Download the Popular Authors Audiobooks in History, 20th Century

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Title: Winston S. Churchill: The History of the Second World War, Volume 2 - Their Finest Hour

Author: Winston S. Churchill

Narrator: Michael Jayston

Format: Abridged

Length: 2 hrs and 46 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-12-11

Publisher: The Copyright Group

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 63 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

In this short and intense period of the war, Churchills sense of history is profound. 'If the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say this was its finest hour.'

In this second volume, Britain stands alone in combat against the mortal threat posed to civilisation, liberal democracy, and human decency. Between May 1940 and January 1941, the world witnessed some of the most spectacular military victories of all time. The audacity and brilliance of Hitlers Blitzkrieg staggered both France and Britain. The Allies had prepared for a repeat of the entrenched First World War instead of something altogether more terrifying, mobile, and destructive.

The consequences were almost fatal. Dunkirk was a victory plucked from the jaws of defeat. The Battle of Britain was defiance against the odds but mastery of the skies remained in British hands and 'Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.' In the deserts of North Africa the outnumbered British forces went from victory to victory against Mussolinis conscripted men. There were many hardships and disasters to come, but Churchill could rightly proclaim 'Alone but up-bourne by every generous heart beat of mankind we had defied the tyrant in the height of his triumph.'

The overview is read by Winston S Churchill, MP, and the volume narrated by Michael Jayston.

Members Reviews:

Brilliant

succinct and to the point. Churchill is a great writer. who better to tell the tale?

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Title: The Storm of War

Subtitle: A New History of the Second World War

Author: Andrew Roberts

Narrator: Christian Rodska

Format: Unabridged

Length: 28 hrs and 35 mins

Language: English

Release date: 07-07-11

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 716 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

The Second World War lasted for 2,174 days, cost $1.5 trillion, and claimed the lives of more than 50 million people. What were the factors that affected the war's outcome? Why did the Axis lose? And could they, with a different strategy, have won?

Andrew Roberts' acclaimed new history has been hailed as the finest single-volume account of this epic conflict. From the western front to North Africa, from the Baltic to the Far East, he tells the story of the war - the grand strategy and the individual experience, the cruelty and the heroism - as never before.

In researching this magnificently vivid history, Roberts walked many of the key battlefields and wartimes sites in Russia, France, Italy, Germany, and the Far East, and drew on a number of never-before-published documents, such as a letter from Hitler's director of military operations explaining the reasoning behind the Fuhrer's order to halt the Panzers outside Dunkirk - a delay that enabled British forces to evacuate. Roberts illuminates the principal actors on both sides and analyzes how they reached critical decisions. He also presents the tales of many little-known individuals whose experiences form a panoply of the extraordinary courage and self-sacrifice, as well as the terrible depravity and cruelty, of the Second World War.

Meticulously researched and masterfully written, The Storm of War gives a dramatic account of this momentous event and shows in remarkable detail why the war took the course it did.

Members Reviews:

A very interesting book with some shortcomings.

I have been reading about the Second World War for the last 50 years and so did not expect to find anything really new in this book. I bought it thinking that it would be good to have a single volume that covered both the European and Pacific theaters and with the thought that there might be something new and interesting in it. What I found was a book that was very interesting; not so much because of new material, but rather because the book centers on the "whys" of what happened and contained a great deal of "back story" about the time that is missing in other books (examples - the actions in North Africa before the German troops were deployed there, the importance of the spy operations on both sides, the actions in generally neglected threaters of the war such as Burma, the fact that the Germans had broken the British Naval codes and so on) as well as a good overview of the major actions of the war. Add to that the excellent narration by Christian Rodska, including his ability to make his voice sound exactly like many of the political figures of the time, and this is a hard book to top if you want something on World War 2.

There are some inaccuracies -

(a) a rise of 500 feet over a length of 1000 feet does NOT make a 45 degree hill. A simple check of the trig tables shows this to be about 27 degrees,

(b) a quote from Churchill (to his war cabinet) wrongly attributed to Hitler,

(c) a statement, with no supporting evidence, that Churchill invented the story of Lord Halifax almost being offered the premiership. This flies in the face of every other book about the period and thus requires some supporting evidence,

(d) aside from the Philippine Islands, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, very little detail about the Pacific war (with nothing about MacArthur's island hopping campaign).

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Title: JFK and the Unspeakable

Subtitle: Why He Died and Why It Matters

Author: James W. Douglass

Narrator: Pete Larkin

Format: Unabridged

Length: 22 hrs and 23 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-16-11

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 303 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

At the height of the Cold War, JFK risked committing the greatest crime in human history: starting a nuclear war. Horrified by the specter of nuclear annihilation, Kennedy gradually turned away from his long-held Cold Warrior beliefs and toward a policy of lasting peace. But to the military and intelligence agencies in the United States, who were committed to winning the Cold War at any cost, Kennedy's change of heart was a direct threat to their power and influence. Once these dark "Unspeakable" forces recognized that Kennedy's interests were in direct opposition to their own, they tagged him as a dangerous traitor, plotted his assassination, and orchestrated the subsequent cover-up.

Douglass takes listeners into the Oval Office during the tense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, along on the strange journey of Lee Harvey Oswald and his shadowy handlers, and to the winding road in Dallas where an ambush awaited the president's motorcade. As Douglass convincingly documents, at every step along the way, these forces of the Unspeakable were present, moving people like pawns on a chessboard to promote a dangerous and deadly agenda.

Critic Reviews:

"The best account I have read of this tragedy and its significance.... But dont take my word for it. Read this extraordinary book and reach your own conclusions." (Oliver Stone)

Members Reviews:

Awesome

Any additional comments?

At first I was a bit skeptical about what angle a thelologian would take on this subject. Boy, was I surprised. Is one of the finest history books I have ever read (and listened to in my car) and perhaps the finest book I have read on the JFK assassination. Well worth the investment.

One Book EVERY AMERICAN Needs to Read

If you could sum up JFK and the Unspeakable in three words, what would they be?

See "Additional Comments" Come on- - - three words to summarize a book this powerful, this revealing and this important. You must be kidding.

Who was your favorite character and why?

The author for his courage and dedication to impeccable research and maintaining as much impartiality as is possible for a book of this kind.

Which character as performed by Pete Larkin was your favorite?

Can't say.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

When it became clear that both Khruschev AND JFK were determined to avert the nuclear wars that both of their generals and admirals were trying so hard to initiate.

Any additional comments?

This book is the absolute best book I have ever read on the subject of the reasons-for and the results-of the JFK assassination. Douglass brings to light truths about JFK's devotion to co-creating a peaceful world with Premier Khruschev and the fact that JFK had faced his own death for so long and in so many ways that he was more prepared to fight the valiant battle plan than any President before or after. Douglass brilliantly brings out the humanity of both Kennedy and Khruschev and the nightmarish battles they had to fight with their own subordinates, who wanted to start preemptive wars between our two nations. The documentation of other assassination scenarios in the U.S. which were overlooked or completely obfuscated and the way that evidence was discarded made this book stand high above most I have read.

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Title: To End All Wars

Subtitle: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

Author: Adam Hochschild

Narrator: Arthur Morey

Format: Unabridged

Length: 16 hrs and 25 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-04-11

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 349 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

World War I stands as one of history's most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. In a riveting, suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Adam Hochschild brings it to life as never before. He focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war's critics, alongside its generals and heroes.

Thrown in jail for their opposition to the war were Britain's leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an editor who, behind bars, published a newspaper for his fellow inmates on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain's most prominent women pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western Front. Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up publishing newspapers that attacked each other.

Today, hundreds of military cemeteries spread across the fields of northern France and Belgium contain the bodies of millions of men who died in the "war to end all wars". Can we ever avoid repeating history?

Editorial Reviews:

It is simply an auditory tour de force as Arthur Morey reads Adam Hochschild's To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. Hochschild provides vivid and riveting descriptions of the world that lurched itself into World War I. Arthur Morey gives that world palpable energy as he voices empire proponents, socialist dissenters, xenophobic war supporters, radical suffragettes, and, most dramatically, soldiers on the various hellish battlefields.

Hochschild sets the scene for the cataclysm to come by beginning his work with Queen Victoria's elaborate Julbilee Celebration of her 60 years on the throne. It was 1897, England was at the height of imperial power, and the world was on the cusp of social change. There were growing movements for workers rights and women's suffrage, but also powerful, aristocratic colonialists whose assumptions included an accepted truth that non-whites could never rule themselves. Most damagingly, this point of view also never envisioned a world where the new weaponry of machine guns could or would ever be used against other Europeans. Such inventions were to be used against savages only.

