Modern Britain
- By: Andrew Marr
- Narrated by: David Timson
- Length: 29 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
A History of Modern Britain confronts head-on the victory of shopping over politics. It tells the story of how the great political visions of New Jerusalem or a second Elizabethan Age, rival idealisms, came to be defeated by a culture of consumerism, celebrity and self-gratification. In each decade political leaders think they know what they are doing but find themselves confounded. Every time the British people turn out to be stroppier and harder to herd than predicted.
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Masterful in focus, pace, content, performance
- By Philo on 11-10-16
By: Andrew Marr
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Eye opening
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While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold. It was a natural fit. Settlers from the East had for decades been pushing into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies....
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Disappointing book that wasted such potential.
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The Anarchy tells the remarkable story of how one of the world’s most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas in one small office, five windows wide, and answerable only to its distant shareholders. In his most ambitious and riveting audiobook to date, William Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.
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excellent book but awkward narration
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The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world.
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Best Single-Volume History of the 30 Years' War
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What listeners say about The Oligarchs
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- Todd
- 12-21-17
Very comprehensive account
This book was well written and very thorough in its account of the rise of the Oligarchs. Perhaps it could have been a little less in depth in some places, as at times the story got quite slow and the overall listen time was quite lengthy. Generally very good, however.
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- turgan@monomood.com
- 11-13-20
Very detailed and informative
I think this book is a must for anyone trying to understand russian politics today.
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- Suzanne Dallimore
- 11-10-19
Compelling History - Rise of the First Oligarchs
When the Soviet Union collapsed and ailing President Boris Yeltsin relaxed restrictions on foreign capital, he set in motion an asset-grabbing, profit-generating nightmare in which, without the structures required to keep raw capitalism in check, billions were made and Russia's crown jewel resources divided among a brilliant, ruthless few. This story tracks these first oligarchs up to the rise of Vladimir Putin, when everything changed. Disgraced, deported or jailed few of the billionaires remained unscathed. Putin installed a new breed of oligarchs whose loyalty to the autocratic Putin remains unquestioned. A highly detailed history of Russia's version of the wild, wild west.
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- SanFrancisco Photographer
- 01-07-16
Russian words are badly mispronounced
Where does The Oligarchs rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
Russian words are badly mispronounced
What was one of the most memorable moments of The Oligarchs?
Russian words are badly mispronounced
How could the performance have been better?
Russian words are badly mispronounced
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
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- AndriiShyshkalov
- 01-01-15
No judgment by the author for any side is great
no emotions for any side for such a book is very hard, but the author made it.
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- Bigcurt1963
- 05-12-20
Detailed
This is a very detailed explanation of how privatization happened after the fall of the Soviet Union. It is very similar to a book about politics with explanations of the different factions and experiences of the players influencing there ideas and actions. The broad context of how the privatization happened with billion-dollar companies selling for cents on the dollar was interesting to me. The politics and outcomes for so many individuals was too detailed for me.
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- Z
- 11-28-19
Excellent!
At first I was intimidate by the length of the book, but once I started listening I couldn’t “put it down”. Great listen and very interesting!
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- ivan
- 03-01-14
Supreme Chronicle of Murky Times
This is by far the best book on this period of Russian history that I have encountered.
The author struggling to present a complex economic/social history to the general reader faces two potential pitfalls. One is to simplify everything to the point of being patronizing. The other is to air on the side of the more technical information that will be alienating to non-academic readers and take away from the human narrative.
This book avoids both of these risks and strikes a perfect balance between stories of men who advanced in this tumultuous period and the systematic/structural shifts that allowed for their rise.
We all know that command economy has failed in the Soviet Union but this book explains why it did without becoming technical or dull. We all know that oligarchs rose from the ashes of the empire, this book explains how they did. We are all familiar with the pervasive corruption in Russia, this book shows how corruption was used to wield power by the mayor of Moscow and the Kremlin itself.
The old historical debate pits those who believe that men make history versus the scholars who emphasize structural forces that toss around the lives of people who are not important in on of themselves. The truth most intelligent people grasp instinctively is that history is made in a messy struggle, the Yin and Yang, between the fates of individuals and larger historical forces. Each trying to define the other.
You want find a better story of this struggle than David Hoffman's book.
Ivan
~Ivan's Shady Existence Blog
***
A word about the narrator. As a native Russian speaker hearing him pronounce Russian names and words is like hearing someone scratch the chalk board. Obviously the pronunciation of Russian words in an American book will not be precise. I wouldn't be asking for that. But the emphasis is sometimes shifted so much that the original Russian name or word becomes unrecognizable.
Imagine listening to a Russian book where the name George Bush would be pronounced as "Dzorge Push"
When it comes to the flow of the book the narration is perfect but its a shame that no one familiar with the Russian language was consulted on the narration to make it a little better.
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- Philo
- 11-11-17
Amazing as economics, history, character study
This gives me the same sensation as a great documentary does: a sense of peering through a window, clean and clear and literal, at the most harrowing and instructive of realities. Here I am, looking over these individuals' shoulders, feeling them tremble, as they face the great questions of their societies' destinies. We find out who heroic figures are, in my sense of the word, when we observe people, perhaps not seemingly touched by greatness to begin with, who must grope as chasms of uncertainty open beneath them, who must build bridges where no clear path or support is evident. Many such characters can be met here, as Russia staggered away from a comprehensively failing socialism, as it is so vividly described here, down to the last rotting tomato in a vast mismanaged distribution center. In econ-tech terms, these stories provide a textbook of internal frictions and agency costs of forced-distributive systems, which brought the ideals of communism staggering clumsily to collapse. At that level, it is easy to see why desperate people must betray the system and furtively grasp for market exchanges to survive. The story does not come all the way to present times, so at least one more book will be needed before I can feel well-briefed. So sad it is, that Russia lurched (perhaps merely due to the speed, but look at China's dissimilar experiment in an only slightly longer time-frame) into a gangster-capitalism, and must await another epoch maybe, for a more humane and balanced system to arrive. But these characters were vaulting across great precipices, fueled by their few capitalist books. This is where ideas are stress-tested and sometimes tested to destruction against fast-breaking realities. There were opportunities everywhere, but risks, oh my!
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- Andis Harasani
- 05-23-18
Great book
Such a great book. Facts very well distributed over each chapter. A never old history of changes in Russia. And coming from Albania it makes the book more interesting for me. A lot of connections between the changes in the two countries
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