Audiobooks narrated by Eric Jason Martin

After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America

After Life is a collective history of how Americans experienced, navigated, commemorated, and ignored mass death and loss during the global COVID-19 pandemic, mass uprisings for racial justice, and the near presidential coup in 2021 following the 2020 election. Inspired by the writers who documented American life during the Great Depression and World War II for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the editors asked twenty-first-century historians and legal experts to focus on the parallels, convergences, and differences between the exceptional 'long 2020', while it unfolds, and earlier eras in US history. Providing context for the entire volume, After Life's Introduction explains how COVID-19 and America's long history of inequality, combined with a corrupt and unconcerned federal government, produced one of the darkest times in our nation's history. Discussing the rise of the COVID-19 death toll in the United States, eventually exceeding the 1918 flu, the AIDS epidemic, and the Civil War, it ties public health, immigration, white supremacy, elections history, and epidemics together, and provides a short history of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the beginnings of a Third Reconstruction. After Life documents how Americans have dealt with grief, pain, and loss, both individually and communally, and how we endure and thrive.

Keri Leigh Merritt, Rhae Lynn Barnes, Yohuru Williams (Author), David Lee Huynh, Eric Jason Martin, Kim Ramirez, LaNecia Edmonds, Leon Nixon, Rebecca Mitchell (Narrator)

Audiobook

Decent Interval: An Insider's Account of Saigon's Indecent End Told by the CIA's Chief Strategy Anal

Widely regarded as a classic on the Vietnam War, Decent Interval provides a scathing critique of the CIA's role in and final departure from that conflict. Still the most detailed and respected account of America's final days in Vietnam, the book was written at great risk and ultimately at great sacrifice by an author who believed in the CIA's cause but was disillusioned by the agency's treacherous withdrawal, leaving thousands of Vietnamese allies to the mercy of an angry enemy. A quarter-century later, it remains a riveting and powerful testament to one of the darkest episodes in American history.

Frank Snepp (Author), Eric Jason Martin (Narrator)

Audiobook

Illegitimate Authority: Facing the Challenges of Our Time

Brought to you by Penguin. In these incisive interviews, activist Chomsky addresses the urgent questions of this tumultuous time, speaking to the deterioration of democracy in the United States and rising tensions globally. He examines the crumbling of the social fabric and the fractures of the Biden era, including the halting steps toward a Green New Deal, the illegitimate authority of the Supreme Court, in particular its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, and the ongoing fallout from COVID-19. Chomsky also untangles the roots of the War in Ukraine, the diplomatic tensions among the United States, China, and Russia, and considers the need for climate action on an international scale. Illegitimate Authority exposes those who wield power in their own self-interest and plots framework for how we can stand together and fight against injustice. ‘One of the greatest, most radical public thinkers of our time’ ARUNDHATI ROY 'The West's most prominent critic of US imperialism . . . the closest thing in the English-speaking world to an intellectual superstar' Guardian 'Will there ever again be a public intellectual who commands the attention of so many across the planet?' New Statesman © Noam Chomsky and C. J. Polychroniou 2023 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

C.J. Polychroniou, Noam Chomsky (Author), Eric Jason Martin, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Mission to Mao: US Intelligence and the Chinese Communists in World War II

From 1941 to 1947, the United States planted a liaison mission in the headquarters of Chinese Communist forces behind the lines. Nicknamed the 'Dixie Mission,' for its location in 'rebel' territory, it was an interagency delegation that included intelligence officers from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Mission to Mao is a social history of the OSS officers in the field that reveals the weakness of United States intelligence diplomacy in the 1940s. Drawing on over 14,000 unpublished records from five archives as well as white papers and memoirs from the participants, Sara B. Castro demonstrates how the OSS officers clashed with political appointees and Washington over the direction of the United States relationship with the Chinese Communists. Initially, the OSS officers were sent to gather intelligence that would help the war effort against Japan, but interagency and political conflicts erupted over whether the mission would later involve operations with the Communists. Castro shows how potential benefits for the war effort were thwarted by politicization and the OSS officers' own biases and blind spots. Mission to Mao is a fresh look at United States intelligence in World War II China and takes listeners beyond the history of 'China hands' versus American anticommunists, introducing more nuance.

