Showing titles in 20th Century

On a summer morning in Sarajevo a hundred years ago, a teenage assassin fired not just the opening shots of the First World War but the starting gun for modern history. By killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Gavrilo Princip triggered conflict that would claim millions of lives in battle, and...

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Drift off to the gentle rhythm of sporting history's strangest corners, where ancient Olympic champions received olive wreaths and free meals for life, and a dog named Pickles once rescued the stolen World Cup trophy from beneath a London hedge. This...

A memoir of hope and survival. I. Betty Grebenschikoff has reached into the past to write a moving account of her experiences as a Holocaust refugee in China. Shanghai was the only port in 1939 that was willing to admit European Jews without passports or visas. Once My Name Was Sara details her...

A timely book for unstable times, Frenchman Flat recounts the science, politics, and human experience of those who developed nuclear weapons, suffered the consequences of their testing, and fought for and against arms control between the 1940s and 1990s. The throughline of this vast, complex...

The riveting untold story of how the defection of a KGB saboteur in London led to the rescue of MI5 after a series of disastrous intelligence failures. Drawing on newly declassified intelligence documents and dozens of interviews with spymasters, The Defector tells a startling story of a Soviet...

From a master historian and the critically acclaimed author of Lenin, comes a dramatic and gripping account of the political and cultural upheavals that lead to the death of democracy in Weimar era Germany—a story ripped out of today’s headlines. In this masterful work of history, Victor...

A sweeping history of America during the tumultuous decades between the ends of World War I and World War II, when a mainly rural, isolationist republic was transformed into a nuclear superpower and the leader of the free world. Through the prosperous 1920s and its culture wars to the Great...

After decades of concealing the full account of her experiences, Holocaust survivor Beatrice Sonders (Basia Gadzuik) writes her story of survival and courage in the face of ultimate horrors.

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...

The summer of 1940 found 60-year-old firebrand Leon Trotsky living in exile in Coyoacan, Mexico, still agitating with his pen and raging against the death he felt certain Stalin was bound to deliver - any day now. In The Death of Trotsky, Cecelia Holland brings this fated and fatal day to life, from its quotidian beginnings to its dramatic close. Between Trotsky's waking and his final rest, she probes the outer-workings and inner thoughts of those who were with him till the end, illuminating a man who exited life as he lived it: defiantly.

The momentous new book from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag and Iron Curtain. In 1932-33, nearly four million Ukrainians died of starvation, having been deliberately deprived of food. It is one of the most devastating episodes in the history of the 20th century. With unprecedented authority and detail, Red Famine investigates how this happened, who was responsible and what the consequences were. It is the fullest account yet published of these terrible events.

In the summer of 1914 most of Europe plunged into a war so catastrophic that it unhinged the continent's politics and beliefs in a way that took generations to recover from. The disaster terrified its survivors, shocked that a civilization that had blandly assumed itself to be a model for the rest of the world had collapsed into a chaotic savagery beyond any comparison.

The story of the Internet begins in the early 1960s, when Russia launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial earth satellite. Afraid of the technological potential of the Russians, the United States Department of Defense formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), in order to develop US science and technology, and in particular its application in the military.

He's been called "America's greatest living tailor" and "the most interesting man in the world." Now, for the first time, Holocaust survivor Martin Greenfield tells his whole, incredible life story. Taken from his Czechoslovakian home at age 15 and transported to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz with his family, Greenfield came face-to-face with "Angel of Death" Dr. Joseph Mengele and was divided forever from his parents, sisters, and baby brother. In haunting, powerful prose, Greenfield remembers his desperation and fear as a teenager alone in the death camp.

Growing up, author Malcolm Bates knew Snohomish's First Street as the heart of town-a place to shop for groceries, school clothes, a baseball mitt, even a car. Prescriptions could be filled, city bills paid, books checked out, and letters mailed. More than a shopping district, First Street was...

Ein ungeschönter Insiderbericht aus Russlands härtester Strafkolonie. Als Andrei Pivovarov im Mai 2021 in einem Flugzeug von St. Petersburg nach Warschau verhaftet wird, beginnt ein dreijähriger Weg durch Untersuchungshaft, soziale Isolation und Schikane. Sein Verbrechen: Facebook-Posts und...

Efter seks års rædsler er krigen endelig slut. Men byer over hele Europa er forvandlet til murbrokker, fabrikker og veje er ødelagt, og alt er til salg for et par kartofler eller en smøg. Millioner af flygtninge strejfer rundt, mens nye regeringer med hjælp fra USA prøver at få styr på...

In 1848, THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO was published by two émigrés from Germany. Marx and Engels' apocalyptic vision of an insatiable system that penetrates every corner of the world reduces every relationship to that of profit, and burst asunder the old forms of production and of politics. It is...

The clock was ticking on the Nazi plan to annihilate the last group of the Hungarian Jewry. After nearly suffocating in an underground bunker, Auschwitz prisoners Ceslav Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin escaped and told Jewish leaders what they had seen. Their testimony in early June, 1944, corroborated earlier hard-to-believe reports of mass killing in Auschwitz by lethal gas and provided eyewitness accounts of record daily arrivals of Hungarian Jews meeting the same fate. It was the spark needed to stir a call for action to pressure Hungary's premier to defy Hitler.

Brought to you by Penguin. An authoritative, revelatory new history of the Holocaust, from one of the leading scholars of his generation The Holocaust is much-discussed, much-memorialized and much-portrayed. But there are major aspects of its history that have been overlooked. Spanning the...