The Military category has 1,612 audiobooks on Listento.it, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 5,283 ratings. The most-rated is The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

1,612 audiobooks
Cover art for Struggle for Sea Power

Struggle for Sea Power

3 ratings

Summary

The American Revolution was a naval war of immense scope and variety, including no less than 22 navies fighting on five oceans - to say nothing of rivers and lakes. In no other war were so many large-scale fleet battles fought, one of which was the most strategically significant naval battle in all of British, French, and American history. Simultaneous naval campaigns were fought in the English Channel, in the North and Mid-Atlantic, in the Mediterranean, off South Africa, in the Indian Ocean, in the Caribbean, in the Pacific, in the North Sea and, of course, off the Eastern Seaboard of America. Not until the Second World War would any nation actively fight in so many different theaters. In The Struggle for Sea Power, Sam Willis traces every key military event in the path to American independence from a naval perspective, and he brings this important viewpoint to bear on economic, political, and social developments that were fundamental to the success of the Revolution. In doing so, Willis offers valuable new insights to American, British, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Russian history. The result is a far more profound understanding of the influence of sea power upon history, of the American path to independence, and of the rise and fall of the British Empire.

©2016 Sam Willis. Recorded by arrangement with W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. (P)2016 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Narrator: Derek Perkins
Author: Sam Willis
Category: History, Military
Length: 15 hrs and 50 mins
Available on Audible
Cover art for The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution: 1763-1789

The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution: 1763-1789

3 ratings

Summary

The first book to appear in the illustrious Oxford History of the United States, this critically-acclaimed volume - a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize - offers an unsurpassed history of the Revolutionary War and the birth of the American republic. This panoramic view of the conflict between England and America combines the political and the personal, giving the listener a vivid sense of how the colonists perceived the events of their struggle for independence, from the French and Indian War to “the shot heard round the world”, and the importance the colonists assigned to them. Praised as “state of the art” and “the most distinguished series in American historical scholarship”, the four new volumes of the Oxford History of the United States – including The Glorious Cause – are narrated with engagingly casual warmth by Robert Fass, who previously read an earlier volume in the series, Empire of Liberty, by Gordon S. Wood. Please note: The individual volumes of the series have not been published in historical order. The Glorious Cause is number III in The Oxford History of the United States.

©2005 Robert Middlekauff (P)2010 Audible, Inc.

Narrator: Robert Fass
Category: History, Military
Length: 26 hrs and 56 mins
Available on Audible
Cover art for The Battle of the Atlantic

The Battle of the Atlantic

3 ratings

Summary

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of The Battle of the Atlantic, written and read by Jonathan Dimbleby. The Battle of the Atlantic was - though often overlooked - crucial to victory in the Second World War. If the German U-boats had prevailed, the maritime artery across the Atlantic would have been severed. Mass hunger would have consumed Britain, and the Allied armies would have been prevented from joining in the invasion of Europe. There would have been no D-Day. Through fascinating contemporary diaries and letters from the leaders and from the sailors on all sides, Jonathan Dimbleby creates a thrilling narrative that uniquely places the campaign in the context of the entire Second World War. Challenging conventional wisdom on the use of intelligence and on Churchill's bombing campaign, The Battle of the Atlantic tells the epic story of the decisions that led to victory and the horror and humanity of life on those perilous seas.

©2015 Jonathan Dimbleby (P)2015 Penguin Books Limited

Category: History, Military
Length: 20 hrs and 43 mins
Available on Audible
Cover art for American Gun

American Gun

3 ratings

Summary

At the time of his tragic death in February 2013, former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, the most accomplished sniper in U.S. military history, was finishing a remarkable book that retold American history through the lens of a hand-selected list of firearms. Kyle masterfully argues that guns have played a fascinating, indispensable, and often under-appreciated role in our national story. Kyle carefully chose ten guns to help tell his story, including the American long rifle, Colt .45 revolver, Winchester rifle, .38 police handgun, and M-16 rifle platform Kyle himself used as a SEAL. This is also the story of how American innovation, creativity, and industrial genius has constantly pushed technology - and U.S. power - forward.

