Listen to Popular Titles Audiobooks in History, 20th Century

Listen to this audiobook free with a 30-day trial. Go to http://hotaudiobook.com/free

Title: The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis

Subtitle: Stanford Nuclear Age Series

Author: Sheldon M. Stern

Narrator: Bob Dunsworth

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-21-12

Publisher: University Press Audiobooks

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 26 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

The Cuban missile crisis was the most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War and the most perilous moment in American history. In this dramatic narrative written especially for students and general listeners, Sheldon M. Stern, longtime historian at the John F. Kennedy Library, enables the listener to follow the often harrowing twists and turns of the crisis.

Based on the author's authoritative transcriptions of the secretly recorded ExComm meetings, the book conveys the emotional ambiance of the meetings by capturing striking moments of tension and anger as well as occasional humorous intervals. Unlike today's readers, the participants did not have the luxury of knowing how this potentially catastrophic showdown would turn out, and their uncertainty often gives their discussions the nerve-racking quality of a fictional thriller. As President Kennedy told his advisers, "What we are doing is throwing down a card on the table in a game which we don't know the ending of."

Stern documents that JFK and his administration bore a substantial share of the responsibility for the crisis. Covert operations in Cuba, including efforts to kill Fidel Castro, had convinced Nikita Khrushchev that only the deployment of nuclear weapons could protect Cuba from imminent attack. However, President Kennedy, a seasoned Cold Warrior in public, was deeply suspicious of military solutions to political problems and appalled by the prospect of nuclear war. He consistently steered policy makers away from an apocalyptic nuclear conflict, measuring each move and countermove with an eye to averting what he called, with stark eloquence, "the final failure."

The book is published by Stanford University Press.

Critic Reviews:

"

The Week the World Stood Still is an impressive work of scholarship that is also highly recommended for non-specialist general readers with an interest in the history of the Cold War era." (

The Midwest Book Review)

Contact me for any questions: [email protected]

Listen to this audiobook free with a 30-day trial. Go to http://hotaudiobook.com/free

Title: The Raid

Author: Benjamin F. Schemmer

Narrator: Dick Rodstein

Format: Abridged

Length: 2 hrs and 8 mins

Language: English

Release date: 02-20-12

Publisher: Random House Audio

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 9 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

Minutes after 2 A.M. on November 21, 1970, more than one hundred U.S. war planes shattered the dark calm of the skies over Hanoi. Their mission: rescue sixty-one American POWs from Son Tay prison. Less than thirty minutes later, the raid was over, but no Americans had been rescued. The prisoners had been moved from Son Tay four and a half months earlier and that wasnt all. Part of the raiding force landed at the wrong compound, a school bristling with enemy soldiers, but the soldiers werent Vietnamese...

Replete with fascinating insights into the workings of high-level intelligence and military command, The Raid is Benjamin Schemmers unvarnished account of the courageous mission that was quickly labeled an intelligence failure by Congress and a Pentagon blunder by the world press. Determined to ferret out the truth, Schemmer uncovers one of the CIAs most carefully guarded secrets. From the planning and live-fire rehearsals to the explosive reactions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff watching the drama unfold to the aftermath as the White House and Pentagon struggled for damage control, Schemmer tackles the tough questions. What really happened during the twenty-seven minutes the raiders spent on the ground? Did the CIA know the whole time that the Americans were gone? Had the Agency in fact been responsible for the POWs being moved? And perhaps most intriguing, why was the rescue - though it never freed a single prisoner - not a failure after all?

Contact me for any questions: [email protected]

Listen to this audiobook free with a 30-day trial. Go to http://hotaudiobook.com/free

Title: The Korean War

Author: Cameron Forbes

Narrator: Richard Aspel

Format: Unabridged

Length: 16 hrs and 43 mins

Language: English

Release date: 02-09-12

Publisher: Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 19 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

The Korean War was a 20th Century conflict that has never ended. South Korea, a powerhouse economy and dynamic democracy sits uneasily alongside North Korea, the worlds most secretive, belligerent, unpredictable and repressive totalitarian state. Today, tensions simmer and occasionally flare into outright violence on a peninsula dense with arms, munitions and nuclear warheads.

