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Alone
- Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat into Victory
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 12 hrs and 58 mins
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Publisher's summary
Combining epic history with rich family stories, Michael Korda chronicles the outbreak of World War II and the great events that led to Dunkirk.
An epic of remarkable originality, Alone captures the heroism of World War II as movingly as any book in recent memory. Bringing to vivid life the world leaders, generals, and ordinary citizens who fought on both sides of the war, Michael Korda, the best-selling author of Clouds of Glory, chronicles the outbreak of hostilities, recalling as a prescient young boy the enveloping tension that defined pre-Blitz London, and then as a military historian the great events that would alter the course of the 20th century.
For indeed, May 1940 was a month like no other. The superior German war machine blazed into France, as the Maginot Line, supposedly "as firmly fixed in place as the Pyramids", crumbled in days. With the fall of Holland and Belgium, the imminent fall of Paris, the British army stranded at Dunkirk, and Neville Chamberlain's government in political freefall, Winston Churchill became prime minister on this historical nadir of May 10, 1941. Britain, diplomatically isolated, was suddenly the only nation with the courage and the resolve to defy Hitler.
Against this vast historical canvas, Korda relates what happened and why. We first meet him at the age of six, surrounded by his glamorous movie family: his stage actress mother; his elegant father, Vincent, soon to receive an Academy Award; and his devoted Nanny Low, with whom he recites his evening prayers. Even the cheery BBC bulletins that Michael listened to every night could not mask the impending catastrophe, the German invasion so certain that the young boy, carrying his passport on a string around his neck, was evacuated to Canada on an ocean liner full of children.
Such alarm was hardly exaggerated. No one, after all, could have ever imagined that the most unlikely flotilla of destroyers - Dutch barges, fishing boats, yachts, and even rowboats - would rescue over 300,000 men off the beach at Dunkirk and bring them home to England. The miraculous return of the army was greeted with a renewed call for courage, and in the months that followed, the lives of tens of millions would be inexorably transformed, often tragically so, by these epochal weeks of May 1940.
It is this pivotal turning point in world history that Korda captures with such immediacy in Alone, a work that triumphantly demonstrates that even the most calamitous defeats can become the most legendary victories.
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American Caesar
- Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964
- By: William Manchester
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 31 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Virtually all Americans above a certain age hold strong opinions about Douglas MacArthur. They either worship him or despise him. Now, in this superb book, one of our most outstanding writers, after a meticulous three-year examination of the record, presents his startling insights about the man. The narrative is gripping, because the general's life was fascinating. It is moving, because he was a man of vision. It ends, finally, in tragedy, because his character, though majestic, was tragically flawed.
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A Great American
- By Charlotte A. Hu on 05-19-13
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The Generals
- Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, and the Winning of World War II
- By: Winston Groom
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 16 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Celebrated historian Winston Groom tells the intertwined and uniquely American tales of George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, and George Marshall - from the World War I battle that shaped them to their greatest achievement: leading the allies to victory in World War II.
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Nothing new here
- By Mike From Mesa on 01-13-16
By: Winston Groom
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Catastrophe 1914
- Europe Goes to War
- By: Max Hastings
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 25 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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From the acclaimed military historian, a new history of the outbreak of World War I: the dramatic stretch from the breakdown of diplomacy to the battles - the Marne, Ypres, Tannenberg - that marked the frenzied first year before the war bogged down in the trenches. In Catastrophe 1914, Max Hastings gives us a conflict different from the familiar one of barbed wire, mud, and futility.
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I thought I knew the battle of the frontiers
- By Anonymous User on 04-02-21
By: Max Hastings
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After Hitler
- The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe
- By: Michael Jones
- Narrated by: Robert Ian Mackenzie
- Length: 14 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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With the world at war, 10 days can feel like a lifetime.... On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in a bunker in Berlin. But victory over the Nazi regime was not celebrated in Western Europe until May 8 and in Russia a day later, on the ninth. Why did a peace agreement take so much time? How did this brutal, protracted conflict coalesce into its unlikely endgame? After Hitler shines a light on 10 fascinating days after that infamous suicide that changed the course of the 20th century.
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The slow end to World War II in Europe
- By Mike From Mesa on 04-10-16
By: Michael Jones
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Roosevelt's Centurions
- FDR and the Commanders He Led to Victory in World War II
- By: Joseph E. Persico
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 24 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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All American presidents are commanders in chief by law. Few perform as such in practice. In Roosevelt’s Centurions, distinguished historian Joseph E. Persico reveals how, during World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt seized the levers of wartime power like no president since Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Declaring himself "Dr. Win-the-War", FDR assumed the role of strategist in chief, and, though surrounded by star-studded generals and admirals, he made clear who was running the war. FDR was a hands-on war leader, involving himself in everything from choosing bomber targets to planning naval convoys to the design of landing craft.
