Robert Meldrum has narrated 8 audiobooks on Listento.it by 7 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.9★ across 6 ratings. The most-rated is Hiroshima Nagasaki.
Hiroshima Nagasaki
Summary
"Nobody is more disturbed," said President Truman, three days after the destruction of Nagasaki in 1945, "over the use of the atomic bombs than I am, but I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our prisoners of war. The only language [the Japanese] seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true." The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more than 100,000 instantly, mostly women, children, and the elderly. Many hundreds of thousands more succumbed to their horrific injuries later, or slowly perished of radiation-related sickness. Yet the bombs were "our least abhorrent choice", American leaders claimed at the time - and still today most people believe they ended the Pacific War and saved millions of American and Japanese lives. Ham challenges this view, arguing that the bombings, when Japan was on its knees, were the culmination of a strategic Allied air war on enemy civilians that began in Germany and had till then exacted its most horrific death tolls in Dresden and Tokyo. The war in Europe may have ended but it continued in the Pacific against a regime still looking to save face. Ham describes the political manoeuvring and the scientific race to build the new atomic weapon. He also gives powerful witness to its destruction through the eyes of 80 survivors, from 12-year-olds forced to work in war factories to wives and children who faced it alone, reminding us that these two cities were full of ordinary people who suddenly, out of a clear blue summer's sky, felt the sun fall on their heads.
©2011 Paul Ham (P)2012 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Passchendaele
Summary
From Paul Ham, winner of the NSW Premier's Prize for Australian History, comes the story of ordinary men in the grip of a political and military power struggle that determined their fate and has foreshadowed the destiny of the world for a century. Passchendaele epitomises everything that was most terrible about the Western Front. The photographs never sleep of this four-month battle, fought from July to November 1917, the worst year of the war: blackened tree stumps rising out of a field of mud, corpses of men and horses drowned in shell holes, terrified soldiers huddled in trenches awaiting the whistle. The intervening century, the most violent in human history, has not disarmed these pictures of their power to shock. At the very least they ask us, on the 100th anniversary of the battle, to see and to try to understand what happened here. Yes, we commemorate the event. Yes, we adorn our breasts with poppies. But have we seen? Have we understood? Have we dared to reason why? What happened at Passchendaele was the expression of the 'wearing-down war', the war of pure attrition at its most spectacular and ferocious. Paul Ham's Passchendaele: Requiem for Doomed Youth shows how ordinary men on both sides endured this constant state of siege, with a very real awareness that they were being gradually, deliberately, wiped out. Yet the men never broke: they went over the top, when ordered, again and again and again. And if they fell dead or wounded, they were casualties in the 'normal wastage', as the commanders described them, of attritional war. Only the soldier's friends at the front knew him as a man, with thoughts and feelings. His family back home knew him as a son, husband or brother, before he had enlisted. By the end of 1917 he was a different creature: his experiences on the Western Front were simply beyond their powers of comprehension. The audiobook tells the story of ordinary men in the grip of a political and military power struggle that determined their fate and has foreshadowed the destiny of the world for a century. Passchendaele lays down a powerful challenge to the idea of war as an inevitable expression of the human will, and examines the culpability of governments and military commanders in a catastrophe that destroyed the best part of a generation.
©2016 Paul Ham, Produced by arrangement with Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd (P)2016 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Eureka
Summary
In 1854, Victorian miners fought a deadly battle under the flag of the Southern Cross at the Eureka Stockade. Though brief and doomed to fail, the battle is legend in both our history and in the Australian mind. Henry Lawson wrote poems about it, its symbolic flag is still raised, and even the nineteenth-century visitor Mark Twain called it: "a strike for liberty". Was this rebellion a fledgling nation’s first attempt to assert its independence under colonial rule? Or was it merely rabble-rousing by unruly miners determined not to pay their taxes? In his inimitable style, Peter FitzSimons gets into the hearts and minds of those on the battlefield, and those behind the scenes, bringing to life Australian legends on both sides of the rebellion.
©2012 Peter FitzSimons (P)2012 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Oil: Bolinda Beginner Guides
Summary
Packed with fascinating facts and insight, this book will fuel dinner party debate and provide listeners with the science and politics behind the world’s most controversial resource. Without oil, there would be no globalisation, no plastic, little transport, and a global political landscape that few would recognise. It is the lifeblood of the modern world, and humanity’s dependence upon it looks set to continue for decades to come. In this captivating audiobook, Vaclav Smil explains all matters related to "black gold", from its discovery in the earth, right through to the political maelstrom that surrounds it today.
©2008 Vaclav Smil © 2008. (P)2012 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Breaking News
Summary
At the age of 82, Rupert Murdoch is divorcing his third wife Wendi Deng and gearing up for the toughest challenge of his life: to hand his empire on to his children. But is this the end of the Murdoch dynasty? Lachlan doesn't want to succeed him. James is in disgrace. And Elisabeth is not a serious contender. His grip on the group has also been weakened by scandal. His British tabloids have been caught hacking phones and bribing officials on an industrial scale. At least twenty journalists will soon face trial for hacking and corruption and could be jailed. But Rupert thrives on crisis. He has recently split News Corp in two, doubled his fortune to US$9 billion, and is bouncing around like a man in his prime. So can he win this one last battle and keep it all in the family?
©2013 Paul Barry (P)2013 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd.
Phillip Schuler
Summary
The definitive biography of Phillip Schuler, one of Australia's greatest war correspondents, from Gallipoli to his death in Flanders. Phillip Schuler, a handsome young journalist from the Melbourne Age, covered the Gallipoli campaign alongside Charles Bean. His bravery was legendary. His dispatches were evocative and compassionate. He captured the heroism and horror for Australian newspaper readers in ways the meticulous yet dry prose of Bean never could. Gallipoli would also propel Schuler on a collision course with his former friend and Age colleague Keith Murdoch, who made his name lobbying against the campaign after a brief visit to Anzac. After his classic account of the campaign, Australia in Arms, was completed in early 1916, Schuler abandoned the relative safety of a correspondent's job and joined the AIF as a humble soldier. In June 1917 he was killed in Flanders. He was 27 years old. Mark Baker's meticulously researched account of Schuler's brief but extraordinary life gives us a true insight into the man. As a correspondent, a lover and a soldier, Schuler left an indelible mark on all who encountered him. He was a shining light of the generation decimated by the war. Baker's biography gives us a new and compelling perspective on the power of journalism and Australia at war.
©2016 Mark Baker (P)2017 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
The United Nations: Bolinda Beginner Guides
Summary
Since its inception in 1945, the United Nations has had a powerful but controversial influence on global politics. In this informative guide, Norrie MacQueen provides a clear introduction to its institutions, remit, personalities, and role in the modern world. Defending the UN from common criticisms of bureaucratic paralysis and bias towards the developed world, MacQueen argues that its limitations are due to the complex web of national interests that it seeks to reconcile, and that despite criticisms the UN has had a positive influence on the modern world.
©2010 Norrie Macqueen (P)2012 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Charles Bean
Summary
C.E.W. Bean's wartime reports and photographs mythologised the Australian soldier and helped spawn the notion that the Anzacs achieved something nation-defining on the shores of Gallipoli and the battlefields of western Europe. In his quest to get the truth, Bean often faced death beside the Diggers in the trenches of Gallipoli and the Western Front – and saw more combat than many. But did Bean tell Australia the whole story of what he knew? In this fresh new biography Ross Coulthart explores the man behind the legend.
©2014 Ross Coulthart (P)2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd