Audiobooks by Peter Heather

[German] - Stürzende Imperien: Rom, Amerika und die Zukunft des Westens

"Was wir vom Untergang Roms für die Zukunft des Westens lernen können Der Westen befindet sich in einer Krise: Unsere Demokratie ist angeschlagen, die Deindustrialisierung bedroht den Wohlstand und Flüchtende machen sich auf in westliche Länder und stehen vor den Toren.In diesem außergewöhnlichen historischen Vergleich erkunden die Autoren die unheimlichen Parallelen – und produktiven Unterschiede – zwischen dem Untergang Roms und dem Fall des Westens, um aus der antiken Geschichte neue Lehren zu ziehen. Die Ära der westlichen globalen Dominanz hat ihr Ende erreicht – doch was kommt als Nächstes? In den letzten drei Jahrhunderten stieg der Westen auf, um den Planeten zu dominieren. Doch plötzlich, um die Jahrtausendwende, kehrte sich die Geschichte um. Angesichts wirtschaftlicher Stagnation und innerer politischer Spaltung befindet sich der Westen in einem rapiden Niedergang. Es ist nicht das erste Mal, dass die globale Ordnung einen solch dramatischen Aufstieg und Fall erlebt. Das Römische Reich folgte einer ähnlichen Entwicklung von überwältigender Macht bis zum Zerfall – eine Tatsache, die mehr ist als ein seltsamer historischer Zufall. In diesem fesselnden Buch nutzen der Historiker Peter Heather und der politische Ökonom John Rapley diese römische Vergangenheit, um über den zeitgenössischen Westen, seinen Zustand der Krise und mögliche Wege heraus neu nachzudenken."

John Rapley, Peter Heather (Author), Klaus B. Wolf (Narrator)

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Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West

"Brought to you by Penguin. Over the last three centuries, the West rose to dominate the planet. Then, suddenly, around the turn of the millennium, history reversed. Faced with economic stagnation and internal political division, the West has found itself in freefall. This is not the first time the global order has witnessed such a dramatic rise and fall. The Roman Empire followed a similar arc from dizzying power to disintegration - a fact that is more than a strange historical coincidence. In Why Empires Fall, historian Peter Heather and political economist John Rapley use this Roman past to think anew about the contemporary West, its state of crisis, and what paths we could take out of it. In this exceptional, transformative intervention, Heather and Rapley explore the uncanny parallels - and productive differences - between the two cases, moving beyond the familiar tropes of invading barbarians and civilizational decay to learn new lessons from ancient history. From 399 to 1999, the life cycles of empires, they argue, sow the seeds of their inevitable destruction. The era of the West has reached its own end - so what comes next? ©2023 John Rapley & Peter Heather (P)2023 Penguin Audio"

John Rapley, Peter Heather (Author), Sid Sagar (Narrator)

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Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion

"Brought to you by Penguin. A major new reinterpretation of Christendom, by one of our foremost medieval historians In the fourth century AD, a new faith exploded out of Palestine. Overwhelming the paganism of Rome, and converting the Emperor Constantine in the process, it resoundingly defeated a host of other rivals. Almost a thousand years later, all of Europe was controlled by Christian rulers, and the religion, ingrained within culture and society, exercised a monolithic hold over its population. But, as Peter Heather shows in this compelling new history, there was nothing inevitable about Christendom's rise to Europe-wide dominance. In exploring how the Christian religion became such a defining feature of the European landscape, and how a small sect of isolated and intensely committed congregations was transformed into a mass movement centrally directed from Rome, Peter Heather shows how Christendom constantly battled against both so-called 'heresies' and other forms of belief. From the crisis that followed the collapse of the Roman empire, which left the religion teetering on the edge of extinction, to the astonishing revolution of the eleventh century and beyond in which the Papacy emerged as the head of a vast international corporation, Heather traces Christendom's chameleon-like capacity for self-reinvention and astounding willingness to mobilize well-directed force. Christendom's achievement was not, or not only, to define official Christianity, but - from its scholars and its lawyers, to its provincial officials and missionaries in far-flung corners of the continent - to transform it into an institution that wielded effective religious authority across nearly all of the disparate peoples of medieval Europe. This is its extraordinary story. ©2022 Peter Heather (P)2022 Penguin Audio"

Peter Heather (Author), Peter Heather (Narrator)

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