Military Audiobooks | History

Playing With the Enemy: A Baseball Prodigy, a World at War, and a Field of Broken Dreams

"In 1940, at just 15 years old, small-town baseball star Gene Moore was signed to the Brooklyn Dodgers, who saw in him the potential to become one of the great catchers of all time. Before that could happen, though, WWII intervened. Gene's story, a surprising paean to the power and humanity of a game, is told here by his son, a first-time author who exhibits the confidence and pacing of a pro. His gripping material certainly helps: after several years overseas in the Navy's touring baseball team, Gene was brought back to Louisiana and assigned to guard secret German POWs, whose U-boat was captured just days before the storming of Normandy. There, Gene teaches his German captives how to play baseball, with a number of unintended and life-altering consequences. When Gene's finally able to return home to Sesser, Ill., he's 'on crutches, depressed and embarrassed,' holing up in the local bar and prompting one bartender to lament, 'he's become one of us, when we were hoping he would make us like him.' Gene's journey from promise to despair and back again, set against a long war and an even longer post-war recovery, retains every bit of its vitality and relevance, a 20th-century epic that demonstrates how, sometimes, letting go of a dream is the only way to discover one's great fortune."

Gary Moore (Author), Toby Moore (Narrator)

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War Stories: Operation Iraqi Freedom

"A decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, retired Marine Colonel Oliver L. North pens a provocative presentation of his experiences as a war correspondent for the FOX network during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Filled with vivid eye-witness accounts, this book follows the combat exploits of a Marine helicopter unit and an armored unit as they move into the country. Ultimately, this work seeks to certify the necessity of the war and the removal of Saddam Hussein's dangerous regime."

Oliver North (Author), Joel Leffert (Narrator)

Audiobook

General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse

"This sweeping history of the Civil War and the Confederacy is told through the lens of its most crucial army, the Army of Northern Virginia commanded by Robert E. Lee. General Lee's Army takes listeners across the Rebel landscape, from campfires to battlefields to their homes, as it portrays a world of life, death, healing, and hardship. Detailing the feelings and conduct of officers and enlisted men throughout the course of the war, it demonstrates how effectively Lee's men served their country and just how close the South came to winning the great war between the states-and why it ultimately lost. Glatthaar investigates the South's commitment to the war and its gradual erosion, and he analyzes Lee's army in triumph and defeat. Fourteen years in the making, this scholarly tour de force upends much of the conventional wisdom about the Civil War."

Joseph T. Glatthaar (Author), Robertson Dean (Narrator)

Audiobook

Red Badge of Courage

"This story is about a young soldier, Henry Fleming, fighting in the American Civil War. It is a vivid and stark portrayal of war on the human psyche, interspersed with symbolic imagery and biblical metaphors. The story realistically portrays the young soldier's physical and psychological struggles after fleeing from his first encounter with a battle. He returns to his regiment to become a strong soldier and even taking on the task of the flag bearer in the final battle. Though Stephen Crane had never been in any combat situations, his interviews with a wide number of veterans enabled him to create this novel, widely regarded as a unusually realistic depiction of a young man in battle."

(Author), Michael Scott (Narrator)

Audiobook

Hitler and the Holocaust

"For over 50 years scholars and philosophers alike have attempted to make some sense of the Third Reich and its 'Final Solution' campaign. Historian Robert Wistrich takes listeners on a guided tour through the death camps and meticulously details the events that led to this horrific tragedy and the lasting repercussions it had on the world community."

Robert S. Wistrich (Author), George Guidall (Narrator)

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Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-45

"In this compelling study Max Hastings addresses the big human and military questions. Why did the Allies not win the war in 1944, when they were vastly stronger than the Germans? Why did the Russians produce the best generals? What was it like to fight the British, American, German and Soviet armies? Armageddon embraces the fates of more than a hundred million people, from the tragic teenage fanatics who died in the ruins of Hitler's Reich to the British 'Tommies' who simply yearned to finish a painful job and go home. Few books on the Second World War have so vividly brought together the story of the battlefields, east and west, with the decisions of the generals and the impact of great events upon ordinary soldiers and civilians."

