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.
Home by Christmas
Summary
Special Forces operative Morgan Raush rarely speaks to the handsome, blue-eyed Russian agent, Dmitry Rurik, about anything except military business if she can help it. They've formed an uneasy alliance during their joint mission in remote Uzbekistan. But now, through a twist of fate, the two must depend on one another to survive rugged mountains, blizzards, and enemy attacks. In the midst of icy nights and glowing fires, Morgan discovers Dmitry is much more than she'd first thought - a man torn between two ideologies, a man driven by faith and family. Then again, maybe the spy is only telling her what he wants her to believe? Morgan has only five days left to sort out the conflict in her heart, and only five days left...to make it home by Christmas.
©2013 Keith Zwingelberg (P)2020 Keith Zwingelberg
Finn
Summary
Welcome to Hathaway House. Rehab Center. Safe Haven. Second chance at life and love. Navy SEAL Finn MacGregor arrives at Hathaway House not only with half of one leg but with a stoma, one that necessitates the use of a colostomy bag. While it’s nice to once again see his old friend Dani Hathaway and her father, the Major, it’s tough to feel like the least sexy man on the face of the Earth. Especially after he meets the pretty nurse in charge of his care.... Fiona Smithers has seen practically everything when it comes to the human body, and Finn’s physical problems don’t faze her. Emotionally, she’s wary, though. Once before, one of her patients had confused the gratitude he felt for her as love.... That scenario left Fiona devastated to know her friendliness had been misunderstood. Whether deemed love or friendliness, those emotions directly affected that patient’s initial healing and then his setbacks of body as well as of heart and of mind, making her more determined not to run the same risks again. Yet, this time, she may not be able to help herself. She wants Finn in her life on a permanent basis, but, after seeing his obsession with her in his artwork, is that even possible?
©2019 Beverly Dale Mayer (P)2020 Beverly Dale Mayer
Abraham Lincoln: The History of Man Who Transformed America
Summary
America's greatest president, who rose to power in the country's greatest hour of need and whose vision saw the US through the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln: He brought freedom to the slaves and held the Union together during the Civil War. His profound and poetic speeches are famous around the world, evidence of the greatness of American’s most beloved leader. The author follows the son of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks from his early years in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, to his highly successful law career, his marriage to Mary Todd, and his one term in Congress. We witness his leadership of the Republican anti-slavery movement, his famous debates with Stephen A. Douglas (a long acquaintance and former rival for the hand of Mary Todd), and his emergence as a candidate for president in 1860. Following Lincoln's election to the presidency, Jim describes his masterful role as commander in chief during the Civil War, the writing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and his assassination by John Wilkes Booth. Inside you'll find: Chapter one: "The Life of Abraham Lincoln" Chapter two: "The Lincoln Upbringing" Chapter three: "Politics" Chapter four: "Life Before the Presidency" Chapter five: "President Lincoln: The First Term 1861-1864" Chapter six: "Assassination and Death of Abraham Lincoln" Chapter seven: "Your Free Gift" Meet Abraham Lincoln, the frontier president whose death made him a martyr but whose life made him a hero.
©2018 Jim Kaplan (P)2018 Jim Kaplan
Love Me When I'm Gone
Summary
Love Me When I'm Gone is a tale for the ages, the perfect blend of action, romance, heroes, villains, patriotism, and valor. What holds this story above all others is the fact that this one is true. Rob had a pretty rough childhood: He was given up for adoption as an infant, brought into a family of highly decorated military men, suffered the loss of his mother to cancer, rebelled, and landed himself in military school. When he finally returns home, he meets Cindy, who quickly becomes his best friend. After graduation the two go off to college at opposite ends of Texas, and their paths diverge. Eight years later, when Rob returns home from SERE school and being a POW in the cold North Carolina woods, he wakes up one morning to discover that Cindy has contacted him on Myspace. He is very surprised, as he has been searching for Cindy for the past few years to no avail. The two reunite to spend his month of leave together, both knowing at the end he will be leaving for the illustrious 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne), the elite Battalion of Green Berets stationed in Germany for quick-reaction missions around the globe. The two share a heart-felt goodbye at the airport, each hoping that somehow they can find a way to keep their love alive throug whatever the future has in store for this newly crowned Green Beret. Rob's time in Germany is a whirlwind. In his first trip to Iraq, he encounters three distinct situations which will haunt him for the rest of his life. At HAVE-ACE, the Special Operations school which he attends with his team, he finally becomes one of the gang. In Africa, Rob learns many valuable lessons about life. In Afghanistan he and his team are tested in many life-or-death situations, including Operation Payback, where he and the Captain are wounded in a sustained firefight in the middle of a village. The culmination of the story is the quintessential fairy-tale ending: Rob moves back to California to spend the rest of his days, and the final chapter is the full military wedding, complete with his teammates as groomsman and sword bearers.
