Modern

NOW THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE NUREMBERG STARRING RUSSELL CROWE AND RAMI MALEK In 1945, an improbable relationship between the fallen Reichsmarschall, Hermann Goering, and ambitious US Army physician, Douglas Kelley, becomes a hazardous quest into the nature of evil “The book is a page turner...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * MORE THAN ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD “A provocative read...There are few tomes that coherently map such broad economic histories as well as Mr. Dalio’s. Perhaps more unusually, Mr. Dalio has managed to identify metrics from that history that can be applied to...

An astonishing account of life under a murderous regime amid a great city’s descent into utter annihilation In 1939, when Ian Buruma’s epic opens, Berlin has been under Nazi rule for six years, and its 4.3 million people have made their accommodations to the regime, more or less. When war...

Night is an unmistakably autobiographical account of the author's own gruesome experiences in Nazi Germany's death camps....

The #1 New York Times Bestseller One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2025 A Washington Post and New York Times Notable Book Named a Best Book of 2025 by TIME, The Guardian, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, and Kirkus Reviews “Comprehensive, enthralling . . . Mark Twain...

THE DEFINITIVE EDITION Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, the remarkable diary that has become a world classic—a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. Updated for the 75th Anniversary of the Diary’s...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the celebrated author of Operation Mincement and The Siege comes the thrilling Americans-era tale of Oleg Gordievsky, the Russian whose secret work helped hasten the end of the Cold War. “The best true spy story I have ever read.”—JOHN LE CARRÉ Named a...

Accounts of seemingly impossible phenomena abounded in the early modern era—tales of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft—even as skepticism, atheism, and empirical science were starting to supplant religious belief in the paranormal....

At one time, Corrie ten Boom would have laughed at the idea that she had a story to tell.....

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and hailed as “the best history of oil ever written” by Business Week, Daniel Yergin’s “spellbinding…irresistible” (The New York Times) account of the global pursuit of oil, money, and power addresses the ongoing energy crisis. Now with an epilogue that...

""Dramatic, heartbreaking and sweeping in scope."" —Wall Street Journal The acclaimed author of A Train in Winter returns with the ""moving finale"" (The Economist) of her Resistance Quartet—the powerful and inspiring true story of the women of the partisan resistance who fought against...

#1 New York Times bestseller and arguably the best business narrative ever written, Barbarians at the Gate is the classic account of the fall of RJR Nabisco at the hands of a buyout from investment firm KKR. A book that stormed both the bestseller list and the public imagination, a book that...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A “bracing” (Vox) guide for surviving and resisting America’s turn towards authoritarianism, from “a rising public intellectual unafraid to make bold connections between past and present” (The New York Times) “Timothy Snyder reasons with unparalleled...

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, historian Barbara Tuchman brings to life the people and events that led up to World War I....

“Larson is a marvelous writer...superb at creating characters with a few short strokes.”—New York Times Book Review Erik Larson has been widely acclaimed as a master of narrative non-fiction, and in his new book, the bestselling author of Devil in the White City turns his hand to a...

The New York Times bestselling author of Stuff Matters presents a rollicking guided tour of the secret lives of gases: the magnificent, strange, and fascinating substances that shape our world. Gases are all around us—they fill our lungs, power our movement, create stars, and warm our...

A masterful and comprehensive chronicle of World War II, by internationally bestselling historian Antony Beevor. Over the past two decades, Antony Beevor has established himself as one of the world's premier historians of WWII. His multi-award winning books have included Stalingrad and The Fall...

A New York Times Bestseller “I’ll be forever changed by Dr. Eger’s story…The Choice is a reminder of what courage looks like in the worst of times and that we all have the ability to pay attention to what we’ve lost, or to pay attention to what we still have.”—Oprah “Dr. Eger’s...

Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch watchmaker who became a heroine of the Resistance, a survivor of Hitler's concentration camps, and one of the most remarkable evangelists of the 20h century....

The American War on Election Corruption is an investigative exposé revealing the battle to uncover and dismantle systemic fraud threatening the integrity of US elections.

The untold story of a heroic band of Caribbean pirates whose defiance of imperial rule inspired revolt in colonial outposts across the world....

It was to be the war to end all wars, and it began at 11:15 on the morning of June 28, 1914, in an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire called Sarajevo. It would officially end nearly five years later. Unofficially, however, it has never ended...

From the author of national bestsellers The Bedford Boys and The Longest Winter comes "a rousing tale of little-known heroes" (Booklist). The Few tells the dramatic and unforgettable story of eight young Americans who joined Britain's Royal Air Force, defying their country's neutrality laws and...

This history of modern Iran is not a survey in the conventional sense but an ambitious exploration of the story of a nation. It offers a revealing look at how events, people, and institutions are shaped by currents that sometimes reach back hundreds of years....

