Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/415120 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain Author: Jeremy Paxman Narrator: Jeremy Paxman Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 12 hours 49 minutes Release date: September 30, 2021 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 1 of Total 1 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: From the bestselling historian and acclaimed broadcaster ‘A rich social history … Paxman’s book could hardly be more colourful, and I enjoyed each page enormously’ DOMINIC SANDBROOK, SUNDAY TIMES ‘Vividly told … Paxman’s fine narrative powers are at their best’ THE TIMES Coal is the commodity that made Britain. Dirty and polluting though it is, this black rock has acted as a midwife to genius. It drove industry, religion, politics, empire and trade. It powered the industrial revolution, turned Britain into the first urban nation and is the industry that made almost all others possible. In this brilliant social history, Jeremy Paxman tells the story of coal mining in England, Scotland and Wales from Roman times, through the birth of steam power to war, nationalisation, pea-souper smogs, industrial strife and the picket lines of the Miner’s Strike. Written in the captivating style of his bestselling book The English, Paxman ranges widely across Britain to explore stories of engineers and inventors, entrepreneurs and industrialists – but whilst coal inevitably helped the rich become richer, the story told by Black Gold is first and foremost a history of the working miners – the men, women and often children who toiled in appalling conditions down in the mines; the villages that were thrown up around the pit-head. Almost all traces of coal-mining have vanished from Britain but with this brilliant history, Black Gold demonstrates just how much we owe to the black stuff.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/422862 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest Author: Fernando Cervantes Narrator: Luis Soto Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 15 hours 8 minutes Release date: September 14, 2021 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: A sweeping, authoritative history of 16th-century Spain and its legendary conquistadors, whose ambitious and morally contradictory campaigns propelled a small European kingdom to become one of the formidable empires in the world   “The depth of research in this book is astonishing, but even more impressive is the analytical skill Cervantes applies. . . . [He] conveys complex arguments in delightfully simple language, and most importantly knows how to tell a good story.” —The Times (London)   Over the few short decades that followed Christopher Columbus's first landing in the Caribbean in 1492, Spain conquered the two most powerful civilizations of the Americas: the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru. Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, and the other explorers and soldiers that took part in these expeditions dedicated their lives to seeking political and religious glory, helping to build an empire unlike any the world had ever seen. But centuries later, these conquistadors have become the stuff of nightmares. In their own time, they were glorified as heroic adventurers, spreading Christian culture and helping to build an empire unlike any the world had ever seen. Today, they stand condemned for their cruelty and exploitation as men who decimated ancient civilizations and carried out horrific atrocities in their pursuit of gold and glory.   In Conquistadores, acclaimed Mexican historian Fernando Cervantes—himself a descendent of one of the conquistadors—cuts through the layers of myth and fiction to help us better understand the context that gave rise to the conquistadors' actions. Drawing upon previously untapped primary sources that include diaries, letters, chronicles, and polemical treatises, Cervantes immerses us in the late-medieval, imperialist, religious world of 16th-century Spain, a world as unfamiliar to us as the Indigenous peoples of the New World were to the conquistadors themselves. His thought-provoking, illuminating account reframes the story of the Spanish conquest of the New World and the half-century that irrevocably altered the course of history.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/429041 to listen full audiobooks. Title: All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler Author: Rebecca Donner Narrator: Rebecca Donner Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 13 hours 50 minutes Release date: August 3, 2021 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.25 of Total 4 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: The INSTANT New York Times Bestseller Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award  Winner of the Chautauqua Prize Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award Finalist for the Plutarch Award A New York Times Notable Book of 2021 A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A New York Times Critics' Top Pick of 2021 Wall Street Journal 10 Best Books of 2021 Time Magazine 100 Must-Read Books of 2021 Publishers Weekly Top Ten Books of 2021 An Economist Best Book of the Year A New York Post Best Book of the Year A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Best Book of the Year Oprah Daily Best New Books of August A New York Public Library Book of the Week   In this “stunning literary achievement,” Donner chronicles the extraordinary life and brutal death of her great-great-aunt Mildred Harnack, the