Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Modern

Winston Churchill had a longer and closer relationship with the Royal Navy than any British statesman in modern times, but his record as a naval strategist and custodian of the nation's sea power has been mired in controversy since the ill-fated Dardanelles campaign in 1915. Today, Churchill is regarded by many as an inept strategist who interfered in naval operations and often overrode his professional advisers - with inevitably disastrous results.

Surge is an insider's view of the most decisive phase of the Iraq War. Using newly declassified documents, unpublished manuscripts, interviews, author notes, and published sources, Surge explains how President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Ambassador Crocker, General Petraeus, and other U.S. and Iraqi political and military leaders shaped the surge from the center of the maelstrom in Baghdad and Washington.

This gripping and vivid book is the first comprehensive world history of the most important transport innovation of the modern age. Steven Parissien examines the impact, development and significance of the automobile over its turbulent and colourful 130-year history, but this is not just the story of horsepower and performance. It is a tale of people, of flamboyant entrepreneurs, shrewd businessmen and gifted engineers; of outstanding success and abject failure.

In this groundbreaking work, Kwame Anthony Appiah, hailed as "one of the most relevant philosophers today" (New York Times Book Review), changes the way we understand human behavior and the way social reform is brought about. In brilliantly arguing that new democratic movements over the last century have not been driven by legislation from above, Appiah explores the end of the duel in aristocratic England, the tumultuous struggles over foot binding in 19th-century China, the uprising of ordinary people against Atlantic slavery, and much more.

Pack your cutlass and blunderbuss--it's time to go a-pirating! The Invisible Hook takes readers inside the wily world of late 17th- and early 18th-century pirates. With swashbuckling irreverence and devilish wit, Peter Leeson uncovers the hidden economics behind pirates' notorious, entertaining, and sometimes downright shocking behavior.

The summer of 1940 found 60-year-old firebrand Leon Trotsky living in exile in Coyoacan, Mexico, still agitating with his pen and raging against the death he felt certain Stalin was bound to deliver - any day now. In The Death of Trotsky, Cecelia Holland brings this fated and fatal day to life, from its quotidian beginnings to its dramatic close. Between Trotsky's waking and his final rest, she probes the outer-workings and inner thoughts of those who were with him till the end, illuminating a man who exited life as he lived it: defiantly.

A recent French biography begins, "Who doesn't know Nadar?" In France, that's a rhetorical question. Of all of the legendary figures who thrived in mid-19th-century Paris - a cohort that includes Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Gustave Courbet, and Alexandre Dumas - Nadar was perhaps the most innovative, the most restless, the most modern. The first great portrait photographer, a pioneering balloonist, the first person to take an aerial photograph, and the prime mover behind the first airmail service, Nadar was one of the original celebrity artist-entrepreneurs.

The searing accounts of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniia Ginsberg, and Varlam Shalamov opened the world's eyes to the terrors of the Soviet Gulag. But not until now has there been a memoir of life inside the camps written from the perspective of an actual employee of the Secret police. In this riveting memoir, superbly translated by Deborah Kaple, Fyodor Mochulsky describes being sent to work as a boss at the forced labor camp of Pechorlag in the frozen tundra north of the Arctic Circle.

After the United Nations established International Women's Year (IWY) in 1975, Congress mandated and funded state conferences to elect delegates to attend the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977. At that conference, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and other feminists adopted a National Plan of Action, endorsing the hot-button issues of abortion rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and gay rights - then a new issue in national politics.

More than 2,000 years ago the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu advised us to know our enemies. The question has always been how. In A Sense of the Enemy, the historian Zachary Shore demonstrates that leaders can best understand an opponent not simply from his pattern of past behavior, but from his behavior at pattern breaks. Meaningful pattern breaks occur during dramatic deviations from the routine, when the enemy imposes costs upon himself. It's at these unexpected moments, Shore explains, that successful leaders can learn what makes their rivals truly tick.

