Explore New Full Audiobooks in History, Europe

Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain by Jeremy Paxman

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/415120 [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.

The Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest by Fernando Cervantes

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/422862 [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.

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/429041 [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.

The End of the Road: A journey around Britain in search of the dead by Jack Cooke

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/367372 [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.

Hitler and Stalin: The Tyrants and the Second World War by Laurence Rees

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/423439 [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.