World Audiobooks | History

Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany

Harald Jähner (Author), Sam Peter Jackson, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Native Nations: A Millennium in North America

A sweeping history of the power of Indigenous North America from ancient cities to fights for sovereignty that continue today, from an award-winning historian In this magisterial history, Kathleen DuVal tells the story of Native nations, from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to the present, reframing North American history with Indigenous power and sovereignty at its center. Before and during European colonization, Indigenous North Americans built diverse civilizations and lived in history, adapting to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. As DuVal explains, no civilization came to a halt when a few wandering explorers arrived, even when the strangers came well-armed. A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size, but following a period of climate change and instability DuVal shows how numerous smaller nations emerged from previously centralized civilizations, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, patterns of egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread across North America. So, when Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century, they encountered societies they did not understand, having developed differently from their own, and whose power they often underestimated. For centuries after these first encounters, Indigenous people maintained an upper hand and used Europeans in pursuit of their own interests. In Native Nations, we see how Mohawks closely controlled trade with the Dutch--and influenced global markets--and how Quapaws manipulated French colonists. Power dynamics shifted after the American Revolution, but Indigenous people continued to control the majority of the continent. Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa forged new alliances and encouraged a controversial new definition of Native identity to attempt to wall off U.S. ambitions. The Cherokees created new institutions to assert their sovereignty on the global stage, and the Kiowas used their preponderance of power in the west to regulate the passage of white settlers across their territory. In this important addition to the growing tradition of North American history centered on Indigenous nations, Kathleen DuVal uses these stories to show how the definitions of power and means of exerting it shifted over time, but the sovereignty and influence of Native peoples remained a constant and will continue far into the future.

Kathleen Duval (Author), Carolina Hoyos, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Covert City: The Cold War and the Making of Miami

Secret operations, corruption, crime, and a city teeming with spies: why Miami was as crucial to winning the Cold War as Washington DC or Moscow. The Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the most dramatic and dangerous period of the Cold War. What's less well known is that the city of Miami, mere miles away, was a pivotal, though less well known, part of Cold War history. With its population of Communist exiles from Cuba, its strategic value for military operations, and its lax business laws, Miami was an ideal environment for espionage. Covert City tells the history of how the entire city of Miami was constructed in the image of the US-Cuba rivalry. From the Bay of Pigs invasion to the death of Fidel Castro, the book shows how Miami is a hub for money and cocaine but also secrets and ideologies. Cuban exiles built criminal and political organizations in the city, leading Washington to set up a CIA station there, codenamed JMWAVE. It monitored gang activities, plotted secret operations against Castro, and became a base for surveilling Latin American neighbors. The money and infrastructure built for the CIA was integral to the development of Miami. Covert City is a sweeping and entertaining history, full of stunning experimental operations and colorful characters--a story of a place like no other.

Eric Driggs, Vince Houghton (Author), Eric Driggs, TBD, Vince Houghton (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Beloved Vision: Music in the Romantic Age

When one thinks of 'great' classical music, we harken back to the nineteenth century and the Romantic tradition. The emotional resonance of nineteenth century has moved generations musicians and resonated with countless listeners. It has inspired artists and writers. But no writer until how has adopted such an insightful narrative approach as Stephen Walsh and he shows how there is more to Romantic music that meets the eye-and the ear. The Beloved Vision links the music history of this singular epoch to the ideas that lay behind Romanticism in all its manifestations. In this account, we come to understand the phase in music history that has become the mainstay of the twentieth and twenty-first century concert and operatic repertoire. The narrative begins in the eighteenth century, with C.P.E. Bach, Haydn and the literary movement known as Sturm und Drang. The windows are flung open, and everything to do with style, form, even technique, is exposed to the emotional and intellectual weather, the impulses and preferences of the individual composer. It's a colorful story, told with passion but also with the precision and clarity of detail for which Stephen Walsh is so widely admired.