Max Hastings (Author), John L. Sessions (Narrator)

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The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets...And Ho

"Major investigative nonfiction on one of the most important stories of our time -- the spread of nuclear weapons -- written by two award-winning journalists who for years have followed the trail of the world's most notorious arms dealer. The world has entered a second nuclear age. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear annihilation is on the rise. Should such an assault occur, there is a strong likelihood that the trail of devastation will lead back to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani father of the Islamic bomb and the mastermind behind a vast clandestine enterprise that has sold nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea, and Libya. Khan's loose-knit organization was and still may be a nuclear Wal-Mart, selling weapons blueprints, parts, and the expertise to assemble the works into a do-it-yourself bomb kit. Amazingly, American authorities could have halted his operation, but they chose instead to watch and wait. Khan proved that the international safeguards the world relied on no longer worked. Journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins tell this alarming tale of international intrigue through the eyes of the European and American officials who suspected Khan, tracked him, and ultimately shut him down, but only after the nuclear genie was long out of the bottle."

Catherine Collins, Douglas Frantz (Author), Bob Craig (Narrator)

Audiobook

Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War

""A crucial study in the political manipulation of intelligence, understanding how Curveball got us into Iraq will arm us for the next round of lies coming out of Washington."-Robert Baer, author of See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism Curveball answers the crucial question of the Iraq war: How and why was America's intelligence so catastrophically wrong? In this dramatic and explosive book, award-winning Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin delivers a narrative that takes us to Europe, the Middle East, and deep inside the CIA to find the truth-the truth about the lies and self-deception that led us into a military and political nightmare. Praise for Curveball "Just when you thought the WMD debacle couldn't get worse, here comes veteran Los Angeles Times national-security correspondent Drogin's look at just who got the stories going in the first place. . . . Simultaneously sobering and infuriating-essential reading for those who follow the headlines."-Kirkus Reviews "In this engrossing account, Los Angeles Times correspondent Drogin paints an intimate and revealing portrait of the workings and dysfunctions of the intelligence community."-Publishers Weekly "An insightful and compelling account of one crucial component of the war's origins . . . Had Drogin merely pieced together Curveball's story, it alone would have made for a thrilling book. But he provides something more: a frightening glimpse at how easily we could make the same mistakes again. . . . The real value of Drogin's book is its meticulous demonstration that bureaucratic imperative often leads to self-delusion."-Washington Monthly "Drogin delivers a startling account of this fateful intelligence snafu."-Booklist "By the time you finish this book you will be shaking your head with wonder, or perhaps you will be shaking with anger, about the misadventures that preceded the misadventures in Iraq. This book is so powerful, it almost refutes its subtitle: The man called Curveball did not cause a war; he became a pretext-one among many."-George F. Will "

Bob Drogin (Author), Erik Singer (Narrator)

Audiobook

Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race

"From the Pulitzer Prize—winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb: the story of the entire postwar superpower arms race, climaxing during the Reagan-Gorbachev decade when the United States and the Soviet Union came within scant hours of nuclear war–and then nearly agreed to abolish nuclear weapons. In a narrative that moves like a thriller, Rhodes sheds light on the Reagan administration’s unprecedented arms buildup in the early 1980s, as well as the arms-reduction campaign that followed, and Reagan’s famous 1986 summit meeting with Gorbachev. Rhodes’s detailed exploration of events of this time constitutes a prehistory of the neoconservatives, demonstrating that the manipulation of government and public opinion with fake intelligence and threat inflation that the administration of George W. Bush has used to justify the current “war on terror” and the disastrous invasion of Iraq were developed and applied in the Reagan era and even before. Drawing on personal interviews with both Soviet and U.S. participants, and on a wealth of new documentation, memoir literature, and oral history that has become available only in the past ten years, Rhodes recounts what actually happened in the final years of the Cold War that led to its dramatic end. The story is new, compelling, and continually surprising–a revelatory re-creation of a hugely important era of our recent history."

