Irritant

Cattle Kate: The Controversial Life and Legend of the Wyoming Territory’s Most Famous Woman Outlaw , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 88min

In the span of scarcely more than a half century, the West developed from a handful of scattered fur trapping enterprises, predominantly inhabited by males, to a region full of burgeoning rustic communities. Before the government’s official “closure” of the frontier as a lawless expanse, Western societies were essentially living apart from traditional American rule of law. What judicial structures were at work across the West were erratic, often willing to exercise extremes without evidential justification and manipulated by major corporate interests of the day, most notably cattle. As this suggests, despite the fact westward expansion is, more often than not, characterized as a conflict with nature and indigenous cultures, inherent danger existed as frontiersmen, family homesteaders, entrepreneurs, and cattle giants fought for a share in the new frontier life.At times, those in search of wealth, whether from a gold rush, an iconic technology, or from the acquisition of land and livestock, went beyond the decimation of the indigenous peoples. That portion of the frontier offered to the more modestly endowed settlers by federal legislation emerged as an economic irritant to bigger companies and the elite. In some economic quarters, they exerted an extreme effort to sabotage the prevailing structure and remove lower classes from the government’s promise.Where older America depended on the slave culture to sustain its rural existence, cattlemen serving Atlantic appetites for meat-forged empires of unthinkable dimensions in the West. With a weak system of law enforcement and unlimited availability of federal acreage open for public use, cattle barons granted themselves land rights and legal authority without limit.Once in control, they dared anyone to correct them, individual or institutional, and in light of their commercial contribution to the markets back east, there was little chance of government reprisals against their usurpation. / ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Kelly McGee. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/194183/bk_acx0_194183_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

Shop: Audible
Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping

This Side of Paradise , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 536min

In This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald gives us Amory Blaine, who, from boyhood through his early 20s, is on a quest for his identity, his philosophy, and his sense of place in a world never quite his own, a world in which he moves with barely concealed ego-fueled disgust and contempt. Fitzgerald's breakthrough novel, written in 1920 when the author was 23, manages to be both a thinly veiled autobiography and a sincere attempt by Fitzgerald to get into the head of the young, privileged personages of his time. This Side of Paradise follows the arc of Amory's life from a shakily moneyed Midwestern childhood through a tortuous tenancy at St. Regis prep school, on to the almost mystical grounds of Princeton, finally arriving in the real world of labor and responsibility. Along the way Amory must come to terms with that great irritant in his life: women. Neither as a boy nor as a young man does Amory come fully to grips with his bipolar reactions to the schoolgirls, starry-eyed debutants, and emotionally off-the-wall women who cross his path so many times throughout the story. Hopeful love turns hopeless, exciting relationships become dull, proximate hearts eventually wander away and fade. It seems that for every emotional or intellectual perigee in Amory's life, there is a soul-punishing apogee waiting in the next minute. Amory's sole companion through much of his journey is Monsignor Darcy, a former pagan from Asheville (as described by Fitzgerald) who, suffering from unfulfilled love for Amory's mother, Beatrice, turned to the Catholic Church with a vengeance. Through richly descriptive narrative, achingly plaintive poetry, and even a theatrically formatted interlude or two, Fitzgerald chronicles the stutter-step journey of a handsome, educated, yet stubbornly socially and emotionally naïve young man blessed with a creative brain but remarkably, frustratingly deficient in human understanding. Amory Blaine strives to comprehend his ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: C. James Moore. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/mike/001502/bk_mike_001502_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

Shop: Audible
Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping