Modern

J. Robert Oppenheimer, an iconic figure of the 20th century, was a brilliant physicist who led efforts to build an atomic bomb but later confronted the moral consequences of scientific progress....

This is the definitive story of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, based on original reporting and new archival research. Through two decades of reporting, new archival information, and firsthand interviews with witnesses, Adam Higginbotham tells the full dramatic story....

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and many around him, including certain other elected Republican officials, intentionally breached their oath to the Constitution....

Based on the newly released personal letters of Albert Einstein, Walter Isaacson explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos....

Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order examines history’s most turbulent economic and political periods to reveal why the times ahead will likely be radically different from those we’ve experienced in our lifetimes....

Erik Larson has been widely acclaimed as a master of narrative non-fiction, and in his new book, turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler’s rise to power....

Hitler’s Forgotten Children is both a harrowing personal memoir and a devastating investigation into the awful crimes and monstrous scope of the Lebensborn program in World War 2. Created by Heinrich Himmler, the Lebensborn program abducted as many as half a million children....

If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky....

From the Pulitzer-prize winning, New York Times bestselling author, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them.

Yuval Noah Harari's 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a probing and visionary investigation into today's most urgent issues as we move into the uncharted territory of the future....

Now available in audio for the first time, Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews - now with a new afterword and additional photographs....

Many books have been written on the tragic decisions regarding Vietnam made by the stars of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Yet despite many words of analysis and reflection, no historian has been able to explain why such decent and previously successful men stumbled so badly...

In the first major biography of Bonhoeffer in 40 years, New York Times best-selling author Eric Metaxas takes both strands of Bonhoeffer's life - the theologian and the spy - to tell a searing story of incredible moral courage in the face of monstrous evil....

Stephen E. Ambrose draws from hundreds of interviews with US Army veterans and the brave Allied soldiers who fought alongside them to create this exceptional account of the day that shaped the twentieth century....

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, historian Barbara Tuchman brings to life the people and events that led up to World War I....

Adrenaline-charged and deeply personal, American Sniper is a thrilling eyewitness account of war that only one man could tell....

A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian explains, with electrifying clarity, why elites in democracies around the world are turning toward nationalism and authoritarianism....

Blind Man's Bluff shows for the first time how the navy sent submarines wired with self-destruct charges into the heart of Soviet seas to tap crucial underwater telephone cables....

This is the book the CIA does not want you to read. For the last 60 years, the CIA has maintained a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, never disclosing its blunders....

Israel is a tiny state, and yet it has captured the world's attention, aroused its imagination, and, lately, been the object of its opprobrium....

A powerful, moving memoir - and a practical guide to healing - written by Dr. Edith Eva Eger, an eminent psychologist whose own experiences as a Holocaust survivor help her treat patients....

The year is 1943, and the three Allied leaders - Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin - are meeting for the first time at a top-secret conference in Tehran. But the Nazis have learned about the meeting, and Hitler sees it as his last chance to turn the tide....

The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world....

The Watchmaker’s Daughter is one of the greatest stories of World War II that listeners haven’t heard: the remarkable and inspiring life story of Corrie ten Boom—a groundbreaking, female Dutch watchmaker, whose family unselfishly transformed their house into a hiding place....

The Golden Age of Aviation is brought to life in this story of the giant Zeppelin airships that once roamed the sky—a story that ended with the fiery destruction of the Hindenburg....

Following the Western Allies' overwhelming victory on D-Day, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin are all prepared to shape the future, and Operation Market Garden is Britain's attempt to beat the Russians to Berlin and be the first to help craft the new world order. With 10,000 men dropped into Arnhem and another 20,000 in Grave, the British are set to secure the area and declare victory. However, Dutch resistance hero Christian Lindemans has other plans. Lindemans is determined to help the Germans gain the lead in the war and begins to dismantle the operation from within.

In Why the Nineties Matter, Terry Anderson provides a broad-ranging history of America in that decade. Not simply a chronological account, the book focuses on key trends that either began or gained steam then and which have had lasting effects until this day. Threading together politics, economic transformations, and sociocultural trends, he focuses on what mattered most in retrospect.

Departing from a simple linear history, The Soviet Century traces all the continuities and ruptures that led from the founding revolution of October 1917, to the final collapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, passing through the Stalinist dictatorship, the impossible reforms of the Khrushchev years, and the glasnost and perestroika policies of Gorbachev.