In March 1944, 76 Allied officers tunnelled out of Stalag Luft III. Of the 73 captured, 50 were shot by direct order of Hitler. This is the story of how a British Bobby from Blackpool, Frank McKenna, was sent to post-war Germany on the express orders from Churchill to bring the Gestapo murderers to justice. In a quest that ranges from the devastated, bombed out cities of Europe to the horrors of the concentrations camps, McKenna is relentless in his pursuit.

How much of our fate is tied to the status of our parents and grandparents? How much does this influence our children? More than we wish to believe. While it has been argued that rigid class structures have eroded in favor of greater social equality, The Son Also Rises proves that movement on the social ladder has changed little over eight centuries.

On a sunny September day in 1931, Soviet spy Stanislav Shumovsky walked down the gangplank of the SS Europa and into New York, concealed in a group of 65 Soviet students. Joseph Stalin had sent him to acquire American secrets to help close the USSR’s yawning technology gap. In this thrilling history, Svetlana Lokhova takes the listener on a journey through Stalin’s most audacious intelligence operation, piecing together every aspect of Shumovsky’s life and character using information derived from American and Russian archives.

Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed - refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples - causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl.

John “Iwan” Demjanjuk was at the center of one of history’s most complex war crimes trials. But why did it take almost sixty years for the United States to bring him to justice as a Nazi collaborator? The answer lies in the annals of the Cold War, when fear and paranoia drove American politicians and the U.S. military to recruit “useful” Nazi war criminals to work for the United States in Europe as spies and saboteurs, and to slip them into America through loopholes in U.S. immigration policy.

Ao longo dos ensaios e dos fragmentos, o ouvinte perceberá que sou contra um mundo melhor, que sou cético e que carrego uma sensibilidade trágica, independentemente de minha vontade filosófica. E por quê? Porque o que nos humaniza é o fracasso, homens e mulheres muito felizes não são homens e mulheres. Tenho medo de pessoas muito felizes. A consciência trágica, seja ela cósmica, seja miserável, miúda e cotidiana, determina o horizonte onde se move o humano.

Ayn Rand’s complicated notoriety as popular writer, leader of a political and philosophical cult, reviled intellectual, and ostentatious public figure endured beyond her death in 1982. In the 21st century, she has been resurrected as a serious reference point for mainstream figures, especially those on the political right, from Paul Ryan to Donald Trump. Mean Girl follows Rand’s trail through the 20th century from the Russian Revolution to the Cold War and traces her posthumous appeal and the influence of her novels via her cruel, surly, sexy heroes.

The dream of capturing and organizing knowledge is as old as history. From the archives of ancient Sumeria and the Library of Alexandria to the Library of Congress and Wikipedia, humanity has wrestled with the problem of harnessing its intellectual output. The timeless quest for wisdom has been as much about information storage and retrieval as creative genius. In Cataloging the World, Alex Wright introduces us to a figure who stands out in the long line of thinkers and idealists who devoted themselves to the task.

Il est arrivé le 15 mai 1779 à l'École royale militaire de Brienne. Il n'a pas encore dix ans et parle à peine le français... Il va rester cinq ans dans cette école, sans la quitter un seul jour, sans revoir sa famille. Vingt ans plus tard, cet enfant sera le général Napoléon, maître de cette France ou il n'a d'abord été qu'un étranger. Quel caractère, quelle volonté, quel courage, quelle énergie, quelle imagination, quelle démesure, quelle puissance de rêve, quel sens des situations, quel génie il a fallu à l'enfant arraché à son milieu pour devenir le héros d'une nation !

The breathtaking memoir by a member of "Nicky's family", a group of 669 Czechoslovakian children who escaped the Holocaust through Sir Nicholas Winton's Kindertransport project. My Train to Freedom relates the trials and achievements of award-winning humanitarian and former Episcopal priest Ivan Backer.