One of AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of 2019! A New York Times Best Book of the Year A Time Best Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Winner From journalist Adam Higginbotham, the New York Times bestselling “account that...

An astonishing account of life under a murderous regime amid a great city’s descent into utter annihilation In 1939, when Ian Buruma’s epic opens, Berlin has been under Nazi rule for six years, and its 4.3 million people have made their accommodations to the regime, more or less. When war...

The history of modern China has long been portrayed as a tale of Communists fighting in the hills for freedom, gradually gaining popular support by taking land from the rich and giving it to the poor. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Red Dawn Over China reveals how unlikely the Party's victory actually was, had it not been for financial and military support from the Soviet Union.

It is newly estimated that 750,000 soldiers died in the American Civil War. But less well-known than the war’s death toll are the roughly 400,000 Union and Confederate troops who were captured and imprisoned. Many POWs died from starvation, dysentery, and exposure, and at the worst of the prison pens, more than 30,000 soldiers were caged in the equivalent of ten city blocks. Against the backdrop of a brutal internecine conflict, the Civil War’s prison camps were a harrowing milestone in the history of mass dehumanization.

From the award-winning author of American Sirens and A Thousand Naked Strangers comes a real-life thriller about the most daring rescue in air-medical history. JULY 2014. Two American medical volunteers who joined the fight against the deadliest Ebola outbreak in world history have gotten...

A LitHub and Parade Most Anticipated Book of the Year For fans of Ben Macintyre and Erik Larson, the gripping story of the assassination of Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky and the deadly game of cat and mouse that preceded it On August 20, 1940, Leon Trotsky invited a man he knew only as...

"My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery," declared Jean‑Jacques Dessalines as he announced the independence of Haiti, the most radical nation‑state during the Age of Revolution and the first country ever to permanently outlaw slavery. Enslaved for the first thirty years of his life, Dessalines (c. 1758-1806) joined the revolution that abolished slavery within the French colony. Then he became a general in the colonial army of the new French Republic. When it was discovered that France once again supported slavery, Dessalines declared war on his former allies.

In the fall of 1943, during some of the Pacific theater's bloodiest battles, the United States and Japan pulled off a diplomatic coup—the exchange of civilians caught on the wrong side of the battlefield after Pearl Harbor. Nearly fifteen hundred Allied civilians trapped in Asia, mostly...

A landmark new history of Syria—a country forged in conflict, cursed by civil war and dictatorship, and pivotal to the future of the Middle East “A masterful history of Syria that is both sweeping in scope and brimming with vivid detail...a riveting and insightful book.” —Wendy Pearlman...

A compelling dual biography of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle that shines new light on two of the greatest figures of the 20th century. Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle were thrown together by war. They incarnated the resistance of Britain and France to the existential threat...

Brought to you by Penguin. No sex. No kids. No future? When Tom Feiling moved to Tokyo as a student in the early nineties, Japan was a beacon of the future: a rising superpower, a technology giant, and a global symbol of prosperity, civility and success. When he returned twenty-four years later...

Lê Đức Thọ: Vietnamese Revolutionary Strategy, The Vietnam War Peace Negotiations, Communist Leadership, and the Political Struggle That Ended America’s Longest War explores the life and influence of one of the most important yet often overlooked figures of the twentieth century. Known internationally for negotiating the Paris Peace Accords and famously refusing the Nobel Peace Prize, Lê Đức Thọ played a decisive role in shaping the outcome of the Vietnam War and the political future of modern Vietnam. This book offers a clear and deeply researched look at the revolutionary ...

By the close of World War II, six million Jews had been erased from the face of the earth. Those who eluded death had lost their homes, families, and entire way of life. Their response was quintessentially Jewish. From a people with a long-history of self-narration, survivors gathered in groups and wrote books, yizkor books, remembering all that had been destroyed. Jane Ziegelman’s Once There Was a Town takes listeners on a journey through this largely uncharted body of writing and the vanished world it depicts.

Over the last few decades, our understanding of slavery has been transformed by the work of many talented scholars. We have learned a great deal about the actions of enslavers, the struggles and victories of the enslaved, and how the aftertimes of American slavery persist into the present. Yet Dan Rood’s In the Shadow of the Great House is one of the first contemporary audiobooks to focus on the primary engine of slavery, race, and capitalism in this country: the plantation.

Drawing together a remarkably wide-range of original sources, including interviews with relatives of the 1920s gangsters, Peaky Blinders: The Real Story adds a new dimension to the true history of Birmingham's underworld and fact behind its fiction.