American leader of one of the largest underground resistance groups in Germany during WWII—“a page-turner story of espionage, love and betrayal” (Kai Bird, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography) Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD program in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment—a small band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. She recruited working-class Germans into the resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution. Her coconspirators circulated through Berlin under the cover of night, slipping the leaflets into mailboxes, public restrooms, phone booths. When the first shots of the Second World War were fired, she became a spy, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies. On the eve of her escape to Sweden, she was ambushed by the Gestapo. At a Nazi military court, a panel of five judges sentenced her to six years at a prison camp, but Hitler overruled the decision and ordered her execution. On February 16, 1943, she was strapped to a guillotine and beheaded. Historians identify Mildred Harnack as the only American in the leadership of the German resistance, yet her remarkable story has remained almost unknown until now. Harnack’s great-great-niece Rebecca Donner draws on her extensive archival research in Germany, Russia, England, and the U.S. as well as newly uncovered documents in her family archive to produce this astonishing work of narrative nonfiction. Fusing elements of biography, real-life political thriller, and scholarly detective story, Donner brilliantly interweaves letters, diary entries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, survivors’ testimony, and a trove of declassified intelligence documents into a powerful, epic story, reconstructing the moral courage of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/367372 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The End of the Road: A journey around Britain in search of the dead Author: Jack Cooke Narrator: Paul Hilliar Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 19 minutes Release date: February 18, 2021 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: A wonderfully quixotic, charming and surprisingly uplifting travelogue which sees Jack Cooke, author of the much-loved The Treeclimbers Guide, drive around the British Isles in a clapped-out forty-year old hearse in search of famous – and not so famous – tombs, graves and burial sites. Along the way, he launches a daredevil trespass into Highgate Cemetery at night, stumbles across the remains of the Welsh Druid who popularised cremation and has time to sit and ponder the imponderables at the graveside of the Lady of Hoy, an 18th century suicide victim whose body was kept in near condition by the bog in which she was buried. A truly unique, beautifully written and wonderfully imagined book.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/423439 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Hitler and Stalin: The Tyrants and the Second World War Author: Laurence Rees Narrator: John Sackville Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 18 hours 17 minutes Release date: February 2, 2021 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.25 of Total 12 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: "Laurence Rees brilliantly combines powerful eye-witness testimony, vivid narrative and compelling analysis in this superb account of how two terrible dictators led their countries in the most destructive and inhumane war in history."―Professor Sir Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler: Hubris and Hitler: Nemesis Two 20th century tyrants stand apart from all the rest in terms of their ruthlessness and the degree to which they changed the world around them. Briefly allies during World War II, Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin then tried to exterminate each other in sweeping campaigns unlike anything the modern world had ever seen, affecting soldiers and civilians alike. Millions of miles of Eastern Europe were ruined in their fight to the death, millions of lives sacrificed. Laurence Rees has met more people who had direct experience of working for Hitler and Stalin than any other historian. Using their evidence he has pieced together a compelling comparative portrait of evil, in which idealism is polluted by bloody pragmatism, and human suffering is used casually as a political tool. It's a jaw-dropping description of two regimes stripped of moral anchors and doomed to destroy each other, and those caught up in the vicious magnetism of their leadership.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/412963 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Berlin: The Story of a City Author: Barney White-Spunner Narrator: Jamie Parker Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 18 hours 9 minutes Release date: October 29, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.33 of Total 3 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: 'My only complaint is that it was so fascinating I wish it had been longer. What a story!' Philip Mansel BERLIN is Europe’s most fascinating and exciting city. The great movements that have shaken Europe, from the Reformation to Marxism, have their origins in Berlin’s streets. With its unique dialect, exceptional museums, experimental cultural scene, its liberated social life and its honest approach to its history, it is as challenging a city as it is absorbing. Too often Berlin is seen through the prism of Nazism and its role on the front line in the Cold War. Important, frightening and interesting as those periods are, its history starts much earlier. Telling the story of its people and its rulers, from its medieval origins to the present day, this is a fascinating and informative history of an extraordinary city.