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Superficial description of World War II
- By Mike From Mesa on 06-23-13
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The Storm of War
- A New History of the Second World War
- By: Andrew Roberts
- Narrated by: Christian Rodska
- Length: 28 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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The Second World War lasted for 2,174 days, cost $1.5 trillion, and claimed the lives of more than 50 million people. Why did the Axis lose? And could they, with a different strategy, have won? Andrew Roberts's acclaimed new history has been hailed as the finest single-volume account of this epic conflict. From the western front to North Africa, from the Baltic to the Far East, he tells the story of the war - the grand strategy and the individual experience, the cruelty and the heroism - as never before.
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A very interesting book with some shortcomings.
- By Mike From Mesa on 10-24-11
By: Andrew Roberts
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Crete 1941
- The Battle and the Resistance
- By: Antony Beevor
- Narrated by: James Langton
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Nazi Germany expected its airborne attack on Crete in 1941 to be a textbook victory based on tactical surprise. Little did they know that the British, using Ultra intercepts, had already laid a careful trap. It should have been the first German defeat of the war, but a fatal misunderstanding turned the battle around.
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Engrossing
- By Jean on 02-01-16
By: Antony Beevor
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Never Surrender
- Winston Churchill and Britain's Decision to Fight Nazi Germany in the Fateful Summer of 1940
- By: John Kelly
- Narrated by: Gordon Greenhill
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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London in April, 1940, was a place of great fear and conflict. Everyone was on edge; civilization itself seemed imperiled. The Germans are marching. They have taken Poland, France, Holland, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia. They now menace Britain. Should Britain negotiate with Germany? The members of the War Cabinet bicker, yell, lose their control, and are divided. Churchill, leading the faction to fight, and Lord Halifax, cautioning that prudence is the way to survive, attempt to usurp one another by any means possible.
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A Vivid Account
- By Jean on 01-21-16
By: John Kelly
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The Rising Sun
- The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945
- By: John Toland
- Narrated by: Tom Weiner
- Length: 41 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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This Pulitzer Prize-winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Told from the Japanese perspective, The Rising Sun is, in the author’s words, "a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened - muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox."
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A political as well as military history
- By Mike From Mesa on 07-30-15
By: John Toland
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Desert Fox
- The Storied Military Career of Erwin Rommel
- By: Samuel W. Mitcham Jr.
- Narrated by: Nigel Patterson
- Length: 11 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the strange and fascinating life of Erwin Rommel, from his days as a youth in Imperial Germany - when he had a child out of wedlock with an early girlfriend - through his lauded military exploits during World War I to his death by suicide during World War II, after he attempted a failed coup against Hitler. Rommel was a man of contradictions: a soldier who wrote a best-selling book about World War I, a commander who went from commanding Hitler's bodyguard to trying to kill him, and a serious military mind who was known for participating in practical jokes.
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Amazing Detail, Amazing Story!
- By Al888 on 05-19-19
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The Guns of August
- By: Barbara W. Tuchman
- Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon
- Length: 19 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, historian Barbara Tuchman brings to life the people and events that led up to World War I. This was the last gasp of the Gilded Age, of Kings and Kaisers and Czars, of pointed or plumed hats, colored uniforms, and all the pomp and romance that went along with war. How quickly it all changed...and how horrible it became.
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Wonderful
- By Mike From Mesa on 10-28-08
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- World War I as Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets
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With Muse of Fire, Michael Korda, the bestselling author of Alone and Hero, takes a novel approach to World War I by telling its history through the lives of the soldier-poets whose verses memorialize the war's unimaginable horrors. He begins with Rupert Brooke and the halcyon days before violence engulfed his generation—destroying the self-contented world of Edwardian England—and ends with the tragic death of Wilfred Owen, killed only days before the armistice brought an end to a war that took over 25,000,000 lives.
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Rip-Roarin' Tale of Devoted 'Cads'!
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The Battle of Britain
- Five Months That Changed History; May-October 1940
- By: James Holland
- Narrated by: Shaun Grindell
- Length: 26 hrs and 40 mins
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The Battle of Britain paints a stirring picture of an extraordinary summer when the fate of the world hung by a thread. Historian James Holland has now written the definitive account of those months based on extensive new research from around the world, including thousands of new interviews with people on both sides of the battle.
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D-Day, June 6, 1944, and the 76 days of bitter fighting in Normandy that followed the Allied landing, have become the defining episode of World War II in the west - the object of books, films, television series, and documentaries. Yet as familiar as it is, as James Holland makes clear in his definitive history, many parts of the OVERLORD campaign, as it was known, are still shrouded in myth and assumed knowledge.