Throughout the seventeenth century, medical lecturers demonstrated human anatomy by dissecting a cadaver while surrounded by students. After the Revolutionary War, though, instructors realized that they needed many more cadavers to serve a growing number of medical students. Enter the “resurrectionists”–body snatchers. Resurrectionists were a cruel lot; men (almost always men and often medical students themselves) who would sneak into a cemetery under the cover of darkness, remove a body, and then sell it to a physician or anatomist–usually for around $100.

Das »Dritte Reich« ist gefallen–doch die Geschichte steht nicht still. In Flensburg kreuzen sich die Wege von Agenten, Überlebenden und alten Eliten. Zwischen zerfallender Macht und zaghaftem Aufbruch wird verhandelt, getäuscht, geschwiegen–und der Grundstein für erstaunliche Karrieren gelegt. Dies ist die spannende Geschichte einer Zwischenzeit, in der die Konturen der heutigen Welt bereits erkennbar sind.

Vladka Meed, born Feigele Peltel, was just a teenager when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. Increasingly devastated by the deportation and murder of 300,000 Jews—including her mother, brother, and sister—who were sent from Warsaw to the death camp of Treblinka, she heeded the call for armed resistance, joining the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), established in Warsaw in July 1942.

On the night of April 14, 1912, the largest ship ever built struck an iceberg and sank in less than three hours, killing more than 1,500 people. But the Titanic disaster did not begin with the iceberg. It began years earlier, in the boardrooms and shipyards where ambition, rivalry, and a dangerous faith in engineering converged to produce a vessel that everyone believed was unsinkable...and that no one had adequately prepared to lose. This book traces the full arc of the catastrophe, from the cutthroat competition between White Star and Cunard that drove the ship's conception, through the ...

World War I: The Firestorm That Reshaped the World History for Curious Minds In 1914, Europe believed it was stable. Its empires were powerful. Its economies were expanding. Its leaders were confident that diplomacy, alliances, and military readiness would prevent catastrophe. Within weeks, that confidence collapsed. World War I: The Firestorm That Reshaped the World explores how a tightly wound system of alliances, mobilization timetables, industrial power, and imperial ambition transformed a regional assassination into a global conflict. Part of the History for Curious Minds series, this ...

Germany one felt the world’s wrath for crimes committed during the Nazi regime. More recently, it received extravagant praise for facing up to the atrocities. The country now boasts of new Jewish museums, Holocaust memorials, restored synagogues, and classroom lessons designed to honor its Jewish heritage and teach tolerance. This effort was led not by politicians or historians, but by local citizen activists, few of them Jewish, almost all of them born after World War II. They could have shrugged off responsibility for evils done before they were born.

The Cold War defined a generation — but it did not begin with missiles or walls. It began in conference rooms, in uneasy negotiations, and in the slow erosion of trust between wartime allies. In Iron Curtains & Broken Promises, historian Elliot Christopher uncovers the hidden dynamics behind the birth of the Cold War. Through cinematic storytelling and carefully researched scholarship, this first volume in the Hidden History Files: The Cold War series explores how Europe fractured, how nuclear deterrence reshaped global strategy, and how proxy wars became the new battlegrounds of ...

The ocean is a graveyard of forgotten nightmares. Beneath the crushing weight of the dark water lie the remains of humanity's greatest ambitions and most devastating failures. In this gripping continuation, journey into the abyss to uncover harrowing accounts of catastrophic loss, unimaginable terror, and desperate bids to stay alive against the unforgiving elements. From legendary doomed voyages to blazing infernos, these pages chronicle the final, terrifying moments of passengers and crew pushed beyond the limits of human endurance. Discover the chilling mysteries of vessels lost without ...

The Russian Revolution: The Fall of the Romanovs and the Rise of Soviet Power A History for Curious Minds How did one of the largest empires on earth collapse in a matter of months? And how did that collapse give rise to one of the most powerful ideological states of the twentieth century? The Russian Revolution: The Fall of the Romanovs and the Rise of Soviet Power offers a clear and structured guide to one of history’s most consequential turning points. Rather than overwhelming you with dates or assuming prior expertise, this book helps you see the forces that drove events—how ...

Will has been—and always will be—the basis for succeeding in any conflict or competition. To win in a conflict or competition, decision-makers must comprehend the meaning and implications of will and successfully transform theories about it into practice.

Architects of the Nineteenth Century: Biographical Studies of the Figures Who Shaped Modern Culture, Politics, and Art BOOK THREE: Matthew Arnold Explained: Life, Poetry, Criticism, and the Making of Modern Culture is a comprehensive and deeply researched biography that explores the life, ideas, and lasting influence of one of the most important intellectual figures of the Victorian era. Written for thoughtful readers, students, and lovers of literary and cultural history, this book presents Matthew Arnold not only as a poet, but as a cultural critic, educational reformer, and moral thinker...