Sara B. Castro (Author), Eric Jason Martin (Narrator)

Audiobook

Japan's Holocaust: History of Imperial Japan's Mass Murder and Rape During World War II

Japan's Holocaust combines research conducted in over eighteen research facilities in five nations to explore Imperial Japan's atrocities from 1927 to 1945 during its military expansions and reckless campaigns throughout Asia and the Pacific. This book brings together the most recent scholarship and new primary research to ascertain that Japan claimed a minimum of thirty million lives, slaughtering more than Hitler's Nazi Germany. Japan's Holocaust shows that Emperor Hirohito not only knew about the atrocities his legions committed, but actually ordered them. He did nothing to stop them when they exceeded even the most depraved person's imagination, as illustrated during the Rape of Nanking as well as many other events. Japan's Holocaust will document in painful detail that the Rape of Nanking was not an isolated event during the Asian War but rather representative of how Japan behaved for all its campaigns throughout Asia and the Pacific from 1927 to 1945. Mass murder, rape, and economic exploitation was Japan's modus operandi during this period, and whereas Hitler's SS Death's Head outfits attempted to hide their atrocities, Hirohito's legions committed their atrocities out in the open. Moreover, whereas Germany has done much since World War II to atone for its crimes and to document them, Japan has been disgraceful with its reparations for its crimes.

Bryan Mark Rigg Phd (Author), Eric Jason Martin (Narrator)

Audiobook

Where Tyranny Begins: The Justice Department, the FBI, and the War on Democracy

Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump intimidated, silenced, and bent to his will Justice Department and FBI officials. He sowed public doubt in both agencies so successfully that when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, he paid little political cost and, despite an unprecedented array of criminal indictments, easily won the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election. In Where Tyranny Begins, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Rohde investigates the strategies Trump systematically used to turn the country's two most powerful law-enforcement agencies into his personal political weapons. Rohde also reveals how, during the Biden years, Justice Department non-partisan 1970s norms that Attorney General Merrick Garland reinforced inadvertently helped Trump, and could fail to deliver a trial and legal accountability by Election Day 2024. Where Tyranny Begins exposes how ill-suited both the DOJ and FBI are to serve as checks on abuses of presidential power. A round of historic reforms equivalent to the post-Watergate reforms that stabilized American democracy in the 1970s are immediately needed. A five-word warning coined by the English philosopher John Locke in 1689 captures the stakes in 2024: 'Where-ever law ends, tyranny begins.'

David Rohde (Author), Eric Jason Martin (Narrator)

Audiobook

Elections: A Very Short Introduction

Elections occur in all democracies and many nondemocratic regimes as well. They determine who will hold public office and who will have the power to govern. They connect citizens to those whom they choose to make decisions on their behalf and who regulate their behavior. This book looks comparatively at the key aspects of elections. In addition to describing types of electoral systems, it discusses the implications of the various systems for the administration of elections, voter participation, representation, government stability, and other factors. Where appropriate, it examines efforts to reform a nation's (or a sub-national entity's) system, exploring the impetus for reform and the effects of those reforms when implemented. L. Sandy Maisel and Jennifer A. Yoder lay out the variety of electoral systems in the broadest terms—single-member district plurality systems; proportional systems; and mixed systems. They discuss voting and the various electoral institutions used to implement the ways in which voting occurs and how votes are tabulated across electoral systems. They analyze the consequences of each system, first for the functioning of the democracy, and second for the electoral strategies politicians employ, closing with a discussion of reforms under consideration in a number of countries.

Jennifer A. Yoder, L. Sandy Maisel (Author), Eric Jason Martin (Narrator)

Audiobook

Too Far on a Whim: The Limits of High-Steam Propulsion in the US Navy

In Too Far on a Whim, Tyler A. Pitrof presents a high-spirited revision of the US Navy's commitment to high-steam propulsion systems, the mainstay of its World War II fleets. Pitrof's research persuasively demonstrates that in its war against the Imperial Japanese Navy, the US Navy succeeded despite its high-steam propulsion systems rather than because of them. War with an aggressive Japan and a resurgent Germany loomed in the dark days of the late 1930s. Rear Admiral Harold G. Bowen Sr., head of the US Navy's Bureau of Engineering, advanced a radical vision: a new fleet based on high-steam propulsion, a novel technology that promised high speeds with smaller engines and better fuel efficiency. The official record of high-steam technology's subsequent performance has relied heavily on Bowen's own memoir, in which he painted high-steam innovation in heroic colors. Pitrof's empirical review of primary sources such as maintenance records illuminates the opposite. Pitrof provides an account that extends far beyond technology and into matters of naval hierarchies and bureaucracy, strategic theory, and ego. To Far on a Whim is a landmark for those interested in naval history and technology.

