Europe War

January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest’s maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz. Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it and why.

Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, Hess, Bormann - names synonymous with power and influence in the Third Reich. Perhaps less familiar are Carin, Emmy, Magda, Margarete, Lina, Ilse, and Gerda. These are the women behind the infamous men - complex individuals with distinctive personalities who were captivated by Hitler and whose everyday lives were governed by Nazi ideology. Throughout the rise and fall of Nazism these women loved and lost, raised families, and quarreled with their husbands and each other, all the while jostling for position with the Fuhrer himself.

Medieval England’s history starts with the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century. In the 11th century, the Anglo-Saxon elite was completely replaced by the invading Normans. William the Conqueror and his successors brought novelties to England such as castles and cavalry. The last phase of Medieval England started with the great Famine and Black Death in the 14th century, when millions of lives were lost, resulting in England losing half of its population. In this book, you'll get insights into all of the above events and many more.

Imagine you are nine years old. Your best friend’s father is arrested, half your classmates disappear from school, and someone burns down the house across the road. Imagine you have to cross a snow-covered mountain range at night in order to escape the soldiers who are trying to kill you. How would you deal with these memories once you are an adult? Jones, a relief worker and child psychiatrist, interviewed over 40 Serb and Muslim children who came of age during the Bosnian War and now returns, 20 years after the war began, to discover the adults they have become.

From the award-winning and acclaimed author of The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, From Warsaw with Love tells the epic story of how Polish intelligence officers forged an alliance with the CIA in the twilight of the Cold War. In 1990, soon after the Polish people voted in their first democratic election since the 1930s, the young Polish government sent a veteran spy, who’d battled the West for decades, to rescue six American officers trapped in Baghdad.

Four days before Christmas in 1943, a badly damaged American bomber struggled to fly over wartime Germany. At its controls was a 21-year-old pilot. Half his crew lay wounded or dead. It was their first mission. Suddenly a sleek, dark shape pulled up on the bomber’s tail - a German Messerschmitt fighter. Worse, the German pilot was an ace, a man able to destroy the American bomber with the squeeze of a trigger.

The breathtaking memoir by a member of "Nicky's family", a group of 669 Czechoslovakian children who escaped the Holocaust through Sir Nicholas Winton's Kindertransport project. My Train to Freedom relates the trials and achievements of award-winning humanitarian and former Episcopal priest Ivan Backer.

This audiobook will transport you to the late 19th century, allowing you to “witness” one of the seminal moments of modern history. You’ll learn what events preceded the confrontation between the waning old European power of France and the up-and-coming Prussian state, and how a war led to the unification of Germany into an empire. Through this guide, you’ll find out how significant the famous “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck was in preparing the ground for a conflict, and how his political genius allowed Prussia to spearhead the German union.

New York Times best-selling author Jay Winik brings to life in gripping detail the year 1944, which determined the outcome of World War II and put more pressure than any other on an ailing yet determined President Roosevelt.

From one of the leading historians of twentieth-century Europe and the author of the definitive biography of Hitler, Personality and Power is a masterful reckoning with how character conspired with opportunity to create the modern age’s uniquely devastating despots—and how and why other countries found better paths. The modern era saw the emergence of individuals who had command over a terrifying array of instruments of control, persuasion and death. Whole societies were reshaped and wars were fought, often with a merciless contempt for the most basic norms.

In 1991, acting on a tip from a local fisherman, two scuba divers discovered a sunken German U-boat, complete with its crew of 60 men, not too far off the New Jersey coast. The divers, realizing the momentousness of their discovery, began probing the mystery. Over the next six years, they became expert and well-traveled researchers, taught themselves German, hunted for clues in Germany, and constructed theories corrective of the history books, all in an effort to identify this sunken U-boat and its crew.

“Faced with the political disaster, I had to become France.” This was how Charles de Gaulle answered the call of history. One of the few French battlefield leaders to have distinguished himself in May 1940, he had become the undersecretary of state for national defense. But when the government rejected his calls to fight on and prepared to capitulate to Hitler, he escaped to London. There he instigated a resistance calling on “all the French who want to remain free to listen to me and follow me” in the legendary radio address of June 22.

The famous journalist and author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich documents his front row seat at the pivotal events leading up to World War II. In the second of a three-volume series, William L. Shirer tells the story of his own eventful life, detailing the most notable moments of his career as a journalist stationed in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich. Shirer was there while Hitler celebrated his new domination of Germany, unleashed the Blitzkrieg on Poland, and began the conflict that would come to be known as World War II.

On September 20, 1940, one of the most famous European art dealers disembarked in New York, one of hundreds of Jewish refugees fleeing Vichy, France. Leaving behind his beloved Paris gallery, Paul Rosenberg had managed to save his family, but his paintings - modern masterpieces by Cézanne, Monet, Sisley, and others - were not so fortunate. As he fled, dozens of works were seized by Nazi forces, and the art dealer's own legacy was eradicated.

The first of two ground-breaking volumes on the Waterloo campaign, this audiobook is based upon a detailed analysis of sources old and new in four languages. It highlights the political stresses between the Allies, the problems of feeding and paying for the Allied forces assembling in Belgium during the undeclared war and how a strategy was thrashed out. It studies the neglected topic of how the Allies beyond the Rhine hampered the plans of Blücher and Wellington, thus allowing Napoleon to snatch the initiative from them.

In the spring of 1839, Britain invaded Afghanistan for the first time. Nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the high mountain passes and re-established on the throne Shah Shuja ul-Mulk. On the way in, the British faced little resistance. But after two years of occupation, the Afghan people rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into violent rebellion. The First Anglo-Afghan War ended in Britain's greatest military humiliation of the 19th century.

Drawing on new archival research, Robert Service's gripping new investigation of the final years of the Cold War - the first to give equal attention to the internal deliberations from both sides of the Iron Curtain - opens a window onto the dramatic years that would irrevocably alter the world's geopolitical landscape and the men at their fore.

When Jacques Lusseyran was an eight-year-old Parisian schoolboy, he was blinded in an accident. He finished his schooling determined to participate in the world around him. In 1941, when he was seventeen, that world was Nazi-occupied France. Lusseyran formed a resistance group with fifty-two boys and used his heightened senses to recruit the best. Eventually, Lusseyran was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in a transport of two thousand resistance fighters.

Lusitania: She was a ship of dreams, a microcosm of the last years of the waning Edwardian Era and the coming influences of the 20th century. When she left New York on her final voyage, she sailed from the New World to the Old. Yet an encounter with a primitive German U-Boat sent her and her gilded passengers to their tragic deaths.

In this magisterial work of history and adventure, based on more than a decade of prodigious research in British, Canadian, and European archives, and months in the field in Nepal and Tibet, Wade Davis vividly re-creates British climbers’ epic attempts to scale Mount Everest in the early 1920s. With new access to letters and diaries, Davis recounts the heroic efforts of George Mallory and his fellow climbers to conquer the mountain in the face of treacherous terrain and furious weather.