©2012 Robert Patrick Lewis (P)2012 Robert Patrick Lewis
Battle of Surigao Strait
Summary
Surigao Strait in the Philippine Islands was the scene of a major battleship duel during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Because the battle was fought at night and had few survivors on the Japanese side, the events of that naval engagement have been passed down in garbled accounts. Anthony P. Tully pulls together all of the existing documentary material, including newly discovered accounts and a careful analysis of U.S. Navy action reports, to create a new and more detailed description of the action. In several respects, Tully's narrative differs radically from the received versions and represents an important historical corrective. The book is published by the Indiana University Press.
©2009 Anthony B. Tully (P)2014 Redwood Audiobooks
A People Betrayed
Summary
From the foremost historian of 20th-century Spain, A People Betrayed is the story of the devastating betrayal of Spain by its political class, its military and its Church. This comprehensive history of modern Spain chronicles the fomenting of violent social division throughout the country by institutionalised corruption and startling political incompetence. Most spectacularly during the Primo de Rivera and Franco dictatorships, grotesque and shameless corruption went hand-in-hand with inept policies that prolonged Spain’s economic backwardness well into the 1950s. A People Betrayed looks back to the years prior to 1923 when electoral corruption excluded the masses from organised politics and gave them a choice between apathetic acceptance and violent revolution. Bitter social conflict, economic tensions and conflict between centralist nationalism and regional independence movements then exploded into the civil war of 1936-1939. It took the horrors of that war and the dictatorship that followed to break the pattern. The moderation shared by the progressive right and a chastened left underlay a bloodless transition to democracy after 1975. Yet, as before, corruption and political incompetence continued to have a corrosive effect on political coexistence and social cohesion. Sparkling with vivid portraits of politicians and army officers, some corrupt and others clean, recounting the triumphs and disasters of Kings Alfonso XIII and Juan Carlos, A People Betrayed unravels the mystery of why both right and left have been unable or unwilling to deal with corruption and the pernicious clash between Spanish centralist nationalism and regional desires for independence.
©2020 Paul Preston (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers Limited
How the Irish Won the American Revolution
Summary
When the Continental Congress decided to declare independence from the British Empire in 1776, 10 percent of the population of their fledgling country were from Ireland. By 1790, close to 500,000 Irish citizens had immigrated to America. They were very active in the American Revolution, both on the battlefields and off, yet their stories are not well known. The important contributions of the Irish on military, political, and economic levels have been long overlooked and ignored by generations of historians. However, new evidence has revealed that Washington's Continental Army consisted of a far larger percentage of Irish soldiers than previously thought - between 40 and 50 percent - who fought during some of the most important battles of the American Revolution. Romanticized versions of this historical period tend to focus on the upper-class figures who had the biggest roles in America's struggle for liberty. But these adaptations neglect the impact of European and Irish ideals as well as citizens on the formation of the revolution. Irish contributors such as John Barry, the colonies' foremost naval officer; Henry Knox, an artillery officer and future secretary of war; Richard Montgomery, America's first war hero and martyr; and Charles Thomson, a radical organizer and secretary to the Continental Congress were all instrumental in carrying out the vision for a free country. Without their timely and disproportionate assistance, America almost certainly would have lost the desperate fight for its existence.
©2015 Phillip Thomas Tucker (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
Yellow Dirt
Summary
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the United States knowingly used and discarded an entire tribe of people. The Navajo worked unprotected in the uranium mines that fueled the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Long after these mines were abandoned, Navajos in all four corners of the Reservation (which borders Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona) continued grazing their animals on sagebrush flats riddled with uranium that had been blasted from the ground. They drank contaminated water from old pits, which had filled with rain. They built their houses out of chunks of yellowcake, they inhaled radioactive dust borne aloft from the waste piles the mining companies had left behind, and their children played in the unsealed mines themselves. Ten years after the mines closed, the cancer rate on the reservation shot up and the babies began to be born with crooked fingers that fused together into claws as they grew. Scientists filed complaints about the situation with the government but were told it was a mess "too expensive" to clean up. Few had heard this story until Judy Pasternak exposed it in a prizewinning Los Angeles Times series. Her work not only inspired this book, which is already a winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award, it also galvanized both a congressman and a famous prosecutor to clean the sites and get reparations for the tribe. Yellow Dirt powerfully chronicles both the scandal of neglect and the Navajo’s fight for justice.
