Middle East Audiobooks | History

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone

Rajiv Chandrasekaran (Author), Ray Porter (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City

Radical Islam has long desired to seize Jerusalem and cut it off from Christian and Jewish believers. Dore Gold explains why only Israel can preserve its holy places for Christians, Jews, and even Muslims and why uncovering Jerusalem's past-and the truth of biblical history-can be the key to saving its future.

Dore Gold (Author), Nadia May, Wanda Mccaddon (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City

April 13, 2006. A Jerusalem Post headline reads: "Jericho man murdered over home sale." The forty-two-year-old father of eight was kidnapped, shot seven times, thrown into his car, and set on fire-because he had sold his Jerusalem apartment to Jews. Radical Islam has long desired to seize Jerusalem and cut it off to Christian and Jewish believers. In this revealing new book, Dore Gold, bestselling author and former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, reminds us that the war on terror is also a war on faith. Gold argues that only an Israeli-controlled Jerusalem can preserve the city's freedom and its openness to people of all faiths. Referring to recent archaeological discoveries, he suggests that uncovering Jerusalem's past and the truth of biblical history can be the key to saving its future.

Dore Gold (Author), Wanda Mccaddon (Narrator)

Audiobook

Where God Was Born: A Journey by Land to the Roots of Religion

At a time when America debates its values and the world braces for religious war, Bruce Feiler, author of the New York Times bestsellers Walking the Bible and Abraham, travels ten thousand miles through the Middle East to examine the question Is Religion Tearing Us Apart ... Or Can it Bring Us Together? Where God Was Born combines the adventure of a wartime chronicle and an archaeological detective story with an inspiring journey of spiritual exploration. Taking readers to biblical sites not seen by Westerners for decades, it uncovers little-known details about the common roots of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and affirms the importance of the Bible in today's world. Where God Was Born observes that at the birth moment of the biblical religions, all of the faiths took from one another, exchanged ideas, recognized their commonalities, and were open to peaceful coexistence. Offering a rare vision of God that can unite different faiths into a shared allegiance of hope, this is a brave, challenging, and profound work that addresses the most important issues of our time.

Bruce Feiler (Author), Bruce Feiler (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier's Account of the War in Iraq

The only book about the war in Iraq by a soldier on the ground-destined to become a classic of war literature. John Crawford joined the Florida National Guard to pay for his college tuition-it had seemed a small sacrifice to give up one weekend a month and two weeks a year in exchange for a free education. But one semester short of graduating, and newly married, he was called to active duty-to serve in Kuwait, then on the front lines of the invasion of Iraq, and ultimately in Baghdad. While serving in Iraq, Crawford began writing short nonfiction stories, his account of what he and his fellow soldiers experienced in the war. At the urging of a journalist embedded with his unit, he began sending his pieces out of the country via an anonymous Internet e-mail account. In a voice at once raw and immediate, Crawford's work vividly chronicles the daily life of a young soldier in Iraq-the excitement, the horror, the anger, the tedium, the fear, the camaraderie. All together, the stories slowly uncover something more: the transformation of a group of young college students-innocents-into something entirely different. In the tradition of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, this haunting and powerful, brutal but compellingly honest book promises to become the lasting, personal literary account of the United States' involvement in Iraq.

John R. Crawford (Author), Patrick Girard Lawlor (Narrator)

Audiobook

Six Days of War

Michael B. Oren (Author), Robert Whitfield, Simon Vance (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Iraq War

Through exclusive interviews, Keegan probes the war's causes, complications, costs, and consequences. The Iraq War is authoritative, timely, and vitally important to our understanding of a conflict whose full ramifications are as yet unknown. "Essential reading for understanding the ongoing conflict."-Booklist

John Keegan (Author), Simon Vance (Narrator)

Audiobook

Secrets of the Kingdom:The Inside Story of the Secret Saudi-U.S. Connection

In its final report, the 9/11 Commission famously called the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia "a problematic ally in combating Islamic extremism." To Gerald Posner, the bestselling author of Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11, this is a gross understatement. In his new book, Secrets of the Kingdom, Posner exposes the undeniable truth about U.S.-Saudi relations-and how the Saudis' influence on American business and politics poses a grave threat to our security. The result of an intensive two-year investigation, Secrets of the Kingdom penetrates the innermost layers of the shielded House of Saud and presents indisputable evidence of complicity and deceit at the highest levels-evidence that the 9/11 Commission, either deliberately or negligently, failed to consider. Using bank records and other previously undisclosed information, Posner unearths many disturbing truths and shattering revelations about the ties that bind the Saudi and U.S. governments, including: * How countless failures in U.S. intelligence and law enforcement gave extraordinary preferential treatment to prominent Saudis living in the United States, including members of the bin Laden family, in the days after 9/11 * A likely close connection between a powerful member of the House of Saud and Abu Zubeydah, the highest-ranking al-Qaeda operative captured so far by the United States * How the Saudi government has turned a blind eye to the role Saudi charities-including many controlled or supported by Kingdom officials- have played in bankrolling al-Qaeda and Islamic terror groups * The never-before-revealed Saudi and U.S. emergency plans in the event of a national crisis in the Kingdom, plans that could affect the security of the United States and the entire Middle East Secrets of the Kingdom is an explosive study that will have a profound impact on both U.S. policy and Americans' perception of their government and its extensive ties to a foreign power. Posner uncovers a disturbing picture of how two nations, despite their differing agendas, have become inextricably entwined.

