Just because war is hell doesn’t mean your next listen on the subject needs to be long, messy, or painful! I’ve curated a list of titles about wars (most of them actual, legitimate historical events marked by battles and conflict, though not all) with one thing in common: they all run six hours or less! I can’t say this constitutes a comprehensive list of *every* war, but I can vouch for a few of the major ones, including the U.S. Civil War, World War I, World War II, and Vietnam. I also included Sun Tzu, who said the best generals manage never to fight a war, and Reinhold Niebuhr’s gem of pacificist wisdom, The Irony of American History. Finally, I included a battle I know my fellow Audible editors would fight to the bitter end: the Grammar Wars. We would scramble to the barricades in defense of the Oxford comma. All we are saying is: Give audio a chance!
Aiden Gillen (who played Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish in the Game of Thrones) brings to life Sun Tzu’s strategic wisdom from the 6th century B.C.E. in this performance of The Art of War, a customer favorite.
Homer’s epic drops listeners onto the beaches around Troy in the twelfth or thirteenth century B.C.E., where the Greeks have laid siege for nine exhausting years. Hear the action-packed stories of Aeneas, Cassandra, Hector, Paris (Trojans), and Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon, and Ajax (Greeks.) Even the gods take sides!
Does Shakespeare’s 1593 play about the last Plantagenet king count as historical fiction? Let’s just cut to the end of the War of the Roses with the advent of the Tudor Dynasty (which happened in real life in 1485), as performed by Kenneth Branagh and a full cast of star voices.
Historian Alexis Coe draws heavily upon primary sources in this detailed but fast-moving biography of George Washington that dives into his private life as a son, husband, step-father, slave-owner, and corporeal person with lots of aches and pains; she also explores Washington’s public life as a British and Continental Army general and “father of his country.”
Dr. Caroline E. Janney, a professor at The University of Virginia, answers some of the most intriguing, provocative, and enduring questions about the Civil War era in 10 eye-opening lectures that separate myth from memory.
This concise listen covers the conflict that broke out in 1870 and eventually led to the collapse of the Second Empire and the creation of a unified Germany. Spoiler alert: Alsace and Lorraine have Otto von Bismarck and Napoleon III to thank.
World War One began on horseback in 1914, with generals employing bayonet charges to gain ground, and ended with attacks resembling the Nazi blitzkriegs. The scale of devastation was unlike anything the world had seen before: 14 million combatants died, a further 20 million were wounded, and four empires were destroyed. Norman Stone, one of world's greatest military historians, wrote a dazzlingly lucid and succinct history of the conflict, and Simon Prebble’s masterful narration gives listeners further clarity.
The series of Very Short Introductions from Oxford University Press often pack a lot of history into a few fascinating hours. Johnny Heller narrates World War II with energy and verve, managing to convey the importance – and the human cost – of the invasion of Poland in 1939, Germany’s battles in the Soviet Union, the Allied victories in Europe in 1944, and the end of the War in the Pacific in 1945.
“If I were God, what would you want for Christmas?” With a thousand-yard stare, a haggard and bloodied marine looked incredulously at the war correspondent who asked him this question. In an answer that took “almost forever,” the marine responded, “Give me tomorrow.”For many of the men of George Company, or “Bloody George” - one of the Forgotten War’s most decorated yet unrecognized companies - this would be their last day. Lloyd James narrates the epic story of George Company, Spartans for the modern age.
America entered Vietnam certain of its Cold War doctrines and convinced of its moral mission to save the world from the advance of communism. However, the war was not at all what the United States expected. Outnumbered and outgunned, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces resorted to a guerrilla war based on the theories of Mao Zedong of China, while the US responded with firepower and overwhelming force. The conflict was brutal and prolonged, and its consequences would change America forever
Veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq show that humor can be a path to healing. Thank you for your service and welcome home!
For years I have argued that the War on Christmas is a straw man, but what if the truth has been hiding in plain sight for years, courtesy of author Dr. Seuss and narrator Walter Matthau?
OK, I admit it: I made that one up on the grounds that this masterpiece is a warning against the arrogance of performative virtue. Many Americans know Reinhold Niebuhr as the theologian who claimed to have authored the “Serenity Prayer,” but this deeply perceptive gem has led generations of listeners to rethink the ethics of war and peace.
If the Grammar Wars aren’t real, then why are all of the Audible Editors ready to climb the barricades in defense of the Oxford comma? One Audible Listener answered this question and also described this listen perfectly in his review: “This is the radio broadcast that inspired the book. It's a very clever program that helps a person think about punctuation and its uses. It shows, for instance, how a misplaced comma can have deadly consequences. ‘Let's eat grandpa!’ means something entirely different than ‘Lets eat, grandpa!’ ”
