World Audiobooks | History

From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire

The politics of grief, in an era marked by loss, shows us how we can find our humanity once more. From one of our most vital and far-seeing social critics. Our era is one of significant and substantial loss, yet we barely have time to acknowledge it. The losses range from the personal grief of a single COVID death to the planetary disaster wrought by climate change. We are in an age of unraveling hopes and expectations, of dreams curtailed, of aspirations desiccated. What can we do? This is capitalism's death phase. It has become clear that the cost of wealth creation for a few is enormous destruction for others. The marginalized and the vulnerable have been feeling the crisis for a long time, but it is increasingly coming for all of us. At the same time, we are denied the means of mourning the futures that are being so brutally curtailed. At such a moment, taking the time to grieve is a radical act. Through in-depth reporting intertwined with memoir, Sarah Jaffe shows how public memorialization has become more than a refusal or a protest: it is a path to imagining a better world. When we are able to mourn the lives, the homes, the worlds we have lost, we are better prepared to fight for a transformed future.

Sarah Jaffe (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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The Good Allies: How Canada and the United States Fought Together to Defeat Fascism during the Secon

From our country's most important war historian, a gripping account of the turbulent relationship between Canada and the US during the Second World War. The two nations entered the war amidst rivalry and mutual suspicion, but learned to fight together before emerging triumphant and bound by an alliance that has lasted to this day. When the Second World War broke out in 1939, it set in motion a deadly struggle between the Axis powers and the Allies, but also fraught negotiations between and among the allies. On questions of diplomacy, economic policy, industrial might, military capabilities, and even national sovereignty, thousands of lives and the fate of the free world depended on back-room deals and desperate trade-offs between soldiers, diplomats, and leaders. In North America, Canada and the US strained to forge a new military alliance to guard their coasts and fend off German U-boats and the menace of a Japanese invasion. Wartime economies were entwined to produce a staggering contribution of weapons to keep Britain and other allies in the war. The defense of North America against enemy threats was essential before the US and Canada could send armies, navies, and air forces overseas. In his trademark style, Tim Cook employs eyewitness accounts to vividly lay bare the brutality of combat and the courage of North Americans under fire. Behind the fighting fronts, the charged and often secret communications between national leaders, Churchill, Roosevelt, and King, reveals how their personalities shaped the outcome of history's most destructive war, the fate of the British Empire, and the North American alliance that lives on to this day. The Good Allies is a masterful account of how Canadians and Americans made the transition from wary rivals to steadfast allies, and how Canada thrived in the shadow of the military and global superpower. In exploring this complex and crucial dimension of the Second World War and its legacy, Cook recounts two nations' story of cooperation, sacrifice, and of bleeding together to save the world from the fascist threat.

Tim Cook (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

Anne Applebaum (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Arnhem: Black Tuesday: The Classic Battle Told As Never Before

Al Murray (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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How to Fit All of Ancient Greece in an Elevator

Theodore Papakostas (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Strangers and Intimates: Rise and Fall of Private Life, The

Tiffany Jenkins (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Combing Through the White House: Hair and Its Shocking Impact on the Politics, Private Lives, and Le

Discover a fascinating and novel look at the U.S. presidents, the first families, and American history-all through the lens of hair. With meticulous detail, engaging storytelling, and full-color visuals, encyclopedia editor Theodore Pappas combs through American history, teasing out long-forgotten and little-known ways that hair has influenced the presidency and the public and private lives, personal scandals, and tragedies, of the men and women who have occupied the White House. Go deep into the history of such topics as: - Abraham Lincoln's famously ridiculed appearance and the surprising role hair played in both his presidency and assassination - John F. Kennedy's connection to James Bond and how hair factored into his vast image-making and infidelities - The lush tradition of collecting hair as a way of honoring leaders, remembering our loved ones, and preserving their memories - Scientific hair analysis and how DNA has been used to solve long-standing presidential mysteries - The connection of hair to the lives, loves, scandals, and tragedies that shaped presidents, first ladies, and the nation at large This unique window into the past shines entertaining new light on the decisions, relationships, and tragedies that have shaped the role of the president and the place of the U.S. in the world. Whether you're interested in presidential trivia or historical mysteries, Combing Through the White House personalizes the past through an element of life we can all relate to-hair-giving us new glimpses into our country and even ourselves.