Stephen Walsh (Author), Michael Page (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Sugar Girls of Love Lane

Duncan Barrett, Nuala Calvi (Author), Samantha Robinson, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Last Mrs. Astor: A New York Story

'Kiernan's sharp-eyed biography brings back a woman who, far into her 90s, relished the dance of life.' -O, The Oprah Magazine This biography, based on firsthand knowledge and interviews with Mrs. Astor's friends and the heads of New York's great cultural institutions, gives us back the woman so loved and admired. At the age of fifty-one, Brooke Astor wedded the notoriously ill-tempered Vincent Astor, who died in 1959. In a highly publicized courtroom battle, she fought off an attempt to break Vincent's will, which left $67 million to the Vincent Astor Foundation. As the foundation's president, Mrs. Astor would use this legacy to benefit New York City. She would personally visit every grant applicant and charm anyone she met. At her hundredth birthday, princes and presidents honored her, but in 2006 a grandson petitioned the courts to have his father removed as Brooke's guardian. Once again, an Astor court battle became the stuff of headlines.

Frances Kiernan (Author), Susan Ericksen (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Forbidden Daughter

The unforgettable true story of one Jewish orphan’s survival against impossible odds, and her lifelong quest for family, safety and a sense of belonging. Elida Friedman was never supposed to have been born. In the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania, Nazi law forbade Jewish women from giving birth. Yet despite the danger they faced, Dr. Jonah Friedman and his wife Tzila, choose to bring a daughter into the world – a little girl they name Elida, meaning non-birth in Hebrew. To ensure her survival, the couple must smuggle their precious baby out of the ghetto into the arms of strangers. So begins a life of constant upheaval, with Elida changing families, countries, continents and even names, countless times. Surviving the war and the Holocaust that stole her parents, the young woman never gives up hope of finding a sense of family, and the chance to belong. A moving, powerful chronicle of overcoming impossible odds, The Forbidden Daughter is the true story of one unforgettable girl and her will to survive.

Zipora Klein Jakob (Author), Robin Siegerman (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Martyr and the Red Kimono: A Fearless Priest’s Sacrifice and A New Generation of Hope in Japan

Brought to you by Penguin. On the 14th of August 1941, a Polish monk named Maximilian Maria Kolbe was murdered in Auschwitz. Kolbe's life had been remarkable. Fiercely intelligent and driven, he founded a movement of Catholicism and spent several years in Nagasaki, ministering to the 'hidden Christians' who had emerged after centuries of oppression. A Polish nationalist as well as a monk, he gave sanctuary to fleeing refugees and ran Poland's largest publishing operation, drawing the wrath of the Nazis. His death was no less remarkable: he volunteered to die, saving the life of a fellow prisoner. It was an act that profoundly transformed the lives of two Japanese men. Tomei Ozaki was just seventeen when the US dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, destroying his home and his family. Masatoshi Asari worked on a farm in Hokkaido during the war and was haunted by the inhumane treatment of prisoners in a nearby camp. Forged in the crucible of an unforgiving war, both men drew inspiration from Kolbe's sacrifice, dedicating their lives to humanity and justice. In The Martyr and the Red Kimono, award-winning author Naoko Abe weaves together a deeply moving and inspirational true story of resistance, sacrifice, guilt and atonement. ©2024 Naoko Abe (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Naoko Abe (Author), Ami Okumura Jones, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Influence: Understand it, Use it, Resist it

One of the government’s former behavioural scientists reveals how you can do what you want, whilst everybody tries to influence you into doing what they want. Influence makes you think what you think and do as you do. You use it to change the thoughts and behaviours of others – just as others use it change yours. We have been perfecting our influence for millions of years, but in the last 20 years digital technologies have revolutionised how influence works. We are now connected to old school friends and niche interest groups – but unwittingly also to organised criminals, terrorists and hostile states who infiltrate our societies. The course of history is being shaped: elections have been hijacked, lies spread about pandemics and the rapidly heating climate, and information has become as important as bullets and bombs to winning wars. More than ever, influence has become the crucial currency for commercial and political gain: If you don’t understand it, you will likely become its victim. Written by a former government behavioural scientist working at the cutting edge of this field, Influence is a groundbreaking guide to the chaotic and murky world we live in. Through examining five key factors we are taken on a tour from the past to our real-world present, to build a picture of the major role influence plays in everyday life. Influence provides a simple personal plan illustrating how you can use influence to achieve your goals – whether gaining that promotion, getting your friends to a music festival, or your children to eat their greens. But by understanding the nature of influence, you will also see how it is changing in the information age, enabling dangerous adversaries to gain power, leaving our societies in peril. Most importantly, by using the tools of influence you will be empowered to play your part in protecting us – it will be down to you and everyone you know. Influence is a fascinating guide to how you can help by understanding it, using it and resisting it.