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/426053 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Official History of Britain: Our Story in Numbers as Told by the Office For National Statistics Author: Boris Starling Narrator: Mark Meadows Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 48 minutes Release date: October 15, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: A wonderfully written and entertaining book which places Britain under the microscope and asks who we are today and how we’ve changed as a nation. ‘Entertaining and absorbing’ – The Sunday Times In 1841 there were 734 female midwives working in Britain, along with 9 artificial eye makers, 20 peg makers, 6 stamp makers and 1 bee dealer. Fast forward nearly two centuries and there are 51,000 midwives working in the UK and not an eye maker in sight! For the past two centuries, the National Census has been monitoring the behaviour of the British: our work-lives, homes lives and strange cultural habits. With questions on occupation, housing, religion, travel and family, the Census is a snapshot of a country at any given epoch, and its findings have informed the economy, politics and every other national matter for decades that followed. Now, for the first time ever, the Census findings of the past two centuries are collected in to a wonderfully written and entertaining book which places Britain under the microscope and asks who we are and how we’ve changed as a nation. On our occupations, our working lives, relationships; our quirks, habits, weird interests and cultural beliefs – this book takes the reader on a journey through the statistical findings of one of the most valuable pieces of ongoing historical research of modern times, and asks us what these fascinating numbers tells us about the Britain in the 21st century.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/424288 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Collateral Damage: Britain, America, and Europe in the Age of Trump Author: Kim Darroch Narrator: Kim Darroch Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 12 hours 29 minutes Release date: October 13, 2020 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: One of the UK's most experienced and respected diplomats reveals the inside story behind his resignation—and his perspective on the challenges of Brexit and the Trump White House. "@realDonaldTrump: The wacky ambassador that the UK foisted on the United States is not someone we are thrilled with, a very stupid guy . . . We will no longer deal with him." Kim Darroch is one of the UK's most experienced and respected diplomats, and this unvarnished, behind-the-scenes account will reveal the inside story behind his resignation; describe the challenges of dealing with the Trump White House; and offer a diplomat's perspective on Brexit, and how it looked to Britain's closest ally. Darroch was the British Ambassador to the US as the age of Trump dawned and Brexit unfolded. He explains why the British embassy expected a Trump victory from as early as February 2016, what part every key figure—from Steve Bannon to Sarah Sanders—has played in Trump's administration, and what balanced policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic should consider during this era of seismic change and populist politics. A riveting account from the best-informed insider, Collateral Damage charts the strangest and most convulsive period in the recent history of Britain and the US—and shows how thirty months threatened to overturn three centuries of history.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/429181 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Running Book: A Journey through Memory, Landscape and History Author: John Connell Narrator: John Connell Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 18 minutes Release date: October 1, 2020 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: From the award-winning, number one bestselling author of The Cow Book. It is summer, the hay and silage have not yet been made on John Connell’s farm, so he has time to indulge his other great passion: running. John sets off on a marathon run of 42.2 kilometres through his native Longford, the scene of his award-winning book The Cow Book. As he runs across woodlands, fields and tiny roads, he tells the story of his life and contemplates Ireland’s history, old and new. He also remembers other great runs he has done, from Australia to Canada, and tells the stories of some of his running heroes, such as Haile Gebrselassie. Part memoir, part essay, The Running Book explores what it is to be alive and what movement can do for a person. It is deeply intimate and wide-ranging, local and global: Connell is as likely to write about colonialism and the effect of British imperialism in Ireland and its former colonies as he is about life on his family farm in Ballinalee, County Longford. Told in 42 chapters, each another kilometre in the 42.2k race, the whole book is 42,000 words long and it captures what it is to undertake a marathon moment by moment, in body and mind. Above all, The Running Book is a book about the nature of happiness and how for one man it came through the feet.