Creator: Sheila Mitchell
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1998-12
RRP: £55.95
Price: £55.95
Review Testament of Youth: Complete & Unabridged: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925: Complete & Unabridged / ISIS Gold Audio Books:In 1914 Vera Brittain was 21 years old, and an undergraduate student at Somerville College, Oxford. When war broke out in August of that year, Brittain "temporarily" disrupted her studies to enrol as a volunteer nurse, nursing casualties both in England and on the Western Front. The next four years were to cause a deep rupture in Brittain's life, as she witnessed not only the horrors of war first hand, but also experienced the quadruple loss of her fiancé, her brother, and two close friends. Testament of Youth is a powerfully written, unsentimental memoir which has continued to move and enthral readers since its first publication in 1933. Brittain, a pacifist since her First World War experiences, prefaces the book with a fairy tale, in which Catherine, the heroine, encounters a fairy godmother and is given the choice of having either a happy youth or a happy old age. She selects the latter and so her fate is determined: "Now this woman," warns the tale, "was the destiny of poor Catherine. " And we find as we delve deeper into the book that she was the destiny of poor Vera too.
Creator: Niall Ferguson
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 2003-01-09
Dewey code: 941
RRP: £13.00
Price: £6.67
Review Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World / Penguin:Niall Ferguson's compelling tour de force, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World is published to coincide with a Channel 4 TV series. Ferguson, author of The Pity of War and The Cash Nexus, does not so much provide a synoptic survey of the British empire since the 17th century, as an arresting argument about why it arose, and how it fell. Ferguson's emphasis throughout is on the pursuit of economic profit and military might. Piracy overseas and a taste for sugar and spice at home, combined with an unerring ability to vanquish rival European powers such as the Dutch and French in the dash for stash and status across the globe. But Ferguson is also alive to the peculiarities of British dominion: the manly and Christian civil service-less than a thousand strong-who ruled India, missionaries such as Livingstone, who explored and mapped as they preached and the barons of empire-Rhodes, Curzon, and Kitchener-who found in empire an outlet for their homoeroticism. The book is brilliant and persuasive on trade and buccaneering before 1750, on India, on the late Victorian imperial mentalité, and on the two world wars, but less convincing on the empire of white settlement, and strangely silent on the most difficult colony of all, Ireland. In the end, Ferguson's penchant for polemic gets the upper-hand-the book closes with a controversial balance-sheet of the gains and losses of the British imperial experience-but he provides a riveting read nonetheless. -Miles Taylor.
Creator: Martin Jarvis
Publication date: 1998-01-05
Dewey code: 364
RRP: £11.00
Price: £0.01
Review A Night to Remember (BBC Radio Collection) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Creator: Mollie Harris
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1993-10
Dewey code: 809
RRP: £31.95
Price: £39.20
Review Lark Rise: Complete & Unabridged (Isis) / ISIS Audio Books:
Creator: Kerry Shale
Publication date: 1999-10-18
RRP: £10.99
Price: £9.99
Review Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea / HarperCollins Audio:The facts speak for themselves. In 1857, the Central America, a sidewheel steamer ferrying passengers fresh from the gold rush of California to New York and laden with 21 tons of California gold, encountered a severe storm off the Carolina coast and sank, carrying more than 400 passengers and all her cargo with her. She then sat for 132 years, 200 miles offshore and almost two miles below the ocean's surface-a depth at which she was assumed to be unrecoverable-until 1989, when a deep-water research vessel sailed into the harbour at Norfolk, Virginia, fat with salvaged gold coins and bullion estimated to be worth $1 billion. Author Gary Kinder wisely lets the story of the Columbus-America Dicovery Group, led by maverick scientist and entrepreneur Tommy Thompson, unfold without hyperbole. Kinder interweaves the tale of the Central America and her passengers and crew with Thompson's own story of growing up landlocked in Ohio. An irrepressible tinkerer and explorer even in his childhood days, his progress to adulthood as a young man who always had "7 to 14" projects on the table or spinning in his head adds fascinating texture and depth to the story. One of those projects would become the unlikely recovery of the stricken steamer, and the resourcefulness and drive with which the project proceeds is contrasted poignantly in the narrative with the Central America's doomed battle to stay afloat in 1857. Thompson, who spent nearly a decade planning and organizing his recovery effort, emerges as one of the great unsung adventurers of these times (the technical innovations alone required for such a task produced a windfall for the scientific community and defined a new state of the art for deep-sea explorers and treasure hunters), and the story of the steamer's sinking is compelling enough to make any reader wonder why the Central America sinking hasn't achieved greater notoriety in this Titanic-dominated area.
