History audiobooks

The Triumph of the West

By: J. M. Roberts

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 15 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

Over the centuries, two important beliefs arose in Europe: a faith that man could order his own destiny, and the idea that progress was normal. But by 1900, doubts had arisen concerning traditional Western values. The continuing problems of world poverty, environmental deterioration, the inequality of women, and continued warfare pose real... Read more

Kindred Souls

By: Edna P. Gurewitsch

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

Length: 10 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

For fifteen years, Eleanor Roosevelt and her handsome doctor, David Gurewitsch, were friends—traveling, entertaining, and eventually buying a townhouse together in Manhattan. Their friendship has always intrigued historians, but not much was known about it. David kept detailed journals and took thousands of photos, but he never publicly... Read more

The Iraq War

By: John Keegan

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 8 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

From the bestselling author of The First World War and Intelligence in War comes the most up-to-date and informed study yet of the Iraq War.John Keegan, whom the New York Review of Books calls “the best historian of our day,” now brings his extraordinary expertise to bear on perhaps the most controversial war of our time. In exclusive interviews... Read more

Let Me Go

By: Helga Schneider

Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat

Length: 4 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

Helga Schneider was four when her mother suddenly abandoned her family in Berlin in 1941. When she next saw her mother, thirty years later, she learned the shocking reason why.Helga’s mother had joined the Nazi SS and had become a guard in the concentration camps, including Auschwitz, where she was in charge of a “correction” unit and... Read more

Unfit for Command

By: John E. O’Neill & Jerome R. Corsi

Narrated by: Jeff Riggenbach

Length: 6 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

In their book, Unfit for Command, John O’Neill and coauthor Jerome Corsi bring together the words of more than two hundred Navy veterans who served with Kerry and who feel it their duty to tell why John Kerry is unworthy of the presidency.In 1971, John O’Neill, the officer who took over John Kerry’s swift boat in Vietnam, returned home from... Read more

Civilization and Its Enemies

By: Lee Harris

Narrated by: Barrett Whitener

Length: 9 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

Civilization and Its Enemies is an extraordinary tour de force by America’s reigning philosopher of 9/11, Lee Harris. In it, Harris focuses on the next great conflict: the war between the civilized world and the international terrorists who wish to destroy it.Harris’ brilliant tour through the stages of civilization, from Sparta to the French... Read more

Caesar’s Legion

By: Stephen Dando-Collins

Narrated by: Stuart Langton

Length: 12 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

Stephen Dando-Collins paints a vivid and definitive portrait of daily life in the Tenth Legion, following Caesar and his men along the blood-soaked fringes of the Empire. This unprecedented regimental history reveals countless previously unknown details about Roman military practices, Caesar’s conduct as a commander and his relationships with... Read more

The Proud Tower

By: Barbara W. Tuchman

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 22 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

The fateful quarter century leading up to World War I was a time when the world of privilege still existed in Olympian luxury and the world of protest was “heaving in its pain, its power, and its hate.”The age was the climax of a century of the most accelerated rate of change to that point in history, a cataclysmic shaping of destiny.Barbara... Read more

The Long March

By: Roger Kimball

Narrated by: Raymond Todd

Length: 9 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

The architects of America’s cultural revolution of the 1960s were Beat authors like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and celebrated figures like Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Eldridge Cleaver and Susan Sontag. In examining the lives and works of those who spoke for the 1960s, Roger Kimball conceives a series of cautionary tales, an annotated... Read more

Wittgenstein in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 16 minutes

Abridged: No

If we accept Wittgenstein's word for it, he is the last philosopher. In his view, philosophy in the traditional sense was finished.Ludwig Wittgenstein was a superb logician who distrusted language and sought to solve the problems of philosophy by reducing them to logic. All else—metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, finally even philosophy itself—was... Read more

Kierkegaard in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 27 minutes

Abridged: No

Kierkegaard wasn't really a philosopher in the academic sense, yet he produced what many people expect of philosophy. He didn't write about the world, he wrote about life, about how we live, and how we choose to live. His subject was the individual and his or her existence, the "existing being." In Kierkegaard's view, this purely subjective... Read more

Kant in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 23 minutes

Abridged: No

Immanuel Kant taught and wrote prolifically about physical geography yet never traveled further than forty miles from his home in Königsberg. How appropriate it is then that in his philosophy he should deny that all knowledge was derived from experience. Kant's aim was to restore metaphysics. He insisted that all experience must conform to... Read more