©2010 Judy Pasternak (P)2010 Tantor
Paper Bullets
Summary
“A Nazi resistance story like none you’ve ever heard or read.” (Hampton Sides, author of Ghost Soldiers and On Desperate Ground) "Every page is gripping, and the amount of new research is nothing short of mind-boggling. A brilliant book for the ages!” (Douglas Brinkley, author of American Moonshot) Paper Bullets is the first book to tell the history of an audacious anti-Nazi campaign undertaken by an unlikely pair: two French women, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, who drew on their skills as Parisian avant-garde artists to write and distribute “paper bullets” - wicked insults against Hitler, calls to rebel, and subversive fictional dialogues designed to demoralize Nazi troops occupying their adopted home on the British Channel Island of Jersey. Devising their own PSYOPS campaign, they slipped their notes into soldier’s pockets or tucked them inside newsstand magazines. Hunted by the secret field police, Lucy and Suzanne were finally betrayed in 1944, when the Germans imprisoned them, and tried them in a court martial, sentencing them to death for their actions. Ultimately they survived, but even in jail, they continued to fight the Nazis by reaching out to other prisoners and spreading a message of hope. Better remembered today by their artist names, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, the couple’s actions were even more courageous because of who they were: lesbian partners known for cross-dressing and creating the kind of gender-bending work that the Nazis would come to call “degenerate art.” In addition, Lucy was half Jewish, and they had communist affiliations in Paris, where they attended political rallies with Surrealists and socialized with artists like Gertrude Stein. Paper Bullets is a compelling World War II story that has not been told before, about the galvanizing power of art, and of resistance.
©2020 Jeffrey H. Jackson (P)2020 Workman Publishing
Belly of the Beast
Summary
On December 13, 1944, POW Estel Myers was herded aboard the Japanese prison ship, the Oryoku Maru, with more than 1,600 other American captives. More than 1,100 of them would be dead by journey's end... The son of a Kentucky sharecropper and an enlistee in the Navy's medical corps, Myers arrived in Manilla shortly before the bombings of Pearl Harbor and the other six targets of the Imperial Japanese military. While he and his fellow corpsmen tended to the bloody tide of soldiers pouring into their once peaceful Naval hospital, the Japanese overwhelmed the Pacific islands, capturing 78,000 POWs by April 1942. Myers was one of the first captured. After a brutal three-year encampment, Myers and his fellow POWs were forced onto an enemy hell ship bound for Japan. Suffocation, malnutrition, disease, dehydration, infestation, madness, and simple despair claimed the lives of nearly three quarters of those who boarded "the beast". Myers survived. A compelling account of a rarely recorded event in military history, this is more than Estel Myers' true story - this is an homage to the unfailing courage of men at war, an inspiring chronicle of self-sacrifice and endurance, and a tribute to the power of faith, the strength of the soul, and the triumph of the human spirit.
©2001 Judith Pearson (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Forty-Seven Days
Summary
The Battle of the Meuse-Argonne stands as the deadliest clash in American history: More than a million untested American soldiers went up against a better-trained and more experienced German army, costing more than 26,000 deaths and leaving nearly 100,000 wounded. Yet, in 47 days of intense combat, those Americans pushed back the enemy and forced the Germans to surrender, bringing the First World War to an end - a feat the British and the French had not achieved after more than three years of fighting. In Forty-Seven Days, historian Mitchell Yockelson tells how General John J. "Black Jack" Pershing's exemplary leadership led to the unlikeliest of victories. Appointed commander of the American Expeditionary Forces by President Wilson, Pershing personally took command of the US First Army until supplies ran low and the fighting ground came to a stalemate. Refusing to admit defeat, Pershing stepped aside and placed gutsy Lieutenant General Hunter Liggett in charge. While Pershing retained command, Liggett reorganized his new unit, resting and resupplying his men, while instilling a confidence in the doughboys that drove them out of the trenches and across no-man's-land.