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/428704 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts and Harrimans – A Story of Love and War Author: Catherine Grace Katz Narrator: Christine Rendel Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 14 hours 54 minutes Release date: September 29, 2020 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: The brilliant untold story of three daughters of diplomacy: Anna Roosevelt, Sarah Churchill, and Kathleen Harriman, glamorous, fascinating young women who accompanied their famous fathers to the Yalta Conference with Stalin in the waning days of World War II. With victory close at hand, the Yalta conference was held across a tense week in February 1945 as Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin attempted to agree on an end to the war, and to broker post-war peace. In Daughters of Yalta, Catherine Katz uncovers the dramatic story of the three young women who travelled with their fathers to the Yalta conference, each bound by fierce ambition and intertwined romances that powerfully coloured these crucial days. Kathleen Harriman, twenty-seven, was a champion skier, war correspondent, and daughter to US Ambassador to Russia Averell Harriman. She acted as his translator and arranged much of the conference’s fine detail. Sarah Churchill, an actress-turned-RAF officer, was devoted to her brilliant father, who in turn depended on her astute political mind. FDR’s only daughter, Anna, chosen over Eleanor Roosevelt to accompany the president to Yalta, arrived there as holder of her father’s most damaging secret. Telling the little-known story of the huge role these women played in a political maelstrom and the shaping of a post-war world, Daughters of Yalta is a remarkable account of behind-the-scenes female achievement, and of fathers and daughters whose relationships were tested and strengthened in their joint effort to shape one of the most precarious periods of recent history.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/403882 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Those Who Forget Author: Geraldine Schwarz Narrator: Kathe Mazur Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 30 minutes Release date: September 22, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: “[Makes] the very convincing case that, until and unless there is a full accounting for what happened with Donald Trump, 2020 is not over and never will be.” —The New Yorker “Riveting…we can never be reminded too often to never forget.” —The Wall Street Journal Journalist Géraldine Schwarz’s astonishing memoir of her German and French grandparents’ lives during World War II “also serves as a perceptive look at the current rise of far-right nationalism throughout Europe and the US” (Publishers Weekly). During World War II, Géraldine Schwarz’s German grandparents were neither heroes nor villains; they were merely Mitlaüfer—those who followed the current. Once the war ended, they wanted to bury the past under the wreckage of the Third Reich. Decades later, while delving through filing cabinets in the basement of their apartment building in Mannheim, Schwarz discovers that in 1938, her paternal grandfather Karl took advantage of Nazi policies to buy a business from a Jewish family for a low price. She finds letters from the only survivor of this family (all the others perished in Auschwitz), demanding reparations. But Karl Schwarz refused to acknowledge his responsibility. Géraldine starts to question the past: How guilty were her grandparents? What makes us complicit? On her mother’s side, she investigates the role of her French grandfather, a policeman in Vichy. Weaving together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe’s process of post-war reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology, overcome by a fog of denial after the war, and, in Germany at least, eventually managed to transform collective guilt into democratic responsibility. She asks: How can nations learn from history? And she observes that countries that avoid confronting the past are especially vulnerable to extremism. Searing and unforgettable, Those Who Forget “deserves to be read and discussed widely...this is Schwarz’s invaluable warning” (The Washington Post Book Review).

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/415118 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream Author: Charles Spencer Narrator: Richard Trinder Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 8 minutes Release date: September 17, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.2 of Total 5 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: THE #2 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ‘As gripping as any thriller. History doesn't get any better than this’ BILL BRYSON ’A brilliant read … Game of Thrones but in the real world’ ANTHONY HOROWITZ PICKED AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 BY THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, THE GUARDIAN, THE DAILY MAIL AND THE DAILY EXPRESS. The sinking of the White Ship in 1120 is one of the greatest disasters England has ever suffered. In one catastrophic night, the king’s heir and the flower of Anglo-Norman society were drowned and the future of the crown was thrown violently off course. In a riveting narrative, Charles Spencer follows the story from the Norman Conquest through to the decades that would become known as the Anarchy: a civil war of untold violence that saw families turn in on each other with English and Norman barons, rebellious Welsh princes and the Scottish king all playing a part in a desperate game of thrones. All because of the loss of one vessel – the White Ship – the medieval Titanic. ‘Highly enjoyable’ Simon Heffer ‘Brilliant’ Dan Jones ‘Fascinating’ Tom Bower The #2 Sunday Times bestseller on Sunday 18 June 2021

