20th Century

The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century....

In this uplifting memoir in the vein of The Last Lecture and Man’s Search for Meaning, a Holocaust survivor pays tribute to those who were lost by telling his story, sharing his wisdom, and living his best possible life....

The #1 New York Times bestseller, now in an expanded audiobook edition that includes detailed historical context for the democracy-threatening Ukrainian conflict and a call to action for modern times....

A brilliant exploration of freedom—what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s our only chance for survival—by the acclaimed Yale historian and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller On Tyranny.

Based on the newly released personal letters of Albert Einstein, Walter Isaacson explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos....

If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky....

Erik Larson has been widely acclaimed as a master of narrative non-fiction, and in his new book, turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler’s rise to power....

At one time, Corrie ten Boom would have laughed at the idea that she had a story to tell.....

As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics....

This is the definitive story of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, based on original reporting and new archival research. Through two decades of reporting, new archival information, and firsthand interviews with witnesses, Adam Higginbotham tells the full dramatic story....

A thrilling tick-tock recounting one of the most harrowing hostage situations and daring rescue attempts of our time—from true-life espionage master and New York Times bestselling author of Operation Mincemeat and The Spy and the Traitor Ben Macintyre.

On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants....

From age 15 to 40, David Hackworth devoted himself to the US Army and fast became a living legend. In 1971, however, he appeared on television to decry the doomed war effort in Vietnam....

A number-one New York Times best seller and arguably the best business narrative ever written, Barbarians at the Gate is the classic account of the fall of RJR Nabisco....

J. Robert Oppenheimer, an iconic figure of the 20th century, was a brilliant physicist who led efforts to build an atomic bomb but later confronted the moral consequences of scientific progress....

The astonishing true story of the Berlin Tunnel, one of the West’s greatest espionage operations of the Cold War - and the dangerous Soviet mole who betrayed it....

Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen - Winston Churchill first among them - the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided....

This Pulitzer Prize-winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire....

Now available in audio for the first time, Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews - now with a new afterword and additional photographs....

As the true horrors of the Third Reich began to be exposed immediately after World War II, the Nazi war criminals who committed genocide went on the run....

Vietnam became the Western world’s most divisive modern conflict. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle....

Thunderstruck tells the stories of two men: Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication....

When Henry Kissinger was made secretary of state in 1973, he had already become the most admired person in the US and one of the most unlikely celebrities to capture the world’s imagination....

From one of the most admired international leaders comes a timely, considered, and personal look at the history and current resurgence of fascism today and the virulent threat it poses....

Here is the story of the men and women who fought against all odds to fulfill the 400-year-old dream of constructing an aquatic passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans....

Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian chronicle how an impoverished and terrorized China experienced radical political changes in the long 1970s and how ordinary people broke free from the beliefs that had shaped their lives during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. These changes, and the unprecedented and sustained economic growth that followed, transformed China and the world.

This iconoclastic study was one of the most widely debated books of 2000. Finkelstein indicts with vigor and honesty those who exploit the tragedy of the Holocaust for their own personal political and financial gain. This new edition includes updated material discussing the initial reception to the book's publication. In a controversial new study, Norman G. Finkelstein moves from an interrogation of the place the Holocaust has come to occupy in American culture to a disturbing examination of recent Holocaust compensation agreements.

On May 8, 1945, when he was just ten years old, Gidon Lev was liberated from a Nazi concentration camp after four nightmarish years. Twenty-six family members, including Gidon’s beloved father and grandparents, were murdered in the Holocaust. Only Gidon and his mother survived. From the depths of despair, a little boy who had lost so much was determined to build a life filled with adventure and love. And that is exactly what he did.

For the first time, once-secret government records and interviews tell the full story of the thousands of Nazis—from concentration camp guards to high-level officers in the Third Reich—who came to the United States after World War II and quietly settled into new lives. Many gained entry on their own as self-styled war “refugees.” But some had help from the U.S. government. The CIA, the FBI, and the military all put Hitler’s minions to work as spies, intelligence assets, and leading scientists and engineers, whitewashing their histories.

David R. Leick uses first-hand accounts from archives such as the Naval History and Heritage Command to examine the campaigns, aircraft, tactics, command decisions, and life aboard ship during the American Pacific campaign against Japan from early 1943 until Princeton’s tragic demise in October 1944. The book focusses closely on the crew and airmen of the Princeton, as well as describing in detail the toll that prolonged combat operations took on the frontline sailor.