Theodore Pappas (Author), TBD, Theodore Pappas (Narrator)

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Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life

From esteemed journalist and scholar Joshua Leifer, a definitive look at the history and future of American Jewish identity and community from the tipping point we are living in Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life is Joshua Leifer's lively and deeply personal history of the fractured American Jewish present. Formed in the middle decades of the twentieth century, all the settled-upon pillars of American Jewish self-definition (Americanism, Zionism, and liberalism) have begun to falter in the first decades of the twenty-first. The binding trauma of Holocaust memory grows ever-more attenuated; soon there will no longer be any living survivors. After two millennia of Jewish life defined by diasporic existence, the majority of the world's Jews will live in a sovereign Jewish state by 2050. Against the backdrop of national political crises, resurgent global antisemitism, and ongoing wars in the Middle East, Leifer provides an illuminating and meticulously reported map of contemporary Jewish life as well as a sober conjecture about its future. Leifer begins with the history of Jewish immigrants in America, starting with the story of his own ancestry, the arrival from a Belarusian shtetl of his great-grandmother, Bessie, and following each subsequent generation as it conformed to the prevailing codes of American Jewish life. He then goes on to report on the state of today's burning Jewish issues, building on interviews with those living daily across the varied fault lines of the Jewish conversation. We meet Millennial Jewish racial justice organizers trying to build new communities grounded in social action; Orthodox political activists navigating the tensions between pragmatism and ideology; young liberal rabbis looking to "queer" the Torah through exegesis; Haredi men learning full-time at the world's largest yeshiva; progressive anti-Zionists attempting to separate Judaism from nationalism; and right-wing Israeli public intellectuals beginning to imagine a future without American Jews. While often coming to radically different conclusions, all are asking the same fundamental question: What will it mean to be Jewish in a seemingly unprecedented time? As it traverses the contemporary Jewish landscape through uncommon personal familiarity with the widest range of Jewish experience, Tablets Shattered also charts the universal quest to understand the increasingly divisive world we live in and build enduring communities amid historical and political rupture.

Joshua Leifer (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Four Points of the Compass

Jerry Brotton (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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The Traitor's Daughter: Captured by Nazis, Pursued by the KGB, My Mother's Odyssey to Freedom from H

The masterful narration of a daughter's decades-long quest to understand her extraordinary mother, who was born in Lenin's Soviet Union, served as a combat soldier in the Red Army, and endured three years of Nazi captivity-but never revealed her darkest secrets. As a child, Roxana Spicer would sometimes wake to the sound of the Red Army choir. She would tip-toe downstairs to find her mother, cigarette in one hand and Black Russian in the other, singing along. Roxana would keep her company, and wonder.... Everyone in their village knew Agnes Spicer was Russian, that she had been a captive of the Nazis. And that was all they knew, because Agnes kept her secrets close: how she managed to escape Germany, what the tattoo on her arm meant, even her real name. Discovering the truth about her beloved, charismatic, volatile mother became Roxana's obsession. Throughout her career as a journalist and documentarian, between investigations across Canada and around the world, she always went home to ask her mother more questions, often while filming. Roxana also took every chance to visit the few places that she did know played a role in her mother's story: Bad Salzuflen, Germany, home to POW slave labourers during the war; notorious concentration camps; and Russia. Under Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the early years of Putin, she was able to find people, places, and documents that are now-perhaps forever-lost again. The Traitor's Daughter is intimate and exhaustively researched, vividly conversational, and shot through with Agnes Spicer's irrepressible, fiery personality. It is a true labour of love as well as a triumph of blending personal biography with sweeping history.

Roxana Spicer (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

Michel-Rolph Trouillot (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives

Biggest Books to Look Out For in 2024 - The Guardian The Books of 2024 - Blackwells 'Loxton is the next big thing in history' - Dan Snow 'A whirlwind of historical energy . . . One of the brightest new stars of popular history' - Dan Jones At eighteen, your life is full of possibility. You have everything to look forward to - unless you've got the plague . . . In this unconventional and witty history, award-winning writer and broadcaster Alice Loxton delves into Britain's past, exploring the country though eighteen notable figures at this formative age. From a young Empress Matilda, already changing the fate of nations, to Richard Burton, the rugby-obsessed teenager who grew up in a Welsh mining town, each journey unpicks a different era of Britain. Irreverent and full of fascinating tidbits (Did you know Chaucer began his career as a scantily clad pageboy?), Loxton shows how the way a society treats its young, reveals much about its values and foibles. Seamlessly blending big history with engaging stories of royalty, explorers, writers and entertainers, Eighteen builds a rich mosaic of Britain's past, inviting a journey of discovery. Looking at the role of class, race, and raw ambition, Loxton also asks what lessons we can take for modern Britain - and why the answers might not be what you think.

Alice Loxton (Author), Alice Loxton, TBD (Narrator)

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World Audiobooks in History