Creator: Cotter Smith
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 2001-12-03
Dewey code: 940.5421
RRP: £20.00
Price: £10.48
Review Band of Brothers (Hbo Mini-Series) / Simon & Schuster Audio:As grippingly as any novelist, preeminent World War II historian Stephen Ambrose uses Band of Brothers to tell the horrifying, hallucinatory saga of Easy Company, whose 147 members he calls the nonpareil combat paratroopers on earth circa 1941-45. Ambrose takes us along on Easy Company's trip from gruelling basic training to Utah Beach on D-day, where a dozen of them turned German cannons into dynamited ruins resembling "half-peeled bananas", on to the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of part of the Dachau concentration camp, and a large party at Hitler's "Eagle's Nest", where they drank the his (surprisingly inferior) champagne. Of Ambrose's main sources, three soldiers became rich civilians; at least eight became teachers; one became Albert Speer's jailer; one prosecuted Robert Kennedy's assassin; another became a mountain recluse; the despised, sadistic CO who first trained Easy Company (and to whose strictness many soldiers attributed their survival of the war) wound up a suicidal loner whose own sons skipped his funeral. The Easy Company survivors describe the hell and confusion of any war: the senseless death of the nicest kid in the company when a souvenir Luger goes off in his pocket; the execution of a GI by his CO for disobeying an order not to get drunk. Despite the gratuitous horrors it relates, Band of Brothers illustrates what one of Ambrose's sources calls "the secret attractions of war. the delight in comradeship, the delight in destruction. [+]war as spectacle". -Tim Appelo.
Publication date: 2005-04-01
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £13.00
Price: £5.48
Review Last Letters Home / Macmillan Audio Books:
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 2005-05-09
Dewey code: 909
RRP: £16.99
Price: £3.98
Review White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa's One Million European Slaves / Hodder & Stoughton Audio Books:Writer and journalist Giles Milton specializes in the history of travel and exploration. His latest literary adventure, White Gold, is the story of Thomas Pellow, a Cornish cabin boy who was captured at sea by a group of fanatical Islamic slave traders—the Barbary corsairs, taken in chains to the great slave markets of Algiers, Tunis and Salè in Morocco and sold to the highest bidder. Pellow's purchaser happened to be the tyrannical sultan of Morroco, Moulay Ismail, a man committed to building a vast imperial pleasure palace of unsurpassable splendour built entirely by Christian slave labour. After enduring long periods of torture Pellow converted to Islam and became the personal slave of the sultan for over two decades—including a stint as a soldier in the sultan's army—before finally making a dramatic escape and return to Cornwall. The account is supported by the unpublished letters and manuscripts of slaves and the various ambassadors sent to free them. This is an excellently written account of the history of the white slave trade. Pellow's story is an extraordinary one but the real interest lies in the picture Milton builds of life in the slave pens and especially of daily life at the court of the spectacularly barbaric Moulay Ismail. -Larry Brown.
Publication date: 2005-02-14
RRP: £9.95
Price: £4.97
Review Churchill: A Celebration in Words and Music / Classical Communications Ltd:
Authors
- Martin Davidson
- James Taylor
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2005-03-04
Dewey code: 940
RRP: £13.00
Price: £8.21
Review Spitfire Ace / Macmillan Audio Books:
Publication date: 2004-05-01
RRP: £12.95
Price: £14.94
Review No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs: The Inspiring Story of Lord Taylor of Warwick / Centre Publishing:
Publication date: 2007-10-11
RRP: £14.99
Price: £5.26
Review England, Our England / Hodder & Stoughton:
Creator: Daniel Philpott
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 2006-03
Dewey code: 900
RRP: £19.96
Price: £9.51
Review Our Island Story: From the Romans to Richard the Lionheart v. 1 (Junior Classics) / Naxos AudioBooks:
Publication date: 2006-06-19
RRP: £25.00
Price: £15.00
Review This Sceptred Isle: 1876-1947 v. 3: Empire: 1876-1947 v. 3 (BBC Audio) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 2003-10-31
Dewey code: 938
RRP: £24.99
Price: £15.49
Review Greek Lives / Naxos AudioBooks:
Creator: Michael Tudor Barnes
Publication date: 2000-05
RRP: £56.50
Price: £56.50
