New Reviews: History

Narrator Michael David Axtell excels in ease, clarity, and pacing, qualities essential to audiobooks that address the active mind, rather than the edge of the seat. In Poland in the 1980s, copies of Orwell's 1984 and other forbidden books circulated hand to hand, fueling a popular uprising that by decade's end had spread across Eastern Europe. American operatives fueled this... Read More

The existence of the American Girls Club in Belle Epoque Paris (1871-1914) had been all but lost to history before author/narrator Jennifer Dasal unearthed details about it. This audiobook is pieced together from artists' autobiographies and American journalists' coverage of the expatriates. Bubbly, enthusiastic Dasal recounts the highs and lows of bohemian life in the famed... Read More

Many listeners will recall Edoardo Ballerini's lucid narration of Stephen Greenblatt's 2013 audiobook, THE SWERVE. It was an inspired match between one of today's finest Renaissance scholars and one of the very finest audiobook narrators. Author and narrator match again in this insightful biography of Shakespeare's predecessor and early model, playwright Christopher Marlowe. In... Read More

This oral history of the Manhattan Project and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is dramatically made aural, thanks to the talents of some 30 narrators, plus the author. Like its predecessor, WHEN THE SEA CAME ALIVE, this audiobook features snippets of first-person accounts of those who lived the history. Artfully arranged into a cohesive whole, they vocalize the... Read More

The year 1963 marked a pivotal turning point in U.S. history, and this audiobook captures its drama and significance in vivid detail. Author and narrator Peniel E. Joseph guides listeners through the era's defining moments and people, including Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, and Malcolm X; the March on Washington and the assassinations of Medgar Evers and John F.... Read More

Many listeners will remember Malcolm Hillgartner's fine narration of Scott Anderson's compelling, much-admired LAWRENCE IN ARABIA. Here again, Hillgartner's frank, unbiased tone is a fitting complement to Anderson's scrupulous reporting of a history heavily encrusted with bias, controversy, and lingering grievances. America's long support of Iran's repressive Shah, its... Read More

Narrator Timothy Andrés Pabon, a gifted storyteller, is an excellent choice for this sweeping retrospective of the counterculture movement of the 1950s-1960s and what made it so influential. Pabon deftly manages long lists of names, deep scholarship, and stories of bohemian life. McNally's scholarship shines with Pabon's voice. Pabon shares what could have been dry research in... Read More

Tlingit narrator Erin Tripp brings an authentic voice to Mary Annette Pember's investigation of the legacy of Indian boarding schools in the U.S. and Canada. Pember's mother, Bernice, attended a government-run and Catholic-operated school in Wisconsin in the 1930s, where she was starved, abused, and worked to the bone while being unable to practice her Ojibwe customs or speak... Read More

This powerful audiobook history of the closing months of the Civil War is fascinating and compelling. However, its narration by author Scott Ellsworth proves stiff, and several beats too slow. The listener will be riveted by Ellsworth's descriptions of the brutal battles that finally crushed Lee's army, Sherman's calculated ravaging of the Confederate heartland, and the... Read More

John Sackville's academic-sounding British accent does quite well in narrating this audiobook. A scholar of the national socialist period in Germany, Rees draws many parallels between how Hitler came to power and present-day politics in the West. However, while he decries the "us versus them" dichotomy--the propensity for humans to act in tribes--he seems to find it difficult... Read More

Actor Richard Attlee has the rare ability among audiobook narrators of extracting full value from each word and syllable while seeming to do nothing at all. What in a lesser narrative might have seemed affected here achieves a singular ease and naturalism. Art historian Pears's richly detailed, expertly written "Love Story from a Lost Continent" comes from firsthand... Read More

This account of the occupation of a portion of the Netherlands during WWII--and how the Dutch commemorate those who resisted and those who liberated them--is given a splendid narration by Golden Voice Dion Graham. Edsel, who also wrote THE MONUMENTS MEN, looks at the lives of 12 individuals who all were connected with the events of 1940-45 in this small corner of Europe. It... Read More

Lucy Paterson's confident narration lends authority to anthropologist Judith Scheele's wide-ranging exploration of the Sahara Desert. Scheele's mission is to complicate Western notions of the region by introducing listeners to its cultural, environmental, historical, economic, and ethnic complexity. Spanning the width of North Africa, the region's languages include both... Read More

This audiobook recounts the extraordinary true story of a small group of women imprisoned in Ravensbrück, the Nazis' only all-female concentration camp during WWII. The powerful account traces their harrowing ordeal with relentless brutality, including starvation, forced labor, inhumane medical experiments, and extreme overcrowding. Narrator Lisa Flanagan delivers a performance... Read More