Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2004-04-01
RRP: £8.99
Price: £5.45
Review The Devil in the White City / Bantam Books:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2005-05-05
Dewey code: 950
RRP: £7.99
Price: £2.96
Review Samira and Samir: The Heart Rendering Story of Love and Oppression in Afghanistan / Arrow Books Ltd:
Publication date: 2002-06-01
Dewey code: 355
RRP: £22.95
Price: £17.55
Review Black Edelweiss / Aegis Consulting Group:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2007-05-21
Dewey code: 355
RRP: £6.99
Price: £0.95
Review Barefoot Soldier / Sphere:
Publication date: 2008-06-12
Dewey code: 941.081092
RRP: £14.99
Price: £5.12
Review Robert Peel: A Biography / Phoenix:
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2004-04-26
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £8.99
Price: £0.88
Review Living History / Headline:
Publication date: 2008-09-04
RRP: £17.99
Price: £4.00
Review Attila the Hun: Barbarian Terror and the Fall of the Roman Empire / The Bodley Head Ltd:
Creator: Peter Hopkirk
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2002-08-08
Dewey code: 950
RRP: £9.99
Price: £4.56
Review Mission to Tashkent / Oxford Paperbacks:
Publication date: 2008-06-01
RRP: £8.99
Price: £4.30
Review A Soldier's War in Chechnya / Portobello Books Ltd:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1999-09-16
Dewey code: 359
RRP: £8.99
Price: £5.30
Review Iron Coffins: A U-boat Commander's War, 1939-45 (Cassell Military Paperbacks) / Phoenix:
Publication date: 2005-10
Dewey code: 940.41241
RRP: £7.99
Price: £5.97
Review Machine Gunner 1914-1918: Personal Experiences of the Machine Gun Corps / Leo Cooper Ltd:
Publication date: 2008-10-07
Dewey code: 974.0882859
RRP: £16.90
Price: £10.25
Review The Wordy Shipmates / Riverhead Hardcover:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2003-09-01
Dewey code: 323
RRP: £7.99
Price: £3.99
Review Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving Stalin's Gulag / Scribner:In 1941, accidentally rolling a Soviet tank while fording a river was considered a capital offence by the Red Army. Unfortunately for young Janusz Bardach, he committed just such an error; luckily for him an old acquaintance from his hometown in Poland had enough rank and influence to commute the court-martial penalty from death to 10 years hard labour in Siberia. For the next four years, Bardach endured hellish conditions in various labour camps-first a logging camp, then a gold mine in the frozen north. Frigid temperatures, inadequate food and clothing combined with physical and spiritual malaise to bring prisoners first to the edge of despair and then to the brink of suicide. Bardach survived by turning his mind off, by refusing to remember happier times or to anticipate the future. He became, simply, a beast of burden, shuffling through the hours of his slavery until he could fall into the brief oblivion of sleep. Ironically, it was a near brush with death that proved to be Bardach's salvation. After surviving an explosion, he was sent to a prison hospital where he managed to talk his way into a job as a medical assistant. There he gained both a new lease on life and a future profession. Released from his sentence early, in 1945, Bardach went on to become a surgeon. [+]His memoir, Man Is Wolf to Man, is more than just an account of his sufferings in a Russian labour camp; it is also a meditation on the will to survive in the face of hopelessness, the occasional kindnesses of strangers in unexpected places, and above all, the struggle to remain human under the most inhumane conditions.
