Showing titles in 20th Century

In the Shadow of the Moon tells the story of the most exciting and challenging years in spaceflight, with two superpowers engaged in a titanic struggle to land one of their own people on the moon. Drawing on interviews with astronauts, cosmonauts, their families, technicians, and scientists, as well as rarely seen Soviet and American government documents, the authors craft a remarkable story of the golden age of spaceflight as both an intimate human experience and a rollicking global adventure.

Twenty-five years after publication of The Shadows of Power, James Perloff returns to the venue of political history, and takes you where the mass media won’t.

Fashionably dressed, the charismatic but deeply flawed Shelby family blind enemies by slashing them with the disposable safety razor blades stitched in to the peaks of their flat caps, as they fight bloody gangland wars involving Irish terrorists and the authorities led by a devious Home Secretary, Winston Churchill. But who were the real Peaky Blinders? Did they really exist? Well-known social historian, broadcaster and author, Carl Chinn, has spent decades searching them out.

When Leosz was only six, his life changed completely. World War II broke out in 1939, sweeping the young boy into the whirlwind of the holocaust. For six long torturous years, Leosz sees and goes through everything: myriads of overcrowded transports headed for concentration camps, life on the streets of occupied Poland as an abandoned child, hiding from cruel Nazis, forced labor under conditions of starvation, and the constant threat of death.

Through a precious cache of WWII letters, a story of war is revealed. But also, most movingly, a story of love, resilience and survival, from award-winning and bestselling writer, Peter Rees and Sue Langford....

Kurt Schindler was an impossible man. His daughter, Meriel, spent her adult life trying to keep him at bay. Kurt had made extravagant claims about their family history. Were they really related to Franz Kafka and Oscar Schindler, of Schindler's List fame? Or Hitler's Jewish doctor - Dr Bloch? What really happened on Kristallnacht, the night that Nazis beat Kurt's father half to death and ransacked the family home? When Kurt died in 2017, Meriel felt compelled to resolve her mixed feelings about him and to solve the mysteries he had left behind.

Fifty years after the event that rocked the nation and shook the world, Marrs reveals the facts behind the most audacious cover-up of our time, how it was planned, who executed the conspiracy, who benefited from it, and ultimately why this extremely well-orchestrated assassination could be so cleverly concealed. This extensively researched audiobook includes evidence proving the Warren Commission's report was a cover-up and a smoke screen for the true conspiracy. Learn why Lee Harvey Oswald could not have been a lone gunman, and that multiple shots were fired that fateful day.

Spain's transition to democracy after Franco's long dictatorship was widely hailed as a success, ushering in three decades of unprecedented progress and prosperity. Yet over the past decade, its political consensus has been under severe strain. A stable two-party system has splintered, with disruptive new parties on the far left and far right. No government has had a majority since 2015. Michael Reid overturns the stereotypical view of Spain as a country haunted by its Francoist past.

Since the secret of Bletchley Park was revealed in the 1970s, the work of its codebreakers has become one of the most famous stories of the Second World War. But cracking the Nazis' codes was only the start of the process. Thousands of secret intelligence workers were then involved in making crucial information available to the Allied leaders and commanders who desperately needed it.

On the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki comes this heart-pounding account of the war-room drama inside the cabinets of the United States and Japan that led to Armageddon on August 6, 1945. Here are the secret strategy sessions, fierce debates, looming assassinations, and planned invasions that resulted in history’s first use of nuclear weapons in combat, and the ensuing chaotic days as the Japanese government struggled to respond to the reality of nuclear war.

In early 1940, Chaim Herzsman was locked in to the Lódz Ghetto in Poland. Hungry, fearless and determined, he goes on scavenging missions outside the wire limits, until he is forced to kill a Nazi guard. That moment changes the course of his life and sets him on an unbelievable adventure across enemy lines.

Between 1940 and 1943, a group of Polish diplomats in Switzerland engaged in a wholly remarkable - and until now, completely unknown - humanitarian operation. In concert with Jewish activists, they masterminded a systematic programme of forging passports and identity documents for Latin American countries, which were then smuggled into German-occupied Europe to save the lives of thousands of Jews facing extermination in the Holocaust.

Tank Rider is the riveting memoir of Evgeni Bessonov telling of his years of service at the vanguard of the Red Army and daily encounters with the German foe. He brings large-scale battles to life, recounts the sniping and skirmishing that tried and tested soldiers on both sides, and narrates the overwhelming tragedy and horror of apocalyptic warfare on the Eastern Front. So much of the Soviet experience of World War II remains untold, but this memoir provides an important glimpse into some of the most decisive moments of this overlooked history.

In 1943, as the Nazi power swept across central Europe, Rosa, her husband Emanuel and their daughter, Judy, were forced into hiding. But after a year and a half of living a terrifying, day-by-day existence, they were betrayed. As they arrived in Auschwitz, Rosa was torn from her husband and her only daughter. Could she dare to hope she would see either of them again?

The conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians is technically 69 years old and counting, but it has its roots in over 2,000 years of history. Over time, it has become exceedingly difficult for even sophisticated political pundits and followers to keep track of it all. In 1947, the British delegated the issue of partitioning the British Mandate to the United Nations. The UN General Assembly eventually came up with what is now known as the UN Partition Plan of 1947.

The Gutmanns, as they were known, rose from a small Bohemian hamlet to become one of Germany's most powerful banking families. They also amassed a magnificent, world-class art collection that included works by Degas, Renoir, Botticelli, Guardi, and many, many others. But the Nazi regime snatched from them everything they had worked to build: their remarkable art, their immense wealth, their prominent social standing, and their very lives.

Conscripted into the Polish army as Hitler’s forces draw closer, Jewish soldier Tolek Klings vows to return to his wife, Klara, and son, Juliusz. However, the army is rife with anti-Semitism and Tolek is relentlessly tormented. As the Germans invade Poland, he is faced with a terrible dilemma: flee home to protect his family - and risk being shot as a deserter - or remain a soldier, hoping reports of women and children being spared by the occupying forces are true.

In these compelling, award-winning, Holocaust memoirs, Nanette Blitz Konig relates her amazing story of survival during the Second World War when she, together with her family and millions of other Jews, was imprisoned by the Nazis with a minimum chance of survival. Nanette (b. 1929) was a class mate of Anne Frank in the Jewish Lyceum of Amsterdam. They met again in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly before Anne died.

At the beginning of November 1942, it looked as if the Axis powers could still win the Second World War; at the end of that month, everyone realized that it was just a matter of time before they would lose. In between was El Alamein, Guadalcanal, the French North Africa landings, the Japanese retreat in New Guinea, and the Soviet encirclement of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad. It may have been the most important month of the 20th century. In this riveting historical marvel, Peter Englund has reduced an epoch-making event to its basic component: the individual experience.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is one of the world's most famous conspiracy theories. It is a statement of prejudice and paranoia, a fake historical record and a grand hoax all rolled into one.