©2013 Chris Kyle (P)2013 HarperCollinsPublishers

Narrator: John Pruden
Category: History, Military
Length: 6 hrs and 56 mins
Available on Audible
Cover art for Out of the Mountains

Out of the Mountains

3 ratings

Summary

When Americans think of modern warfare, what comes to mind is the US army skirmishing with terrorists and insurgents in the mountains of Afghanistan. But the face of global conflict is ever-changing. In Out of the Mountains, David Kilcullen, one of the world's leading experts on current and future conflict, offers a groundbreaking look at what may happen after today's wars end. This is a book about future conflicts and future cities, and about the challenges and opportunities that four powerful megatrends - population, urbanization, coastal settlement, and connectedness - are creating across the planet. And it is about what cities, communities and businesses can do to prepare for a future in which all aspects of human society - including, but not limited to, conflict, crime and violence - are changing at an unprecedented pace. Kilcullen argues that conflict is increasingly likely to occur in sprawling coastal cities, in peri-urban slum settlements that are enveloping many regions of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, and in highly connected, electronically networked settings. He suggests that cities, rather than countries, are the critical unit of analysis for future conflict and that resiliency, not stability, will be the key objective. Ranging across the globe - from Kingston to Mogadishu to Lagos to Benghazi to Mumbai - he offers a unified theory of "competitive control" that explains how nonstate armed groups such as drug cartels, street gangs, and warlords draw their strength from local populations, providing useful ideas for dealing with these groups and with diffuse social conflicts in general. His extensive fieldwork on the ground in a series of urban conflicts suggests that there will be no military solution for many of the struggles we will face in the future. We will need to involve local people deeply to address problems that neither outsiders nor locals alone can solve, drawing on the insight only locals can bring, together with outsider knowledge from fields like urban planning, systems engineering, renewable energy, conflict resolution, and mediation. This deeply researched and compellingly argued book provides an invaluable road map to a future that will increasingly be crowded, urban, coastal, connected - and dangerous.

©2013 David Kilcullen (P)2018 Audible, Inc.

Category: History, Military
Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
Available on Audible
Cover art for Frozen in Time

Frozen in Time

3 ratings

Summary

Audie Award Finalist, History, 2014 On November 5, 1942, a U.S. cargo plane slammed into the Greenland ice cap. Four days later, a B-17 on the search-and-rescue mission also crashed. Miraculously, all nine men on the B-17 survived. The U.S. military launched a second daring rescue operation, but the Grumman Duck amphibious plane sent to find the men vanished. In this thrilling adventure, Mitchell Zuckoff offers a spellbinding account of these harrowing crashes and the fate of the survivors and their would-be saviors. Frozen in Time places us at the center of a group of valiant airmen fighting to stay alive through 148 days of a brutal Arctic winter until an expedition attempts to bring them to safety. But that is only part of the story. In present-day Greenland, Zuckoff joins the Coast Guard and North South Polar Inc. on a dangerous expedition to recover the remains of the lost plane's crew. Frozen in Time is a breathtaking blend of mystery, adventure, heroism, and survival. It is also a poignant reminder of the sacrifices of our military personnel and their families - and a tribute to the important, perilous, and often overlooked work of the U.S. Coast Guard.

©2013 Mitchell Zukoff (P)2013 HarperCollins Publishers

Category: History, Military
Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
Available on Audible
Cover art for In the Waves

In the Waves

3 ratings

Summary

"One part science book, one part historical narrative, one part memoir…harrowing, and inspiring.” (The Wall Street Journal)  How a determined scientist cracked the case of the first successful - and disastrous - submarine attack. On the night of February 17, 1864, the tiny Confederate submarine HL Hunley made its way toward the USS Housatonic just outside Charleston harbor. Within a matter of hours, the Union ship’s stern was blown open in a spray of wood planks. The explosion sank the ship, killing many of its crew. And the submarine, the first ever to be successful in combat, disappeared without a trace.  For 131 years the eight-man crew of the HL Hunley lay in their watery graves, undiscovered. When finally raised, the narrow metal vessel revealed a puzzling sight. There was no indication the blast had breached the hull, and all eight men were still seated at their stations - frozen in time after more than a century. Why did it sink? Why did the men die? Archaeologists and conservationists have been studying the boat and the remains for years, and now one woman has the answers.  In the Waves is much more than just a military perspective or a technical account. It’s also the story of Rachel Lance’s single-minded obsession spanning three years, the story of the extreme highs and lows in her quest to find all the puzzle pieces of the Hunley. Balancing a gripping historical tale and original research with a personal story of professional and private obstacles, In the Waves is an enthralling look at a unique part of the Civil War and the lengths one scientist will go to uncover its secrets.