Cameron Forbes, acclaimed author of Hellfire, tells the story of the war and Australias involvement in it in a riveting narrative.

From the letters and diaries of those diggers who fought across Koreas unforgiving hills and mountains to the grand strategies formulated in Washington, Moscow and Beijing, The Korean War reveals the conflict on all its levels human, military and geopolitical.

Contact me for any questions: [email protected]

Listen to this audiobook free with a 30-day trial. Go to http://hotaudiobook.com/free

Title: Scotts Last Expedition

Subtitle: The Journals of Robert Scott

Author: Robert Scott

Narrator: David Horovitch

Format: Abridged

Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-21-11

Publisher: CSA Word

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 12 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

Captain Robert Scotts final journey to the South Pole has been called one of historys greatest tales of adventure. And his journals are among the most dramatic and moving documents in the English language. Sensitively read by David Horovitch, this new audio adaptation starts in 1910 as Scott's ship, the Terra Nova, sets sail from New Zealand. Then in vivid, conversational style details the dangerous journey through the ice to Antarctica, the winter hibernation in 24-hour darkness, and the final journey to and from the Pole. A remarkable story of courage, it ends with Scott's last tragic diary entry on the 29th March 1912, when he, Wilson and Bowers, out of food, sheltering from the raging blizzard outside their tent, calmly await their deaths.

Contact me for any questions: [email protected]

Listen to this audiobook free with a 30-day trial. Go to http://hotaudiobook.com/free

Title: Who Shot JFK?

Author: Robin Ramsay

Narrator: Bob Sinfield

Format: Unabridged

Length: 4 hrs and 1 min

Language: English

Release date: 06-27-11

Publisher: Matrix Digital Publishing

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 10 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

The John F Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy, The Mafia, Zapruda Film and What They Don't Want You to Know

After nearly 1000 books, half a dozen journals, two official inquiries, several million pages of declassified documents, dozens of TV documentaries and hundreds of Websites, is there anything left to say about the assassination of President John F Kennedy? Hell, yes.

The Kennedy assassination remains both the greatest whodunit of the post-World War Two era and the best route into recent American history. In this short book, taking it as proved that Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed the patsy he claimed to be before he was murdered, Robin Ramsay looks at the assassination through the work of the researchers who refused to buy the official cover-up story that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin.

He explores:

Contact me for any questions: [email protected]

Listen to this audiobook free with a 30-day trial. Go to http://hotaudiobook.com/free

Title: The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie Mansfield

Subtitle: A Tragedy of the Gilded Age

Author: H. W. Brands

Narrator: Richard McGonagle

Format: Unabridged

Length: 4 hrs and 56 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-31-11

Publisher: Random House Audio

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 13 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

Even before he was shot dead on the stairway of the tony Grand Central Hotel in 1872, financier James Jubilee Jim Fisk, Jr., was a notorious New York City figure. From his audacious attempt to corner the gold market in 1869 to his battle for control of the geographically crucial Erie Railroad, Fisk was a flamboyant exemplar of a new financial era marked by volatile fortunes and unprecedented greed and corruption. But it was his scandalously open affair with a showgirl named Josie Mansfield that ultimately led to his demise.

In this riveting short history - the first in his American Portraits series - H. W. Brand's traces Fisks extraordinary downfall, bringing to life New Yorks Gilded Age and some of its legendary players, including Boss William Tweed, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the railroad tycoon Jay Gould.

Critic Reviews:

H. W. Brands is a master at finding the essence of an important American life, telling its story grippingly and showing us why it is important to our own generation. (Michael Beschloss)

Contact me for any questions: [email protected]

Listen to this audiobook free with a 30-day trial. Go to http://hotaudiobook.com/free

Title: And the Show Went On

Subtitle: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris

Author: Alan Riding

Narrator: Stephen Hoye

Format: Unabridged

Length: 16 hrs and 47 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-19-10

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 22 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

In the weeks after the Germans captured Paris, theaters, opera houses, and nightclubs reopened to occupiers and French citizens alike, and they remained open for the duration of the war. Alan Riding introduces a pageant of 20th-century artists who lived and worked under the Nazis and explores the decisions each made about whether to stay or flee, collaborate or resist.

