Audiobooks narrated by Bill Thatcher

Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society

Something basic is missing in our culture. Americans know it. Nothing much works as it should. Simple daily choices seem impossible, or fraught with peril. In the workplace, we walk on eggshells. Big projects get stalled in years of review. Endemic social problems such as homelessness become, well, more endemic. Everyday Freedom offers a radical reinterpretation of the corrosion of American culture. The assault on authority after the 1960s, aimed at enhancing freedom, instead created a plague of powerlessness. The teacher in the classroom, the principal in a school, the nurse in the hospital, the official in Washington, the parent on a field trip . . . all have their hands tied. Things don't work, and Americans have lost the freedom to be themselves. Everyday Freedom offers a radical vision for change: Re-empower Americans in their everyday choices. The massive legal structures erected since the 1960s were based on flawed notions that human judgment could be replaced by elaborate dictates. These failed structures must be replaced with simpler frameworks activated by human responsibility and accountability. Nothing will work sensibly until Americans are free to draw on their skills, intuitions, and values when confronting daily challenges. This is the only cure to alienation. This is also the only way to deliver good government.

Philip K. Howard (Author), Bill Thatcher (Narrator)

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Kissing My Ass Goodbye

Tom Mccaffrey (Author), Bill Thatcher (Narrator)

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Night Fighter: An Insider’s Story of Special Ops from Korea to SEAL Team 6

For readers of American Sniper, the stirring account of a life of service by the “father of the US Navy SEALs” One month after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, when President John F. Kennedy pressed Congress about America’s “urgent national needs,” he named expanding US special operations forces along with putting a man on the moon. Captain William Hamilton was the officer tasked with creating the finest unconventional warriors ever seen. Merging his own experience commanding Navy Underwater Demolition Teams with expertise from Army Special Forces and the CIA, and working with his subordinate, Roy Boehm, he cast the mold for sea-, air-, and land-dispatched night fighters capable of successfully completing any mission anywhere in the world. Initially, they were used as a counter to the potential devastation of nuclear war, and later for counterterrorism and hostage rescue. His vision led to the formation of the celebrated SEAL Team 6. In this stirring, action-filled book, Hamilton tells his story for the first time. Night Fighter is a trove of true adventure from the history of the late twentieth century, which Hamilton lived, from fighter pilot in the Korean War to operative for the CIA in Vietnam, Africa, Latin America, and Europe, from the Pentagon to Foggy Bottom, and from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Reagan White House’s Star Wars. Like American Sniper, here is the record of a life devoted to patriotic service.

Charles W. Sasser, William H. Hamilton (Author), Bill Thatcher (Narrator)

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Marine!: The Life of Chesty Puller

The gripping story of an extraordinary American hero, the most decorated man in U.S. Marine Corps history, from a New York Times bestselling author. In the glorious chronicles of the U.S. Marine Corps, no name is more revered than that of Lt. Gen. Lewis B. 'Chesty' Puller. The only fighting man to receive the Navy Cross five separate times-a military honor second only to the Congressional Medal of Honor-he was the epitome of a professional warrior. A son of the South, descendant of Robert E. Lee, and cousin to George S. Patton, Puller began his enlisted career during World War I and moved up through the ranks as he proved his battlefield mettle in Haiti and Nicaragua, with the Horse Marines in Peking, in the Pacific Theater of World War II, and in the nightmarish winter engagements of the Korean War. Fearless and seemingly indestructible, adored by the troops he championed yet forced into early retirement by a high command that resented his 'lowly' beginnings and unwillingness to play politics, Puller remains one of most towering figures in American military history. Bestselling military biographer Burke Davis paints the definitive portrait of this extraordinary marine hero.

Burke Davis (Author), Bill Thatcher (Narrator)

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The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force

"Speak softly and carry a big stick" Theodore Roosevelt famously said in 1901, when the United States was emerging as a great power. It was the right sentiment, perhaps, in an age of imperial rivalry. But today many Americans doubt the utility of their global military presence, thinking it outdated, unnecessary, or even dangerous. In The Big Stick, Eliot A. Cohen-a scholar and practitioner of international relations-disagrees. He argues that hard power remains essential for American foreign policy. While acknowledging that the United States must be careful about why, when, and how it uses force, he insists that its international role is as critical as ever, and armed force is vital to that role. Cohen explains that American leaders must learn to use hard power in new ways and for new circumstances. The rise of a well-armed China, Russia's conquest of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran, and the spread of radical Islamist movements like ISIS are some of the key threats to global peace. If the United States relinquishes its position as a strong but prudent military power and fails to accept its role as the guardian of a stable world order, we run the risk of unleashing disorder, violence, and tyranny on a scale not seen since the 1930s. The United States is still, as Madeleine Albright once dubbed it, "the indispensable nation."