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Excellent account of Normandy but be weary...
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The Battle for Berlin was the culminating struggle of World War II in the European theater. The last offensive against Hitler’s Third Reich, it devastated one of Europe’s historic capitals and marked the final defeat of Nazi Germany. It was also one of the war’s bloodiest and most pivotal battles, whose outcome would shape international politics for decades to come.
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Thanks to Dan Carlin of Hardcore History podcasts.
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The Rising Sun
- The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945
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This Pulitzer Prize-winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Told from the Japanese perspective, The Rising Sun is, in the author’s words, "a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened - muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox."
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Very Compelling
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In the spring of 1939, a top-secret organization was founded in London: Its purpose was to plot the destruction of Hitler's war machine through spectacular acts of sabotage. The guerrilla campaign that followed was every bit as extraordinary as the six men who directed it. One of them, Cecil Clarke, was a maverick engineer who had spent the 1930s inventing futuristic caravans. Now his talents were put to more devious use: He built the dirty bomb used to assassinate Hitler's favorite, Reinhard Heydrich.
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Excellent account of Normandy but be weary...
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What listeners say about Alone
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Nicholas Hevesy
- 04-13-18
Nothing Wrong Here
I didn’t find Alone to be amazing or terrible. One of those books that doesn’t stand out either way, which might be worse. Performance was good but the story I felt was lacking somehow. Perhaps I was looking for a more in depth hard history version of the months leading up to Dunkirk.
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- Steve
- 06-22-18
Very Telling
My parents and grand parents would not talk about the war. There were great insights that helped give a much better picture of what and why. It never fails to interest me in the egos that govern war and the mistakes that are continually made generation after generation.
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- Tom S
- 11-20-18
Far better than the Dunkirk film
very informative run through the first parts of WWII resulting in Great Britain's isolation after the famous operation Dynamo
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France's resistance to German invasion.
Most of this is familiar territory, but is an excellent counterpoint to the movie Dunkirk, which I found fatuous. Excellent, informative analysis of France's underwhelming resistance to German invasion.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Logophile
- 09-06-20
WWII in Britain from the prodrome through Dunkirk.
I'm a self-admitted devotee of WWII non-fiction, and this surpassed my expectations. My favorite sub-genre is "bottom-up history" - stories of historical events see through the eyes of individuals at street level who lived through them, at least long enough to have left a diary, letter, or a memoir.
Having spent the first half of 2020 reading the three-volume mega-tome "The Last Lion", to realize Alone was another top-shelf retelling and analysis of the events leading up to Dunkirk was a bit of a disappointment, but that didn't last long!
Alone is told not only from a great deal of historical facts and research, but always framed by author Michael Korda's own memories of living through the events, told from the perspective of a six-year-old boy in the home of highly placed parents who, as famous people in show business, hobnobbed with the high and mighty in Britain's political arena.
In America, our historical knowledge and focus is mostly told from the bombing of Pearl Harbor forward, to the end of the war, with a brief but romanticized retelling of the incredible rescue of over 300,000 British and French fighters cornered and stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk. As we currently remember and honor those world-changing historical events at 75th-anniversary commemorations, if you only want to read one engaging but over-arching book for this period, choosing this one would be a terrific choice. Who knows but that it might whet your appetite for more - both top-down and bottom-up views!
I chose to listen to this book read to me on Audible, and the narrator, John Lee, was articulate, his voice easy on the ear, perfectly paced, and the sound engineering criticism-proof.
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- K2
- 01-26-23
Great listen
Incredibly good listen. Great story combined with good performance. This book made history come alive.
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- E. Idenmill
- 06-13-19
Great and unexpected
I thought this book would be a history about the time between the surrender of France and the invasion of the USSR. I was pleasantly surprised to find it covered the time leading up to the war and the Battle of France in great detail. the author's anecdotes regarding his own life as a child at the time provide a welcome humanizing element to a thoroughly engaging book.
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3 people found this helpful
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- TheologyFamily
- 02-28-19
Great listen for a history novice
I have a hard time retaining history that I learn. Alone did a good job of helping me to understand WW1 from the British standpoint (I'm American). I read this after watching the Darkest Hour and Dunkirk. I appreciated this book correcting the errors or Hollywood.
The narrator was engaging, I mostly listened on 1.25-1.5 speed.
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- SERCY
- 03-14-22
very educational
good narrator, I learned a lot about what lead up to world War 2 and perspective.
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- Murphhere
- 04-02-23
Great Listen!
Very well written and interesting accounting of Britain's view of WW II and Dunkirk. Excellent narration! I really enjoyed this book, and I didn't expect to find it interesting.
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