Gerald Posner (Author), Alan Sklar (Narrator)

Audiobook

Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

In Israel and the West, it is called the Six Day War. In the Arab world, it is known as the June War, or simply as "the Setback." Never has a conflict so short, unforeseen, and largely unwanted by both sides so transformed the world. The Yom Kippur War, the war in Lebanon, the Camp David accords, the controversy over Jerusalem and Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the intifada, and the rise of Palestinian terror are all part of the outcome of those six days of intense Arab-Israeli fighting in the summer of 1967. Writing with a novelist's command of narrative and a historian's grasp of fact and motive, Michael B. Oren spotlights all the participants-Arab, Israeli, Soviet, and American-that were involved in this earth-shaking clash. Drawing on thousands of top-secret documents and exclusive personal interviews, he recreates the regional and international context that, by the late 1960s, virtually assured an Arab-Israeli conflagration. A towering work of history and an enthralling human narrative, Six Days of War is the most important book on the Middle East conflict to appear in a generation.

Michael B. Oren (Author), Simon Vance (Narrator)

Audiobook

House of Bush, House of Saud

Newsbreaking and controversial -- an award-winning investigative journalist uncovers the thirty-year relationship between the Bush family and the House of Saud and explains its impact on American foreign policy, business, and national security. House of Bush, House of Saud begins with a politically explosive question: How is it that two days after 9/11, when U.S. air traffic was tightly restricted, 140 Saudis, many immediate kin to Osama Bin Laden, were permitted to leave the country without being questioned by U.S. intelligence? The answer lies in a hidden relationship that began in the 1970s, when the oil-rich House of Saud began courting American politicians in a bid for military protection, influence, and investment opportunity. With the Bush family, the Saudis hit a gusher -- direct access to presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. To trace the amazing weave of Saud-Bush connections, Unger interviewed three former directors of the CIA, top Saudi and Israeli intelligence officials, and more than one hundred other sources.His access to major players is unparalleled and often exclusive -- including executives at the Carlyle Group, the giant investment firm where the House of Bush and the House of Saud each has a major stake. Like Bob Woodward's The Veil, Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud features unprecedented reportage; like Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My Country? Unger's book offers a political counter-narrative to official explanations; this deeply sourced account has already been cited by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles Schumer, and sets 9/11, the two Gulf Wars, and the ongoing Middle East crisis in a new context: What really happened when America's most powerful political family became seduced by its Saudi counterparts?

Craig Unger (Author), James Naughton (Narrator)

Audiobook

Name of the Enemy

Over the past several decades, Islamic terrorists have transformed themselves into a sophisticated global network of self-proclaimed holy warriors. These fighters no longer confine themselves to local battles against incumbent Muslim regimes in a bid to establish theocratic states. The Jihadi Salafis (a name they would use to describe themselves) have instead turned their fury toward the United States. The Name of the Enemy weaves complex political, sociological, and religious issues together to provide a comprehensive understanding of the forces involved and the possible future of Islamic terrorism. This exceptional production is offered by InAudio as Global Jihad: Understanding September 11, and was awarded Book of the Year by Foreword Magazine.

Quintan Wiktorowicz (Author), Grover Gardner (Narrator)

Audiobook

All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror

Half a century ago, the United States overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, whose "crime" was nationalizing the country's oil industry. In a cloak-and-dagger story of spies, saboteurs, and secret agents, Kinzer reveals the involvement of Eisenhower, Churchill, Kermit Roosevelt, and the CIA in Operation Ajax, which restored Mohammad Reza Shah to power. Reza imposed a tyranny that ultimately sparked the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which, in turn, inspired fundamentalists throughout the Muslim world, including the Taliban and terrorists who thrived under its protection. "It is not far-fetched," Kinzer asserts, "to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah's repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York."

Stephen Kinzer (Author), Michael Prichard (Narrator)

Audiobook

Middle East Audiobooks in History