©2016 Mitchell Yockelson (P)2016 Tantor
Born to Battle
Summary
Born to Battle examines the Civil War’s complex and decisive western theater through the exploits of its greatest figures: Ulysses S. Grant and Nathan Bedford Forrest. These two opposing giants squared off in some of the most epic campaigns of the war, starting at Shiloh and continuing through Perryville, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga - battles in which the Union would slowly but surely divide the western Confederacy, setting the stage for the final showdowns of this bloody and protracted conflict. Grant is widely regarded as the man most responsible for winning the war for the Union; Forrest is known as the Confederacy’s most fearsome defender in the West. Both men had risen through their respective hierarchies thanks to their cunning and military brilliance, and despite their checkered pasts. Grant and Forrest were both lower-born officers who struggled to overcome particular, dubious reputations. In time, each became renowned for his intelligence, resourcefulness, and grit. Beginning with the Union victory at Tennessee’s Fort Donelson in February, 1862, Hurst follows both men through the campaigns of the next 20 months, showing how this critical period - and these two unequaled leaders - would change the course of the war. An utterly American tale about class and merit and their role in one of the most formative wars in the nation’s history, Born to Battle offers an impassioned account of two visionary Civil War leaders and the clashing cultures they fought - in some cases, quite ironically - to protect. Hurst shows how Grant and Forrest brought to the battlefield the fabled virtues of the American working class: ingenuity, hard work, and intense determination. Each man’s background contributed to his triumphs on the battlefield, but the open-mindedness of his fellow commanders proved just as important. When the North embraced Grant, it won a stalwart defender. When the South rejected Forrest, by contrast, it sealed its fate.
©2012 Jack Hurst (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Battle of Tarawa - World War II: A History from Beginning to End
Summary
Discover the remarkable history of the Battle of Tarawa... “It’s hell out there” was how one Marine described the assault on Tarawa, the US Navy’s first amphibious landing in World War II’s arduous Pacific campaign to bring the Empire of Japan to its knees. In 76 hours of fighting, the Marines lost nearly as many men as had died during the six months of the Guadalcanal campaign. Military intelligence had failed to take into account the reefs around Betio, the target of the assault, or the low tides which prevented transport vehicles from bringing the Marines safely to shore. As Marines were forced to wade 700 yards from the stranded vehicles to the shore, many of them were shot by enemy fire or drowned from the weight of their packs. When Americans back home saw the photographs of the bodies in the waters around Tarawa, they were horrified to realize that the route to Japan and victory would be strewn with the bodies of their young soldiers. Discover a plethora of chapters, such as: The Road to Tarawa Preparing Tarawa's Defenses The First Day of the Battle Eyewitness Account of the Betio Landing The Lessons and Legacy of Tarawa And much more! So, if you want a concise and informative book on the Battle of Tarawa, simply scroll up and click the "buy now" button for instant access!
©2019 Hourly History (P)2020 Hourly History
American History: A Very Short Introduction
Summary
In a miracle of concision, Paul S. Boyer provides a wide-ranging and authoritative history of America, capturing in a compact space the full story of our nation. Ranging from the earliest Native American settlers to the presidency of Barack Obama, this Very Short Introduction offers an illuminating account of politics, diplomacy, and war as well as the full spectrum of social, cultural, and scientific developments that shaped our country. Here is a masterful picture of America's achievements and failures, large-scale socio-historical forces, and pivotal events. Boyer sheds light on the colonial era, the Revolution and the birth of the new nation; slavery and the Civil War; Reconstruction and the Gilded Age; the Progressive era, the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression; the two world wars and the Cold War that followed; right up to the tragedy of 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the epoch-making election of Barack Obama. Certain broad trends shape much of the narrative - immigration, urbanization, slavery, continental expansion, the global projection of U.S. power, the centrality of religion, the progression from an agrarian to an industrial to a post-industrial economic order. Yet in underscoring such large themes, Boyer also highlights the diversity of the American experience, the importance of individual actors, and the crucial role of race, ethnicity, gender, and social class in shaping the contours of specific groups within the nation's larger tapestry. And along the way, he touches upon the cultural milestones of American history, from Tom Paine's The Crisis to Allen Ginsberg's Howl. American History: A Very Short Introduction is a panoramic history of the United States, one that covers virtually every topic of importance - and yet can be read in a single day.