Morey emphatically portrays the unique Pankhurst women, mother Emmeline, daughters Christabel and Sylvia, as they became more and more strident in their call for women's right to vote. Morey then deftly changes tone for Emmeline and Christabel when they became unabashed, jingoistic proponents of England's place in the war. Sylvia remained passionately committed to peace throughout the war and also to workers rights, to the needs of women and their children, and to Englands conscientious objectors. Morey gives extraordinary vocal force to the dynamo that was Emily Hobhouse, the archdeacon's daughter who could not be intimidated in her decades of work for peace and humanitarian treatment of women, children, and prisoners during wartime.

Interlaced throughout the book is the personal story of writer Rudyard Kipling, another clarion of unflagging support of the empire, whose tone became jaundiced and nativist once his own young son was killed.

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Title: No Ordinary Time

Subtitle: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II

Author: Doris Kearns Goodwin

Narrator: Nelson Runger

Format: Unabridged

Length: 39 hrs and 18 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-04-11

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 948 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

Pulitzer Prize Winner, History, 1995

No Ordinary Time describes how the isolationist and divided United States of 1940 was unified under the extraordinary leadership of Franklin Roosevelt to become the preeminent economic and military power in the world.

Using diaries, interviews, and White House records of the president's and first lady's comings and goings, Goodwin paints an intimate portrait of the daily conduct of the presidency during wartime and the Roosevelts' extraordinary constellation of friends, advisers, and family.

Bringing to bear the tools of both history and biography, No Ordinary Time relates the unique story of how Franklin Roosevelt led the nation to victory against seemingly insurmountable odds and, with Eleanor's essential help, forever changed the fabric of American society.

Members Reviews:

Great at 1.5 speed

What about Nelson Rungers performance did you like?

I liked the voice alright. However, I think 10 hours of the 40 hour book were the narrator's pauses between sentences. I listened at 1 and a half speed and loved it then.

Fascinating, But Could Have Been Shortened

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt are among the most remarkable people in the 20th century world, and the roles they played out during his 12 years in the White House is an incredible story.

This book focuses on the period from May 1940 to FDR's death, and details (and I do mean DETAILS) the day to day activities of the President and First Lady over that period... not every day by any means, but Goodwin has thoroughly presented both the public and private lives and what everyone said about most everything it seems. My only quibble is that, at times, I felt like there was just too much information about who said what to whom and about whom. Now it can be argued that the Roosevelts had so many important relationships that it was necessary to present all of these for context, and I get that. After all, the White House was like a rooming house during their presidency, with many people from outside of the family living there, and so there were lots of relationships. All of this makes for a very long book.

That quibble aside, the story is what it is, a story of two very exceptional people who had a flawed relationship (at least in terms of what we traditionally expect marriage to be). Goodwin shows us both the good and the bad, and at times I found myself admring FDR and Eleanor, at times I found myself pitying them, and at time I found myself irritated at them for their obvious foibles.

But the real value of this book seems to be in the documentation of the times, and the amazing story of America's movement from isolation to combatant in World War II, and the incredible transformation this movement caused in American society. As I read this book and its story of opportunities for women and for blacks, I found myself eager to talk to my dad about his work as a WAC recruiter early in the war, and in so doing, heard personal stories from he and my mom about their life during the war (they were married in October 1942).

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Title: Seabiscuit

Subtitle: An American Legend

Author: Laura Hillenbrand

Narrator: George Newbern

Format: Unabridged

Length: 13 hrs and 13 mins

Language: English

Release date: 11-16-10

Publisher: Random House Audio

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 1611 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

Seabiscuit was one of the most electrifying and popular attractions in sports history and the single biggest newsmaker in the world in 1938, receiving more coverage than FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini. But his success was a surprise to the racing establishment, which had written off the crooked-legged racehorse with the sad tail. Three men changed Seabiscuit's fortunes:

Charles Howard was a onetime bicycle repairman who introduced the automobile to the western United States and became an overnight millionaire. When he needed a trainer for his new racehorses, he hired Tom Smith, a mysterious mustang breaker from the Colorado plains. Smith urged Howard to buy Seabiscuit for a bargain-basement price, then hired as his jockey Red Pollard, a failed boxer who was blind in one eye, half-crippled, and prone to quoting passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Over four years, these unlikely partners survived a phenomenal run of bad fortune, conspiracy, and severe injury to transform Seabiscuit from a neurotic, pathologically indolent also-ran into an American sports icon.