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/414194 to listen full audiobooks. Title: This Sceptred Isle: Collection 3: The 20th Century: The Classic BBC Radio History Author: Christopher Lee Narrator: Anna Massey, Robert Powell Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 15 hours 15 minutes Release date: September 17, 2020 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: All five volumes from the landmark BBC radio series This Sceptred Isle: The Twentieth Century Christopher Lee's vivid, compelling history tells the story of Britain from the death of Queen Victoria to the dawning of a new millennium. This collection includes the original volumes 1-5: 1901-1919: The Victorian era comes to an end, Suffragettes demand 'Votes for Women', the Titanic sinks and the Great War casts a long shadow. 1919-1939: Ramsay MacDonald becomes the first Labour PM, millions of workers take industrial action during the General Strike, Wall Street crashes and Hitler rises to power. 1939-1959: The horrors of the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War, Indian independence, the founding of the NHS, the beginning of a new Elizabethan age and the Space Race. 1959-1979: War in Vietnam, Profumo causes a scandal, the Beatles generate worldwide hysteria, Britain joins Europe and Thatcherism is born. 1979-1999: The nation celebrates a fairytale royal wedding, Argentine troops invade the Falklands, disaster strikes at Chernobyl, the Berlin Wall falls - and as the year 2000 approaches, construction begins on London's Millennium Dome. Narrated by Anna Massey, with additional readings by Robert Powell, this is the definitive radio account of one of the most exciting and fast-moving periods in the history of the United Kingdom. NB: Due to the age of these recordings, sound quality may vary Production credits Written by Christopher Lee Narrated by Anna Massey, with additional readings by Robert Powell Produced by Pete Atkin First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 30 August-31 December 1999

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/414920 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Dead Doubles: The Extraordinary Worldwide Hunt for One of the Cold War’s Most Notorious Spy Rings Author: Trevor Barnes Narrator: William Gaminara Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 53 minutes Release date: September 15, 2020 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: The astonishing but true story of one of the most notorious spy cases from the Cold War—and the international manhunt that seized global attention as it revealed the shadowy world of deep cover KGB operatives.  The dramatic arrest in London on January 7, 1961 of five Soviet spies made headlines worldwide and had repercussions around the globe. Alerted by the CIA, Britain's security service, MI5, had discovered two British spies stealing invaluable secrets from the highly sensitive submarine research center at Portland, UK.  Their controller, Gordon Lonsdale, was a Canadian who frequently visited a middle-aged couple, the Krogers, in their sleepy London suburb. But the seemingly unassuming Krogers were revealed to be deep cover American KGB spies—infamous undercover agents the FBI had been hunting for years—and they were just one part of an extensive network of Soviet operatives in the UK. In the wake of the spies' sensational trial, the FBI uncovered the true identity of the enigmatic Lonsdale—Konon Molody, a Russian who had lived in California before being recruited by the KGB. Molody opened secret talks with MI5 to betray Russia, but before he had the chance, the KGB blackmailed Britain into spy swaps for him and the Krogers. Based on revelatory, newly-released archival material and inside sources from around the world, Dead Doubles follows the hunt for the highly damaging Portland Spy Ring.  As gripping as a le Carré novel, this incredible narrative, layered with false identities, deceptions, and betrayal, crisscrosses from the UK to the USSR to the US, Canada, Europe and New Zealand, and brings to life one of the most extraordinary spy stories of the Cold War. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/421307 to listen full audiobooks. Title: A Belfast Child: My true story of life and death in the Troubles Author: John Chambers Narrator: Patrick Moy Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 54 minutes Release date: September 3, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.83 of Total 6 Ratings of Narrator: 3.5 of Total 2 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: John Chambers was brought up on Belfast's notorious Loyalist Glencairn estate, during the height of the Troubles. From an early age he witnessed violence, hatred and horror as Northern Ireland tore itself apart in civil strife. Kneecapping, brutal murders, and even public tarring-and-feathering were simply a fact of life for the children on the estate. He thought he knew which side he was on, but although raised as a Loyalist, he was hiding a troubling secret: that his disappeared mother - whom he'd always been told was dead - was a Roman Catholic, 'the enemy'. In a memoir of rare power, John explores the dark heart of Northern Irish sectarianism in the seventies and eighties. With searing honesty and native Belfast wit, he describes the light and darkness of his unique childhood, and his teenage journey through mod culture and ultra-Loyalism, before an escape from Belfast to London - where, still haunted by the shadow of his fractured family history - he began a turbulent and hedonistic adulthood. A Belfast Child is a tale of divided loyalties, dark secrets and the scars left by hatred and violence on a proud city - but also a story of hope, healing and ultimate redemption for a family caught in the rising tide of the Troubles.