South America Audiobooks | Travel

Soledad & Compañía (Solitude and Company): Un retrato a voces de Gabriel García Márquez

Este libro es un boleto de entrada para una fiesta en la que todos hablan, todos gritan, todos opinan, se contradicen y hasta dicen mentiras. Bienvenidos. Soledad & Compañía es un retrato humano, fresco e irreverente de Gabriel García Márquez donde se entretejen las voces de sus amigos, sus seres queridos y hasta sus detractores, quienes nunca antes habían compartido sus historias con el primerio Nobel. Habla su mítica agente Carmen Balcells, su traductor al inglés, la española a quien dedicó Cien años de soledad, y hasta el escritor norteamericano William Styron, entre otros. Lo que se va desvelando es la biografía de Gabo desde los tiempos desordenados y esperanzadores en que un muchacho de provincia se propuso ser escritor hasta convertirse en uno de los autores más universalmente leídos y admirados.

Silvana Paternostro (Author), Daniela Sierra (Narrator)

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Populista: The Rise of Latin America's 21st Century Strongman

'An ambitious, riveting and essential book that has much to teach us about the recent history of this region, and about the human impulse towards populism that continues to shape the world' Ben Rhodes, bestselling author of The World As It Is 'A REVOLUTION IS A STRUGGLE TO THE DEATH BETWEEN THE FUTURE AND THE PAST.' FIDEL CASTRO For more than six decades, Fidel Castro's words have echoed through the politics of Latin America. His towering political influence still looms over the region today. The swing to the Left in Latin America, known as the 'Pink Tide', was the most important political movement in the Western Hemisphere in the 21st century. It involved some of the biggest, most colourful and most controversial characters in Latin America for decades, leaders who would leave an indelible mark on their nations and who were adored and reviled in equal measure. Parties became secondary to individual leaders and populism reigned from Venezuela to Brazil, from Central America to the Caribbean, financed by a spike in commodity prices and the oil-backed largesse of Venezuela's charismatic socialist president, Hugo Chávez. Yet within a decade and a half, it was all over. Today, this wave of populism has left the Americas in the hands of some of the most authoritarian and dangerous leaders since the military dictatorships of the 1970s. 2021 Head of Zeus

Will Grant (Author), Ed Hughes, Will Grant (Narrator)

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Cuba en la Encrucijada (Cuba at the Crossroads): 12 Perspectivas sobre la continuidad y el cambio en

Un libro de crónicas cubanas de la mano de doce de los más prestigiosos periodistas y escritores de nuestro tiempo que abarca política y arte, música y béisbol, presente y pasado, y nos ofrecen una excepcional instantánea de la particular encrucijada en la que se encuentra la sociedad cubana. "De todas las preguntas que debe hacerse el periodismo, solo hay una que, si hablamos de Cuba, puede responderse fácilmente: dónde. Todo el mundo sabe más o menos dónde queda Cuba. Para las demás: 'qué es Cuba, quiénes son los cubanos, cómo es Cuba, cuándo comenzó Cuba a ser lo que es, por qué Cuba es como es', y diversas variaciones y combinaciones de lo mismo no solo no hay respuestas fáciles sino que cada quien parece tener las suyas. "Los doce textos que componen este libro procuran alejarse de los reduccionismos más tópicos y contar el país desde el territorio más peligroso, y por lo mismo más interesante, de la duda y la contradicción. Contar Cuba -como contar el desembarco en Normandía o la caída del Muro de Berlín- es contar la Historia en mayúsculas: una tarea ambiciosa. Pero, en el tartamudeo ametrallado de los tiempos presentes, estos son algunos intentos.»

Leila Guerriero (Author), Adhemar Montagne, Isolda Peguero (Narrator)

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The Cristero War: The History and Legacy of the Major Religious Uprising in Mexico

The Cristero War in Mexico is the last great armed movement in a country that for a hundred years suffered revolution after revolution, in an apparently endless cycle. Ignored for decades, the war was long seen simply as an unwanted corollary of the Mexican Revolution, a kind of anomaly in the official narrative. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 produced an admirable social and agrarian reform, but created an authoritarian state. With no counterweights, the victorious revolutionary class fell into excesses and tried to put religious institutions under totalitarian control, and probably to actually suppress religion. In order to do that, the controversial president Plutarco Elías Calles confiscated church property, had monasteries, temples and confessional schools shut down, deported archbishops, had priests killed, nuns arrested, and declared that the next stage of the Revolution would be the revolution of the minds. This persecution produced one of the most little-known episodes in the history of Mexico, one that, for many years, the state tried to slide under the rug: the Cristero War, also known as the Cristiada, which for several years ravaged the central plateau of the country. The Cristiada began in 1927, and officially it ended two years later, though it boiled beneath the surface for ten more years. It was a rebellion of the poorest who were willing to take up arms to defend their spiritual freedom and fight a government that had declared, in practical terms, religion illegal. Unlike the revolutionary armies of a decade earlier, these armies of the poor were never funded by world powers.