©2012 Oxford University Press (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Southern Storm
Summary
Award-winning Civil War historian Noah Andre Trudeau has written a gripping, definitive new account that will stand as the last word on General William Tecumseh Sherman's epic march - a targeted strategy aimed to break not only the Confederate army but an entire society as well. With Lincoln's hard-fought reelection victory in hand, Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union forces, allowed Sherman to lead the largest and riskiest operation of the war. In rich detail, Trudeau explains why General Sherman's name is still anathema below the Mason-Dixon Line, especially in Georgia, where he is remembered as "the one who marched to the sea with death and devastation in his wake". Sherman's swath of destruction spanned more than 60 miles in width and virtually cut the South in two, badly disabling the flow of supplies to the Confederate army. He led more than 60,000 Union troops to blaze a path from Atlanta to Savannah, ordering his men to burn crops, kill livestock, and decimate everything that fed the Rebel war machine. Grant and Sherman's gamble worked, and the march managed to crush a critical part of the Confederacy and increase the pressure on General Lee, who was already under siege in Virginia. Told through the intimate and engrossing diaries and letters of Sherman's soldiers and the civilians who suffered in their path, Southern Storm paints a vivid picture of an event that would forever change the course of America.
©2008 Noah Andre Trudeau (P)2008 HarperCollins Publishers
Navy SEALs: Their Untold Story
Summary
Written with the unprecedented cooperation of the Naval Special Warfare community, here is the definitive history of the U.S. Navy SEALs, a thrilling chronicle that reveals the inside story behind the greatest combat operations of our nation’s most celebrated warriors. New York Times best-selling authors Dick Couch - former SEAL, Vietnam veteran, and highly respected military writer - and award-winning author William Doyle draw on exclusive interviews with more than 100 special operators (including multiple Medal of Honor recipients), as well as thousands of pages of declassified documents to create a vivid, unparalleled portrait of the SEALs in action. Navy SEALs: Their Untold Story charts the dramatic evolution of the frogmen from their origins in World War II, when the daring Naval Combat Demolition Teams, Underwater Demolition Teams, Scouts and Raiders commando units, and OSS Operational Swimmers proved instrumental at D-Day, Okinawa, and many other critical campaigns. In the Korean War, the Navy UDTs cleared mines and scouted landing sites ahead of the main American forces. After their official founding in 1962 by order of President John F. Kennedy and early covert operations in Cuba, the SEALs came of age in the jungles of Vietnam, where they specialized in executing the most daring missions. Couch and Doyle trace their transformation in the 1980s and 1990s when America’s special operations teams were centralized under the U.S. Special Operations Command - including untold accounts from Panama, Grenada, Somalia, and the first Gulf War. Finally, we follow their rise to preeminence in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11. The SEALs and their forefathers have shaped the tides of history; from fighting Hitler to eliminating Osama bin Laden, the frogmen of the U.S. Navy are the spearhead of American military might: the toughest, most highly trained, best equipped, and most invisible band of warriors.
©2014 Dick Couch and William Doyle (P)2014 Harper Collins Publishers
To Provide and Maintain a Navy
Summary
The national conversation regarding the United States Navy has, for far too long, been focused on the popular question of how many ships does the service need? To Provide and Maintain a Navy, a succinct but encompassing treatise on sea power by Dr. Henry J. "Jerry" Hendrix, goes beyond the numbers to reveal the crucial importance of Mare Liberum (Free Sea) to the development of the Western thought and the rules based order that presently governs the global commons that is the high seas. Proceeding from this philosophical basis, Hendrix explores how a "free sea" gave way to free trade and the central role sea borne commercial trade has played in the overall rise in global living standards. This is followed by analysis of how the relative naval balance of power has played out in terms of naval battles and wars over the centuries and how the dominance of the United States Navy following World War II has resulted in seven decades of unprecedented peace on the world's oceans. He further considers how, in the years that followed the demise of the Soviet Union, both China and Russia began laying the groundwork to challenge the United States maritime leadership and upend five centuries of naval precedents in order to establish a new approach to sovereignty over the world's seas. It is only at this point that Dr. Hendrix approaches the question of the number of ships required for the United States Navy, the industrial base required to build them, and the importance of once again aligning the nation's strategic outlook to that of a "seapower" in order to effectively and efficiently address the rising threat.