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/420430 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Sicily '43: A Times Book of the Year Author: James Holland Narrator: Al Murray Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 19 hours 52 minutes Release date: September 3, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 3 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: Brought to you by Penguin. From the bestselling author of Normandy ‘44 comes a major new history of one of World War II’s most crucial campaigns. Codenamed Operation HUSKY, the Allied assault on Sicily on 10 July 1943 remains the largest amphibious invasion ever mounted in world history, landing more men in a single day than at any other time. That day, over 160,000 British, American and Canadian troops were dropped from the sky or came ashore, more than on D-Day just under a year later. It was also preceded by an air campaign that marked a new direction and dominance of the skies by Allies. The subsequent thirty-eight-day Battle for Sicily was one of the most dramatic of the entire Second World War, involving daring raids by special forces, deals with the Mafia, attacks across mosquito-infested plains and perilous assaults up almost sheer faces of rock and scree. It was a brutal campaign - the violence was extreme, the heat unbearable, the stench of rotting corpses intense and all-pervasive, the problems of malaria, dysentery and other diseases a constant plague. And all while trying to fight a way across an island of limited infrastructure and unforgiving landscape, and against a German foe who would not give up. It also signalled the beginning of the end of the War in the West. From here on, Italy ceased to participate in the war, the noose began to close around the neck of Nazi Germany, and the coalition between the United States and Britain came of age. Most crucially, it would be a critical learning exercise before Operation OVERLORD, the Allied invasion of Normandy, in June 1944. Based on his own battlefield studies in Sicily and on much new research over the past thirty years, James Holland’s SICILY ’43 offers a vital new perspective on a major turning point in World War II. It is a timely, powerful and dramatic account by a master military historian and will fill a major gap in the narrative history of the Second World War. © James Holland 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/405455 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency Author: Bea Koch Narrator: Rengin Altay Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 48 minutes Release date: September 1, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 2 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: Discover a feminist pop history that looks beyond the Ton and Jane Austen to highlight the Regency women who succeeded on their own terms and were largely lost to history -- until now. Regency England is a world immortalized by Jane Austen and Lord Byron in their beloved novels and poems. The popular image of the Regency continues to be mythologized by the hundreds of romance novels set in the period, which focus almost exclusively on wealthy, white, Christian members of the upper classes. But there are hundreds of fascinating women who don't fit history books limited perception of what was historically accurate for early 19th century England. Women like Dido Elizabeth Belle, whose mother was a slave but was raised by her white father's family in England, Caroline Herschel, who acted as her brother's assistant as he hunted the heavens for comets, and ended up discovering eight on her own, Anne Lister, who lived on her own terms with her common-law wife at Shibden Hall, and Judith Montefiore, a Jewish woman who wrote the first English language Kosher cookbook. As one of the owners of the successful romance-only bookstore The Ripped Bodice, Bea Koch has had a front row seat to controversies surrounding what is accepted as 'historically accurate' for the wildly popular Regency period. Following in the popular footsteps of books like Ann Shen's Bad Girls Throughout History, Koch takes the Regency, one of the most loved and idealized historical time periods and a huge inspiration for American pop culture, and reveals the independent-minded, standard-breaking real historical women who lived life on their terms. She also examines broader questions of culture in chapters that focus on the LGBTQ and Jewish communities, the lives of women of color in the Regency, and women who broke barriers in fields like astronomy and paleontology. In Mad and Bad, we look beyond popular perception of the Regency into the even more vibrant, diverse, and fascinating historical truth.