Showing results for "Stories" in Eastern

Shannon Monaghan follows a core group of Western volunteers in Ukraine, fighting together from the early battle for Kyiv through to the last stands at Severodonetsk and Bakhmut. They arrived alone, but became a family—back when nobody bothered to learn names, because they all expected to die. These men knew they'd be fighting without the NATO support they were used to. They knew the danger they faced, and how they might be criticized for fighting someone else's war. But they also knew it was the right thing to do. This is their story.

This is the simplest tale in the world. Two people meet and fall in love. But the route which brought Larissa Salmina and Francis Haskell to a backstreet Venetian restaurant in 1962 was anything but straightforward. Larissa was born in northern Russia, the daughter of a Soviet army officer from...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The dramatic story of the Jewish Bund—a revolutionary movement from a vanished world—and its radical vision of solidarity in an age of division. “Molly Crabapple beckons readers through a portal to an irresistible, lost world, one bound together by passion...

Vlad III, known as Vlad the Impaler was voivode of Wallachia three times. The tales about the burning of the lazy, the poor, and the lame at Vlad's order and the execution of the woman who had made her husband too short a shirt can also be found among the German and Slavic anecdotes. Books describing Vlad's cruel acts were among the first best sellers in the German-speaking territories.

From the author of the New York Times bestsellers A Higher Call, Spearhead, and Devotion comes an astonishing true story set in an untold arena of World War II. “Tidal Wave is epic in every way. Like all good WWII books, it reminds us again, in the starkest terms possible, how much we owe to...

Young Gavrilo Princip arrived at the Vlajnic pastry shop in Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina on the morning of 28th June 1914. He was greeted by his fellow conspirators in the plot to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The archduke, next in line to succeed as emperor of Austria, was beginning a state visit to Sarajevo later that morning. Ferdinand was not a very popular character - widely thought of as bad-tempered and arrogant and perhaps even deranged. To the young students, he embodied everything they loathed about imperial oppression.  

“A riveting tale of her family’s experience in Europe during World War II [and] a well-wrought political history of the region, told with great authority. . . . More than a memoir, this is a book of facts and action, a chronicle of a war in progress from a partisan faithful to the idea of...

There is a chapter of World War II history that remains largely untold: the story of the fourth largest Allied military of the war, and the only nation to have fought in the battles of Leningrad, Arnhem, Tobruk, and Normandy. This is the story of the Polish forces during the Second World War, the story of millions of young men and women who gave everything for freedom and in the final victory lost all. In a cruel twist of history, the monumental struggles of an entire nation have been largely forgotten, and even intentionally obscured. No Greater Ally redresses the balance,

'History is made up of myths,' writes the renowned Russian dissident journalist Mikhail Zygar. 'Alas, our myths led us to the fascism of 2022. It is time to expose them.' Drawing from his perilous career investigating the frontiers of the Russian empire, Zygar reveals how 350 years of propaganda...

Prize-winning author Michael J. Totten returns with a masterpiece of travel writing and history in this journey through 13 nations - all but two formerly communist - just beyond the edge of the West where few casual travelers venture. His work as an independent foreign correspondent takes him deep into the field beyond the sensational headlines, from his hilariously miserable road trip with his best friend to Iraq to the Wild West of Albania, the most bizarre country in Europe; from the killing fields in Bosnia and Kosovo to a Romania haunted by the ghosts of its communist past.

The brilliant untold story of three daughters of diplomacy: Anna Roosevelt, Sarah Churchill, and Kathleen Harriman, glamorous, fascinating young women who accompanied their famous fathers to the Yalta Conference with Stalin in the waning days of World War II. With victory close at hand, the...

Brought to you by Penguin. In November 1943, with the outcome of the Second World War hanging in the balance, the Allies needed a new plan. The Americans' audacious suggestion to the Soviets was to open a second air front, with the US Air Force establishing bases in Soviet-controlled territory...

Bloomsbury presents The Land of Tears and Hope: The Ukrainian Story by Illia Ponomarenko, read by Greg Kolpakchi. An epic, popular history of Ukraine, from an acclaimed, front-line war reporter, directly countering Putin’s attempted erasure of Ukrainian identity. “Likely the best-known...

One reactor. One lie. One empire brought to its knees. What really happened inside Unit 4 in the seconds before the explosion—and why did the men who understood the danger stay silent while a nation slept beneath a radioactive sky? Chernobyl tears open the official record to reveal the human catastrophe behind the world's worst nuclear disaster: the arrogance, the miscalculations, and the institutional cowardice that turned a flawed reactor into a continental poison.

Historic quarters in cities and towns across the middle of Europe were devastated during the Second World War—some, like those of Warsaw and Frankfurt, had to be rebuilt almost completely. They are now centers of peace and civility that attract millions of tourists, but the stories they tell about places, peoples, and nations are selective. They are never the whole story. Exploring seven old towns, from Frankfurt and Prague to Vilnius in Lithuania, Marek Kohn examines how they have been used since the Second World War to conceal political tensions and reinforce certain versions of history.

A unique retelling of WWII’s most dramatic escape, told through first-hand recollections of the airmen who experienced it. On the night of March 24, 1944, 80 Commonwealth airmen crawled through a 336-foot-long tunnel and slipped into the forest beyond the wire of Stalag Luft III, a German POW compound near Sagan, Poland. The event became known as "The Great Escape"; an intricate breakout more than a year in the making, involving as many as 2,000 POWs working with extraordinary coordination, intelligence, and daring.

During the height of the Cold War, a group of small-town young men would lead their underdog hockey team from the little country of Czechoslovakia against the Soviet Union, the juggernaut in their sport. As they battled on the ice, the young players would keep their people's quest for freedom alive, and forge a way to fight back against the authoritarian forces that sought to crush them. Freedom to Win tells a story that ranges from iconic moments in history to courageous individual stories.

In May of 2007, in a small, quiet town in the South Moravia region of the Czech Republic, a technical glitch - a simple, accidental crossing of signals - revealed a terrible case of child abuse, and an entire nation watched transfixed with horror as the grisly extent of the perversion of the maternal instinct was revealed. Two small brothers named Jakub and Ondrej, nine and seven years old respectively, were revealed to have suffered confinement, mutilation, psychological brutality, and cannibalism at the hands of several people.

Stories abound of immigrant Jews on the outside looking in, clambering up the ladder of social mobility, successfully assimilating and integrating into their new worlds. But this book is not about the success stories. It's a paean to the bunglers, the blockheads, and the just plain weird—Jews who were flung from small, impoverished eastern European towns into the urban shtetls of New York and Warsaw, where, as they say in Yiddish, their bread landed butter side down in the dirt.

The New York Times bestseller now a major motion picture starring Jessica Chastain.A true story in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands. Jan and Antonina Zabinski were Polish Christian zookeepers horrified by Nazi racism, who managed to save over three...