Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in History

The modern era saw the emergence of individuals who had command over a terrifying array of instruments of control, persuasion and death. Whole societies were re-shaped and wars fought, often with a merciless contempt for the most basic norms. At the summit of these societies were leaders whose personalities had somehow given them the ability to do whatever they wished. Ian Kershaw's new book is a compelling, lucid and challenging attempt to understand these rulers.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the acclaimed multi-million copy best seller Team of Rivals, filmed by Spielberg as Lincoln, turns to the birth of America's Progressive Era - that heady, optimistic time when the 20th century is fresh. Reform is in the air, and it is time to take on the robber barons and corrupt politicians who have brought the country to its knees. The story is told through the close friendship between two presidents: Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) and his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft (1909-1913).

This second volume of the best-selling diaries of Henry 'Chips' Channon takes us from the heady aftermath of the Munich agreement, when the prime minister Chips so admired was credited with having averted a general European conflagration, through the rapid unravelling of appeasement, and on to the tribulations of the early years of the Second World War. It closes with a moment of hope, as Channon, in recording the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, reflects: 'The war must be more than half over.'

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Where Have All the Bullets Gone?, written and read by Spike Milligan. Back to those haunting days in Italy in 1944, at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, with lava running in great red rivulets down the slope towards us, and Jock taking a drag on his cigarette and saying, "I think we've got grounds for a rent rebate."

Spring 1958: a mysterious individual believed to be high up in the Polish secret service began passing Soviet secrets to the West. His name was Michal Goleniewski, and he remains one of the most important yet least known and most misunderstood spies of the Cold War. Even his death is shrouded in mystery and he has been written out of the history of Cold War espionage - until now.

The media often suggest that Russia poses the greatest threat to America's national security, but the real danger lies farther east. While those in power have been distracted and disorderly, China has waged a six-front war on America's economy, military, diplomacy, technology, education, and infrastructure - and they're winning. It's almost too late to undo the shocking, though nearly invisible, victories of the Chinese. In Stealth War, retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Spalding reveals China's motives and secret attacks on the West.

After passing the world's toughest Special Forces selection to get into D Squadron, 22 SAS, in 1979, Mark 'Splash' Aston thought he'd missed out on all the action. Too late to fight with the SAS in a decade long secret war in Oman, when terrorists then seized the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980 Splash missed out again when responsibility for the counter-terror role was passed to their comrades in B Squadron just weeks earlier. Then on April 2nd 1982 Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands.

Central Europe is not just a space on a map but also a region of shared experience - of mutual borrowings, impositions and misapprehensions. From the Roman Empire onwards, it has been the target of invasion from the east. In the Middle Ages, Central Europeans cast their eastern foes as 'the dogmen'. They would later become the Turks, Swedes, Russians and Soviets, all of whom pulled the region apart and remade it according to their own vision.

Linen, cotton, silk, synthetics, wool: through the stories of these five fabrics, Sofi Thanhauser illuminates the world we inhabit in a startling new way, travelling from China to Cumbria to reveal the craft, labour and industry that create the clothes we wear. From the women who transformed stalks of flax into linen to clothe their families in 19th-century New England to those who earn their dowries in the cotton-spinning factories of South India today, this book traces the origins of garment making through time and around the world.

Through the lens of their decades-long friendship and including exclusive interviews and details from previously classified documents, noted historian and New York Times best-selling author Steven M. Gillon examines John F. Kennedy Jr.’s life and legacy from before his birth to the day he died. Gillon covers the highs, the lows, and the surprising incidents, viewpoints, and relationships that John never discussed publicly, revealing the full story behind JFK Jr.'s complicated and rich life. In the end, Gillon proves that John’s life was far more than another tragedy.

Told with a thrilling pace, New York Times bestselling author and historian Scott Ellsworth has written the most compelling new book about the Civil War in years. Focusing on the last, desperate months of the war, when the outcome was far from certain, Midnight on the Potomac is a story of titanic battles, political upheaval, and the long-forgotten Confederate terror war against the loyal citizens of the North.

In early 1461, a teenage boy won a battle on a freezing morning in the Welsh marches and claimed the crown of England. He was Edward IV, first king of the usurping house of York. The country, crippled by economic crisis, insurgency, and a corrupt and bankrupt government, was in need of a new hero. Charismatic, able and ruthlessly ambitious, Edward and his two younger brothers, George, Duke of Clarence, and Richard, Duke of Gloucester, became the figureheads of a spectacular ruling dynasty which laid the foundations for a renewal of English royal power.

He has lived his whole life in the public eye, yet he remains an enigma. He was born to be king, but he aims much higher. A landmark publication, Charles: The Heart of a King reveals Prince Charles in all his complexity: the passionate views that mean he will never be as remote and impartial as his mother; the compulsion to make a difference and the many and startling ways in which the heir to the throne of the United Kingdom and fifteen other realms has already made his mark.

Written in 1857, this is the autobiography of a Jamaican woman whose fame rivalled Florence Nightingale's during the Crimean War. Seacole's offer to volunteer as a nurse in the war met with racism and refusal. Undaunted, Seacole set out independently to the Crimea where she acted as doctor and 'mother' to wounded soldiers while running her business, the 'British Hotel'. A witness to key battles, she gives vivid accounts of how she coped with disease, bombardment and other hardships at the Crimean battlefront.

The life story and adventures of Captain Eric 'Winkle' Brown - Britain's greatest-ever pilot. Brown's extraordinary flying career saw him fight in the Battle of Britain, narrowly escape death on a torpedoed aircraft carrier, achieve a litany of new records and firsts as a test pilot, and fly more kinds of aircraft than any other pilot in history. With a life as remarkable as his flying, Brown faced imprisonment in Germany at the outbreak of WWII, and after the Allied victory his fluent German saw him interviewing senior Nazi officials and participating in the liberation of Belsen.

James Baldwin's breakthrough essay collection made him the voice of his generation. Ranging over Harlem in the 1940s, movies, novels, his preacher father and his experiences of Paris, they capture the complexity of black life at the dawn of the civil rights movement with effervescent wit and prophetic wisdom.

History is swamped by patriotic myths about the aerial combat fought between the RAF and the Luftwaffe over the summer of 1940. In his gripping history of the Battle of Britain, Len Deighton drew on a decade of research and his own wartime experiences to puncture these myths and point towards a more objective, and even more inspiring, truth.

The year 1916 was one of the great turning-points in British history: as the youthful hopes of a generation were crushed in a desperate struggle to survive and traditional attitudes to authority were destroyed for ever. On paper, few battles have ever been so meticulously planned. Yet while there were good political reasons to launch a joint offensive with a French Army demoralised by huge casualties at Verdun, the raw troops on the ground knew nothing of that.

In the summer of 1940, after the Nazi occupation of Poland, an underground operative called Witold Pilecki accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands of people being interred at a new concentration camp on the border of the Reich. His mission was to report on Nazi crimes and raise a secret army to stage an uprising. The name of the detention centre - Auschwitz. It was only after arriving at the camp that he started to discover the Nazis' terrifying designs.

In a refugee camp in southern Turkey, Elliot Ackerman sits across the table from Abu Hassar, who fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq and has murky connections to the Islamic State. At first, Ackerman pretends to have been a journalist during the Iraq War, but after he establishes a rapport with Abu Hassar, he reveals that in fact he was a marine.