We see Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf singing before French and German audiences; Picasso painting and occasionally selling his work from his Left Bank apartment; and Marcel Carné and Henri-Georges Clouzot, among others, directing movies in Paris studios (more than 200 were produced during this time).

We see that pro-Fascist writers, such as Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Robert Brasillach, flourished, but also that Camus's The Stranger was published and Sartre's play No Exit was first performed - 10 days before the Normandy landings.

Based on exhaustive research and extensive interviews, And the Show Went On sheds a clarifying light on a protean and problematic era in 20th-century European cultural history.

Critic Reviews:

"A stark account of how we act when evil enters our door." (Kirkus)

Contact me for any questions: [email protected]

Listen to this audiobook free with a 30-day trial. Go to http://hotaudiobook.com/free

Title: Closing with the Enemy

Subtitle: How GIs Fought the War in Europe, 1944-1945

Author: Michael D. Doubler

Narrator: Mel Foster

Format: Unabridged

Length: 16 hrs and 46 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-05-10

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 34 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

Closing with the Enemy picks up where D-Day leaves off. From Normandy through the "breakout" in France to the German army's last gasp in the Battle of the Bulge, Michael D. Doubler deals with the deadly business of war - closing with the enemy, fighting and winning battles, taking and holding territory. His study provides a provocative reassessment of how American GIs accomplished these dangerous and costly tasks.

Doubler portrays a far more capable and successful American fighting force than previous historians - notably Russell Weigley, Martin Van Creveld, and S. L. A. Marshall - have depicted. True, the GIs weren't fully prepared or organized for a war in Europe and have often been viewed as inferior to their German opponent. But, Doubler argues that they were more than compensated for this by their ability to learn quickly from mistakes, to adapt in the face of unforeseen obstacles, and to innovate new tactics on the battlefield. This adaptability, Doubler contends, was far more crucial to the American effort than we've been led to believe.

Fueled by a fiercely democratic and entrepreneurial spirit, GI innovations emerged from every level within the ranks - from the novel employment of conventional weapons and small units to the rapid retraining of troops on the battlefield. Their most dramatic success, however, was with combined arms warfare - the coordinated use of infantry, tanks, artillery, air power, and engineers - in which they perfected the use of air support for ground operations and tank-infantry teams for breaking through enemy strongholds. Doubler argues that, without such ingenuity and imaginative leadership, it would have been impossible to defeat an enemy as well-trained and heavily fortified as the German army the GIs confronted.

Critic Reviews:

"This important book is a watershed in critical thinking.... Fluently written and beautifully detailed, it is essential for a complete understanding of American operations in World War II." (Library Journal)

Contact me for any questions: [email protected]

Listen to this audiobook free with a 30-day trial. Go to http://hotaudiobook.com/free

Title: The Company Town

Subtitle: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills that Shaped the American Economy

Author: Hardy Green

Narrator: L J Ganser

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-14-10

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 26 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

Company town: The very phrase sounds un-American. Yet company towns are the essence of America. Hershey bars, Corning glassware, Kohler bathroom fixtures, Maytag washers, Spam... each is the signature product of a company town in which one business, for better or worse, exercises a grip over the population.

In The Company Town, Hardy Green, who has covered American business for over a decade, offers a compelling analysis of the emergence of these communities and their role in shaping the American economy, beginning in the country's earliest years.

From the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, to the R&D labs of Corning, New York; from the coal mines of Ludlow, Colorado, to corporate campuses of todays major tech companies, America has been uniquely open to the development of the single-company community. But rather than adhering to a uniform blueprint, American company towns represent two very different strands of capitalism. One is socially benign - a paternalistic, utopian ideal that fosters the development of schools, hospitals, parks, and desirable housing for its workers. The other, Exploitationville, focuses only on profits, at the expense of employees well-being.

