The Alternative History Audiobook Chronicles Best of May 2024
WRITTEN BY Sounded Best Of
ARTICLE TYPE Book of the Week
PUBLISHED ON 2024-05-12
The Alternative History Audiobook Chronicles Best of May 2024
Curated with care Top Alternative History audiobooks for May 2024.
The Greatest Story Ever Told - The Yeshua Years by Rebe James
The saga continues as Yosef and Miriam settle into life in Nazara. They are blessed with children, but Herod, the ruler of Judea has ordered the death of all males between the age of two and four. Their youngest, Yeshua, falls into this category. This is the thrilling tale of Yeshua Cu Cuileann, son of Yosef of Arimathea and Miriam bat Helios. Known as the Day Star who is destined to save mankind, Yeshua does his best to ignore the prophesies of his birth and to lead as normal a life as possible. It is also the story of a love that was meant to be. Mariamne bat Herod Philip is the granddaughter of Herod the Great. She meets Yeshua at the young age of seven and it doesn't take long for her to fall head over heels for this atypical aristocrat. Although Yeshua returns the sentiment, power, intrigue and a horrific secret keeps him from declaring himself. From the depths of Egypt where he has gone into hiding, to his education at Qumran and eventually Jerusalem under the tutelage of the esteemed Rabbi Gamaliel, the wonders of Yeshua's childhood are brought to life. The missing years of this esteemed youth are also revealed as we explore his travels through the Eastern lands to learn from the greatest sages of old. Will he be able to curtail the horrific evils he has uncovered? Will he find a way to stop those in power who want to keep the masses enslaved? And what lies in store for Yeshua and Mariamne of Magdala? Will he need to give her up to keep her safe, or will they be together for all time?
In a future Denmark, Karl Nielsen, Royal Clockmaker, is recalled to the Round Tower to design the King's most ambitious project yet - a vehicle to travel into space. The second book in the Kingdom of Clockwork series is a quirky, humorous tale of Nordic monarchs, Irish monks, jazz records, airships, submarines, spacecraft and conspiracies.
Drei Könige – Bruderkriege by Bernd Michael Grosch
Drei Königsbrüder führen Scheinkriege gegeneinander, um die eigene Bevölkerung, welche von Hungersnöten bedroht ist, hinter’s Licht zu führen und gleichzeitig zu dezimieren, so daß die nach den Kriegen geschrumpfte Bevölkerung den eigenen Herrscher weiterhin respektiert und verehrt und die Schuld an der Misere den vorgeblichen ausländischen Feinden gibt. Charaktereigenschaften der drei Königsbrüder werden beschrieben, - insbesondere der moralische Abstieg des Jüngsten, Eberhard, der durch Trunk (später durch Haschischessen und sexuelle Ausschweifungen) vom lustigen Schwerenöter zum Psychopathen wird. FSK: Ab 18 !
Lincoln's connection to black history may go much further than his role in slavery. In the 2001 book 'Black People and Their Place in History', historian Leroy Vaughn, alleges that Lincoln’s father was African American and his mother had Ethiopian ethnicity, both of which may have explained his “very dark skin and coarse hair.” The fact is his rivals campaigned using propaganda that depicted Lincoln as “Abraham Africanus the First,” an African man. It is claimed that Abraham Lincoln, who became America’s 16th President in 1860, was a Melungeon; a person of European, African-American and Native American ancestry. But beyond even that thoughtful historical proposition the late scholar Lerone Bennet Jr. sees America's most beloved president in a very different light to how he has been portrayed throughout time. Bennet hit a nerve in his research and writing on Lincoln. His book, 'Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream', questions Lincoln's role as the "Great Emancipator". The work was described by one reviewer as a "flawed mirror." It was further criticized by historians of the Civil War period as faulty. In his introduction, Bennett wrote: "The idea of the book is simple: Everything you think you know about Lincoln and race is wrong. Every schoolchild, for example, knows the story of "the great emancipator" who freed Negroes with a stroke of the pen out of the goodness of his heart. The real Lincoln ... was a conservative politician who said repeatedly that he believed in white supremacy. Not only that: He opposed the basic principle of the Emancipation Proclamation until his death and was literally forced – Count Adam Gurowski said he was literally whipped – "into the glory of having issued the Emancipation Proclamation," which Lincoln drafted in such a way that it did not in and of itself free a single slave."
Raised as a Catholic in rural Vermont, I was infused with an awareness of sin and penitence, but also absolution and forgiveness. My late teenage encounter with Dostoevsky’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” shattered my youthful allegiance to Catholic dogma, but it’s one thing to walk away from Catholic doctrine and quite another to lose the weight of its beauty, fear, and guilt. Shortly after I read The Brothers Karamazov, in which “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” occurs as a story told by Ivan Karamazov, the sybarite, to his novice monk brother, Alyosha, I read Dante’s Inferno. I was fascinated by the vivid portrayal of the hell I’d heard about so graphically from the Québécois sisters who came down to teach Saturday morning catechism. I saw in Dante’s work and the extraordinary illustrations of Gustav Doré the hell I had imagined in catechism, a hell that haunts my imagination to this day. Is sin a temporal concept? Some of the sins of Dante’s time are not viewed as such today: heresy, suicide, concupiscence. His simple architecture of human sin is lost today in scale and technology. In 1320, one killed with one’s hands or with a piercing weapon like a stiletto, battle-axe, or sword, or with poison. Today, we have drones, nuclear bombs, and industrial toxins leaching into our soil, water, food, and air — and Pharma: subliminal mass homicides. The Correctional Facility comes after a lifetime of living with Catholicism and Dante’s weight of sin, evil, punishment, expiation, and redemption, and is my effort to make sense of it all.