©2020 Rachel Lance (P)2020 Penguin Audio

Narrator: Rebecca Lowman
Author: Rachel Lance
Category: History, Military
Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
Available on Audible
Cover art for Great Battles of the Ancient World

Great Battles of the Ancient World

3 ratings

Summary

Forget Hollywood's portrayal of violence and mayhem in ancient warfare and find out what the ancient battles were really like. What were the weapons, tactics, armor, training, and logistics? What were the crucial factors that could turn the tide of battle, giving one side victory and the other defeat? In 24 exciting lectures, Professor Fagan introduces you to the many fateful battles that became crucibles of history: the fearsome clash between the Athenians and the invading Persian army at the Marathon, Alexander the Great's crushing hammer-and-anvil tactics against the Persians at Gaugemela, and the Roman mastery of siege warfare at the Jewish fortress of Masada. Encompassing the region from Mesopotamia to western Europe-including Egypt and Northern Africa-this course charts the development of warfare from prehistoric times and examines battles and warfare from the city-states of early Sumer to the fearsome Assyrian war machine, the Greeks' distinctive form of combat, the Persian invasions, and the legions of Rome, which evolved brutally effective tactics that gained them dominion over the entire Mediterranean basin. Although the battles you study were fought long ago, considerable controversy exists among contemporary historians. Professor Fagan presents contending theories without losing sight of the grim realities of war, and the many millions who have died on the battlefields. "We owe it to them," he concludes, "and to the thousands who continue to perish in our planet's wars, to understand as fully as possible what it was that killed them. If this course has advanced its audience's comprehension of war even a little, then it has amply fulfilled its purpose."

©2005 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2005 The Great Courses

Category: History, Military
Length: 12 hrs and 13 mins
Available on Audible
Cover art for The Fire and the Darkness

The Fire and the Darkness

3 ratings

Summary

“Beautifully-crafted, elegiac, compelling - The Fire and the Darkness delivers with a dark intensity and incisive compassion rarely equalled. Authentic and authoritative, a masterpiece of its genre.” (Damien Lewis, author of Zero Six Bravo) A gripping work of narrative nonfiction recounting the history of the Dresden Bombing, one of the most devastating attacks of World War II. On February 13, 1945 at 10:03 p.m., British bombers began one of the most devastating attacks of WWII: the bombing of Dresden. The first contingent killed people and destroyed buildings, roads, and other structures. The second rained down fire, turning the streets into a blast furnace, the shelters into ovens, and whipping up a molten hurricane in which the citizens of Dresden were burned, baked, or suffocated to death. Early the next day, American bombers finished off what was left. Sinclair McKay’s The Fire and the Darkness is a pulse-pounding work of history that looks at the life of the city in the days before the attack, tracks each moment of the bombing, and considers the long period of reconstruction and recovery. The Fire and the Darkness is powered by McKay’s reconstruction of this unthinkable terror from the points of view of the ordinary civilians: Margot Hille, an apprentice brewery worker; Gisela Reichelt, a 10-year-old schoolgirl; boys conscripted into the Hitler Youth; choristers of the Kreuzkirche choir; artists, shop assistants, and classical musicians, as well as the Nazi officials stationed there. What happened that night in Dresden was calculated annihilation in a war that was almost over. Sinclair McKay’s brilliant work takes a complex, human view of this terrible night and its aftermath in a gripping audiobook. A Macmillan Audio production fron St. Martin's Press  "McKay’s rich narrative and descriptive gifts provide us with an elegant yet unflinching account of that terrible night...to be recommended as a very readable and finely crafted addition to the literature on one of modern history’s most morally fraught military operations.” (Wall Street Journal)

©2020 Sinclair McKay (P)2020 Macmillan Audio

Narrator: Leighton Pugh
Category: History, Military
Length: 13 hrs and 49 mins
Available on Audible
Cover art for The Apache Wars

The Apache Wars

3 ratings

Summary

They called him Mickey Free. His kidnapping started the longest war in American history, and both sides - the Apaches and the white invaders - blamed him for it. A mixed-blood warrior who moved uneasily between the worlds of the Apaches and the American soldiers, he was never trusted by either but desperately needed by both. He was the only man Geronimo ever feared. He played a pivotal role in this long war for the desert Southwest from its beginning in 1861 until its end in 1890 with his pursuit of the renegade scout Apache Kid. In this sprawling, monumental work, Paul Hutton unfolds over two decades of the last war for the West through the eyes of the men and women who lived it. This is Mickey Free's story but also the story of his contemporaries: the great Apache leaders Mangas Coloradas, Cochise, and Victorio; the soldiers Kit Carson, O. O. Howard, George Crook, and Nelson Miles; the scouts and frontiersmen Al Sieber, Tom Horn, Tom Jeffords, and Texas John Slaughter; the great White Mountain scout Alchesay and the Apache female warrior Lozen; the fierce Apache warrior Geronimo; and the Apache Kid. These lives shaped the violent history of the deserts and mountains of the Southwestern borderlands - a bleak and unforgiving world where a people would make a final, bloody stand against an American war machine bent on their destruction.