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1994-09-08
Dewey code: 305
RRP: £6.99
Price: £1.50
Review Sold: Story of Modern-day Slavery / Time Warner Paperbacks:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1999-12-30
Dewey code: 940
RRP: £7.99
Price: £3.05
Review The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-45 / Phoenix:The last live broadcast on Polish Radio, on September 23, 1939, was Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp Minor, played by a young pianist named Wladyslaw Szpilman, until his playing was interrupted by German shelling. It was the same piece, and the same pianist, when broadcasting resumed six years later. The Pianist is Szpilman's account of the years in between, of the death and cruelty inflicted on the Jews of Warsaw and on Warsaw itself, related with a dispassionate restraint borne of shock. Szpilman, now 88, has not looked at his description since he wrote it in 1946 (the same time as Primo Levi's If This Is A Man?; it is too personally painful. The rest of us have no such excuse. Szpilman's family were deported to Treblinka, where they were exterminated; he survived only because a music-loving policeman recognised him. This was only the first in a series of fatefully lucky escapes that littered his life as he hid among the rubble and corpses of the Warsaw Ghetto, growing thinner and hungrier, yet condemned to live. Ironically, it was a German officer, Wilm Hosenfeld, who saved Szpilman's life by bringing food and an eiderdown to the derelict ruin where he discovered him. Hosenfeld died seven years later in a Stalingrad labour camp, but portions of his diary, reprinted here, tell of his outraged incomprehension of the madness and evil he witnessed, thereby establishing an effective counterpoint to ground the nightmarish vision of the pianist in a desperate reality. Szpilman originally published his account in Poland in 1946, but it was almost immediately withdrawn by Stalin's Polish minions as it unashamedly described collaborations by Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Poles and Jews with the Nazis. [+]In 1997 it was published in Germany after Szpilman's son found it on his father's bookcase. This admirably robust translation by Anthea Bell is the first in the English language. There were 3,500,000 Jews in Poland before the Nazi occupation; after it there were 240,000. Wladyslaw Szpilman's extraordinary account of his own miraculous survival offers a voice across the years for the faceless millions who lost their lives. -David Vincent.
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2003-02-06
Dewey code: 910
RRP: £9.99
Price: £5.11
Review Captain Cook: The Life, Death and Legacy of History's Greatest Explorer / Ebury Press:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2001-09-06
Dewey code: 324
RRP: £14.99
Price: £7.50
Review The Prime Minister: The Job and Its Holders Since 1945 / Penguin:Peter Hennessy, former journalist turned scholar of contemporary political history, is an academic aeolus whose infectious enthusiasm for his subject, Whitehall and Westminster, blows the dust off documents and reinflates a mandarin's minute with a telling topicality. The holder of the Chair of Contemporary History at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, he has natural gift (and inclination) for grafting germane gossip onto the gravity of his subject and thus enlivening his expert exhumation of archives with appropriate anecdote. His earlier work, Whitehall has become a classic, and in his latest study he turns his attention to the steady accretion of power by Prime Ministers since the last world war and makes an assessment of each occupant of 10 Downing Street. Hennessy delights in proceeding by exposure as well as explication, throwing up fascinating insights on Premiers as they arrive at crucial decisions. He is undoubtedly happiest when chronicling the manoeuvrings of the backroom boys in Whitehall rather than those in the corridors of the Palace of Westminster, but then the shift of power away from the legislature to the executive is becoming all too apparent. In each of his studies, Hennessy shows how individual Prime Ministers struggled and shaped the governance of the nation to their different personalities, and then their day of hard graft and glory is gone. As Harold Macmillan, one of the more charismatic holders of the office, said after his resignation, "nothing rolls up more quickly than a red carpet" -Michael Hatfield.
Publication date: 2005-01-01
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £3.95
Price: £1.41
Review The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin / Digireads.com:
Creator: William Davies
Publication date: 2008-02-11
RRP: £17.99
Price: £10.69
Review Somme Mud / Doubleday:
Publication date: 2004-09-09
Dewey code: 355
RRP: £7.99
Price: £2.19
Review Amongst the Marines: The Untold Story / Mainstream Publishing:
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The Devil in the White City, Samira and Samir: The Heart Rendering Story of Love and Oppression in Afghanistan, Black Edelweiss, Barefoot Soldier, Robert Peel: A Biography, Living History, Attila the Hun: Barbarian Terror and the Fall of the Roman Empire, Mission to Tashkent, A Soldier's War in Chechnya, Iron Coffins: A U-boat Commander's War, 1939-45 (Cassell Military Paperbacks), Machine Gunner 1914-1918: Personal Experiences of the Machine Gun Corps, The Wordy Shipmates, Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving Stalin's Gulag, Sold: Story of Modern-day Slavery, The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-45, Captain Cook: The Life, Death and Legacy of History's Greatest Explorer, The Prime Minister: The Job and Its Holders Since 1945, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Somme Mud, Amongst the Marines: The Untold Story |
