This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.“Assiduously researched, compulsively readable.” — LA Review of Books“A richly woven work of narrative nonfiction.” — The Spectator“An intimate portrait of the country.” — Foreign AffairsIn the early 1990s, Europe’s most closed and repressive state began a startling transformation. After forty years of Communist isolation, Albanians who had been banned from pract...

A "compulsively readable" account of the collapse of Europe's last Communist regime and the dramatic events that followed ( Los Angeles Review of Books).In the early 1990s, Albania, arguably Europe's most closed and repressive state, began a startling transition out of forty years of self-imposed Communist isolation. Albanians who were not allowed to practice religion, travel abroad, wear jeans, or read "decadent" Western literature began to devour the out...

At the age of five, Zoltan Zinn-Collis was torn from his home in Slovakia and cast into the deepest horrors of a Nazi concentration camp. In Bergen-Belsen concentration camp he survived the inhuman brutality of the SS guards, the ravages of near starvation, disease, and squalor. All but one of his family died there, his mother losing her life on the very day the British finally marched into the camp. Discovered by a Red Cross nurse who described him as ‘an enchanting scrap of humanity’, Zo...

From the ashes of former Yugoslavia an independent Croatian state has arisen, the fulfillment, in the words of President Franjo Tudjman, of the Croats' "thousand-year-old dream of independence." Yet few countries in Europe have been born amid such bitter controversy and bloodshed: the savage war between pro-independence forces and the Yugoslav army left about one-third of the country in ruins and resulted in the flight of a quarter of a million of the country's Serbian minority.I...

The story of the invasion of Moscow, told through its people.Fought over a territory the size of France, the Battle of Moscow in 1941 cost the Russians as many casualties as the British lost in WW1. It marked the first strategic defeat of the Wehrmacht and halted their seemingly unstoppable advance across Europe. This is the story of that battle - and the ordinary men and women who fought it.Based on huge research and scores of interviews, this book offers ...

The brief war between Russia and Georgia in August 2008 seemed to many like an unexpected shot out of the blue that was gone as quickly as it came. Former Assistant Deputy Secretary of State Ronald Asmus contends that it was a conflict that was prepared and planned for some time by Moscow, part of a broader strategy to send a message to the United States: that Russia is going to flex its muscle in the twenty-first century. A Little War that Changed the World is a fascinating look ...

The 1992–1995 battle for Sarajevo was the longest siege in modern history. It was also the most internationalized, attracting a vast contingent of aid workers, UN soldiers, journalists, smugglers, and embargo-busters. The city took center stage under an intense global media spotlight, becoming the most visible face of post-Cold War conflict and humanitarian intervention. However, some critical activities took place backstage, away from the cameras, including extensive clan...

Nicolae Ceausescu, was the leader of Romania from 1965 until he was overthrown and killed in the revolution of 1989. Early in his life he played an active role in the Communist party, which resulted in imprisonment in 1936 and 1940. In 1939 he married another highly devoted Communist, Elena Petrescu. Once the Communists fully gained power in Romania in 1947, Ceausescu headed the nation's ministry of agriculture and served as deputy minister of the armed forces. Eventually he rose u...

Hailed as one of the most important portrayals of the dark years of Nazism, this powerful chronicle by the Romanian Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian aroused a furious response in Eastern Europe when it was first published. A profound and powerful literary achievement, it offers a lucid and finely shaded analysis of erotic and social life, a Jew’s diary, a reader’s notebook, a music-lover’s journal. Above all, it is an account of the “rhinocerization” of major Romanian intellectuals whom Seba...

Growing up Jewish in the little town, or shtetl, of Eisiskes near the Polish-Lithuanian border, Leon Kahn experienced a peaceful childhood until September 1, 1939 when Hitler’s forces attacked Poland. Only sixteen years of age, Kahn watched as the women and children of his community were herded into a gravel pit and murdered. Realizing that to stay meant certain death, Kahn tore off his yellow star of David identifying him as a Jew, and fled with his father, brother and sister to the Polis...

The Guillotine At Work Vol 1 develops the theme that the Stalinist terror of the 1930s-1950s, the bureaucratisation of Russian society, the imperialist escapades, through to the total disregard for human rights in the Soviet Union and other East European countries under its dominion were not aberrations in the development of a socialist society, but rather a logical development of Marxist philosophy which found its orientation in the writings and actions of Lenin ...

The current crisis in Ukraine has revealed a striking lack of background knowledge about Ukraine’s history and politics among West European politicians, journalists, intellectuals and even many academics. In this book, experts from Poland, Ukraine, the US, Russia and Western Europe fill the gap between an omnipresent and easily available narrative about Russia and a scarce, scattered knowledge about Ukraine. They show what history and political science can offer for a better understanding ...