Showing results for "The Book of Firsts" in Modern

From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lords of Finance comes a brilliant account of the earliest truly global financial calamity. On Friday, 9 May 1873 the Vienna stock market collapsed. Four months later Wall Street was in trouble. Elsewhere, as panic selling spread across financial...

Brought to you by Penguin. With a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people and a global reach, the Spanish flu of 1918–1920 was the greatest human disaster, not only of the twentieth century, but possibly in all of recorded history. And yet, in our popular conception it exists largely...

By the New York Times’s Global Economics Correspondent, an extraordinary journey to understand the worldwide supply chain—exposing both the fascinating pathways of manufacturing and transportation that bring products to your doorstep, and the ruthless business logic that has left local...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Places and Names: On War, Revolution and Returning by Elliot Ackerman. In a refugee camp in southern Turkey, Elliot Ackerman sits across the table from Abu Hassar, who fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq and has murky connections to the Islamic State. At first...

It is an era that redefined history. As the 1790s began, a fragile America teetered on the brink of oblivion, Russia towered as a vast imperial power, and France plunged into revolution. But in contrast to the way conventional histories tell it, none of these remarkable events occurred in...

It is an era that redefined history. As the 1790s began, a fragile America teetered on the brink of oblivion, Russia towered as a vast imperial power, and France plunged into monumental revolution. But none of these remarkable events occurred in isolation. In The Great Upheaval, acclaimed...

Brought to you by Penguin. An intimate history of the most important month of World War II, as experienced by the people who lived through it, completely based on their diaries, letters and memoirs. At the beginning of November 1942, it looked as if the Axis powers could still win the Second...

In a world divided by the ideological struggles of the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, more than one-fifth of the people on the planet paused to watch the live transmission of the Apollo 11 mission. To watch as humanity took a giant leap forward. A companion book to the...

A funny, fascinating and personal look at 100 years of history in the BBC archives Historian Greg Jenner uses a random date generator to visit somewhere in the BBC's vast archives of remarkable sound clips from the last 100 years. Using that clip as a jumping-off point to explore what has...

From New York Times bestselling historian H. W. Brands comes the riveting story of how, in nineteenth-century America, a new set of political giants battled to complete the unfinished work of the Founding Fathers and decide the future of our democracy In the early 1800s, three young men strode...

'I will be good,' promised the thirteen-year-old Victoria, when she understood that she would be Queen of the most powerful country in the world. That, of course, is a matter of opinion. And there are other layers to the story. With a combination of novelistic flair and historical accuracy, Kate...

Brought to you by Penguin. 'Four years of war turned Ypres into a ghost town. Not a leaf grew on a tree. Scarcely one stone stood upon another. From the battered ramparts the eye swept clean across a field of rubble to the swamp-lands beyond . . .' The Third Battle of Ypres, ending in a...

From LA Times bestselling author Mallory O'Meara, the story of America’s first professional stuntwoman, Helen Gibson, who rose to fame during a time when women ruled Hollywood. Helen Gibson was a woman willing to do anything to give audiences a thrill. Advertised as "The Most Daring Actress in...

Brought to you by Penguin. A non-stop flight across the Atlantic might seem routine today. But it is only possible because of those who went first. Newfoundland, 1919. Buffeted by winds, an unwieldy aircraft struggled to take to the air. Cramped side by side in its open cockpit were two men...

“David K. Randall has conjured the first air race to circumnavigate the globe in all its death-defying glory, featuring a cast of unlikely heroes who had the right stuff before anyone knew what that was.” — Mitchell Zuckoff, New York Times bestselling author of Lost in Shangri-La and 13...

Who is Donald J. Trump? To truly understand America’s forty-fifth president, argues Vanity Fair journalist Emily Jane Fox, you must know his children, whose own stories provide the key to unlocking what makes him tick. Born Trump is Fox’s dishy, deeply reported, and richly detailed look at...

With authoritative, exciting text, The World War I Book explores the historical background to the war, its causes, all of key events across the major theatres of conflict, and its aftermath. Using the original approach of the series, entries profile more than 90 of the key events during and surrounding the conflict - from tensions between Europe's major powers to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the German invasion of Belgium, the endless slaughter in the trenches, the American entry into the war, the Russian Revolution, the Armistice, and the creation of the League of Nations.

Combining the pulsating drive of Showtime's Homeland with the fascinating historical detail of such of narrative nonfiction bestsellers as Double Cross and In the Garden of Beasts, Dark Invasion is Howard Blum’s gritty, high-energy true-life tale of German espionage and terror on American soil...

The New York Times bestseller “A glistening psychological history, faceted largely by the biographies of eight famous leaders . . .” —The Boston Globe “A provocative thesis . . . Ghaemi’s book deserves high marks for original thinking.” —The Washington Post “Provocative...

Penguin presents The Birth of the RAF by Richard Overy, read by Jonathan Keeble. The dizzying pace of technological change in the early 20th century meant that it took only a little over ten years from the first flight by the Wright Brothers to the clash of fighter planes in the Great War. A...