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France: An Adventure History
- Narrated by: Tom Lawrence
- Length: 17 hrs and 2 mins
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Publisher's summary
A SPECTATOR and PROSPECT Book of the Year
France: An Adventure History is a profoundly original and endlessly entertaining history of France, from the first century BC to the present day, based on countless new discoveries and thirty years of exploring France on foot, by bicycle and in the library.
Beginning with the Roman army’s first recorded encounter with the Gauls and ending with the Gilets Jaunes protests in the era of Emmanuel Macron, each chapter is an adventure in its own right. Along the way, readers will find the usual faces, events and themes of French history – Louis XIV, the French Revolution, the French Résistance, the Tour de France – but all presented in a shining new light.
Graham Robb does not offer a standard dry list of facts and dates, but instead a panorama of France, teeming with characters, full of stories, journeys and coincidences, giving readers a thrilling sense of discovery and enlightenment. France: An Adventure History is a vivid, living history of one of the world’s most fascinating nations by a ceaselessly entertaining writer in complete command of subject and style.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
Critic reviews
"Packed full of discoveries." (Sunday Times)
"Ceaselessly interesting, knowledgeable and evocative." (Spectator)
"A rich and vibrant narrative...clear-eyed but imaginative storytelling." (Financial Times)
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- A Journey Down the Amur River at the Borderlands of Empires
- By: Dominic Ziegler
- Narrated by: Steve West
- Length: 14 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 48
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 42
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Story4 out of 5 stars 41
Black Dragon River is a personal journey down one of Asia's great rivers. The world's ninth largest river, the Amur serves as a large part of the border between Russia and China. As a crossroads for the great empires of Asia, this area offers journalist Dominic Ziegler a lens with which to examine the societies at Europe's only borderland with East Asia.
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5 out of 5 stars
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INFORMATIVE
- By JK on 10-14-22
By: Dominic Ziegler
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The Trigger
- Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War
- By: Tim Butcher
- Narrated by: Gerard Doyle
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 55
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 46
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Story4 out of 5 stars 48
The Trigger tells the story of a young man who changed the world forever. It focuses on the drama of the incident itself by following Princip's journey. By retracing his steps from the feudal frontier village of his birth, through the mountains of the northern Balkans to the great plain city of Belgrade, and ultimately to Sarajevo, Tim Butcher illuminates our understanding of Princip and makes discoveries about him that have eluded historians for 100 years.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Good, but not what I was looking for
- By Kendra on 07-08-14
By: Tim Butcher
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Conquistadors
- By: Michael Wood
- Narrated by: John Telfer
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 591
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 505
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 499
Following in the footsteps of the greatest Spanish adventurers, Michael Wood retraces the path of the conquistadors from Amazonia to Lake Titicaca, and from the deserts of North Mexico to the heights of Machu Picchu. As he travels the same routes as Hernán Cortés, Francisco, and Gonzalo Pizarro, Wood describes the dramatic events that accompanied the epic sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Horrific anti-European bias
- By Anonymous User on 08-30-20
By: Michael Wood
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Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities
- By: Bettany Hughes
- Narrated by: Bettany Hughes
- Length: 24 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 172
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 149
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 147
From the Koran to Shakespeare, this city with three names - Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul - resonates as an idea and a place, real and imagined. Standing as the gateway between East and West, North and South, it has been the capital city of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires. For much of its history it was the very center of the world, known simply as "The City", but, as Bettany Hughes reveals, Istanbul is not just a city but a global story.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A daunting undertaking pulled off superlatively
- By SGS on 12-24-17
By: Bettany Hughes
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Rome
- By: Matthew Kneale
- Narrated by: Neil Gardner
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 42
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 39
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 39
Rome, the Eternal City. Today visitors can stand on bridges that Julius Caesar and Cicero crossed; walk around temples in the footsteps of emperors; visit churches from the earliest days of Christianity. This is all the more remarkable considering what the city has endured. It has been ravaged by fires, floods, earthquakes, and - most of all - by roving armies. Matthew Kneale uses seven of these crisis moments to create a powerful and captivating account of Rome’s extraordinary history. He paints portraits of the city before each assault, describing how Romans, both rich and poor, lived their everyday lives.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Lack of language skills an irritation
- By lmc on 07-16-18
By: Matthew Kneale
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Jungle of Stone
- The True Story of Two Men, Their Extraordinary Journey, and the Discovery of the Lost Civilization of the Maya
- By: William Carlsen
- Narrated by: Paul Michael Garcia
- Length: 16 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 608
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 543
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 546
In 1839 rumors of extraordinary yet baffling stone ruins buried within the unmapped jungles of Central America reached two of the world's most intrepid travelers. Seized by the reports, American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood sailed together out of New York Harbor on an expedition into the forbidding rainforests of present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. What they found would rewrite the West's understanding of human history.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Unsung Explorers at the Heart of History
- By thomas on 01-10-17
By: William Carlsen
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A Voyage Long and Strange
- Rediscovering the New World
- By: Tony Horwitz
- Narrated by: John H. Mayer
- Length: 17 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 245
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 182
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 180
On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz makes an unsettling discovery. A history buff since early childhood, expensively educated at university - a history major, no less! - he's reached middle age with a third-grader's grasp of early America. In fact, he's mislaid more than a century of American history, the period separating Columbus' landing in 1492 from the arrival of English colonists at Jamestown in 16-oh-something. Did nothing happen in between?