Author Laura Hillenbrand brilliantly re-creates a universal underdog story, one that proves life is a horse race.

Critic Reviews:

Fascinating...Vivid... A first-rate piece of storytelling, leaving us not only with a vivid portrait of a horse but a fascinating slice of American history as well.(

The New York Times)

Engrossing...Fast-moving...More than just a horses tale, because the humans who owned, trained, and rode Seabiscuit are equally fascinating.... [Hillenbrand] shows an extraordinary talent for describing a horse race so vividly that the reader feels like the rider. (

Sports Illustrated)

Remarkable...Memorable...Just as compelling today as it was in 1938." (

The Washington Post)

Members Reviews:

See you in the winner's circle

I never got around to reading this book when it first came out, but did see the movie and have watched it several times. Because the movie was so perfectly casted with Jeff Bridges, Toby Maguire and Chris Cooper, those were the faces I saw in my head as I listened to the scenes familiar from the film. The real delight was in discovering the details that further fleshed out those characters and the story in general Howards compassionate and feisty wife, Smiths sly tricks to evade the press, the brutal life of virtual indentured servitude jockeys endured to make a dangerous and financially unrewarding living.

The book starts somewhat slowly methodically, introducing the three damaged men and the horse, who all needed to come together to mend each others lives. These introductions also laid out necessary information for the reader uninitiated in racing lore to understand the context of the lives in question. For that reason, some readers may feel it moves slowly. But with the foundation laid, the stage is well set for the exciting racing scenes that had me rooting for The Biscuit, sometimes with victory and more often than I had realized with defeat. If there was one weakness, because the excitement of any sporting event depends largely on the visual witnessing of the event, hearing a verbal narration just didnt convey the tension, danger, and exhilaration that raised my adrenalin, especially for the lesser races. The major races (the Match Race, and the 100 Grander) were exceptions very exciting and well written. Narration was good, had the tone of a documentary which this really was.

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Title: The Master Switch

Subtitle: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Author: Tim Wu

Narrator: Marc Vietor

Format: Unabridged

Length: 14 hrs and 10 mins

Language: English

Release date: 11-02-10

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 1141 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

A secret history of the industrial wars behind the rise and fall of the 20th century's great information empires - Hollywood, the broadcast networks, and AT&T - asking one big question: Could history repeat itself, with one giant entity taking control of American information?

Most consider the Internet Age to be a moment of unprecedented freedom in communications and culture. But as Tim Wu shows, each major new medium, from telephone to cable, arrived on a similar wave of idealistic optimism only to become, eventually, the object of industrial consolidation profoundly affecting how Americans communicate. Every once-free and open technology was in time centralized and closed, a huge corporate power taking control of the master switch. Today, as a similar struggle looms over the Internet, increasingly the pipeline of all other media, the stakes have never been higher. To be decided: who gets heard, and what kind of country we live in. Part industrial exposé, part meditation on the nature of freedom of expression, part battle cry to save the Internet's best features, The Master Switch brings to light a crucial drama rife with indelible characters and stories, heretofore played out over decades in the shadows of our national life.

Critic Reviews:

Wus engaging narrative and remarkable historical detail make this a compelling and galvanizing cry for sanity - and necessary deregulation - in the information age. (Publishers Weekly)

This is an essential look at the directions that personal computing could be headed depending on which policies and worldviews come to dominate control over the Internet. (Booklist)

"Theres a sharp insight and a surprising fact on nearly every page of Wus masterful survey. Above all, Wu shows that each new communications technology spawns the same old quest for power." (The Boston Globe)

"A brilliant exploration of the oscillations of communications technologies between 'open' and 'closed' from the early days of the telephone up through Hollywood and broadcast television up to the Internet era." (Forbes.com)

"My pick for economics book of the year." (Ezra Klein, The Washington Post)

Members Reviews:

Very interesting history, biased conclusions

I've never heard of Tim Wu before reading this, but he really knows his stuff as far as media/technology history goes. The best parts of this book were examining this history of prior "cutting edge" media (Telephony, Radio, Television) through the eyes of what we'd now call the "Open Source" vs. "Closed System" dynamic. Fascinating and informative. I found I couldn't put it down.

HOWEVER -- the last hour turns into a very biased analysis of what's going on today.

I take his larger point -- that the Internet's open-ended structure which we tend to think of as permanent is not, in fact, unassailable. I think it's a well-supported point and he makes some interesting conjectures as to how that structure could change.

