Showing results by publisher "Random House Audio" in History

Politics today doesn’t look much like it did fifty years ago. Electorates that were once divided by economics—with blue-collar workers supporting leftwing parties while the wealthy trended right—are now more likely to split along cultural lines. Campaigns have gone high-tech, hoping to turn electioneering into a science. Meanwhile, a permanent class of political consultants has emerged, with teams of pollsters, message gurus, and field operatives. Taken together, all this amounts to a silent revolution that has transformed politics across much of the globe.

Gertrude "Gertie" Legendre was a big-game hunter from a wealthy industrial family who lived a charmed life in Jazz Age America. Her adventurous spirit made her the inspiration for the Broadway play Holiday, which became a film starring Katharine Hepburn. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Legendre, by then married and a mother of two, joined the OSS, the wartime spy organization that preceded the CIA.

A story from a third-generation soldier of the 1st Battalion, the 5th Gorkha Rifles (FF) who was killed in combat. A ghost story narrated to the author by an officer of the Garhwal Rifles while on a visit to Lansdowne. A gripping account of the air raid on Pakistan's airfield at Sargodha in 1965 led by Wing Commander O.P. Taneja, VrC. These are some of the stories featured in Major General Ian Cardozo's book Beyond Fear, stories that inform the listener that fear is not exceptional. It is common to all human beings.

The Vatican's silence in the face of Nazi atrocities remains one of the great controversies of our time. History has accused wartime pontiff Pius the Twelfth of complicity in the Holocaust and dubbed him "Hitler's Pope". But a key part of the story has remained untold. Pius ran the world's largest church, smallest state, and oldest spy service. Saintly but secretive, he skimmed from church charities to pay covert couriers, and surreptitiously tape-recorded his meetings with top Nazis.

A groundbreaking, important recovery of history; the overlooked story—fully explored—of the critical aspect of America’s Revolutionary War that was fought in the South, showing that the British surrender at Yorktown was the direct result of the southern campaign, and that the battles that emerged south of the Mason-Dixon line between loyalists to the Crown and patriots who fought for independence were, in fact, America’s first civil war.

In late 31 AD, after the Roman senators murdered Lucius Sejanus, the Roman Emperor Tiberius's closest confidant, the Empire was forever changed. If Sejanus had not been murdered, Jesus would never have been crucified. This profound connection between the lives of Sejanus and Jesus is the first of many revelations in this startling reexamination of the Roman world in which Jesus walked. With new evidence and meticulous research, Dr. James Lacey weaves a majestic and accurate description of who Jesus was.

In this taut inquiry, Posner digs deep into the radical history of the religious right to reveal how issues of race and xenophobia have always been at the movement’s core, and how religion often cloaked anxieties about perceived threats to a white, Christian America. Fueled by an antidemocratic impulse, and united by this narrative of reverse victimization, the religious right and the alt-right support a common agenda.

In the first and only inside account of the Mueller investigation, one of the special counsel’s most trusted prosecutors breaks his silence on the team’s history-making search for the truth, their painstaking deliberations and costly mistakes, and Trump’s unprecedented efforts to stifle their report.

Hollywood in the 1950s was a period when the film industry both set conventions and broke norms and traditions—from Cinerama, Cinemascope and Vistavision to the epic film and lavish musical. It was a decade that saw the rise of the anti-hero; the smoldering, the hidden, and the unspoken; teenagers gone wild in the streets; the sacred and the profane; the revolution of the Method; the socially conscious; the implosion of the studios, the end of the production code; and the invasion of the ultimate body snatcher: the “small screen” television.

Four decades after Ronald Reagan’s landslide win in 1980, Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency is often labeled a failure; indeed, many Americans view Carter as the only ex-president to have used the White House as a stepping-stone to greater achievements. But in retrospect the Carter political odyssey is a rich and human story, marked by both formidable accomplishments and painful political adversity. In this deeply researched, brilliantly written account, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird deftly unfolds the Carter saga as a tragic tipping point in American history.

En El mapa fantasma se cuenta la historia de la aterradora epidemia de cólera que envolvió Londres en 1854 y sus dos héroes poco probables: el anestesista doctor John Snow y el afable clérigo, el reverendo Henry Whitehead, quienes derrotaron la enfermedad mediante una combinación de conocimiento local, investigación científica y elaboración de mapas.

David Halberstam, an avid sports writer with an investigative reporter’s tenacity, superbly details the end of the 15-year reign of the New York Yankees in October 1964. That October found the Yankees going head-to-head with the St. Louis Cardinals for the World Series pennant. Expertly weaving the narrative threads of both teams’ seasons, Halberstam brings the major personalities on the field - from switch-hitter Mickey Mantle to pitcher Bob Gibson - to life. Using the teams’ subcultures, Halberstam also analyzes the cultural shifts of the '60s.

I started making a list in my diary entitled “Things I Have Been Silent About”. Under it I wrote: “Falling in Love in Tehran. Going to Parties in Tehran. Watching the Marx Brothers in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran". I wrote about repressive laws and executions, about public and political abominations. Eventually I drifted into writing about private betrayals, implicating myself and those close to me in ways I had never imagined. - From Things I Have Been Silent About.

With his now-legendary store on 125th Street in Harlem, Dapper Dan pioneered high-end streetwear in the 1980s, remixing classic luxury-brand logos into his own innovative, glamorous designs. But before he reinvented haute couture, he was a hungry boy with holes in his shoes, a teen who daringly gambled drug dealers out of their money, and a young man in a prison cell who found nourishment in books. In this remarkable memoir, he tells his full story for the first time.

An army medic who went beyond the call of duty amid a frenzy of treacherous bloodletting in Ladakh’s Galwan while his fellow soldiers fought the Chinese to death; the crew of an Indian Navy destroyer that put everything on the line to rescue hundreds from Cyclone Tauktae in the Arabian Sea; an Indian Air Force pilot who ejected from his doomed fighter less than two seconds before it hit the ground, only to find he was missing a leg.

Just in time for the kickoff of the 2012 presidential campaign, Joe McGinniss, the author of the classic account of the packaging of a presidential candidate, The Selling of the President; of the acclaimed search for the essence of Alaska, Going to Extremes; and of the best-selling study of the dark family secrets of an American patriarch, Fatal Vision; presents his already controversial investigative chronicle of Sarah Palin as an individual, politician, and cultural phenomenon.

One hundred and thirty years ago Eadweard Muybridge invented stop-motion photography, anticipating and making possible motion pictures. He was the first to capture time and play it back for an audience, giving birth to visual media and screen entertainments of all kinds. Yet the artist and inventor Muybridge was also a murderer who killed coolly and meticulously, and his trial is one of the early instances of a media sensation.

Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon began working on this book shortly after leaving the National Security Council, where, as director and senior director for counterterrorism, they watched the rise of al-Qaeda and helped coordinate America’s fight against Usama bin Laden and his organization. They warned in articles and interviews about the appearance of a new breed of terrorists who were determined to kill on the grand scale.

While the 77-day siege of Khe Sanh in early 1968 remains one of the most highly publicized clashes of the Vietnam War, scant attention has been paid to the first battle of Khe Sanh, also known as "the Hill Fights". Although this harrowing combat in the spring of 1967 provided a grisly preview of the carnage to come at Khe Sanh, few are aware of the significance of the battles, or even their existence.

Told from the point of view of the men who waged this steel-shattering battle, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors captures Navy pilots attacking enemy battleships with makeshift weapons and sacrificial valor, a veteran commander improvising tactics never taught in Annapolis, and young crews from across America rising to an impossible challenge.