20th Century

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

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....

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....

Max Hastings presents a worldwide cast of characters and some extraordinary sagas of intelligence and resistance to create a new perspective on the greatest conflict in history....

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....

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....

On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants....

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....

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....

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

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....

This Pulitzer Prize-winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire....

Thunderstruck tells the stories of two men: Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication....

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....

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....

From age 15 to 40, David Hackworth devoted himself to the US Army and fast became a living legend. In 1971, however, he appeared on television to decry the doomed war effort in Vietnam....

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 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 pivotal true story of the first fifty-three days of the standoff between Imperial Japanese and a handful of Marine aviators defending the Americans dug in at Guadalcanal....

Here is the story of the men and women who fought against all odds to fulfill the 400-year-old dream of constructing an aquatic passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans....

The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century....

Drawing on previously unpublished eyewitness accounts, prizewinning historian Donald L. Miller has written what critics are calling one of the most powerful accounts of warfare ever published....

This is a sweeping narrative history of the events leading to 9/11, a groundbreaking look at the people and ideas that culminated in the assault on America....

Who was Kim Philby? Those closest to him—like his fellow MI6 officer and best friend since childhood, Nicholas Elliot, and the CIA’s head of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton—knew him as a loyal confidant and an unshakeable patriot....

On August 20, 1942, twelve Marine dive-bombers and nineteen Marine fighters landed at Guadalcanal. Their mission: defeat the Japanese navy and prevent it from sending more men and supplies to "Starvation Island," as Guadalcanal was nicknamed. The Japanese were turning the remote, jungle-covered mountain in the south Solomon Islands into an air base from which they could attack the supply lines between the U.S. and Australia.

Children of concentration camp survivors are also known as "memorial candles" because they are usually named after relatives who have been killed in the Holocaust. This is Volume II of an autobiography and is dedicated exclusively to how a son of Concentration Camp survivors dealt with the ever-present topic in such people's life: the Holocaust.

Raoul Wallenberg lived at a time when one of the worst outrages of inhumanity was occurring: the Holocaust. As a Swedish businessman in Hungary, he bore witness to this tragedy firsthand as Hungarian Jews were being shipped off to Auschwitz.

On June 4,1924 George Mallory donned an oxygen set and set off for the summit of Everest with his young partner Andrew Irvine. Next day they were glimpsed through clouds heading upwards, but after that they were never seen again. Whether they died on the way up or on the way down no one knows. In the years following his disappearance, Mallory was elevated into an all-British hero. Dubbed by his friends the 'Galahad' of Everest, he was lionized in the press as the greatest mountaineer of his generation who had died while taking on the ultimate challenge

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

Out of the ashes of World War I a phoenix arose. In the next two decades, the Turks created in Anatolia a nation unique to the Middle East. This phoenix, the Republic of Turkey, replaced the moribund Ottoman Empire, which succumbed to internal disorder as well as British and Arab forces in Arabia. At the conclusion of World War I, Great Britain, France, Greece, Italy, the Kurds, and Armenians all hoped to gain land or influence in Anatolia. However, a popular Ottoman general, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, resigned from the army, united the Turkish Nationalist forces, and pushed back the invading ...

The legendary ‘Red Devils’ were among the finest combat troops of the Second World War. Created at Churchill’s instigation in June 1940, they began as a single parachute battalion of 500 men and grew into three 10,000-strong airborne divisions: the 1st, 6th and 44th Indian, each composed of parachutists and glider-borne troops. Wearing their distinctive maroon berets, steel helmets and Dennison smocks, they served with distinction in every major theatre of the conflict and played a starring role in some most iconic airborne operations in history.

Berlin, 1945. Following the fall of the Third Reich, drug use — long kept under control by the Nazis' strict anti-drug laws — is rampant throughout the city. In the American sector, Arthur J. Giuliani of the nascent Federal Bureau of Narcotics is tasked with learning about the Nazis' drug policies and bringing home anything that might prove 'useful'.

Elida Friedman was never supposed to have been born. In the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania, Nazi law forbade Jewish women from giving birth. Yet despite the danger they faced, Dr. Jonah Friedman and his wife, Tzila, choose to bring a daughter into the world – a little girl they name Elida, meaning non-birth in Hebrew. To ensure her survival, the couple must smuggle their precious baby out of the ghetto into the arms of strangers. So begins a life of constant upheaval, with Elida changing families, countries, continents and even names, countless times.