Adeptly distinguishing between these two models, Green offers rich stories about town-builders and workers. He vividly describes the origins of Americas company towns, the living and working conditions that characterize them, and the violent, sometimes fatal, labor confrontations that have punctuated their existence. And he chronicles the surprising transformation underway in many such communities today.

With fascinating profiles of American moguls, The Company Town is a sweeping tale of how the American economy has grown and changed, and how these urban centers have reflected the best and worst of American capitalism.

Critic Reviews:

Taking in textile, coal, oil, lumber and appliance-manufacturing towns, Mr. Greens survey is a useful one. [T]he company towns overseen by Milton Hershey, Francis Cabot Lowell and even Charlie Cannon were communities enlivened by quirks and passions and idiosyncratic visions. Edens? Hardly. But they had soul, and you can neither buy nor sell that at the company store. (The Wall Street Journal)

[Green] offers a completely fascinating look at how American business titans motivated by a combination of practicality, greed, and philanthropy have established company towns.... Green explores utopian ideals gone awry and the changes in labor-management tensions across geography, time, and increasing globalization, and offers cogent insight on the need to balance divergent interests. (Booklist)

[An] engaging book. [It] provides a valuable perspective on a well-worn history, detailing the heinous, lofty, and occasionally absurd ways companies have tried to shape their workers lives beyond factory walls. (Publishers Weekly)

The clash between the ideal of political freedom and the reality of extreme economic dependence on corporations is nowhere more stark than in the history of the American company town. From the now-rusted industrial cities on the hills to todays Google server farms in the forests, Hardy Green captures the conundrum between the public good and private power in his elegant, insightful, and potent book.

Listen to this audiobook free with a 30-day trial. Go to http://hotaudiobook.com/free

Title: The Eyes of Willie McGee

Subtitle: A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South

Author: Alex Heard

Narrator: J. D. Jackson

Format: Unabridged

Length: 14 hrs

Language: English

Release date: 05-11-10

Publisher: HarperAudio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 14 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

A gripping saga of race and retribution in the Deep South and a story whose haunting details echo the themes of To Kill a Mockingbird.

In 1945, Willie McGee, a young African-American man from Laurel, Mississippi, was sentenced to death for allegedly raping Willette Hawkins, a white housewife. At first, McGee's case was barely noticed, covered only in hostile Mississippi newspapers and far-left publications such as the Daily Worker. Then Bella Abzug, a young New York labor lawyer, was hired by the Civil Rights Congressan aggressive civil-rights organization with ties to the Communist Party of the United Statesto oversee McGee's defense. Together with William Patterson, the son of a slave and a devout believer in the need for revolutionary change, Abzug and a group of white Mississippi lawyers risked their lives to plead McGee's case. After years of court battles, McGee's supporters flooded President Harry S. Truman and the U.S. Supreme Court with clemency pleas, and famous Americans spoke out on McGee's behalf.

By the time the case ended in 1951 with McGee's public execution in Mississippi's infamous traveling electric chair, "Free Willie McGee" had become a rallying cry among civil-rights activists, progressives, leftists, and Communist Party members. Their movement had succeeded in convincing millions of people worldwide that McGee had been framed and that the real story involved a consensual love affair between him and Mrs. Hawkinsone that she had instigated and controlled. As Heard discovered, this controversial theory is a doorway to a tangle of secrets that spawned a legacy of confusion, misinformation, and pain that still resonates today.

Critic Reviews:

"The case of Willie McGee is an enduring mystery, but theres no doubt he was the victim of a primitive and unfair judicial system. Alex Heards excellent account of his life and death is tragic, sad, and very compelling." (John Grisham)

In this riveting personal journey, Alex Heard explores the political and social forces at play and then reveals the fascinating human drama underneath it all. Its like a real-life To Kill a Mockingbird, but with even more subtlety and complexity. (Walter Isaacson, author of Einstein)

Contact me for any questions: [email protected]