Frederick Taylor has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 7 ratings. The most-rated is The Berlin Wall.
The Berlin Wall
Summary
The appearance of a hastily constructed barbed wire entanglement through the heart of Berlin during the night of 12-13 August 1961 was both dramatic and unexpected. Within days, it had started to metamorphose into a structure that would come to symbolise the brutal insanity of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. A city of almost four million was cut ruthlessly in two, unleashing a potentially catastrophic East-West crisis and plunging the entire world for the first time into the fear of imminent missile-borne apocalypse. This threat would vanish only when the very people the Wall had been built to imprison breached it on the historic night of 9 November 1989. The Berlin Wall is the definitive account of a divided city and its people.
©2009 Frederick Taylor (P)2011 Audible Ltd
Exorcising Hitler
Summary
In Exorcising Hitler, Frederick Taylor tells the story of Germany's year zero and what came after. Not since the end of the Roman Empire, almost 1500 years earlier, is there a parallel, in Europe at least, to the fall of the German nation in 1945. As Taylor describes the final Allied campaign, the hunting down of the Nazi resistance, the vast displacement of peoples in central and eastern Europe, the attitudes of the conquerors, the competition between Soviet Russia and the West, the hunger and near starvation of a once proud people, the initially naive attempt at expunging Nazism from all aspects of German life and the later more pragmatic approach, we begin to understand that despite almost total destruction, a combination of conservatism, enterprise and pragmatism in relation to former Nazis enabled the economic miracle of the 1950s. And we see how it was only when the '60s generation (the children of the Nazi era) began to question their parents with increasing violence that Germany began to awake from its sleep cure.
©2011 Frederick Taylor (P)2011 Audible Ltd
The Downfall of Money
Summary
An economic horror story: The complete meltdown of a major modern country’s financial system, and its disastrous effects on every aspect of society. A hundred years ago, many theorists believed - just as they did at the beginning of our 21st century - that the world had reached a state of economic perfection, a never-before-seen human interdependence that would lead to universal growth and prosperity. Then, as now, the German mark was one of the most trusted currencies in the world. Yet the early years of the Weimar Republic in Germany witnessed the most calamitous meltdown of a developed economy in modern times. The Downfall of Money will tell anew the dramatic story of the hyperinflation that saw the mark - worth 4.2 to the dollar in 1914 - plunge until it traded at over 4 trillion to 1 by the autumn of 1923. The story of the Weimar Republic’s financial crisis clearly resonates today, when the world is again anxious about what money is, what it means, and how we can judge if its value is true. It is a trajectory of events uncomfortably relevant for our own uncertain world. Frederick Taylor - one of the leading historians of Germany writing today - explores the causes of the crisis and what the collapse meant to ordinary people and traces its connection to the dark decades that followed. Drawing on a wide range of sources and accessibly presenting vast amounts of research, The Downfall of Money is a timely and chilling exploration of a haunting episode in history.
©2013 Frederick Taylor (P)2013 Audible Inc.
1939
Summary
A best-selling historian's chronicle of the dramatic months from the Munich Agreement to Hitler's invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II. In the autumn of 1938, Europe believed in the promise of peace. But only a year later, the fateful decisions of just a few men had again led Europe to a massive world war. Drawing on contemporary diaries, memoirs, and newspapers, as well as recorded interviews, 1939 is a narrative account of what the coming of the Second World War felt like to those who lived through it. Frederick Taylor, author of renowned histories of the Berlin Wall and the bombing of Dresden, highlights the day-to-day experiences of ordinary citizens as well as those who were at the height of power in Germany and Britain. Their voices lend an intimate flavor to this often-surprising account of the period and reveal a marked disconnect between government and people, for few people in either country wanted war. 1939 is a vivid and richly peopled narrative of Europe's slide into the horrors of war and a powerful warning for our own time.
©2019 Frederick Taylor (P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books