Review Stalingrad / ISIS Publishing:Hitler made two fundamental and crippling mistakes during the Second World War. The first was his whimsical belief that the United Kingdom would eventually become his ally, which delayed his decision to launch a major invasion of Britain, whose army was unprepared for the force of blitzkrieg warfare. The second was the ill-conceived Operation Barbarossa-an invasion of Russia that was supposed to take the German army to the gates of Moscow. Antony Beevor's thoughtfully researched compendium recalls this epic struggle for Stalingrad. No-one, least of all the Germans, could foretell the deep well of Soviet resolve that would become the foundation of the Red Army; Russia, the Germans believed, would fall as swiftly as France and Poland. The ill-prepared Nazi forces were trapped in a bloody war of attrition against the Russian behemoth, which held them in the pit of Stalingrad for nearly two years. Beevor points out that the Russians were by no means ready for the war either, making their stand even more remarkable; Soviet intelligence spent as much time spying on its own forces-in fear of desertion, treachery and incompetence-as they did on the Nazis. Due attention is also given to the points of view of the soldiers and generals of both forces, from the sickening battles to life in the gulags. Many believe Stalingrad to be the turning point of the war. The Nazi war machine proved to be fallible as it spread itself too thin for a cause that was born more from arrogance than practicality. [+]The Germans never recovered, and its weakened defences were no match for the Allied invasion of 1944. We know little of what took place in Stalingrad or its overall significance, leading Beevor to humbly admit that "[t]he Battle of Stalingrad remains such an ideologically charged and symbolically important subject that the last word will not be heard for many years". This is true. But this gripping account should become the standard work against which all others should measure themselves. -Jeremy Storey.
Edition: Revised
Publication date: 2006-09-06
RRP: £33.13
Price: £14.26
Review The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child: Ancient Times v. 1 (Story of the World: History for the Classical Child) / W. W. Norton & Co.:
Creator: Tom Griffith
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 2001-11-30
Dewey code: 184
RRP: £16.99
Price: £9.40
Review The Trial and Death of Socrates / Naxos AudioBooks:
Authors
- Imperial War Museum
- Lyn Smith
RRP: £18.99
Price: £8.00
Review Young Voices: British Children Remember the Second World War / Penguin Audiobooks:
Authors
- H.E. Marshall
- Daniel Philpott
Publication date: 2006-10
RRP: £16.99
Price: £8.97
Review The Best of Our Island Story / Naxos AudioBooks:
Creator: Ariel Dorfman
Publication date: 2003-11-01
Dewey code: 900
RRP: £10.00
Price: £6.59
Review Chile: Promise of Freedom (AK Press Audio) / AK Press:
Edition: New title
Publication date: 2007-06-21
RRP: £13.99
Price: £6.57
Review Forgotten Voices of the Falklands: Pt. 3: Doing the Business: Pt. 3 (Forgotten Voices/Falklands) / Random House Audiobooks:
Creator: Sean Barrett
Publication date: 2006-07-27
RRP: £16.99
Price: £9.45
Review The War of the World / Penguin Books Ltd:
Publication date: 2006-12-07
RRP: £13.99
Price: £9.78
Review Forgotten Voices of the Blitz and the Battle for Britain: Dunkirk and the Threat of Invasion Pt. 1 (Forgotten Voices CD) / Random House Audiobooks:
Edition: New title
Publication date: 2004-12-01
Dewey code: 940
RRP: £30.00
Price: £17.95
Review Stephen Ambrose World War II Audio Collection / Simon & Schuster Audio:
| Browse History:
Models & Brands:
Band of Brothers (Hbo Mini-Series), Last Letters Home, White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa's One Million European Slaves, Churchill: A Celebration in Words and Music, Spitfire Ace, No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs: The Inspiring Story of Lord Taylor of Warwick, England, Our England, Our Island Story: From the Romans to Richard the Lionheart v. 1 (Junior Classics), This Sceptred Isle: 1876-1947 v. 3: Empire: 1876-1947 v. 3 (BBC Audio), Greek Lives, Stalingrad, The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child: Ancient Times v. 1 (Story of the World: History for the Classical Child), The Trial and Death of Socrates, Young Voices: British Children Remember the Second World War, The Best of Our Island Story, Chile: Promise of Freedom (AK Press Audio), Forgotten Voices of the Falklands: Pt. 3: Doing the Business: Pt. 3 (Forgotten Voices/Falklands), The War of the World, Forgotten Voices of the Blitz and the Battle for Britain: Dunkirk and the Threat of Invasion Pt. 1 (Forgotten Voices CD), Stephen Ambrose World War II Audio Collection |
