American Eclipse
A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World
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Narrated by:
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Jonathan Yen
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By:
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David Baron
About this listen
In the scorching summer of 1878, with the Gilded Age in its infancy, three tenacious and brilliant scientists raced to Wyoming and Colorado to observe a rare total solar eclipse. One sought to discover a new planet. Another - an adventuresome female astronomer - fought to prove that science was not anathema to femininity. And a young megalomaniacal inventor, with the tabloid press fast on his heels, sought to test his scientific bona fides and light the world through his revelations.
David Baron brings to three-dimensional life these three competitors - James Craig Watson, Maria Mitchell, and Thomas Edison - and thrillingly re-creates the fierce jockeying of 19th-century American astronomy. With spellbinding accounts of train robberies and Indian skirmishes, the mythologized age of the last days of the Wild West comes alive as never before. A magnificent portrayal of America's dawn as a scientific superpower, American Eclipse depicts a young nation that looked to the skies to reveal its towering ambition and expose its latent genius.
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- By: Erik Larson
- Narrated by: Bob Balaban
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men: Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication. Their lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.
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Reader cannot read
- By Bob on 12-08-07
By: Erik Larson
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Falling Upwards
- How We Took to the Air
- By: Richard Holmes
- Narrated by: Gildart Jackson
- Length: 13 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Falling Upwards tells the story of the enigmatic group of men and women who first risked their lives to take to the air and so discovered a new dimension of human experience. Why they did it, what their contemporaries thought of them, and how their flights revealed the secrets of our planet in wholly unexpected ways is its subject.
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Great history of early ballooning
- By Jeffrey L. Smith, PE on 11-30-24
By: Richard Holmes
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The Wright Brothers
- By: David McCullough
- Narrated by: David McCullough
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize David McCullough tells the dramatic story behind the story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly: Wilbur and Orville Wright.
On December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Wilbur and Orville Wright's Wright Flyer became the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled, sustained flight with a pilot aboard. The Age of Flight had begun. How did they do it? And why?
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Disappointing
- By Sara on 07-10-16
By: David McCullough
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To Conquer the Air
- The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight
- By: James Tobin
- Narrated by: Boyd Gaines
- Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
- Abridged
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To Conquer the Air is a hero's tale of overcoming obstacles within and without that plumbs the depths of creativity and character. With a historian's accuracy and a novelist's eye, Tobin has captured the interplay of remarkable personalities at an extraordinary moment in our history. In the centennial year of human flight, To Conquer the Air is itself a heroic achievement.
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A great story
- By Jere on 05-30-03
By: James Tobin
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The Path Between the Seas
- The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914
- By: David McCullough
- Narrated by: Nelson Runger
- Length: 31 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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The Path Between the Seas tells the story of the men and women who fought against all odds to fulfill the 400-year-old dream of constructing an aquatic passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It is a story of astonishing engineering feats, tremendous medical accomplishments, political power plays, heroic successes, and tragic failures. McCullough expertly weaves the many strands of this momentous event into a captivating tale.
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No Stone Unturned
- By Tim on 06-25-13
By: David McCullough
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Chasing Venus
- The Race to Measure the Heavens
- By: Andrea Wulf
- Narrated by: Robin Sachs
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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On June 6, 1761, the world paused to observe a momentous occasion: the first transit of Venus between the earth and the sun in more than a century. Through that observation, astronomers could calculate the size of the solar system - but only if they could compile data from many different points of the globe, all recorded during the short period of the transit. Fortunately, transits of Venus occur in pairs: eight years later, the scientists would have another opportunity to succeed.
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Fascinating history, beautifully told
- By GC1 on 04-26-16
By: Andrea Wulf
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The Man Who Loved China
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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No cloistered don, this tall, married Englishman was a freethinking intellectual, who practiced nudism and was devoted to a quirky brand of folk dancing. In 1937, while working as a biochemist at Cambridge University, he instantly fell in love with a visiting Chinese student, with whom he began a lifelong affair. He soon became fascinated with China, and his mistress swiftly persuaded the ever-enthusiastic Needham to travel to her home country, where he embarked on a series of extraordinary expeditions to the farthest frontiers of this ancient empire.
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turn your watch back 70 years
- By Andy on 05-22-08
By: Simon Winchester
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The Apparitionists
- A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost
- By: Peter Manseau
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America's imagination. A "spirit photographer", William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation. Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for contact with their dead husbands and sons. It took a circus-like trial of Mumler on fraud charges to expose a fault line of doubt and manipulation.
