Titres dans XXe siècle

In Kremlin Winter, Robert Service, acclaimed biographer of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky and one of the finest historians of modern Russia, brings his deep understanding of that country to bear on the man who leads it. 'One of our most accomplished, erudite and prolific historians of modern Russia'...

In a memorable scene from Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, viewers the world over witnessed the clandestine marriage of two Jews in the Płaszów concentration camp: Joseph and Rebecca Bau. At once a tale of horror and beauty, Bau: Artist at War is one man’s memoir of a miracle: the bloom of love in the depths of a Nazi concentration camp. In his painstaking prose, Joseph Bau also shares his experience of other wartime traumas—the bombing of Kraków, the brutality of the ghetto, the harsh last days at Oskar Schindler’s factory—with surprising wit and irony.

The astonishing but true story of one of the most notorious spy cases from the Cold War—and the international manhunt that seized global attention as it revealed the shadowy world of deep cover KGB operatives. The dramatic arrest in London on January 7, 1961 of five Soviet spies made headlines...

The last ruler of the House of Solomon, Haile Selassie, was not only the final Emperor of Ethiopia but also the link to a bygone past. In the days of Haile Selassie, absolute rule was given as an unquestioned divine right. Even though Selassie in many ways was a moderate progressive, he was still an autocratic ruler.

World War II reached into the homes and lives of ordinary people in an unprecedented way. Civilians made up the vast majority of those killed by war. On Europe's home front, the war brought the German blitzkrieg, followed by long occupations and the racial genocide of the Holocaust. In An Iron Wind, historian Peter Fritzsche draws on first-person accounts to show how civilians in occupied Europe struggled to understand this maelstrom.

This original and “meticulously researched retelling of history’s most infamous voyage” (Denise Kiernan, New York Times bestselling author) uses the sinking of the Titanic as a prism through which to examine the end of the Edwardian era and the seismic shift modernity brought to the...

Hong Kong is the world’s most exciting city, at once fascinating and exasperating, a tangle of contradictions. It is a dazzling amalgam of conspicuous consumption and primitive poverty, the most architecturally incongruous yet undeniably beautiful urban panorama of all. Through firsthand reportage, world-renowned travel writer Jan Morris takes us through the crowded streets of this enigmatic city, offering the most insightful and comprehensive study of Hong Kong thus far. She reviews Hong Kong’s early days as a British opium port controlled by pirates, cutthroats, and scoundrel tycoons, and looks ahead to the city’s future.

A radio broadcaster and journalist for Edward R. Murrow at CBS, William L. Shirer was new to the world of broadcast journalism when he began keeping a diary while on assignment in Europe during the 1930s. Shirer’s Berlin Diary, which is considered the first full record of what was happening in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich, appeared in 1941. Shirer returned to the European front in 1944 to cover the end of the war. End of a Berlin Diary chronicles this year-long study of Germany after Hitler.

In this innovative biography, Ruth Franklin explores the transformation of Anne Frank (1929–1945) from ordinary teenager to icon, shedding new light on the young woman whose diary of her years in hiding, now translated into more than seventy languages, is the most widely read work of literature to arise from the Holocaust. Comprehensively researched but experimental in spirit, this book chronicles and interprets Anne’s life as a Jew in Amsterdam during World War II while also telling the story of the diary—its multiple drafts, its discovery, its reception, and its message for today’s world.

For fans of the Netflix series The Crown and from the author of the New York Times bestseller 17 Carnations comes a captivating biography of Wallis Simpson, the notorious woman for whom Edward VIII gave up the throne. "You have no idea how hard it is to live out a great romance." -- Wallis...

From the internationally acclaimed Oxford authority on Communism, a definitive history that examines the origins of the ideology, its development in different nations, its collapse in many of those countries following perestroika, and its current incarnations around the globe. The Rise and Fall...

“This vivid account of the Wall and all that it meant reminds us that symbolism can be double-edged, as a potent emblem of isolation and repression became, in its destruction, an even more powerful totem of freedom.” — The Atlantic Monthly NOW WITH AN UPDATED EPILOGUE 30 YEARS AFTER THE...

The Pharmacist of Auschwitz is the little-known story of Victor Capesius, a Bayer pharmaceutical salesman from Romania, who, at the age of 35, joined the Nazi SS in 1943 and quickly became the chief pharmacist at the largest death camp, Auschwitz. Based in part on previously classified documents, Patricia Posner exposes Capesius's reign of terror at the camp, his escape from justice, and how a handful of courageous survivors and a single brave prosecutor finally brought him to trial for murder 20 years after the end of the war.

On April 15, 1945, Brigadier H. L. Glyn Hughes entered Bergen-Belsen for the first time. Waiting for him were 10,000 unburied, putrefying corpses and 60,000 living prisoners, starving and sick. One month earlier, 15-year-old Rachel Genuth arrived at Bergen-Belsen; deported with her family from Sighet, Transylvania, in May of 1944, Rachel had by then already endured Auschwitz, the Christianstadt labor camp, and a forced march through the Sudetenland.

The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz is the extraordinary true story of a British soldier who marched willingly into the notorious concentration camp, Buna-Monowitz, known as Auschwitz III. In the summer of 1944, Denis Avey was being held in a British POW labor camp, E715, near the site of Auschwitz III. He had heard of the brutality meted out to the prisoners there and he was determined to witness what he could.

Freedom of the press isn’t just a fundamental right in America but a key part of the democratic process. When the United States secured its independence against Britain in the War of Independence in 1783, there was no certainty about what the new country would look like in terms of national governance. In 1787, delegates from the various states convened in Philadelphia to draft a constitution that would define this.

Senator Thomas Dodd began his career in public service as a prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials. His son, Senator Christopher Dodd, recently discovered his mother's collection of letters his father wrote during that time. Through his father, Chris Dodd learned not only the scope of the Holocaust but also the importance of the rule of law.

An inspiring true story of hope and survival, this is the testimony of a boy who was imprisoned in Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen and Buchenwald and recorded his experiences through words and color drawings. In June 1943, after long years of hardship and persecution, thirteen-year-old Thomas Geve and...

“A valuable reexamination” (Booklist, starred review) of the event that changed twentieth-century America—Pearl Harbor—based on years of research and new information uncovered by a New York Times bestselling author. The America we live in today was born, not on July 4, 1776, but on...

Telling the rousing story of a Jewish boy who fled persecution and returned to prosecute the Nazi oppressors, Walter Wolff's daughter Nina has reconstructed these events from family lore and her father’s own cache of more than 700 wartime letters and 200 photographs, which he revealed to her shortly before he died.