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 1995-10
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £7.99
Price: £7.90
Review Footbridge to Enchantment: Nigel Tranter's Country Notebook / Novelsound:
Publication date: 1995-03-01
Dewey code: 320
RRP: £7.50
Price: £6.00
Review Robert F.Kennedy: In His Own Words / Soundworks,U.S.:
Publication date: 1982-12
RRP: £12.93
Price: £12.93
Review Lenin / Sussex Publications:
Publication date: 2002-03-31
Dewey code: 843.912
RRP: £13.20
Price: £6.99
Review The Life and Work of Marcel Proust (Naxos Audio) / Naxos AudioBooks:
Creator: Susy Smith
Edition: Abridged edition
Publication date: 1999-11-04
RRP: £9.99
Price: £29.99
Review "Country Living" Magazine: My Country Childhood / Hodder & Stoughton Audio Books:
Creator: Simon Garfield
Publication date: 2004-09-02
Dewey code: 941
RRP: £10.99
Price: £1.99
Review Our Hidden Lives: The Everyday Diaries of a Forgotten Britain 1945-1948 / Random House Audiobooks:
Publication date: 2002-11-07
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £9.99
Price: £8.95
Review It's a Long Way from Penny Apples / Hodder & Stoughton Audio Books:
Creator: Lindsay Duncan
Publication date: 2001-06-07
Price: £12.99
Review Marie Antoinette (Tape) / Orion:Marie Antoinette, Antonia Fraser's first book in five years, heralds the welcome return of her wonderfully lucid, engaging style as she disentangles myth from fact regarding the life of the still controversial, and misunderstood, wife of Louis XVI of France. It is also perhaps her most assured work to date. The daughter of Empress Maria Teresa of Austria, the 14-year-old Marie Antoinette, or l'Autrichienne, was sent to France to marry the Dauphin in 1770 in an act of political union between the two countries. Despite her husband's preference for the hunting field over the bedroom, and a somewhat inexpressive personality-his final terse diary entry was to be, appropriately, "Rien"-a decade of French courtly exuberance entailed. Her disappointment in marriage gave way to an enjoyment of her position, especially on turning 30, yet an increasing number of libelles and scandalous rumours about the new Queen and her sexual proclivities grew from Versailles' whispers to the shouts of what was to be the revolution of 1789. This was followed by her own awful demise and beheading four wretched years later, after the appalling torture of her own young son falsely testifying that he had been sexually abused by her. Those are the skeletal facts of her life, but Fraser fleshes out the story with her customary composed authority. Her stated ambition is twofold. The book's subtitle, "The Journey", refers to Marie Antoinette's political significance in a union over which she had no control, but also her own personal story, from the ill-educated, overwhelmed teenage bride to the despised monarch who bore the brunt of all the ills of the ancien régime. Fraser, arch debunker, necessarily removes the apocryphal-Mozart the child prodigy saying that he would marry her, the infamous "let them eat cake" comment that preceded her by several hundred years, dressing as a milkmaid at her model village in the grounds of Versailles-to reveal a woman whose misfortunes, she concludes, outweighed her failures. [+]Like the Jemima Shore detective novels she also pens, Fraser displays an unerring ability to ask the right questions. Most of all, though, she writes with an understated, unadorned clarity that imparts her learning with an ease to be both envied and savoured. In 1789, Marie Antoinette famously said to a deputation from the Commune of Paris, "I've seen everything, known everything, and forgotten everything". There could be no wiser, compassionate and judicious reclaimer of her besmirched reputation than Antonia Fraser. -David Vincent.