Tyler A. Pitrof (Author), Eric Jason Martin (Narrator)

Audiobook

When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

A lively, revelatory look back at the convulsions at the end of the Reagan era—and their dark legacy today. With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated, and U.S. power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a “kinder, gentler America.” Instead, it was a period of rising anger and domestic turmoil, anticipating the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today. In When the Clock Broke, the acclaimed political writer John Ganz tells the story of America’s late-century discontents. Ranging from upheavals in Crown Heights and Los Angeles to the advent of David Duke and the heartland survivalists, the broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh, and the bitter disputes between neoconservatives and the “paleo-con” right, Ganz immerses us in a time when what Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk” took new and ever-wilder forms. In the 1992 campaign, Pat Buchanan's and Ross Perot’s insurgent populist bids upended the political establishment, all while Americans struggled through recession, alarm about racial and social change, the specter of a new power in Asia, and the end of Cold War–era political norms. Conspiracy theories surged, and intellectuals and activists strove to understand the “Middle American Radicals” whose alienation fueled new causes. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton appeared to forge a new, vital center, though it would not hold for long. In a rollicking, eye-opening book, Ganz narrates the fall of the Reagan order and the rise of a new and more turbulent America.

John Ganz (Author), Eric Jason Martin, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Wraithbound

Since he was a boy, Rae Kelthannis has dreamed of being a stormbinder like his father, with an air elemental stitched into the fabric of his soul and the winds of heaven at his command. Those dreams died when his father, through no fault of his own, fell into disgrace and was banned by the justicars of the Iron Council. The family fled to the edge of the Ordered World, to live in fear in the shadow of encroaching Chaos. When Rae defies his father's orders and attempts to stitch an air elemental to his soul, he instead binds himself to a mysterious wraith. That's when things get complicated and the world starts to fall apart around him. Literally.

Tim Akers (Author), Eric Jason Martin (Narrator)

Audiobook

Murder in Manchuria: The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat, and a

In Murder in Manchuria, Scott D. Seligman explores an unsolved murder set amid the chaos that reigned in China in the run-up to World War II. The story unfolds against the backdrop of a three-country struggle for control of Manchuria-an area some called China's 'Wild East'-and an explosive mixture of nationalities, religions, and ideologies. Semyon Kaspe, a young Jewish musician, is kidnapped, tortured, and ultimately murdered by disaffected, antisemitic White Russians, secretly acting on the orders of Japanese military overlords who covet his father's wealth. When local authorities deliberately slow-walk the search for the kidnappers, a young French diplomat takes over and launches his own investigation. Part cold-case thriller and part social history, the true, tragic saga of Kaspe is told in the context of the larger, improbable story of the lives of the twenty thousand Jews who called Harbin home at the beginning of the twentieth century. Scott D. Seligman recounts the events that led to their arrival and their hasty exodus-and solves a crime that has puzzled historians for decades.

Scott D. Seligman (Author), Eric Jason Martin (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations

A groundbreaking investigative narrative that trails the money and massive wealth amassed from slavery from pre-Civil War to today, proving how our modern economy was built on the backs of enslaved Black people. In this timely, powerful, investigative history, The Stolen Wealth of Slavery, Emmy Award-nominated journalist David Montero follows the trail of the massive wealth amassed by Northern corporations throughout America's history of enslavement. It has long been maintained by many that the North wasn't complicit in the horrors of slavery. The truth, however, is that large Northern banks-including well-known institutions like Citibank, Bank of New York, and Bank of America-were critical to the financing of slavery; that they saw their fortunes rise dramatically from their involvement in the business of enslavement; and that white business leaders and their surrounding communities created enormous wealth from the enslavement and abuse of Black bodies. The Stolen Wealth of Slavery grapples with facts that will be a revelation to many: Most white Southern enslavers were not rich-many were barely making ends meet-with Northern businesses benefitting the most from bondage-based profits. And some of the very Northerners who would be considered pro-Union during the Civil War were in fact anti-abolition, seeing the institution of slavery as being in their best financial interests, and only supporting the Union once they realized doing so would be good for business. It is a myth that the wealth generated from slavery vanished after the war. Rather, it helped finance the industrialization of the country, and became part of the bedrock of the growth of modern corporations, helping to transform America into a global economic behemoth. In this remarkable book, Montero elegantly and meticulously details rampant Northern investment in slavery. He showcases exactly what was stolen, who stole it, and to whom it is owed, calling for corporate reparations as he details contemporary movements to hold companies accountable for past atrocities.

David Montero (Author), Eric Jason Martin, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks Narrated by Eric Jason Martin