Eliot A. Cohen (Author), Bill Thatcher (Narrator)

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Black Friday

Black Friday. The American Way Mall is packed with holiday shoppers and bargain seekers. Machine-gun fire rings out, and within minutes hundreds are dead and dying. Others are taken hostage by an army of fanatical Middle Eastern terrorists ready to blast the American Way Mall into a pile of rubble. But one man-Iraq War vet Tobey Lanning-refuses to go down without a fight. Separated from his soon-to-be fiancee, Lanning finds himself on the frontlines of a new war against terror. The FBI and the local police are helpless. The battle is going to be lost or won inside the mall. With thousands of innocent lives at stake, Lanning assembles a makeshift platoon of Black Friday shoppers. A teenage security guard. A retired Chicago cop. A school teacher who's never fired a gun. A young ex-con who has. A soccer mom. A priest. A wheelchair-bound World War II vet . . . These brave everyday Americans will stand up and meet the enemy face to face. Defend their land, their values, their honor-and, if necessary, pay the ultimate price for freedom . . .

J. A. Johnstone, William W. Johnstone (Author), Bill Thatcher (Narrator)

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Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era

In Mission Failure, Michael Mandelbaum, one of America's leading foreign policy thinkers, provides an original, provocative, and definitive account of the ambitious but deeply flawed post-Cold War efforts to promote American values and American institutions throughout the world. In the decades before the Cold War ended, the United States used its military power to defend against threats to important American international interests or to the American homeland itself. When the Cold War concluded, however, it embarked on military interventions in places where American interests were not at stake. Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo had no strategic or economic importance for the United States, yet the US intervened in all of them for purely humanitarian reasons. Each such intervention led to efforts to transform the local political and economic systems. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq turned into similar missions of transformation-none of them achieved its aims. Mission Failure describes and explains how such missions came to be central to America's post-Cold War foreign policy, even in relations with China and Russia in the early 1990s and in American diplomacy in the Middle East, and how they all failed. Mandelbaum shows how American efforts to bring peace, national unity, democracy, and free-market economies to poor, disorderly countries ran afoul of ethnic and sectarian loyalties and hatreds as well as foundered on the absence of the historical experiences and political habits, skills, and values that Western institutions require. The history of American foreign policy in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall is, he writes, "the story of good, sometimes noble, and thoroughly American intentions coming up against the deeply embedded, often harsh, and profoundly un-American realities of places far from the United States. In this encounter the realities prevailed." "[Mission Failure is] going to be one of the most talked about foreign policy books of the year...A must-read."-New York Times

Michael Mandelbaum (Author), Bill Thatcher (Narrator)

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Call Sign Extortion 17: The Shoot-down of Seal Team Six

On August 6, 2011-three months after members of Navy SEAL Team Six killed Osama Bin Laden-Taliban forces took down a United States helicopter, call sign "Extortion 17." The attack killed the Air National Guard crew, seven unidentified members of the Afghan military, and seventeen members of Navy SEAL Team Six-warrior brothers from the same Team that had killed Osama Bin Laden just ninety days prior. Were the seven Afghan soldiers aboard that helicopter really undercover Taliban who either maneuvered the chopper within easy range of being shot down or sabotaged it from within? Were the SEALs sacrificed on the altar of political correctness and deliberately flown into a known Taliban hot zone? Don Brown, a former U.S. Navy JAG officer stationed at the Pentagon and a former special assistant United States attorney, re-creates the wartime action, tells the life stories of the elite warriors our nation lost on that day, and tears apart the official military explanation of the incident contained in the infamous Colt Report, which reveals either gross incompetence or a massive cover-up.

Don Brown (Author), Bill Thatcher (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Bill Thatcher