Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in 20th Century

In this brilliantly focused and haunting portrait of the people, the politics, the land and the poetry of Nicaragua, Salman Rushdie brings to the forefront the palpable human facts of a country in the midst of revolution. Rushdie went to Nicaragua in 1986. What he discovered was overwhelming: a land of difficult, often beautiful contradictions, of strange heroes and warrior-poets. Rushdie came to know an enormous range of people, from the foreign minister, a priest, to the midwife who kept a pet cow in her living room.

When Nicholas Shakespeare stumbled across a box of documents belonging to his late aunt he was completely unaware of where this discovery would take him. The Priscilla he remembered was very different from the glamorous, morally ambiguous young woman who emerged from the many love letters and journals, surrounded by suitors and living the dangerous existence of a British woman in a country controlled by the enemy. He had heard rumours that Priscilla had fought in the Resistance, but the truth turned out to be far more complicated.

History has it that the role of women in Nazi Germany was to be the perfect Hausfrau, produce the next Aryan generation, and be a loyal cheerleader for the Führer. Then they became the Trümmerfrauen, or Rubble Women, as they cleared and tidied their ruined country to get it back on its feet. They were Germany’s heroines. The few women tried and convicted after the war were simply the evil aberrations - the camp guards, the female Nazi elite - that proved this rule. However, Wendy Lower’s research into the very ordinary women who went out to the Nazi Eastern Front reveals an altogether different story.

On 21 July 1942, the Nazis invaded Poland. In the small town of Zolkiew, life for Jewish 15-year-old Clara Kramer was never to be the same again. While those around her were either slaughtered or transported, Clara and her family hid perilously in a hand-dug cellar. Living above and protecting them were the Becks. Mr Beck was a womaniser, a drunkard, and a self-professed anti-Semite, yet he risked his life throughout the war to keep his charges safe.

On the day that Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister, Germany invaded Holland and Belgium. Despite all the efforts of the Allied armies, Hitler's powerful Panzer divisions smashed their way through to the French coast. For the retreating British Expeditionary Force, Dunkirk was the only practical point of departure, and on May 26, the order for total evacuation, Operation Dynamo, was given.

When America entered World War II, Ernie Pyle followed the soldiers into the trenches. Long before television and the internet beamed combat footage directly to us, his dispatches from the front lines augmented the coverage of the war’s politics, strategies, and macro-level mobilizations to give the American public what he called his “worm’s-eye view” of the day-to-day life of the war.

In 1916, Arthur Eddington, a war-weary British astronomer, opened a letter written by an obscure German professor named Einstein. The neatly printed equations on the scrap of paper outlined his world-changing theory of general relativity. Until then Einstein's masterpiece of time and space had been trapped behind the physical and ideological lines of battle, unknown. Eddington realised the importance of the letter - perhaps Einstein's esoteric theory could not only change the future of science but also restore the world of cooperative international science in a time of brutal war.

On 17 July 1918, the whole of the Russian imperial family was murdered. There were no miraculous escapes. The former Tsar Nicholas, his wife, Alexandra, and their children - Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexey - were all tragically gunned down in a blaze of bullets. On the 100 year anniversary of these brutal murders, historian Helen Rappaport set out to uncover why the Romanovs’ European royal relatives and the Allied governments failed to save them.

At only 16 years old, Josef Lewkowicz became a number, prisoner 85314. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland, he and his father were separated from their family and herded to the Kraków-Plaszów concentration camp. Forced to carry out hard labour in brutal conditions, and to live under the constant threat of extreme violence and sudden death, before the war was over Josef would witness the unique horrors of six of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Ebensee.

In 1962, Stephanie 'Steve' Shirley created a software company when the concept of software barely existed. Freelance Programmers employed women to work on complex projects such as Concorde's black box recorder from the comfort of their own homes. Shirley empowered a generation of women in technology, giving them unheard of freedom to choose their own hours and manage their own workloads. The business thrived, and Shirley gradually transferred ownership to her staff, creating 70 millionaires in the process.

