Thirty Years

Initially, the Thirty Years War was precipitated in 1618 by religious conflicts between Protestants and Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire. But the conflict soon spread beyond religion to encompass the internal politics and balance of power within the Empire, and then later to the other European powers. By the end, it became simply a dynastic struggle between Bourbon France and Habsburg Spain. And almost all of it was fought out in Germany. Entire regions were depopulated and destroyed.

The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world.

In July 1983, James Morgan Kane returned home in the evening to find a corpse in his living room. Fearing that he would be held responsible, and sensing that his wife was involved, he wanted to do all he could to protect his young family. Jamie worked through the night to dispose of the body. But his luck ran out days later, as he was arrested and sentenced to 13 years in prison. Jamie entered the American prison system and was to stay there for 34 years with stints in San Quentin, Folsom State Prison and the notorious Deuel Vocational Institution in California.

This incredible story shows how John Douglas tracked and participated in the hunt for one of the most notorious serial killers in US history. For 31 years a man who called himself BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) terrorized the city of Wichita, Kansas, sexually assaulting and strangling a series of women, taunting the police with frequent communications, and bragging about his crimes to local newspapers and TV stations.

Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region's Christian minorities, who had previously accounted for 20 percent of the population. By 1924 the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had been reduced to two percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. This is the first account to show that the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia's Christian population.

At the entrance of Sydney Harbor, the cliffs rise fourteen stories above the Pacific, like a gigantic skirt made of sandstone. North Head, one of the most memorable cliffs, is a gorgeous place to watch the sunrise. But it's an unforgiving place to lose your footing. When Steve Johnson's younger brother Scott went over the edge in 1988, he hit an outcrop on the way down and exploded on the rocks below. The police deemed it a suicide. But Steve Johnson never believed his brother would take his own life.

Mark Rippetoe has been in the fitness industry since 1978 and has owned a black-iron gym since 1984. He knows things about lifting weights and training for performance that most other coaches and professionals have never had the chance to learn. This book of essays offers a glimpse into the depths of experience made possible through many years under the bar, and many more years spent helping others under the bar.

Stanley Kubrick, the director of a string of timeless movies from Lolita and Dr. Strangelove to A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, and others, has always been depicted by the media as the Howard Hughes of filmmakers, a weird artist obsessed with his work and privacy to the point of madness. But who was he really?

In Deal with the Devil, five-time Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter Peter Lance draws on once-secret FBI files and exclusive new interviews to disclose the epic saga of Colombo family capo Gregory Scarpa, Sr., who spent more than 30 years as a paid Top-Echelon FBI informant while wreaking havoc as a drug dealer, loan shark, bank robber, hijacker, high-end securities thief - and killer. A Mafia capo who "stopped counting" after 50 murders, Greg Scarpa was enlisted by the FBI as early as 1960.

Within FBI field operative circles, groups of people known as “Special” by their titles alone, Michael R. McGowan is an outlier. Over the course of his career, McGowan has worked more than 50 undercover cases. In this extraordinary and unprecedented book, McGowan will take listeners through some of his biggest cases, from international drug busts to the Russian and Italian mobs to biker gangs and contract killers to corrupt unions and SWAT work. Ghost is an unparalleled view into how the FBI, through the courage of its undercover Special Agents, nails the bad guys.

In Bucharest, Romania's capital, Kaplan discovered that few Westerners were reporting on the country - one of the darkest corners of Europe during the Cold War. In an intense and cinematic travelogue, Kaplan explores the history and culture of the only country in the West where the leading intellectuals have been right-wing rather than left-wing; a country that gave rise to the dictator Ion Antonescu, Hitler's chief foreign accomplice during WWII; a country where the Latin West mixes with the Greek East, producing a fascinating fusion of cultures.

In the Spring of 1974, 2nd Lt. Hiroo Onoda of the Japanese army made world headlines when he emerged from the Philippine jungle after a thirty-year ordeal. Hunted in turn by American troops, the Philippine army and police, hostile islanders, and eventually successive Japanese search parties, Onoda had skillfully outmaneuvered all his pursuers, convinced that World War II was still being fought and waiting for the day when his fellow soldiers would return victorious.

For decades, The Year's Best Science Fiction has been the most widely read short science fiction anthology of its kind. Now, after 35 annual collections comes the ultimate in science fiction anthologies. In The Very Best of the Best, legendary editor Gardner Dozois selects the finest short stories for this landmark collection, including short fiction from authors such as Charles Stross, Michael Swanwick, Nancy Kress, Greg Egan, Stephen Baxter, Pat Cadigan, and any many more.

In this short book, Gardiner describes the famous battles and the daring generals: Mansfeld and Wallenstein, Tilly and Gustavus Adolphus, Bernard and Turenne. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, working through secret subsidies and wily diplomacy, frail but indomitable Cardinal Richelieu gained control of crucial supply lines, crippling Austria and Spain, and setting the stage for the golden age of France.

If you had to name the most destructive conflicts in human history, you likely wouldn’t put the Thirty Years’ War near the top of that list, but in fact, this conflict resulted in more than eight million fatalities throughout Europe. It resulted in widespread destruction, and it bankrupted the majority of the powers involved. For such a destructive war, the Thirty Years’ War is not well-known, and yet it changed the geopolitical face of Europe as well as the role of religion and nation-states in society. This audiobook tells the compelling story of the Thirty Years’ War.

From a childhood spent making smoke bombs, killing wasps and carving soap in '70s Kent, Harry Hill then found himself in charge of hundreds of sick people as a junior doctor. Out of his depth and terrified, he chucked it all in to pursue his dream of becoming a stand-up comedian. Battling his way through the '90s comedy circuit, he quickly rose to become a household name and one of the UK's most celebrated comics, almost making it to the top of the showbiz tree.

Eric Bentley has chosen highlights from the 30-year record of the House Un-American Activities Committee to demonstrate HUAC's focus on artists, intellectuals, and performers. Volume 2: 1951-1952 includes the testimonies of Clifford Odets, Edward G. Robinson, Elia Kazan, Jose Ferrer, Bud Schulberg, Sterling Hayden, Abe Burroughs, Lillian Hellman, and many others. Thirty Years of Treason serves as a warning for the future and creates living history from the documentary record.

The testimony that the author has gleaned for this book from the 30-year record of the House Un-American Activities Committee focuses on HUAC's treatment of artists, intellectuals, and performers. This highly listenable and absorbing collection of significant excerpts from the hearings shows with painful clarity how HUAC grew from a panel that investigated possible subversive activities in a "dignified" manner to a huge, unrelenting accusatory finger from which almost no one was safe.

The testimony that the author has gleaned for this audiobook from the 30-year record of the House Un-American Activities Committee focuses on HUAC's treatment of artists, intellectuals, and performers. This highly readable and absorbing collection of significant excerpts from the hearings shows with painful clarity how HUAC grew from a panel that investigated possible subversive activities in a "dignified" manner to a huge, unrelenting accusatory finger from which almost no one was safe.

Born into bondage in 1818, Elizabeth Keckley was able to purchase her freedom only after years of saving. She then went on to build a thriving business as a seamstress, eventually becoming modiste to Mary Todd Lincoln herself. In this dressmaking role, Keckley was a close confidante of Mary Todd, and her 1868 memoir recounted her incredible rise while also providing revelatory insights into everyday life among the Lincolns.