Creator: William Hope
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 2001-07
Dewey code: 809
RRP: £11.99
Price: £6.00
Review Walden (Naxos Audio) / Naxos AudioBooks:
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1999-05-31
Dewey code: 917.30492
Price: £49.95
Review Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance / Renaissance Audio:
Creator: John Nettles
Publication date: 2004-06-01
Dewey code: 940
RRP: £16.99
Price: £7.00
Review Stalin (Tape): The Court of the Red Tsar / Orion:
Publication date: 2003-04-07
Dewey code: 808
RRP: £10.99
Price: £0.41
Review Letter from America (BBC Radio Collection) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Publication date: 1994-06-01
Dewey code: 973
RRP: £10.99
Price: £5.30
Review JFK, The Kennedy Tapes: Highlights of the Original Speeches of the Presidential Years (Penton Audio): Highlights of the Original Speeches of the Presidential Years / Soundworks,U.S.:
Creator: John Sessions
Publication date: 2002-06-24
Dewey code: 941
RRP: £13.00
Price: £1.39
Review Churchill: A Biography / Macmillan Audio Books:Book buyers will never tire of reading about Winston Churchill, for "the greatest adventurer of modern political history" (RA Butler's verdict) led a life of action-packed drama and global significance. Roy Jenkins' Churchill is the latest biography of this great Briton, following closely in the tailwind of Geoffrey Best's Churchill: A Study in Greatness. Where Best restores altitude to Churchill's dipping reputation, seeing off academic critics of the last decade or so, Jenkins provides a jumbo-size old-fashioned biography, lauding his subject's achievements, sympathising with his quirks, and stepping lightly over his well-known mistakes. As he did in his earlier biographies of Dilke, Asquith and Gladstone, Jenkins sticks closely to the published record, utilising in particular the definitive researches of Martin Gilbert, but he brings the authority and the inside knowledge of British politics to his book, slipping in his own memories of Churchill, and his own comparable experience sat the Cabinet table. It is all here, from the Boer Wars to the nuclear bomb, from the hustings in Oldham to the diplomacy of Yalta, with due coverage of the big moments-at the Board of Trade and at the Admiralty in Asquith's peacetime and wartime cabinets, taking on the appeasers in the 1930s and Hitler in the 1940s. All the books are here, and all the political relationships tetchy and touchy alike, from Lloyd George to Baldwin, Smuts to Stalin, and of course, the British people. Like its subject the book is bulky and at times indulgent, but impossible not to enjoy. -Miles Taylor.
Creator: Robert Powell
Publication date: 1999-10-04
Dewey code: 941
RRP: £54.99
Price: £54.99
Review This Sceptred Isle: The Twentieth Century v.1-5 . The BBC Radio 4 Series: The Twentieth Century Vol 1-5 . The BBC Ra (BBC Radio Collection) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
| Models & Brands:
Testament of Youth: Complete & Unabridged: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925: Complete & Unabridged, Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World, A Night to Remember (BBC Radio Collection), Lark Rise: Complete & Unabridged (Isis), Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, Footbridge to Enchantment: Nigel Tranter's Country Notebook, Robert F.Kennedy: In His Own Words, Lenin, The Life and Work of Marcel Proust (Naxos Audio), "Country Living" Magazine: My Country Childhood, Our Hidden Lives: The Everyday Diaries of a Forgotten Britain 1945-1948, It's a Long Way from Penny Apples, Marie Antoinette (Tape), Walden (Naxos Audio), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Stalin (Tape): The Court of the Red Tsar, Letter from America (BBC Radio Collection), JFK, The Kennedy Tapes: Highlights of the Original Speeches of the Presidential Years (Penton Audio): Highlights of the Original Speeches of the Presidential Years, Churchill: A Biography, This Sceptred Isle: The Twentieth Century v.1-5 . The BBC Radio 4 Series: The Twentieth Century Vol 1-5 . The BBC Ra (BBC Radio Collection) |
