Richard Davenport-Hines has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Voyagers of the Titanic.
Voyagers of the Titanic
Summary
Late in the night of April 14, 1912, the mighty Titanic, a passenger liner traveling from Southampton, England, to New York City, struck an iceberg four hundred miles south of Newfoundland. Its sinking over the next two and a half hours brought the ship—mythological in name and size—100 years of infamy. Of the 2,240 people aboard the ship, 1,517 perished either by drowning or by freezing to death in the frigid North Atlantic waters. What followed the disaster was tantamount to a worldwide outpouring of grief: In New York, Paris, London, and other major cities, people lined the streets and crowded around the offices of the White Star Line, the Titanic’s shipping company, to inquire for news of their loved ones and for details about the lives of some of the famous people of their time. While many accounts of the Titanic’s voyage focus on the technical or mechanical aspects of why the ship sank, Voyagers of the Titanic follows the stories of the men, women, and children whose lives intersected on the vessel’s fateful last day, covering the full range of first, second, and third class—from plutocrats and captains of industry to cobblers and tailors looking for a better life in America. Richard Davenport-Hines delves into the fascinating lives of those who ate, drank, reveled, dreamed, and died aboard the mythic ship: from John Jacob Astor IV, the wealthiest person on board, whose comportment that night was subject to speculation and gossip for years after the event, to Archibald Butt, the much-beloved military aide to Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft, who died helping others into the Titanic’s few lifeboats. With magnificent prose, Voyagers of the Titanic also brings to life the untold stories of the ship’s middle and third classes—clergymen, teachers, hoteliers, engineers, shopkeepers, counterjumpers, and clerks—each of whom had a story that not only illuminates the fascinating ship but also the times in which it sailed. In addition, Davenport-Hines explores the fascinating politics behind the Titanic’s creation, which involved larger-than-life figures such as J. P. Morgan, the ship’s owner, and Lord Pirrie, the ship’s builder. The memory of this tragedy still remains a part of the American psyche and Voyagers of the Titanic brings that clear night back to us with all of its drama and pathos.
©2012 Richard Davenport-Hines (P)2012 HarperCollinsPublishers
Titanic Lives
Summary
Marking the centenary of the Titanic, A Shape of Ice is an utterly compelling exploration of the lives on board the most famous ship in history. The RMS Titanic was built as one of the world's largest and most luxurious liners. A marine Ritz, it was a 45,000 ton hotel of thin steel plates, travelling at a speed of 21 knots across the unforgiving ocean.On the night of 14 April 1912, the seemingly unsinkable ship hit an iceberg. It sustained a 300 feet gash and six compartments were wrenched open to the sea. In little over two hours, the palatial Titanic nose-dived to the bottom of the North Atlantic. Terribly mismanaged, there were not enough lifeboats to carry passengers to safety; over 1,500 people died that night.Who were the Titanic's passengers? In this original and timely book, Richard Davenport-Hines examines the great liner as a social portrait of the Edwardian age; above the squalor of steerage, filled with emigrants moving to the New World, were hundreds of second-class passengers buoyed up by their prosperous respectability. Higher up were the hereditary rich and at the pinnacle stood those of inconceivable wealth - Americans like John Jacob Astor IV, who was found with £2000 and $4000 in sodden notes in his pockets.Bringing together over 2,000 passengers and crew from every class and five continents, A Shape of Ice tells their stories, re-creating the complexities, disparities and tensions of life one hundred years ago.
©2012 Richard Davenport-Hines (P)2011 HarperCollins
Enemies Within: Communists, Spies and the Making of Modern Britain
Summary
What pushed Blunt, Burgess, Cairncross, Maclean and Philby into Soviet hands? With access to recently released papers and other neglected documents, this sharp analysis of the intelligence world examines how and why these men and others betrayed their country and what this cost Britain and its allies. 'Historians fumble their catches when they study individuals' motives and ideas rather than the institutions in which people work, respond, find motivation and develop their ideas', writes Richard Davenport-Hines in his history of the men who were persuaded by the Soviet Union to betray their country. In an audiobook which attempts to counter many contradictory accounts, Enemies Within offers a study of character: both individual and institutional - the operative traits of boarding schools, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Intelligence Division, the Foreign Office, MI5, MI6 and Moscow Centre. The audiobook refuses to present the Cambridge spies as they wished to be seen, in Marxist terms. It argues that these five men did their greatest harm to Britain not from their clandestine espionage but in their propaganda victories enjoyed from Moscow after 1951. Notions of trust, abused trust, forfeited trust and mistrust from the late 19th century to perestroika pepper its narrative. In an audiobook that is as intellectually thrilling as it is entertaining and illuminating, Davenport-Hines charts how the undermining of authority, the rejection of expertise and the suspicion of educational advantages began with the Cambridge Five and has transformed the social and political temper of Britain.
©2017 Richard Davenport-Hines (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers