History audiobooks

Charlie Wilson’s War

By: George Crile

Narrated by: Christopher Lane

Length: 20 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

Charlie Wilson’s War is the untold story of the last battle of the Cold War and how it fueled the rise of militant Islam. Charlie Wilson, a maverick congressman from east Texas, conspired with a rogue CIA operative to launch the biggest, meanest, and most successful covert operation in the Agency’s history.In the early 1980s, after a Houston... Read more

Rothstein

By: David Pietrusza

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 13 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

The model for Meyer Wolfsheim from The Great Gatsby and Guys and Dolls' Nathan Detroit, Arnold Rothstein was an underworld genius, racketeer, rumrunner, political fixer, and criminal mastermind who, as F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, played "with the faith of fifteen million people with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe."David... Read more

Antietam

By: James Reasoner

Narrated by: Lloyd James

Length: 10 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

In early 1862, the Civil War comes within view of the Brannon family farm in Culpeper County, Virginia. The din of drilling soldiers sweeps over the quiet county seat, and another Brannon son, Mac, answers the call to arms.The long-anticipated spring offensive pitches the Union and Confederate armies against each other on the Virginia Peninsula,... Read more

Scourge

By: Jonathan B. Tucker

Narrated by: John Lescault

Length: 9 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

Smallpox, the only infectious disease to have been eradicated, was one of the most terrifying of human scourges. It covered the skin with hideous, painful boils, killed a third of its victims, and left the survivors disfigured for life. In this riveting, often terrifying look at the history of smallpox, Jonathan B. Tucker tells the story of this... Read more

Wonderful Memories of It’s a Wonderful Life

By: Jimmy Hawkins

Narrated by: Jimmy Hawkins

Length: 1 hour 31 minutes

Abridged: No

When the movie It’s a Wonderful Life opened in December 1946, it captured five Academy Award nominations. It also captured the hearts of millions of Americans. Over the past fifty years, It’s a Wonderful Life has become as much a holiday tradition as Thanksgiving dinner and the Christmas tree. For many people, Christmas just isn’t complete until... Read more

New World Coming

By: Nathan Miller

Narrated by: Lloyd James

Length: 18 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

Jazz, bootleggers, flappers, talkies, Model T Fords, Lindbergh's history-making flight over the Atlantic—the 1920s was also the decade of the hard-won vote for women, racial injustice, censorship, social conflict, and the birth of organized crime. With scandal and crime the lifeblood of the tabloids, it was the time when the culture of celebrity... 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

Sartre in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 40 minutes

Abridged: No

During his lifetime, Jean-Paul Sartre enjoyed unprecedented popularity for a philosopher, due partly to his role as a spokesman for existentialism—at the opportune moment when this set of ideas filled the spiritual gap left amidst the ruins of World War II. Existentialism was a philosophy of action and showed the ultimate freedom of the... 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

The Twentieth Maine

By: John J. Pullen

Narrated by: Barrett Whitener

Length: 10 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

It was at Little Round Top that the volunteer regiment, the Twentieth Maine, with Joshua Chamberlain in command, performed one of the miracles of the Civil War and saved the left flank of the Union battle line. Outnumbered two to one, their front doubled back to the shape of a horseshoe. And with ammunition gone, the men fixed bayonets, charged,... 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

Plato in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 14 minutes

Abridged: No

In an age when philosophers had scarcely glimpsed the horizons of the mind, a boy named Aristocles decided to forgo his ambitions as a wrestler. Adopting the nickname Plato, he embarked instead on a life in philosophy. In 387 BC he founded the Academy, the world's first university, and taught his students that all we see is not reality but... 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

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

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

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

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

Voucher Wars

By: Clint Bolick

Narrated by: Jeff Riggenbach

Length: 9 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

In June 2002, the US Supreme Court's ruling in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris opened the door to school choice. In Voucher Wars: Waging the Legal Battle over School Choice, Clint Bolick recounts the dramatic twelve-year struggle to finally give families a choice in education. As the central figure in the legal battle over school choice, Bolick tells... Read more

Thomas Aquinas in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 21 minutes

Abridged: No

We see our age as the greatest in human history, filled with seemingly unending originality. Yet such dynamism is not a necessary characteristic of great eras. Among the most long-lasting and stable civilizations was that of medieval Europe. There stasis was achieved, and with it a stability that permitted the development of structured thought... Read more

Schopenhauer in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 18 minutes

Abridged: No

Schopenhauer, the "philosopher of pessimism," makes it very plain that he regards the world and our life in it as a bad joke. But if the world is indifferent to our fate, it doesn't thwart us on purpose. The world's fa├ºade is supported by what Schopenhauer calls the universal Will—blind and without purpose. This Will brings on all our misery... 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

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

Heidegger in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 27 minutes

Abridged: No

One of two major philosophical traditions of the twentieth century was Wittgenstein's linguistic analysis. The other, diametrically opposed, came from Heidegger, and his fundamental question: "What is the meaning of existence?" For Heidegger, this question was beyond the reach of reason and was the primary "given" of every individual life. To... Read more