Charles River Editors (Author), Daniel Houle (Narrator)

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The Popol Vuh Illustrated: The Mythic and Heroic Sagas of the Mayans

There is no document of greater importance to the study of the pre-Columbian mythology of America than the 'Popol Vuh.' It is the chief source of our knowledge of the mythology of the Kiché people of Central America, and it is further of considerable comparative value when studied in conjunction with the mythology of the Nahuatlacâ, or Mexican peoples. This interesting text, the recovery of which forms one of the most romantic episodes in the history of American bibliography, was written by a Christianised native of Guatemala sometime in the seventeenth century, and was copied in the Kiché language, in which it was originally written, by a monk of the Order of Predicadores, one Francisco Ximenes, who also added a Spanish translation and scholia.

Ryan Moorhen (Author), Robbie Smith, Tom Kingsley (Narrator)

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The Ancient Mythologies of Peru and Mexico: Exploring Surviving Historical Accounts of the Americas

Regarding the origin of the American mythologies, it is difficult to discover traces of foreign influence in either Mexico or Peru's religion. At the time of their subjugation by the Spaniard's legends were ripe in both countries of beneficent white and bearded men, who brought a fully developed culture. The question of Asiatic influences must not altogether be cast aside as an untenable theory; but it is well to bear in mind that such influences, did they ever exist, must have been of the most transitory description, and could have left but few traces upon the religion of the peoples in question. If any such contact took place, it was merely accidental, and, when speaking of faiths carried from Asia into America at the period of its original settlement, it is first necessary to premise that Pleistocene Man had already arrived at that stage of mental development in which the existence of supernatural beings is recognized—a premise with which modern anthropology would scarcely find itself in agreement.

Henry Romano (Author), Robbie Smith, Ryan Moorhen (Narrator)

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Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country

This hybrid collection of short crónicas, journalism, and personal essays on systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border draws together literary theory and historical analysis to outline how neoliberalism, corruption, and drug trafficking—culminating in the misnamed “war on drugs”—has shaped Mexico. Working from and against this political context, Cristina Rivera Garza posits that collective grief is an act of resistance against state violence and that writing is a powerful mode of seeking social justice and embodying resilience. As she states, “As we write, as we work with language—the humblest and most powerful force available to us—we activate the potential of words, phrases, sentences. Writing as we grieve, grieving as we write: a practice able to create refuge from the open. Writing with others. Grieving like someone who takes refuge from the open. Grieving, which is always a radically different mode of writing.”

Cristina Rivera Garza (Author), Marisa Blake (Narrator)

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The Aztec, Inca and Maya Empires: Digitally narrated using a synthesized voice

This recording has been digitally produced, by DeepZen Limited, using a synthesized version of an audiobook narrator’s voice under license. DeepZen uses Emotive Speech Technology to create digital narrations that offer a similar listening experience to human narration. The Aztec, Inca and Maya Empires charts the rise and fall pre-Columbian civilizations in Mesoamerica and South America, from the Maya to the Aztec and Inca empires, as well as the Zapotec, Olmec, Teotihuacan and Toltec civilizations. From government structures to marriage rites, from pyramids to human sacrifice, from agriculture to textiles, astronomy to hieroglyphics to ball games, the book explores the history of what today we call Latin America from its early kingdoms up to the crippling of the societies with the arrival of conquistadores and smallpox. The biggest Mesoamerican cities, such as Teotihuacan, Tenochtitlan and Cholula, were among the largest in the world. Mesoamerican civilisations are credited with many inventions: building pyramid-temples, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, writing, highly accurate calendars, fine arts, intensive agriculture, engineering, an abacus calculator, and complex theology. In South America, the Inca Empire, the largest empire in pre-Columbian America, was, at its height, possibly the largest in the world. And yet it achieved this without wheeled vehicles, animals to ride or draft animals, without using iron or steel, or developing a written script. The Aztec, Inca and Maya Empires is a fascinating account of Mesoamerican and South American civilisations from the 2nd century BCE to the 16th century CE.

