Eastern Europe

For more than 40 years, communism held eight European nations in its iron fist. Yet by the end of 1989, all of these nations had thrown off communism, declared independence, and embarked on the road to democracy.

Timothy Snyder opens a new path in the understanding of modern nationalism and 20th-century socialism by presenting the often overlooked life of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, an important Polish thinker at the beginning of the 20th century. During his brief life in Poland, Paris, and Vienna, Kelles-Krauz influenced or infuriated most of the leaders of the various socialist movements of Central Europe and France. His central ideas ultimately were not accepted by the socialist mainstream at the time of his death.

Thomas Buergenthal, now a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, tells his astonishing experiences as a young boy in his memoir, A Lucky Child. He arrived at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp. Separated first from his mother and then his father, Buergenthal managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life.

Before becoming the world's most notorious dictator, Kim Jong-Il ran North Korea's Ministry for Propaganda and its film studios. Conceiving every movie made, he acted as producer and screenwriter. Despite this control, he was underwhelmed by the available talent and took drastic steps, ordering the kidnapping of Choi Eun-Hee (Madam Choi) - South Korea's most famous actress - and her ex-husband Shin Sang-Ok, the country's most famous filmmaker.

Imagine you are nine years old. Your best friend’s father is arrested, half your classmates disappear from school, and someone burns down the house across the road. Imagine you have to cross a snow-covered mountain range at night in order to escape the soldiers who are trying to kill you. How would you deal with these memories once you are an adult? Jones, a relief worker and child psychiatrist, interviewed over 40 Serb and Muslim children who came of age during the Bosnian War and now returns, 20 years after the war began, to discover the adults they have become.

Despite the best efforts of a number of historians, many aspects of the ferocious struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War remain obscure or shrouded in myth. One of the most persistent of these is the notion - largely created by many former members of its own officer corps in the immediate postwar period - that the German Army was a paragon of military professionalism and operational proficiency whose defeat on the Eastern Front was solely attributable to the amateurish meddling of a crazed former Corporal.

Ruling Russia for a little over 300 years, from the 17th to the early 20th centuries, the Romanov tsars, and in rare but unforgettable cases, empresses, dominated the political landscapes of their times and forged one of the most legendary dynasties of all time.

Gobernando Rusia durante algo más de trescientos años, desde el siglo XVII hasta principios del XX, los zares Romanov y, en raros pero inolvidables casos, las emperatrices dominaron los paisajes políticos de su época y forjaron una de las dinastías más legendarias de todos los tiempos.

Etwas mehr als dreihundert Jahre, vom 17. bis zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert, beherrschten die Zaren und – in seltenen, aber unvergesslichen Fällen – die Zarinnen aus der Familie der Romanows die politische Landschaft ihrer Zeit und schmiedeten eine der sagenhaftesten Dynastien aller Zeiten. Russland, der große und mächtige Nationalstaat, wie wir ihn heute kennen, wurde größtenteils durch die Anstrengungen von Romanow-Herrschern wie Peter dem Großen oder Katharina der Großen geschaffen.

This biography traces the Holocaust through the eyes of young Nathan Poremba and examines the difficult emotional and physical choices he had to make to survive. His father was murdered by the Nazis before his hometown went under deportation orders, so he made the heart-wrenching decision to flee his home in Southern Poland (Wieliczka) and leave his mother and sisters behind.

Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed - refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples - causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl.

In Polish: Applebaum presents the story of an inconceivable crime: “she describes the works of Stalin, which are only superseded by the Holocaust, but their cruelty and perfidy match the actions of Hitler” - Wacław Radziwinowicz (Polish journalist). This book describes Holodomor - the Great Famine in Ukraine between 1931 and 1933 which killed three million people and was man-made by the Soviet government.

Modern-day Lithuania is a small country bordering the Baltic Sea with a population of less than three million people, but despite its relative size, the nation has exerted an influential role on the history of the region. More recently, in the 20th century, Lithuania was caught between much larger powers in two world wars and then the Cold War. Along with neighbors Latvia and Estonia, Lithuania was one of the only states to truly break free of the Soviet Union when the latter dissolved in 1991.

Country of Ash is the starkly compelling, original chronicle of a Jewish doctor who miraculously survived near-certain death, first inside the Lodz and Warsaw ghettoes, where he was forced to treat the Gestapo, then on the Aryan side of Warsaw, where he hid under numerous disguises. He clandestinely recorded the terrible events he witnessed, but his manuscript disappeared during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After the war, reunited with his wife and young daughter, he rewrote his story.

Yevgeni Nikolaev was one of Russia's leading snipers in World War II, and his memoir provides an unparalleled account of front-line action in crucial theaters of war. Nikolaev is credited with a remarkable 324 kills, and his wartime service included time in the siege of Leningrad in 1941/1942. His memoir is not a neutral, apolitical account. As a member of the NKVD, it is not surprising that his memoir is full of historical misinterpretation and justification of the agency's actions.

The three tales in this audiobook are adapted from stories told by the peasants in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. They are drawn from some books I found in shops when I visited the former USSR in 1988 as part of a citizen diplomacy group. I was intrigued by these folktales, since my paternal grandmother lived for some time in Odessa in the Ukraine. Also, I found these stories share a common theme - the poor peasant is able to succeed despite obstacles against an unfair ruler.

The first-born son of his generation, Peter Balakian grew up in a close, extended family, sheltered by 1950s and '60s New Jersey suburbia. He was immersed in an all-American boyhood defined by rock 'n' roll, adolescent pranks, and a passion for the New York Yankees that he shared with his beloved grandmother. But beneath this sunny world lay the dark specter of the trauma his family and ancestors had experienced: the Turkish government's extermination of more than a million Armenians.

La historia de Rusia ha cautivado al público durante generaciones. Desde las hazañas de Iván el Terrible hasta el asesinato de la familia real Románov, hay mucha historia que explorar. ¿Cómo se ganó el título Iván el Terrible? ¿Quiénes eran los Románov y qué llevó al brutal final de su dinastía? Siga la historia de Rusia y descubra los principales acontecimientos históricos que dieron forma a este país.

Greater Than a Tourist – Albania by Redina Zela offers the inside scoop on Albania. Most travel books tell you how to travel like a tourist. Although there is nothing wrong with that, as part of the Greater Than a Tourist series, this book will give you travel tips from someone who has lived at your next travel destination.

El Gulag aparece en la conciencia de occidente en 1977 con la publicación de la obra de Aleksandr Solzhenitsin Archipiélago Gulag. A partir de nuevos estudios, memorias publicadas tras la caída de la URSS y algunos archivos hasta ahora secretos, Anne Applebaum realiza una reconstrucción histórica del origen y la evolución de los campos de concentración soviéticos que devuelve este infausto e inolvidable episodio al centro de la tormentosa historia del convulso siglo XX.