Aristotle in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Aristotle wrote on everything from the shape of seashells to sterility, from speculations on the nature of the soul to meteorology, poetry, art, and even the interpretation of dreams. Apart from mathematics, he transformed every field of knowledge that he touched. Above all, Aristotle is credited with the founding of logic. When he first divided... Read more

Four against the Arctic

By: David Roberts

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

Length: 10 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

In 1743, a Russian ship was blown off course and trapped in ice off the coast of Svalbard (Spitzbergen), a barren Arctic island. Four sailors went ashore with only two days' supplies, and only twenty pounds of flour for food. Upon return they found the ship had vanished, apparently crushed and sunk by the ice. Blessed with courage and ingenuity,... Read more

Rousseau in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 28 minutes

Abridged: No

In Rousseau we encounter a walking ego, a naked sensibility. Feeling triumphs over intellectual argument in his works, which are both deeply stirring and deeply inconsistent. Yet while his contemporaries Kant and Hume may have been superior academic philosophers, the sheer power of Rousseau’s ideas was unequaled in his time. It was he who... Read more

Hume in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 17 minutes

Abridged: No

Hume reduced philosophy to ruins: he denied the existence of everything—except our actual perceptions themselves. I alone exist, he argued, and the world is nothing more than part of my consciousness. Yet we know that the world remains, and we go on as before. What Hume expressed was the status of our knowledge about the world, a world in which... Read more

Jazz 101

By: John F. Szwed

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 8 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

Jazz 101 is a fascinating entr├®e into the world of jazz, for the beginner, novice, or jazz enthusiast. Szwed takes listeners on a tour of the varied and nonlinear history of jazz, exploring how it developed from an ethnic music to become America's most popular music and then part of the avant-garde in less than fifty years. Szwed's complete... Read more

Promise of Glory

By: C. X. Moreau

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 11 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

This is the story of the battle of Antietam and the events leading up to the single bloodiest day in the entire Civil War, in which Union casualties topped 12,000 and Confederate casualties topped 11,000. It is also the story of such memorable figures of military history as Lee and McClellan, Burnside, Longstreet, Hooker, and Jackson, who took... Read more

Bums

By: Peter Golenbock

Narrated by: Raymond Todd

Length: 19 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

Before the team headed to Los Angeles in 1957, the Brooklyn Dodgers were one of the most colorful and beloved teams in baseball. Even today, they remain ingrained in the fabric of our national pastime. In Bums, bestselling author Peter Golenbock has compiled a fascinating oral history of the Ebbets Field heroes with recollections from former... Read more

Spinoza in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 12 minutes

Abridged: No

Spinoza’s brilliant metaphysical system was derived neither from reality nor experience. Starting from basic assumptions, with a series of geometric proofs he built a universe which was also God—one and the same thing, the classic example of pantheism. Although his system seems an oddity today, Spinoza’s conclusions are deeply in accord with... Read more

The Masters

By: Curt Sampson

Narrated by: Barrett Whitener

Length: 10 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

The Masters golf tournament weaves a hypnotic spell. Success at Augusta National breeds legends, while failure can overshadow even the most brilliant of careers. But as Curt Sampson, author of the bestseller Hogan, reveals in The Masters, a cold heart beats behind the warm antebellum façade of this famous Augusta course.The Masters is an... Read more

Socrates in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 18 minutes

Abridged: No

Just a century after it had begun, philosophy entered its greatest age with the appearance of Socrates, who spent so much of his time talking about philosophy on the streets of Athens that he never got around to writing anything down. His method of aggressive questioning, called dialectic, was used to cut through the palaver of his adversaries... Read more

St. Augustine in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 13 minutes

Abridged: No

Augustine’s spiritual crisis and conversion to Christianity, detailed in his Confessions, ultimately led him to his major contribution to philosophy: the fusion of the two doctrines of Christianity and Neoplatonism. This not only provided Christianity with a strong intellectual backing but tied it to the Greek tradition of philosophy, which... Read more

Nietzsche in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 14 minutes

Abridged: No

With Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophy was dangerous not only for philosophers but for everyone. Nietzsche ultimately went mad, but his ideas presaged a collective madness that had horrific consequences in Europe in the early 1900s. Though his philosophy is more one of aphorisms and insights than a system, it is brilliant, persuasive, and... Read more