©2016 Paul Andrew Hutton. Recorded by arrangement with Crown, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. (P)2016 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Narrator: Jonathan Yen
Category: History, Military
Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
Available on Audible
Cover art for Collision of Empires

Collision of Empires

3 ratings

Summary

The fighting that raged in the East during the First World War was every bit as fierce as that on the Western Front, but the titanic clashes between three towering empires - Russia, Austro-Hungary, and Germany - remains a comparatively unknown facet of the Great War. With the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the war in 2014, Collision of Empires is a timely expose of the bitter fighting on this forgotten front - a clash that would ultimately change the face of Europe forever. Drawing on firsthand accounts and detailed archival research, this is a dramatic retelling of the tumultuous events of the first year of the war, with the battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes in East Prussia followed by the Russo-Austrian clashes in Galicia and the failed German advance toward Warsaw.

©2014 Prit Buttar (P)2017 Tantor

Narrator: Roger Clark
Author: Prit Buttar
Category: History, Military
Length: 21 hrs and 25 mins
Available on Audible
Cover art for Medic

Medic

3 ratings

Summary

Doctors, nurses, medics, and stretcher-bearers must venture wherever someone is injured and the cry for assistance goes up. Their job is to put themselves in the heart of danger – to risk their own lives as they try to save the dying. War at its rawest is their domain, an ugly place of shattered bodies, severed limbs and death. They fulfil society’s vital pledge to its warriors that they will not be abandoned on the battlefield. Yet, more often than not, what they do goes unnoticed – except by those who survive because of their extraordinary courage and skill. This is the story of those brave men and women who go to war armed with bandages not bombs, and put saving life above taking life.

©2009 John Nichol and Tony Rennell (P)2010 Soundings

Category: History, Military
Length: 17 hrs and 7 mins
Available on Audible
Cover art for A Storm in Flanders

A Storm in Flanders

3 ratings

Summary

A Storm in Flanders is novelist and prizewinning historian Winston Groom's gripping history of the four-year battle for Ypres in Belgian Flanders, the pivotal engagement of World War I that would forever change the way the world fought - and thought about - war. This is Groom's account of what would become the most dreaded place on Earth. In 1914, Germany launched an invasion of France through neutral Belgium - and brought the wrath of the world upon itself. Ypres became a place of horror, heroism, and terrifying new tactics and technologies: poison gas, tanks, mines, air strikes, and the unspeakable misery of trench warfare. Drawing on the journals of the men and women who were there, Winston Groom has penned a breathtaking drama of politics, strategy, and the human heart.

©2002 Winston Groom. The Source Notes on pages 266-267 are an extension of the copyright page. Recorded by arrangement with Grove Atlantic, Inc. (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Narrator: David Baker
Category: History, Military
Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
Available on Audible
Cover art for To End All Wars

To End All Wars

3 ratings

Summary

World War I stands as one of history's most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. In a riveting, suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Adam Hochschild brings it to life as never before. He focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war's critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Thrown in jail for their opposition to the war were Britain's leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an editor who, behind bars, published a newspaper for his fellow inmates on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain's most prominent women pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western Front. Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up publishing newspapers that attacked each other. Today, hundreds of military cemeteries spread across the fields of northern France and Belgium contain the bodies of millions of men who died in the "war to end all wars". Can we ever avoid repeating history?

©2011 Adam Hochschild (P)2011 Tantor

Narrator: Arthur Morey
Category: History, Military
Length: 16 hrs and 26 mins
Available on Audible
Cover art for Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom

3 ratings

Summary

Stephen R. Platt is widely respected for his incisive nonfiction, particularly in regard to his knowledge and understanding of China. With Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, Platt details the absorbing narrative of the Taiping Rebellion, which resulted in the loss of 20 million lives. Occurring in the 1850s, this is the story of a cultural movement characterized by intriguing personages such as influential military strategist Zeng Guofan and brilliant Taiping leader Hong Rengan.