But I feel he makes a serious error in his analysis.

Specifically, he reduces "fate of the communications future" to a simple dynamic: Apple vs Google, with his preference clearly falling on Team Google. I think this a fairly short-sighted, narrow interpretation.

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Title: Bloodlands

Subtitle: Europe between Hitler and Stalin

Author: Timothy Snyder

Narrator: Ralph Cosham

Format: Unabridged

Length: 18 hrs and 15 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-18-10

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 685 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

Americans think of World War II as The Good War, a moment when the forces of good resoundingly triumphed over evil. Yet the war was not decided by D-day. It was decided in the East, by the Red Army and Joseph Stalin.

While conventional wisdom locates the horrors of World War II in the six million Jews killed in German concentration camps, the reality is even grimmer. In 13 years, the Nazi and Soviet regimes killed 13 million people in the lands between Germany and Russia. The majority of these deaths occurred in Eastern Europe, not Germany.

In the groundbreaking long-view style of Tony Judt and Niall Ferguson, Tim Snyder, one of Americas foremost historians of Eastern Europe, has written a new history of Europe that focuses on the battleground of Eastern Europe, which suffered the worst crimes of Hitler and Stalin. Based upon scholarly literature and primary sources in all of the relevant languages, Bloodlands pays special attention to the sources left by those who were killed: the letters home, the notes flung from trains, the diaries found on corpses.

This is a new kind of European history, one more concerned with suffering than with intention, one that recognizes how stories of progress or victory have excluded the most salient human experience, and one focused on the extreme predicament of the tens of millions of Europeans who found themselves between Hitler and Stalin.

The scale of destruction in the lands between Germany and Russia has eluded historians and baffles the cynicism of our new century, but for these very reasons, Bloodlands offers the way forward to a sensible reconstruction of European history. Ultimately, in Snyders matchless telling, the German and Soviet regimes appear not so much as totalitarian twins, but as rivals whose ruthless pursuit of similar goals doomed millions of innocents.

Critic Reviews:

"A chillingly systematic study of the mass murder mutually perpetrated by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. A significant work of staggering figures and scholarship." (Kirkus)

This is a book which will force its readers to rethink history. (Norman Davies)

History of a high order, Bloodlands may also point us towards lessons for our own time. (Timothy Garton Ash)

Members Reviews:

One of the best and scariest books I've ever read

Let's start with the end: you should buy this book. It will surprise you, shock you, scare you, enlighten you, inform you and more than anything else, it will make you think. As promised by the description (and from my own time in high school history classes) most Westerners think of WWII from a western perspective, the attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany invades France, the landing at Normandy, the march towards Berlin. But we don't think of the drama in Eastern Europe, the areas between Berlin and Moscow. That was where the real atrocities happened between 1930 and 1945. This book examines these areas, known to our author as the Bloodlands.

With wonderful depth, humanity and detail, the author describes what happens throughout Eastern Europe as it is annexed by Stalin, invaded by Russia and Germany, traded back and forth in the war's Eastern front and continually starved, persecuted and purged of "unnecessary eaters".

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Title: The Envoy

Subtitle: The Epic Rescue of the Last Jews of Europe in the Desperate Closing Months of World War II

Author: Alex Kershaw

Narrator: George Guidall

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 34 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-14-10

Publisher: Recorded Books

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 75 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

Hailed as a master storyteller (Booklist), Alex Kershaw routinely climbs best-seller lists with his narrative histories. In the waning months of World War II, SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann sent over half a million Hungarians to their deaths at Auschwitz. But one Jewish ghetto remained, and only one man - a Swedish diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg - could stop Eichmann.

Critic Reviews:

"A tense, fast-moving narrative that shows Wallenberg as a match for Eichmann in intelligence and determination as he utilized fake documents, safe houses, and a variety of other methods to save thousands of Jewish lives. This is an inspiring story that illustrates how one dedicated human can make an impact, even against a monstrous tyranny." (Booklist)

Members Reviews:

an amazing story

This is a moving, tragic story of Raol Wallenberg's efforts to rescue Jews of Hungary using his diplomat's status and strategy. It exposes the cruelty of the Nazi's the Hungarian Nazi party and the role of Eichman in the deportation. Such cruelty is hard to imagine, Also hard to imagine is the courage of Wallenberg. The tragic end of Wallenberg and the impact on his family, make this book an important addition to the history of WW2

The Envoy

I don't typically read or listen to books of this nature. I was pleasantly surprised that it flowed very well. The book has alot of focus on Budapest and provides the reader with more information on this lightly covered area of the Holocost. It is a an excellent narration by George Guidall

Raoul Wallenberg and what he did should be taught in schools

Surprisingly, as a WWII history buff, I had never heard of Raoul Wallenberg until I read this excellent book. His exploits to save the last of the Jews in Europe, along with how the soviets "disappeared" and later murdered him, should be more well known, and taught in schools everywhere. This book is an excellent telling of his story, and some of the people he saved.

Outstanding.

A+ all around. Excellent writing and narration. Kershaw and Guidall are a great combo. Exceptional.

Perhaps the most important book I have ever "read"

This is a wonderful story! Raoul Wallenberg would have been a remarkable person in any decade of the past century, but it seems as though he was the necessary hero to live in Hungary during the 1940s in order to save so many from murder by the Nazis. He consciously chose to give up all for strangers, people whom he did not know. This book is written with intrigue, providing a clear view of what it was like to live during those horrific times,, It develops a very human and riveting picture of Wallenberg, who did not simply supply false papers that often meant the difference between life and death for those who received them. He repeatedly personally confronted Eichmann, his henchman, and the Iron Guard of Hungary, personally saving Jews from certain death. This book makes it possible to begin to understand how one man could save tens of thousands of lives through sheer will. This is a story that all should read. And a lesson in heroism that our children and their children should learn from. It provides new (to me) and needed facts about what happened to Wallenberg once the war was ended. I am sorry to the book ended. It was gripping throughout.

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Title: Freedom from Fear

Subtitle: The American People in Depression and War, 19291945

Author: David M. Kennedy

Narrator: Tom Weiner

Format: Unabridged

Length: 31 hrs and 28 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-20-10

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 350 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

Between 1929 and 1945, two great travails were visited upon the American people: the Great Depression and World War II. This Pulitzer Prize-winning history tells the story of how Americans endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of those unprecedented calamities.

The Depression was both a disaster and an opportunity. As David Kennedy vividly demonstrates, the economic crisis of the 1930s was far more than a simple reaction to the alleged excesses of the 1920s. For more than a century before 1929, America's unbridled industrial revolution had gyrated through repeated boom-and-bust cycles, wastefully consuming capital and inflicting untold misery on city and countryside alike.

Freedom from Fear explores how the nation agonized over its role in World War II, how it fought the war, why the United States won, and why the consequences of victory were sometimes sweet, sometimes ironic. In a compelling narrative, Kennedy analyzes the determinants of American strategy, the painful choices faced by commanders and statesmen, and the agonies inflicted on the millions of ordinary Americans who were compelled to swallow their fears and face battle as best they could.

Both comprehensive and colorful, this account of the most convulsive period in American history, excepting only the Civil War, reveals a period that formed the crucible in which modern America was formed.

Please note: The individual volumes of the series have not been published in historical order. Freedom from Fear is number IX in The Oxford History of the United States.

Critic Reviews:

An engrossing narrative of a momentous time. (New York Times Book Review)

Members Reviews:

Good summary of a pivotal time.

While not very deep, this book presents a balanced overview of the Roosevelt presidency and provides a good jumping off point for those (like myself) who are interested in exploring selected topics from this era in greater detail. "Freedom from Fear" provides a balanced view of FDR, citing his accomplishments, but not sugar coating the mistakes and personal flaws of this most controversial figure.

Outstanding

As good as it gets. Well read with a quick pace, the book moves quickly painting a panoramic view of these years, scanning across the US as well as its relationship to the rest of the world. Very rapidly paced, well research, outstandingly read and presented. A great part of the Oxford history series. highly recommended.

Well done, But a little off target

There was too much emphasis on statistics and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in this book for my taste. I wanted to hear what the times were like in the words of people who lived through them.The author chose to portray the select circle of the movers and shakers. The book that was written was well done. The writing had a good flow and there were many interesting details about events and people. The author went out of his way to give Herbert Hoover credit for being a good President who was overwhelmed by circumstances. Many of the issues of the times were set forth well.It was made clear that Roosevelt suffered a long term loss in prestige when he proposed the court packing plan. I have enjoyed the Oxford series and several are outstanding books. I didn't think this was one of the best but it is a well written and thoroughly researched work of history.