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/405402 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Habsburgs: To Rule the World Author: Martyn Rady Narrator: Simon Boughey Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 14 hours 58 minutes Release date: August 25, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.67 of Total 6 Ratings of Narrator: 3 of Total 4 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: The definitive history of a powerful family dynasty who dominated Europe for centuries -- from their rise to power to their eventual downfall. Habsburgs ruled much of Europe for centuries. From modest origins as minor German nobles, the family used fabricated documents, invented genealogies, savvy marriages, and military conquest on their improbable ascent, becoming the continent's most powerful dynasty. By the mid-fifteenth century, the Habsburgs controlled of the Holy Roman Empire, and by the early sixteenth century, their lands stretched across the continent and far beyond it. But in 1918, at the end of the Great War, the final remnant of their empire was gone. In The Habsburgs, historian Martyn Rady tells the epic story of the Habsburg dynasty and the world it built -- and then lost -- over nearly a millennium, placing it in its European and global contexts. Beginning in the Middle Ages, the Habsburgs expanded from Swabia across southern Germany to Austria through forgery and good fortune. By the time a Habsburg duke was crowned as Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III in 1452, he and his clan already held fast to the imperial vision distilled in its AEIOU motto: Austriae est imperare orbi universe, 'Austria is destined to rule the world.' Maintaining their grip on the imperial succession of the Holy Roman Empire for centuries, the Habsburgs extended their power into Italy, Spain, the New World, and the Pacific, a dominion that Charles V called 'the empire on which the sun never sets.' They then weathered centuries of religious warfare, revolution, and transformation, including the loss of their Spanish empire in 1700 and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. In 1867, the Habsburgs fatefully consolidated their remaining lands the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, setting in motion a chain of events that would end with the 1914 assassination of the Habsburg heir presumptive Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, World War I, and the end of the Habsburg era. Their demise was ignominious, and historians often depict the Habsburgs as leaders of a ramshackle, collapsing empire at Europe's margins. But in The Habsburgs, Rady reveals how they saw themselves -- as destined to rule the world, not through mere territorial conquest, but as defenders of Christian civilization and the Roman Catholic Church, guarantors of peace and harmony, and patrons of science and learning. Lively and authoritative, The Habsburgsis the engrossing definitive history of the remarkable dynasty that forever changed Europe and the world.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/410970 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989 Author: Frederick Taylor Narrator: Peter Noble Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 21 hours 28 minutes Release date: August 25, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 3 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: “This vivid account of the Wall and all that it meant reminds us that symbolism can be double-edged, as a potent emblem of isolation and repression became, in its destruction, an even more powerful totem of freedom.” — The Atlantic Monthly NOW WITH AN UPDATED EPILOGUE 30 YEARS AFTER THE FALL OF THE WALL On the morning of August 13, 1961, the residents of East Berlin found themselves cut off from family, friends, and jobs in the West by a tangle of barbed wire that ruthlessly split a city of four million in two. Within days the barbed-wire entanglement would undergo an extraordinary metamorphosis: it became an imposing 103-mile-long wall guarded by three hundred watchtowers. A physical manifestation of the struggle between Soviet Communism and American capitalism that stood for nearly thirty years, the Berlin Wall was the high-risk fault line between East and West on which rested the fate of all humanity. In the definitive history on the subject, Frederick Taylor weaves together official history, archival materials, and personal accounts to tell the complete story of the Wall's rise and fall.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/424796 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings Author: Neil Price Narrator: Samuel Roukin Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 17 hours 25 minutes Release date: August 25, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.91 of Total 11 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: The definitive history of the Vikings—from arts and culture to politics and cosmology—by a distinguished archaeologist with decades of expertiseThe Viking Age—from 750 to 1050—saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe. But for centuries, the Vikings have been seen through the eyes of others, distorted to suit the tastes of medieval clerics and Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more. None of these appropriations capture the real Vikings, or the richness and sophistication of their culture.Based on the latest archaeological and textual evidence, Children of Ash and Elm tells the story of the Vikings on their own terms: their politics, their cosmology and religion, their material world. Known today for a stereotype of maritime violence, the Vikings exported new ideas, technologies, beliefs, and practices to the lands they discovered and the peoples they encountered, and in the process were themselves changed. From Eirík Bloodaxe, who fought his way to a kingdom, to Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, the most traveled woman in the world, Children of Ash and Elm is the definitive history of the Vikings and their time.