©2020 Focsle LLP (P)2021 Focsle LLP
The Gullah
Summary
“If you do not know where you're going, you should know where you come from.” (Old Gullah Proverb) Charming drawls, bluegrass bops, NASCAR, mouthwatering barbecues, and the Great Smoky Mountains are all customs that make America’s Deep South home to some of the most vibrant, powerfully evocative, and culturally rich subregions on the continent, tethered to a heritage that rose from the ashes of the Civil War. There exists, however, a lesser-known, but equally indispensable subculture based within a 500-mile radius of the coastal South Atlantic states and Sea Islands. These culture bearers, who refer to themselves as the Gullah Geechee, or the “Gullah” for short, are the descendants and rightful heirs of the once-shackled slaves who resided in these parts. As the guardians and torch holders of the incredible legacy left behind by their persevering ancestors, the modern Gullah spare no effort in preserving the inherently unique customs and traditions, complete with their own creole tongue, that have been passed down from one generation to the next. Of course, the first Gullah people were not natives of the Deep South, nor were they eager immigrants who willingly crossed the North Atlantic in the hopes of landing opportunities available only in the “land of the free”. Rather, the Gullah were normal, everyday people who were forcibly extracted from their homes and shipped like chattel to a foreign land, where they were sold, purchased, and put to work on plantations, mines, factories, and elsewhere. Simply put, they were an ill-starred, yet fiercely diligent people who made the most out of their unimaginably horrific fates, constructing their own colorful customs and a remarkable legacy for their future successors. A number of notable figures have been linked with the Gullah in recent years. Michelle Obama, for instance, is said to be a descendant of a Gullah slave who once dwelled in a cotton plantation in the Low Country region of South Carolina. Little Melvinia was no older than eight when she arrived at the plantation of one Henry Wells Shields, soon after adopting the surname of her “master”, as per the customs of the mid-19th century. A teenaged Melvinia was ripped from her home once more in 1852 and relocated to Georgia, and it was there that she was impregnated by a white man and gave birth to the great-great-grandfather of the former First Lady. South Carolinian boxing icon Smokin' Joe Frazier and Cleveland Browns legend Jim Brown of St. Simons Island, Georgia also share Gullah blood. The Gullah: The History and Legacy of the African American Ethnic Group in the American Southeast examines the origins of the people, their culture, and how their history has winded over the centuries; you will learn about the Gullah like never before.
©2019 Charles River Editors (P)2019 Charles River Editors
Revolver
Summary
A sweeping, definitive biography of Samuel Colt - the inventor of the legendary Colt revolver (aka six-shooter), which changed the US forever, triggering the industrial revolution and the settlement of the American West. Patented in 1836, the Colt pistol with its revolving cylinder was the first practical firearm that could shoot more than one bullet without reloading. For many reasons, Colt’s gun had a profound effect on American history. Its most immediate impact was on the expansionism of the American West, where white emigrants and US soldiers came to depend on it and where Native Americans came to dread it. The six-shooter became the iconic weapon of gunslingers, outlaws, and cowboys - some willing to pay $500 out West for a gun that sold for $25 back East. In making the revolver, Colt also changed American manufacturing - his factory revolutionized industry in the United States. Ultimately, Colt and his gunmaking brought together the two most significant forces of change before the Civil War - the industrial revolution in the East, Manifest Destiny in the West. Brilliantly told, Revolver brings the brazenly ambitious and profoundly innovative industrialist and leader Samuel Colt to vivid life. In the space of his 47 years, he seemingly lived five lives: He traveled, womanized, drank prodigiously, smuggled guns to Russia, bribed politicians, and supplied the Union Army with the guns they needed to win the Civil War. Colt lived during an age of promise and progress, but also of slavery, corruption, and unbridled greed, and he not only helped to create this America, he completely embodied it. By the time he died in 1862 in Hartford, Connecticut, he was one of the most famous men in the nation and one of the richest. While Revolver is a riveting and revealing biography of Colt, a man who made significant contributions to our country during the 19th century, it’s also a lively and informative historical portrait of America during a time of extraordinary transformation.
©2020 Jim Rasenberger (P)2020 Simon & Schuster Audio
Blitzkrieg
Summary
The successes of the German Blitzkrieg in 1939-41 were as surprising as they were swift. Allied decision-makers wanted to discover the secret to German success quickly, even though only partial, incomplete information was available to them. The false conclusions drawn became myths about the Blitzkrieg that have lingered for decades. It has been argued that German victories in the early part of the war rested less upon newly developed tanks and aircraft and more on German military traditions: Rather than creating a new way of war based on new technology, the Germans fitted the new weapons into their existing ideas on warfare. The conduct of German soldiers, particularly the lower-ranking men, on the battlefield was at the core of the concept, and German victories rested upon the quality of the small combat units. This book focuses on the experience of the enlisted men and junior officers in the Blitzkrieg operations in Poland, Norway, Western Europe, and Russia. Military historian Niklas Zetterling explores how they operated, for example, how a company commander led his tanks, how a crew worked together inside a tank, and the role of the repair services. The author fits these narratives into a broader perspective to give the listener a better understanding of why the Germans were so successful in 1939-41.
©2017 Niklas Zetterling (P)2019 Tantor