Justin Hempson-Jones (Author), Elliot Fitzpatrick, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

Brought to you by Penguin. The international best-selling author explores the revolutions—past and present—that define the chaotic, polarized and unstable age in which we live Populist rage, ideological fracture, economic and technological shocks, geopolitical dangers and an international system studded with catastrophic risk — the early decades of the 21st century may be one of the most revolutionary periods in modern history. But they are not the first. Humans have lived, and thrived, through more than one great realignment. What makes an age a revolutionary one? And how do they end? In this major new work, Fareed Zakaria masterfully investigates eras that have shattered and shaped humanity. Four such periods hold profound lessons for today. First, in seventeenth-century Netherlands a series of transformations made that tiny land the richest in thew world — and created modern politics as we know it today. The ‘Glorious Revolution’ in Britain showed that major political change could happen peacefully. Next, the French Revolution, a dramatic decade and a half that devoured its ideological children and left a bloody legacy that haunts us to this day. Finally, the mother of all revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, which catapulted Britain and the U.S. to global dominance and created the modern world. Against these paradigm-shifting historical eras, Zakaria describes our current situation, unpacking the four revolutions we are living through now; in globalization, technology, identity, and geopolitics. As few public intellectuals can, Zakaria combines intellectual range, deep historical insight, and uncanny prescience to reframe and illuminate a turbulent present. ©2024 Fareed Zakaria (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Fareed Zakaria (Author), Fareed Zakaria, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa

Brought to you by Penguin. At the heart of the extraordinary ferment of the High Renaissance stood a distinctive, strange and beguiling figure: the magus. An unstable mix of scientist, bibliophile, engineer, fabulist and fraud, the magus ushered in modern physics and chemistry while also working on everything from secret codes to siege engines to magic tricks. Anthony Grafton's wonderfully original book discusses the careers of men who somehow managed to be both figures of startling genius and - by some measures - credulous or worse. The historical Faust, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa are all fascinating characters, closely linked to monarchs, artists and soldiers and sitting at the heart of any definition of why the Renaissance was a time of such restless innovation. The study of the stars, architecture, warfare, even medicine: all of these and more were revolutionized in some way by the experiments and tricks of these extraordinary individuals. No book does a better job of allowing us to understand the ways that magic, religion and science were once so intertwined and often so hard to tell apart. ©2024 Anthony Grafton (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Anthony Grafton (Author), Nick Pearse, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Agent A12 and the Solving of the Holocaust Code

The thrilling true story of Agent A12, the earliest enemy of the Nazis, and the first spy to crack Hitler's deadliest secret code: the framework of the Final Solution. In public life, Dr. Winthrop Bell was a Harvard philosophy professor and wealthy businessman. As an MI6 spy—known as secret agent A12—in Berlin in 1919, he evaded gunfire and shook off pursuers to break open the emerging Nazi conspiracy. His reports, the first warning of the Nazi plot for World War II, went directly to the man known as C, the mysterious founder of MI6, as well as to various prime ministers. But a powerful fascist politician quietly worked to suppress his alerts. Nevertheless, Dr. Bell's intelligence sabotaged the Nazis in ways only now revealed in Cracking the Nazi Code. As World War II approached, Bell became a spy once again. In 1939, he was the first to crack Hitler's deadliest secret code: Germany's plan for the Holocaust. At that time, the führer was a popular politician who said he wanted peace. Could anyone believe Bell's shocking warning? Fighting an epic intelligence war from Eastern Europe and Russia to France, Canada, and finally Washington, DC, Agent A12 was a real-life 007, waging a single-handed struggle against fascists bent on destroying the Western world. Without Bell's astounding courage, the Nazis just might have won the war.

Jason Bell (Author), Christopher Grove, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

World Audiobooks in History