Callum leaned closer to her throat. “Why would you tease me this way? It’s torture.” “Torture? You know nothing about torture!” Her eyes narrowed, and she bit her bottom lip. “What do you think it’s like to keep such a secret from you? To have these feelings for you and be unable to say a word for fear I’d ruin everything? Not just for me, but for my sister.” His eyes bore into her. “You have feelings for me?” With that, she lifted up on her tiptoes and pressed her lips to his, letting her emotions break free for the first time in her life. If that didn’t answer his ...

This remarkable book recreates one of the watershed moments in the history of the Middle East: the ferocious outbreaks of disorder across the Levant in 1860 which resulted in the massacre of thousands of Christians in Damascus. Eugene Rogan brilliantly recreates the lost world of the Middle East under Ottoman rule. This is both an essential book for understanding the emergence of the modern Middle East from the destruction of the old Ottoman world, and a uniquely gripping story.

Has the Communist-Nazi conglomerate completed the global takeover?

When her mother Celia Paget died, Ariane Bankes inherited a battered trunk stuffed with letters and diaries belonging to Celia and her twin Mamaine. This correspondence charted the remarkable lives of the Paget sisters and their friends and lovers, including Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Edmund Wilson and George Orwell.

Josephine Bonaparte, future Empress of France; Terezia Tallien, the most beautiful woman in Europe; and Juliette Recamier, muse of intellectuals, had nothing left to lose. After surviving incarceration and forced incestuous marriage during the worst violence of the French Revolution of 1789, they dared sartorial revolt.

Spanning three centuries and eight thousand nautical miles, and compiled by a direct descendant of a sailor who waged war with pirates in the early nineteenth century, The Penguin Book of Pirates takes us behind the eye patches, the peg legs, and the skull and crossbones of the Jolly Roger and into the no-man’s-land of piracy that is rife with paradoxes and plot twists.

The gripping narrative of one of the last Nazi criminal trials in Germany—that of Bruno Dey, a 93-year-old former concentration camp guard charged with aiding the murder of more than 5,000 people—and a larger exploration of Germany's reckoning with the Holocaust, from silence to memory to today's rising tide of fascism and antisemitism.

Scholars persist in framing the Cold War as a battle between left and right, one in which the Global South is cast as either witting or unwitting proxies of Washington and Moscow. What if the era is told from the perspective of the many who preferred reform to revolution? Scholars have routinely neglected, dismissed, or caricatured moderate politicians. In this book, Allen Wells argues that until the Cuban Revolution, the struggle was not between capitalism and communism—that was Washington's abiding preoccupation—but between democracy and dictatorship.

Why did Adolf Hitler allow the British to escape at Dunkirk? Why did he not invade England but attack the Soviet Union instead? Why did he order his army to halt outside Moscow? In "Hitler: The Pathology of Evil," Dr. George Victor, a psychotherapist, explores Hitler’s childhood to find the answer to these military questions and concludes that Hitler’s obsession with the Jewish question drove him to prolong World War II as a cover for the Holocaust. In part I, Victor investigates Hitler’s development into a charismatic leader, concluding that his desire to be his mother’s champion ...

In A Brief History On The Black Death, we embark on a gripping journey through one of humanity's most devastating catastrophes—the Black Death. This meticulously researched and engaging book offers a concise yet comprehensive account of the infamous pandemic that swept across Europe in the 14th century, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. Drawing from a vast array of historical sources and scholarly research, this captivating exploration delves into the origins, spread, and impact of the Black Death with meticulous detail. From its mysterious beginnings in Asia to the tumultuous ...

Through a study of history, Alfred Thayer Mahan concluded that six key factors influence a nation’s development as a sea power. Mahan also argued that command of the sea is valuable in both peace and war and that, during conflict, concentrating one’s fleet for decisive battle is key. Mahan’s ideas gained popularity among the major world powers in the late 19th century and continue to influence naval strategy today.

Are you drawn to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of unimaginable adversity? Intrigued by the stories of courage that emerge from the darkest chapters of history? Wondering how a young girl's diary became a beacon of hope and a symbol of the unbreakable will to live? Step into the world of Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis in the heart of Amsterdam during the Holocaust and World War II. A Brief History of Anne Frank - Unravelling a Tale of Courage and Survival in the Holocaust and World War II takes you on a profound journey through the pages of her diary, ...