History audiobooks

West with the Night

By: Beryl Markham

Narrated by: Anna Fields

Length: 8 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

This beautifully written autobiography brings us the remarkable life story of Beryl Markham, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. Brought up on a farm in Kenya, Markham chose to stay in Africa when, at seventeen, her father lost their farm and went to Peru. She began an apprenticeship as a racehorse trainer which... Read more

John Ransom’s Diary

By: John Ransom

Narrated by: David Thorn

Length: 8 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

This book is an extraordinary day-to-day documentary of the Civil War's most infamous Confederate prison, Camp Sumter, better known as Andersonville. Here thirteen thousand wretched Union prisoners died within barely fourteen months, from starvation, scurvy, and other diseases that spread through the camp. There was little shelter but makeshift... 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

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

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

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

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

A Call to Heroism

By: Peter H. Gibbon

Narrated by: Brian Emerson

Length: 8 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

What do we look for in our heroes of today? And what are we to expect of heroes in our uncertain future? In this book, Gibbon traces the evolution of our collective vision of greatness from the age of our founders to today’s celebrity-obsessed media age.Among history’s exemplary men and women who have sacrificed for causes greater than... Read more

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

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

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

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

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

True to Our Roots

By: Paul Dolan

Narrated by: Barrett Whitener

Length: 6 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

Set against the colorful backdrop of the California wine industry, True to Our Roots is the story of how Paul Dolan led his California company, Fetzer Vineyards, to become a model for sustainable businesses everywhere. His respect for the environment, responsibility to his community, avoidance of chemicals, and humanistic approach to his... Read more

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

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

Classical Music 101

By: Fred Plotkin

Narrated by: Fred Plotkin

Length: 19 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

The author who has taught tens of thousands of people to love opera now introduces readers to the rich and soul-stirring world of classical music.From the author of the bestselling Opera 101 comes a comprehensive and highly accessible guide to discovering the glories of classical music, based on the fundamental principle of developing the skills... 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

Defying Hitler

By: Sebastian Haffner

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 8 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

When the famous German author Sebastian Haffner died at age ninety-one in 1999, a manuscript was discovered among his unpublished papers that offers a compelling eyewitness account of the rise of Hitler and Nazism. He describes the country's inflation and the political climate that contributed to Hitler's rise to power and also examines the... 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