Martin J. Dougherty (Author), Alice White (female Synthesized Voice) (Narrator)

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A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire

On March 10, 1920, in Pachuca, Mexico, the Compañía de Santa Gertrudis-the largest employer in the region, and a subsidiary of the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company-may have committed murder. The alert was first raised at six in the morning: a fire was tearing through the El Bordo mine. After a brief evacuation, the mouths of the shafts were sealed. Company representatives hastened to assert that "no more than ten" men remained inside the mineshafts, and that all ten were most certainly dead. Yet when the mine was opened six days later, the death toll was not ten, but eighty-seven. And there were seven survivors. A century later, acclaimed novelist Yuri Herrera has reconstructed a workers' tragedy at once globally resonant and deeply personal: Pachuca is his hometown. His work is an act of restitution for the victims and their families, bringing his full force of evocation to bear on the injustices that suffocated this horrific event into silence.

Yuri Herrera (Author), Armando Durán (Narrator)

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Azteca: Una Guía Fascinante De La Historia Azteca y la Triple Alianza de Tenochtitlán, Tetzcoco y Tl

Explora la Fascinante Historia y Mitología de los Aztecas Nada queda de la antigua civilización Mesoamericana que se autodenominaba los Mexicas, mejor conocidos por nosotros como los aztecas. Nada excepto su notable historia. En este libro, discutimos sus orígenes enigmáticos y cómo los Aztecas se elevaron de las tribus nómadas al poder dominante en Mesoamérica a una velocidad asombrosa. Vagará por las calles de su gran ciudad capital, Tenochtitlán, conocida como 'la Venecia del Nuevo Mundo' entre los conquistadores españoles, que difundieron el término por toda Europa. Descubrirá la magnitud del esplendor de la ciudad, visitando sus muchos puestos en el mercado, oliendo a chocolate fresco y vainas de vainilla. Se deleitará con el sabor de los aguacates maduros, recogidos a mano, y las tortillas de maíz recién horneadas mientras descifra el Náhuatl, el idioma que hablan los 50.000 comerciantes que visitan Tenochtitlán cada día. Algunos de los temas y preguntas que se tratan en este libro incluyen: - Los Orígenes de los Aztecas: Una Tribu Destinada a la Grandeza - La Llegada No Deseada al Valle de México - El Ascenso de Tenochtitlán y la Triple Alianza - Los Reyes Aztecas Más Grandes y su Herencia - El Esplendor de Tenochtitlán - ¡Y mucho más! ¡Obtenga el libro ahora para conocer más sobre los Aztecas!

Captivating History (Author), Massiel Pena (Narrator)

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[Spanish] - Leyendas de Valadolid. La Morelia de Ayer

Audiolibro de Vive el Tiempo. Las leyendas de Valladolid guardan relación con la construcción de historias en las ciudades coloniales de la Nueva España, en las que se funden también las historias de los pobladores originales. Las leyendas que se presentan, como las que se cuentan en el origen y desarrollo de todos los grupos humanos, llevan a la valoración del pasado, al que se le coloca rostro, sabor, olor, paisaje, sentimientos, amor. Esta disfrutable versión de las Leyendas de Valladolid, hoy Morelia, nos lleva a historias de monjes, de muertos que reviven, de descubrimiento de tesoros, de bellas jóvenes que mueren y vagan convertidas en almas en pena por culpa del amor y de los rigores de la educación de la época. La invitación es a que con faldas largas, levitas, crinolinas y hábitos de monjas y monjes, viajemos al pasado de la mano de las leyendas que contaban las abuelas.

Francisco De Paula León (Author), Jesús Isarrarás Gutiérrez, Roberto Briseño, Roberto Briseño Figueras (Narrator)

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The Maya: A Very Short Introduction

The Maya forged one of the greatest societies in the history of the ancient Americas and in all of human history. Long before contact with Europeans, Maya communities built spectacular cities with large, well-fed large populations. They mastered the visual arts, and developed a sophisticated writing system that recorded extraordinary knowledge in calendrics, mathematics, and astronomy. The Maya achieved all this without area-wide centralized control. There was never a single, unified Maya state or empire, but always numerous, evolving ethnic groups speaking dozens of distinct Mayan languages. The people we call 'Maya' never thought of themselves as such; yet something definable, unique, and endlessly fascinating-what we call Maya culture-has clearly existed for millennia. So what was their self-identity and how did Maya civilization come to be 'invented?' With the Maya historically subdivided and misunderstood in so many ways, the pursuit of what made them 'the Maya' is all the more important. In this Very Short Introduction, Restall and Solari explore the themes of Maya identity, city-state political culture, art and architecture, the Maya concept of the cosmos, and the Maya experience of contact with including invasion by outsiders.

Amara Solari, Matthew Restall (Author), Tim Campbell (Narrator)

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South America Audiobooks in Travel