Richard Rhodes (Author), Robertson Dean (Narrator)

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The Ultimate Battle: Okinawa 1945—The Last Epic Struggle of World War II

"Respected historian Bill Sloan tells the full story of the Battle of Okinawa as it has never been told before, through the eyes of the men in battle. Using the same grunt's-eye-view narrative style of Sloan's acclaimed Brotherhood of Heroes, The Ultimate Battle is the full story of the largest land-sea-air battle ever waged by the United States, a battle whose staggering casualties and take-no-prisoners ferocity led Truman to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. From April through June 1945, more than 250,000 American and Japanese lives were lost, including those of nearly 150,000 civilians who either committed suicide or were caught in the crossfire. This book tells a gripping story of heroism, sacrifice, and death."

Bill Sloan (Author), Robertson Dean (Narrator)

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A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign

"CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 'They could write like angels and scheme like demons.' So begins Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward Larson's masterful account of the wild ride that was the 1800 presidential election—an election so convulsive and so momentous to the future of American democracy that Thomas Jefferson would later dub it 'America's second revolution.' This was America's first true presidential campaign, giving birth to our two-party system and indelibly etching the lines of partisanship that have so profoundly shaped American politics ever since. The contest featured two of our most beloved Founding Fathers, once warm friends, facing off as the heads of their two still-forming parties—the hot-tempered but sharp-minded John Adams, and the eloquent yet enigmatic Thomas Jefferson—flanked by the brilliant tacticians Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, who later settled their own differences in a duel. The country was descending into turmoil, reeling from the terrors of the French Revolution, and on the brink of war with France. Blistering accusations flew as our young nation was torn apart along party lines: Adams and his elitist Federalists would squelch liberty and impose a British-style monarchy; Jefferson and his radically democratizing Republicans would throw the country into chaos and debase the role of religion in American life. The stakes could not have been higher. As the competition heated up, other founders joined the fray—James Madison, John Jay, James Monroe, Gouverneur Morris, George Clinton, John Marshall, Horatio Gates, and even George Washington—some of them emerging from retirement to respond to the political crisis gripping the nation and threatening its future. Drawing on unprecedented, meticulous research of the day-to-day unfolding drama, from diaries and letters of the principal players as well as accounts in the fast-evolving partisan press, Larson vividly re-creates the mounting tension as one state after another voted and the press had the lead passing back and forth. The outcome remained shrouded in doubt long after the voting ended, and as Inauguration Day approached, Congress met in closed session to resolve the crisis. In its first great electoral challenge, our fragile experiment in constitutional democracy hung in the balance. A Magnificent Catastrophe is history writing at its evocative best: the riveting story of the last great contest of the founding period."

Edward J. Larson (Author), John Dossett (Narrator)

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Clausewitz's On War: A Biography

"Perhaps the most important book on military strategy ever written, Carl von Clausewitz's On War has influenced generations of generals and politicians, has been blamed for the unprecedented death tolls in the First and Second World Wars, and is required reading at military academies to this day. But On War, which was never finished and was published posthumously, is obscure and fundamentally contradictory. What Clausewitz declares in book one, he discounts in book eight. The language is confusing and the relevance not always clear. For a book that has truly changed the world, On War is extremely difficult for the general reader to approach, to reconcile with itself, and to place in context. Hew Strachan, one of the world's foremost military historians, answers these problems in this fascinating book. He explains how and why On War was written, elucidates what Clausewitz meant, and offers insight into the impact it made on conflict and its continued significance in our world today."

Hew Strachan (Author), Simon Vance (Narrator)

Audiobook

Military Audiobooks in History