By: Peter Manseau
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Chief Engineer
- Washington Roebling, the Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge
- By: Erica Wagner
- Narrated by: Jo Anna Perrin
- Length: 14 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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His father conceived of the Brooklyn Bridge, but after John Roebling's sudden death, Washington Roebling built what has become one of American's most iconic structures - as much a part of New York as the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. Yet, as recognizable as the bridge is, its builder is too often forgotten - and his life is of interest far beyond his chosen field. It is the story of immigrants, of the frontier, of the greatest crisis in American history, and of the making of the modern world.
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Monumental
- By charles mueller on 07-09-19
By: Erica Wagner
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Tesla vs Edison
- A Captivating Guide to the War of the Currents and the Life of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison
- By: Captivating History
- Narrated by: Duke Holm
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Human history has seen many surprising and profound turning points. The ways that humans learned to use raw materials to create activity and resources set the stage for the most compelling and life-altering phase of the modern era, the Industrial Revolution. Born during this time on different continents but connected by similar interests, two men indelibly marked their generation and those that followed with their genius and foresight. This audiobook covers the war of currents and the individual lives of Tesla and Edison.
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Arduous
- By Hasbro on 10-22-18
What listeners say about American Eclipse
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Robert W. Tippin
- 07-08-17
Nature, Scientific Discovery, Equality, & Eclipse
This a good primer for what to expect out of the 2017 eclipse and the one coming in the 2020's. It is a wonderful historical narrative about the slow development of scientific theories. Especially how the only scientific facts are those that tell us what Nature isn't. In some small part this book gives an insight into how scientific progress comes after a society is able to fund it when its economy has developed excess capital much like that needed for the arts. There is also some exposition on the negative effects of competition and ego in science. It also reminds us of the slow recognition of woman's place in science and society.
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- Donna C. Scott
- 07-12-24
The history of various inventors. I liked the description of the women and the part that placed in history.
Too many facts and numbers. There was.not enough information regarding what the characters looked liked..
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- Melanie A Hwalek
- 09-18-17
Just OK.
The book is more about the lives of contemporary scientists than about eclipses. Liked the little bit about history of women astrologists.
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1 person found this helpful
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- newyorkaise
- 08-22-17
Great prep for eclipse viewing
I'm not sure I'd have found this as interesting if I read it a couple years ago, but in the run-up to the Aug 21 2017 American eclipse it was really fun. Gave me a lot of interesting material to share with others traveling to see the eclipse like I was. Author does a good job of contextualizing the event, but ultimately the relative dearth of information about what regular folks thought about the 1878 eclipse means the bulk of the story is about the famous people involved and the general circumstances.
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- Roy Sachleben
- 11-12-17
wonderful tale
while the book stumbles a bit after the headliner event, the while is still a great story. I loved hearing about the state of science before and after the Great Eclipse.
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- Blaise
- 05-06-24
Good, but dated to this year's eclipse.
The book's premise was validated in that the eclipse described was influential in establishing America as a world scientific power, but this book was only marginally engaging.
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- Desiree Willis
- 10-15-17
Eclispse brought to life!
I loved this book! I heard about it on the podcast Science Talk and decided to purchase it. I am a regular Jane who loves science but doesn't learn it easily. I am more of a history person so this was a perfect way to learn about solar eclipses. Baron truly brings the stories of Edison, Mitchell, and Watson to life. I knew little about Mitchell and now have a new historic woman to discover. I'm from Cincinnati and a member of the Cincinnati Observatory so I loved reading about us and Abbe Cleveland in Chapter 13. Once I started it, I couldn't stop. It was engaging and made so many scientific principles simple and enjoyable to understand. Will be looking into more of David Baron's books. So glad I heard him on the podcast.
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- LEE WARREN
- 06-25-17
Don't listen to Jonathan Yen!
What would have made American Eclipse better?
A reader who simply read the book, rather than someone who dramatized every word, so much so that I couldn't stand to listen to it. Just tell the tale!!
What did you like best about this story?
Great idea for a book. Hope to read it some time.
What didn’t you like about Jonathan Yen’s performance?
Too dramatic and inflected. Just read the thing!! The inflections were so distracting I couldn't hear the story, and avoided it.
You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?
Great book, good idea for a book.
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- Tim Bishop
- 01-15-24
Disorganized and irrelevant
Rambling collection of factoids that add up to a waste of time. Don’t bother with this one. You’ll get nothing out of it.
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