©2012 Stephen R. Platt (P)2011 Recorded Books, LLC

Narrator: Angela Lin
Category: History, Military
Length: 17 hrs and 33 mins
Available on Audible
Cover art for When the Irish Invaded Canada

When the Irish Invaded Canada

3 ratings

Summary

"Christopher Klein's fresh telling of this story is an important landmark in both Irish and American history." (James M. McPherson, author of War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865) Just over a year after Robert E. Lee relinquished his sword, a band of Union and Confederate veterans dusted off their guns. But these former foes had no intention of reigniting the Civil War. Instead, they fought side by side to undertake one of the most fantastical missions in military history: to seize the British province of Canada and to hold it hostage until the independence of Ireland was secured. By the time that these invasions - known collectively as the Fenian raids - began in 1866, Ireland had been Britain's unwilling colony for 700 years. Thousands of Civil War veterans who had fled to the United States rather than perish in the wake of the Great Hunger still considered themselves Irishmen first, Americans second. With the tacit support of the US government and inspired by a previous generation of successful American revolutionaries, the group that carried out a series of five attacks on Canada - the Fenian Brotherhood - established a state in exile, planned prison breaks, weathered infighting, stockpiled weapons, and assassinated enemies. Defiantly, this motley group, including a one-armed war hero, an English spy infiltrating rebel forces, and a radical who staged his own funeral, managed to seize a piece of Canada - if only for three days. When the Irish Invaded Canada is the untold tale of a band of fiercely patriotic Irish Americans and their chapter in Ireland's centuries-long fight for independence. Inspiring, lively, and often undeniably comic, this is a story of fighting for what's right in the face of impossible odds.

©2019 Christopher Klein (P)2019 Random House Audio

Category: History, Military
Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
Available on Audible
Cover art for Robert E. Lee and His High Command

Robert E. Lee and His High Command

3 ratings

Summary

Few events have captivated students of American history like the Civil War. Its most striking personalities seem somehow outsized, magnified beyond the ability of books or even legend to contain them. And few among those personalities have ever held our attention like General Robert Edward Lee. With his Army of Northern Virginia, Lee came to embody the cause of the Confederacy itself, inspiring a commitment from troops and civilians that eventually overshadowed even those given to its political leaders and institutions. This riveting series of 24 lectures from one of the nation's most respected Civil War historians explains how this came to pass, and how - in a war that produced no other successful Confederate armies - this amazing leader was able to create and inspire an army whose achievements resonated not only across the Confederacy but also throughout the North and in foreign capitals like London and Paris. You'll learn what Lee was actually like, and gain insights into his ideas about strategy and tactics. You'll grasp how battlefield events influenced public opinion on the home fronts of both the Union and the Confederacy. And, most of all, you'll grasp how crucial Lee's choices in forming his high command were to the war's events and outcome. These lectures have been designed to appeal to everyone who wants to understand more about the Civil War and why it unfolded as it did, whether your interest is in the strategy and tactics underlying its major battles or in the broader context within which those battles took place.

©2004 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2004 The Great Courses

Category: History, Military
Length: 12 hrs and 19 mins
Available on Audible
Cover art for Hell and Good Company

Hell and Good Company

3 ratings

Summary

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, the remarkable story of the Spanish Civil War through the eyes of the reporters, writers, artists, doctors, and nurses who witnessed it. The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) inspired and haunted an extraordinary number of exceptional artists and writers, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and John Dos Passos. The idealism of the cause--defending democracy from fascism at a time when Europe was darkening toward another world war--and the brutality of the conflict drew from them some of their best work: Guernica, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Homage to Catalonia, The Spanish Earth. The war spurred breakthroughs in military and medical technology as well. New aircraft, new weapons, new tactics and strategy all emerged in the intense Spanish conflict. Indiscriminate destruction raining from the sky became a dreaded reality for the first time. Progress also arose from the horror: The doctors and nurses who volunteered to serve with the Spanish defenders devised major advances in battlefield surgery and front-line blood transfusion. In those ways, and in many others, the Spanish Civil War served as a test bed for World War II and for the entire twentieth century. From the life of John James Audubon to the invention of the atomic bomb, listeners have long relied on Richard Rhodes to explain, distill, and dramatize crucial moments in history. Now he takes us onto battlefields and into bomb shelters, into the studios of artists, into the crowded wards of war hospitals, and into the hearts and minds of a rich cast of characters to show how the ideological, aesthetic, and technological developments that emerged in Spain changed the world forever.