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1 out of 5 stars
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Just Not For Me
- By Sara on 10-25-15
By: Tony Horwitz
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Lords of the Horizons
- A History of the Ottoman Empire
- By: Jason Goodwin
- Narrated by: Grahame Edwards
- Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 62
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 57
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Story4 out of 5 stars 56
The Ottoman Empire has long exerted a strong pull on Western minds and hearts. For over 600 years the empire swelled and declined, rising from a dusty fiefdom in the foothills of Anatolia to a power which ruled over the Danube and the Euphrates with the richest court in Europe. But its decline was prodigious, protracted and total.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Good introduction to the Ottomans, bad narration
- By Skeptical on 06-06-18
By: Jason Goodwin
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The Fracture Zone
- A Return to the Balkans
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 129
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 110
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Story4 out of 5 stars 109
Award-winning journalist and author Simon Winchester takes readers on a personal tour of the Balkans. Combining history and interviews with the people who live there, Winchester offers a fascinating glimpse into the complex issues at work in this chaotic region. Unrest in the Balkans has gone on for centuries. A seasoned reporter, Winchester visited the region twenty years ago. When Kosovo reached crisis level in 1997, Winchester thought a return visit to the beleaguered area would help to make sense out of the awful violence.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Loved this-Great combo:Story and History Explained
- By Jeremy on 07-10-14
By: Simon Winchester
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Iberia
- By: James A. Michener
- Narrated by: Larry McKeever
- Length: 37 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 262
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 225
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Story4 out of 5 stars 227
Spain is an immemorial land like no other, one that James A. Michener, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and celebrated citizen of the world, came to love as his own. Iberia is Michener’s enduring nonfiction tribute to his cherished second home. In the fresh and vivid prose that is his trademark, he not only reveals the celebrated history of bullfighters and warrior kings, painters and processions, cathedrals and olive orchards, he also shares the intimate, often hidden country he came to know, where the congeniality of living souls is thrust against the dark weight of history.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Outdated and no storyline.
- By john lundberg on 08-05-17
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The Marches
- A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland
- By: Rory Stewart
- Narrated by: Rory Stewart
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 65
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 59
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Story4 out of 5 stars 59
Ten years after the walk across Central Asia and Afghanistan that he memorialized in The Places in Between, Rory Stewart set out on a new journey, traversing a thousand miles between England and Scotland. Stewart was raised along the border of the two countries, the frontier taking on poignant significance in his understanding of what it means to be both Scottish and English, of his relationship with his father, who's lived on this land his whole life, and of his ties to the rich history and culture of the region.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Uneven and unexpected, still worth it.
- By Nassir on 04-29-17
By: Rory Stewart
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King Leopold's Ghost
- A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
- By: Adam Hochschild
- Narrated by: Geoffrey Howard
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,912
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,591
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,592
In the late 1890s, Edmund Dene Morel, a young British shipping company agent, noticed something strange about the cargoes of his company's ships as they arrived from and departed for the Congo. Incoming ships were crammed with valuable ivory and rubber. Outbound ships carried little more than soldiers and firearms. Correctly concluding that only slave labor could account for these cargoes, Morel almost singlehandedly made this slave-labor regime the premier human rights story in the world.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fascinating
- By Edith on 01-20-11
By: Adam Hochschild
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Seven Ages of Paris
- By: Alistair Horne
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 20 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 188
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 162
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 162
With a keen eye for the telling anecdote and pivotal moment, he portrays an array of vivid incidents to show us how Paris endures through each age, is altered but always emerges more brilliant and beautiful than ever. The Seven Ages of Paris is a great historian's tribute to a city he loves and has spent a lifetime learning to know.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Very well researched, but difficult to follow
- By Aw on 05-23-19
By: Alistair Horne
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Travels with Herodotus
- By: Ryszard Kapuscinski
- Narrated by: Nicolas Coster
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 54
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 42
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 42
From renowned journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski comes this intimate account of his years in the field, traveling for the first time beyond the Iron Curtain to India, China, Ethiopia, and other exotic locales.
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4 out of 5 stars
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The father of journalism
- By James R. Modrall on 06-22-18
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Trail of Hope
- The Anders Army, an Odyssey Across Three Continents
- By: Norman Davies
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 15 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 32
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 29
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 29
In this remarkable work, renowned historian Professor Norman Davies draws from years of meticulous research to recount the compelling story of the Polish II Corps or "Anders Army", and their exceptional journey from the Gulag of Siberia through Iran, the Middle East, and North Africa to the battlefields of Italy to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with Allied forces. Complete with firsthand accounts from the men and women who lived through it, this is a unique record of one of the most fascinating episodes of World War II.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Amazing story of Polish peoples and never giving up hope for free Poland.
- By Peter Chmiel on 09-24-19
By: Norman Davies
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Lotharingia
- A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country
- By: Simon Winder
- Narrated by: Jonathan Cowley
- Length: 18 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 101
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 88
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Story4 out of 5 stars 88
Following Germania and Danubia, the third installment in Simon Winder's personal history of Europe. In 843 AD, the three surviving grandsons of the great emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ways. In a moment of staggering significance, one grandson inherited the area we now know as France, another Germany, and the third received the piece in between: Lotharingia.
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1 out of 5 stars
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The Loquacious Traveler in Middle Earth
- By Doris on 11-22-19
By: Simon Winder
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African Samurai
- The True Story of Yasuke, a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan
- By: Thomas Lockley, Geoffrey Girard
- Narrated by: Gary Furlong
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 833
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 720
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 716
The remarkable life of history’s first foreign-born samurai and his astonishing journey from Northeast Africa to the heights of Japanese society.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Not worth finishing
- By William Shehan on 06-12-19
By: Thomas Lockley, and others