Showing titles in Modern

For centuries, opium has been a source of both profit and peril, its legacy entangled with addiction, imperialism, and the complex interplay of global trade and national development. While the illicit opium trade is infamous, the history of licit opium has remained largely untold. Markets of...

A fascinating look at the real Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, the designer who forever revolutionized the way women look. She was a free spirit, brilliant business woman, and beauty who never found reciprocated love. Madsen, with authority, delves into this fashion doyenne's business and private lives to reveal one woman's extraordinary progress: from orphan to millinery shopkeeper, from lodestar of feminine style to a very rich woman with a closet full of dark secrets.

The bestselling biography of Britain's 'Queen of Crime' by acclaimed historian Lucy Worsley OBE 'Every Christie fan should read this' - THE TIMES To Lucy Worsley, Agatha Christie was 'thrillingly, scintillatingly modern'. She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by...

In the 1860s a new word entered the economic and political vocabulary of the world: 'capitalism'. The global triumph of capitalism is the major theme of history in the decades after 1848. It was the triumph of a society which believed that economic growth rests on competitive private enterprise, on success in buying everything in the cheapest market (including labour) and selling it in the dearest. 

May 1945. Hitler is dead, and the Third Reich is little more than smoking rubble. No GI wants to be the last man killed in action against the Nazis. But for cigar-chewing, rough-talking, hard-drinking, hard-charging Captain Jack Lee and his men, there is one more mission: rescue 14 prominent French prisoners held in an SS-guarded castle high in the Austrian Alps. It's a dangerous mission, but Lee has help from a decorated German Wehrmacht officer and his men, who voluntarily join the fight.

Brought to you by Penguin. Read by the author, with Christine Kavanagh, Rosina Aichner, Laurence Dobeisz, Joe Jameson, Conor Macleod, Jamie Zubairi, Ayesha Antoine, Naruto Komatsu, Alfie Thompson, Chris Thompson, Nile Faure-Bryan, Sam Heaton, Michael Pender, Brónagh Grace and Ru Merritt. There...

What do ordinary Russians think of Putin? Who are his supporters? And why might their support now be faltering? Alive with the voices and experiences of ordinary Russians and elites alike, Sam Greene and Graeme Robertson craft a compellingly original account of contemporary Russian politics.

Anne Boleyn is the most notorious of England’s queens, but more famous for her death as an adulterer than for her life. Henry’s second wife and mother of Elizabeth I, Anne, was the first English queen to be publicly executed. Yet what do we know of the achievements and the legacy of her short reign? In The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn: The Most Happy, Eric Ives provides the most detailed and convincing portrait we have of the queen.

The Pursuit of Power draws on a lifetime of thinking about 19th-century Europe to create an extraordinarily rich, surprising and entertaining panorama of a continent undergoing drastic change. The aim of this audiobook is to reignite the sense of wonder that permeated this remarkable era, as rulers and ruled navigated overwhelming cultural, political and technological changes.

On 11 March 2011, a massive earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of Northeast Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than 18,000 people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned. It was Japan's greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It set off a national crisis and the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. And even after the immediate emergency had abated, the trauma of the disaster continued to express itself in bizarre and mysterious ways.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Metaxas is a scrupulous chronicler and has an eye for a good story. . . . full, instructive, and pacey.” —The Washington Post From #1 New York Times bestselling author Eric Metaxas comes a brilliant and inspiring biography of the most influential man in modern...

A Washington Post Best Book of the Year The dramatic story of a South Carolina heiress who joined the OSS and became the first American woman in uniform taken prisoner on the Western front—until her escape from Nazi Germany. Gertrude “Gertie” Legendre was a big-game hunter from a wealthy...

On the afternoon of January 16, 1942, three men boarded a TBD Devastator aircraft - a low-wing, single-engine torpedo-bomber - for an antisubmarine patrol flight. Although it was to be a relatively short flight, they became lost...

Written by one of Israel's most notable scholars, this volume provides a breathtaking history of Israel from the origins of the Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century to the present day.

In this innovative biography, Ruth Franklin explores the transformation of Anne Frank (1929–1945) from ordinary teenager to icon, shedding new light on the young woman whose diary of her years in hiding, now translated into more than seventy languages, is the most widely read work of literature to arise from the Holocaust. Comprehensively researched but experimental in spirit, this book chronicles and interprets Anne’s life as a Jew in Amsterdam during World War II while also telling the story of the diary—its multiple drafts, its discovery, its reception, and its message for today’s world.

In Patient Zero, Richard A. McKay presents a carefully documented and sensitively written account of the life of Gaetan Dugas, a gay man whose skin cancer diagnosis in 1980 took on very different meanings as the HIV/AIDS epidemic developed - and who received widespread posthumous infamy when he was incorrectly identified as patient zero of the North American outbreak.

In time for Scorsese’s 80th birthday and the release of Killers of the Flower Moon, a new edition of the seminal oral history tracing Scorsese’s journey from young filmmaker to legend, featuring a foreword by Steven Spielberg Few filmmakers, if any, make the kind of impact that Martin...

Deportationsfantasien, Untersuchungshaft wegen Terrorverdacht, Gelder aus Russland und China-Spionage – ganz Deutschland rätselt: Wie gefährlich ist die AfD? Muss die Partei verboten werden, bevor sie an die Macht kommt? Die Autoren Michael Kraske und Dirk Laabs, die seit Jahren im extremistischen Milieu recherchieren, liefern harte Fakten. Sie berichten aus ostdeutschen AfD-Brennpunkten, von AfD-Veranstaltungen, aus geheimen Chatprotokollen und Gesprächen mit Aussteigern.

A pochi è stato dato di uscire vivi dal campo di concentramento istituito dalle SS tedesche a Birkenau-Auschwitz. II poter narrare quanto avveniva in quelle terre, descrivere le scene d'orrore, ricordare con un brivido di raccapriccio lo scempio che vi si faceva, non solo della carne ma anche dell'anima umana e d'ogni sentimento civile, è dato a pochi; e pochissimi, al pari di me, ebbero la sorte di penetrare nei più misteriosi recessi di quei maledetti recinti e di assistere, sopravvivendo, allo sfacelo di migliaia e migliaia di esseri umani di quasi tutte le nazioni d'Europa;

This story casts penetrating light on how struggles in Europe and Asia merged into a tightly entwined global war. It features not just battles, but also the sweeping political, economic, and social effects of the war, and are graced with a rich tapestry of individual characters from top-tier political and military figures down to ordinary servicemen, as well as the accounts of civilians of all races and ages.