©2015 Richard Rhodes (P)2015 Simon and Schuster

Category: History, Military
Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
Available on Audible
Cover art for Scribbling the Cat

Scribbling the Cat

3 ratings

Summary

When Alexandra ("Bo") Fuller was home in Zambia a few years ago, visiting her parents for Christmas, she asked her father about a nearby banana farmer who was known for being a "tough bugger". Her father's response was a warning to steer clear of him; he told Bo: "Curiosity scribbled the cat." Nonetheless, Fuller began her strange friendship with the man she calls K, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian war. With the same fiercely beautiful prose that won her acclaim for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller here recounts her friendship with K. K is, seemingly, a man of contradictions: tattooed, battle scarred, and weathered by farm work, he is a lion of a man, feral and bulletproof. Yet he is also a born-again Christian, given to weeping when he recollects his failed romantic life, and more than anything else welling up inside with memories of battle. For his war, like all wars, was a brutal one, marked by racial strife, jungle battles, unimaginable tortures, and the murdering of innocent civilians, and K has blood on his hands. Driven by K's memories, Fuller and K decide to enter the heart of darkness in the most literal way, by traveling from Zambia through Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and Mozambique to visit the scenes of the war and to meet other veterans. It is a strange journey into the past, one marked at once by somber reflections and odd humor. What results from Fuller's journey is a remarkably unbiased and unsentimental glimpse of men who have killed, mutilated, tortured, and scrambled to survive during wartime and who now must attempt to live with their past and live past their sins. In these men, too, we get a glimpse of life in Africa, a land that besets its creatures with pests, plagues, and natural disasters, making the people there at once more hardened and more vulnerable than elsewhere. Scribbling the Cat is an engrossing and haunting look at war, Africa, and the lines of sanity.

©2004 Alexandra Fuller (P)2004 Recorded Books

Narrator: Lisette Lecat
Category: History, Military
Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
Available on Audible
Cover art for Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

3 ratings

Summary

In this groundbreaking biography of the Japanese emperor Hirohito, Herbert P. Bix offers the first complete, unvarnished look at the enigmatic leader whose 63-year reign ushered Japan into the modern world. Never before has the full life of this controversial figure been revealed with such clarity and vividness. Bix describes what it was like to be trained from birth for a lone position at the apex of the nation's political hierarchy and as a revered symbol of divine status.  Influenced by an unusual combination of the Japanese imperial tradition and a modern scientific worldview, the young emperor gradually evolves into his preeminent role, aligning himself with the growing ultranationalist movement, perpetuating a cult of religious emperor worship, resisting attempts to curb his power, and all the while burnishing his image as a reluctant, passive monarch. Here we see Hirohito as he truly was: a man of strong will and real authority. Supported by a vast array of previously untapped primary documents, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan is perhaps most illuminating in lifting the veil on the mythology surrounding the emperor's impact on the world stage. Focusing closely on Hirohito's interactions with his advisers and successive Japanese governments, Bix sheds new light on the causes of the China War in 1937 and the start of the Asia-Pacific War in 1941. And while conventional wisdom has had it that the nation's increasing foreign aggression was driven and maintained not by the emperor but by an elite group of Japanese militarists, the reality, as witnessed here, is quite different.  Bix documents in detail the strong, decisive role Hirohito played in wartime operations, from the takeover of Manchuria in 1931 through the attack on Pearl Harbor and ultimately the fateful decision in 1945 to accede to an unconditional surrender. In fact, the emperor stubbornly prolonged the war effort and then used the horrifying bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, together with the Soviet entrance into the war, as his exit strategy from a no-win situation. From the moment of capitulation, we learn how American and Japanese leaders moved to justify the retention of Hirohito as emperor by whitewashing his wartime role and reshaping the historical consciousness of the Japanese people.  The key to this strategy was Hirohito's alliance with General MacArthur, who helped him maintain his stature and shed his militaristic image, while MacArthur used the emperor as a figurehead to assist him in converting Japan into a peaceful nation. Their partnership ensured that the emperor's image would loom large over the postwar years and later decades, as Japan began to make its way in the modern age and struggled - as it still does - to come to terms with its past. Until the very end of a career that embodied the conflicting aims of Japan's development as a nation, Hirohito remained preoccupied with politics and with his place in history. Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan provides the definitive account of his rich life and legacy. Meticulously researched and utterly engaging, this book is proof that the history of 20th-century Japan cannot be understood apart from the life of its most remarkable and enduring leader.

©2016 Herbert P. Bix (P)2018 Tantor

Narrator: Jonathan Yen
Category: History, Military
Length: 29 hrs and 55 mins
Available on Audible