What was mothering like in the past? When acclaimed historian Sarah Knott became pregnant, she asked herself this question. But accounts of motherhood are hard to find. For centuries, historians have concerned themselves with wars, politics and revolutions, not the everyday details of carrying and caring for a baby. These details matter: they shape our feelings and give structure to our hours. But they leave little historical trace. Much to do with becoming a mother, past or present, is lost or forgotten.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Six Minutes in May by Nicholas Shakespeare, read by Peter Noble. London, May 1940. Britain is under threat of invasion and Neville Chamberlain’s government is about to fall. It is hard for us to imagine the Second World War without Winston Churchill taking the helm, but in Six Minutes in May Nicholas Shakespeare shows how easily events could have gone in a different direction.

In 1938, when her diary begins, Helga is eight years old. Alongside her father and mother and the 45,000 Jews who live in Prague, she endures the Nazi invasion and regime: Her father is denied work, schools are closed to her, she and her parents are confined to their flat. Then deportations begin, and her friends and family start to disappear. In 1941, Helga and her parents are sent to the concentration camp of Terezn, where they live for three years. Here Helga documents their daily life - the harsh conditions, disease, and suffering, as well as moments of friendship, creativity, and hope - until, in 1944, they are sent to Auschwitz.

From July to September 1940 the British people watched the From July to September 1940, the British people watched the Battle of Britain play out in the skies above them, aware that the eventual outcome would decide their fate. From September through to the following May, Hitler attempted to "blitz" London and other major cities into submission. For a year, the citizens of Britain were effectively front-line soldiers in a battle that united the country against a hated enemy.

Lending intimate historical detail and thrilling historical narrative, swinging from Moscow to Paris to Mexico, and taking in a cast of morally conflicted Russian spies, fanatical Mexican painters, and innocent American idealists, The Death of Trotsky delves into the lives of two fascinating, complex men locked in a life-or-death struggle that will bend the course of history.

In the summer of 1942, 22-year-old Franci Rabinek - designated a Jew by the Nazi racial laws - arrived at Terezin, a concentration camp and ghetto 40 miles north of her home in Prague. Franci, a spirited and glamorous young woman, was known among her fellow inmates as the Prague dress designer. During an Auschwitz selection, Franci would spontaneously lie to Nazi officer Dr Josef Mengele and claim to be an electrician. It was a split-second decision that would go on to endanger - and save - her life.

Launched in the early 1970s in the United States, Italy and the UK, Wages for Housework was a political movement making the case that women who did all the care work at home deserved to be paid. Like many revolutionary ideas, it remained an unfulfilled promise. It is a feminist path not taken. Here historian Emily Callaci tells the enthralling story of this international campaign and its intellectual roots by exploring the lives of its key figures.

In 1939 off the New England coast, the submarine USS Squalus accidentally sinks to the bottom of the sea during a training exercise, killing half her crew. Coming to the rescue is the USS Sculpin, in many ways the Squalus’s twin. As their oxygen supply dwindles, the remaining crew aboard the Squalus are saved in a time-consuming, white-knuckle operation. Eventually the sunken submarine is raised, repaired, and returned to duty, with a new name: the Sailfish.

Growing up in the Polish village of Tarnogrod on the fringes of a deep pine forest gives Mala the happiest childhood she could have hoped for. But, as the German invasion begins, her beloved village becomes a ghetto and her family and friends are reduced to starvation. She takes matters into her own hands and bravely removes her yellow star, risking sneaking out to the surrounding villages to barter for food.

'On the face of it,' writes Lyn Macdonald, 'no one could have been less equipped for the job than these gently nurtured girls who walked straight out of Edwardian drawing rooms into the manifest horrors of the First World War....' Yet the volunteer nurses rose magnificently to the occasion. In leaking tents and draughty huts they fought another war, a war against agony and death, as men lay suffering from the pain of unimaginable wounds or diseases we can now cure almost instantly.