Assassinations That Changed the World
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Narrated by:
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David Thorpe
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By:
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Nigel Cawthorne
About this listen
48 assassinations - from Archduke Franz Ferdinand to Osama Bin Laden - that changed the world.
We live in an age of asymmetric warfare. Huge armies no longer face each other on the battlefield. Instead, heads of major powers and lone assassins (or martyrs) target each other to pursue their agendas. President Donald Trump felt it necessary to use drones to blow away the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's Qasem Soleimani - a mastermind of terrorism in the Middle East who threatened the lives of US troops - and President Barack Obama felt fully justified in sending in US Navy SEALs to take out Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. This is the nature of modern warfare. And it is only going to get worse.
When 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, in 1914, he triggered the First World War. Few assassinations have had such devastating consequences, but political assassinations have always changed the world - often in ways that the assassins and their cohorts could not have predicted.
The murder of John F. Kennedy left Lyndon B. Johnson free to escalate the war in Vietnam. However, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, while not derailing the demands for African American civil rights in the US, did lead many to abandoning his commitment to nonviolence and adopting more radical means.
In a world globalised by social media, more lone-wolf assassins seek their 15 minutes of fame by taking out a famous figure, while leaders of world powers have everything to gain by decapitating terrorist organisations, employing the latest surveillance technology to obliterate their leaders.
There are 48 assassinations that changed the world in this book. Rest assured that in the coming years we will see many more.
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Story
In this remarkably human portrait of one of the 20th century's most complicated personalities, author Andrew Scott Cooper traces Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's life from childhood through his ascension to the throne in 1941. He highlights the turbulence of the postwar era, during which the shah survived assassination attempts and coup plots to build a modern, pro-Western state and launch Iran onto the world stage as one of the world's top five powers.
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Excellent account of a pivotal and sad time
- By Guerin Shea on 09-05-16
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The Butcher's Trail
- How the Search for Balkan War Criminals Became the World's Most Successful Manhunt
- By: Julian Borger
- Narrated by: Paul Hodgson
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Written with a thrilling narrative pull, The Butcher's Trail chronicles the pursuit and capture of the Balkan war criminals indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. Borger recounts how Radovan Karadžic and Ratko Mladic - both now on trial in The Hague - were finally tracked down and describes the intrigue behind the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president who became the first head of state to stand before an international tribunal for crimes perpetrated in a time of war.
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The most comprehensive and unbiased account of ICTY’s inception and development to date
- By AR on 04-18-22
By: Julian Borger
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Bitter Freedom
- Ireland in a Revolutionary World
- By: Maurice Walsh
- Narrated by: Michael Healy
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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The Irish Revolution has long been mythologized in American culture but seldom understood. For too long the story of Irish independence and its aftermath has been told only within an Anglo-Irish context. Now, in the critically acclaimed Bitter Freedom, journalist Maurice Walsh, with "a novelist's eye for the illuminating detail of everyday lives in extremis" ( Prospect), places revolutionary Ireland in the panorama of the global disorder born of the terrible slaughter of World War I and provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human face of the conflict.
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Helpful for Irish Americans
- By Matthew Tozer on 04-12-17
By: Maurice Walsh
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Lenin
- The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror
- By: Victor Sebestyen
- Narrated by: Jonathan Aris
- Length: 20 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawing on new research, including the diaries, memoirs, and personal letters of both Lenin and his friends, Victor Sebestyen's unique biography - the first in English in nearly two decades - is not only a political examination of one of the most important historical figures of the 20th century but a portrait of Lenin the man. Unexpectedly, Lenin was someone who loved nature, hunting, and fishing and could identify hundreds of species of plants, a despotic ruler whose closest ties and friendships were with women.
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Lenin totally took an extra piece of that cake.
- By John Gathly on 05-14-19
By: Victor Sebestyen
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Killing a King
- The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel
- By: Dan Ephron
- Narrated by: Assaf Cohen
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin remains the single most consequential event in Israel's recent history and one that fundamentally altered the trajectory for both Israel and the Palestinians. Killing a King relates the parallel stories of Rabin and his stalker, Yigal Amir, over the two years leading up to the assassination, as one of them planned political deals he hoped would lead to peace - and the other plotted murder.
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Tragic history well presented.
- By Mmday on 02-28-16
By: Dan Ephron
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Inside the Kingdom
- Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia
- By: Robert Lacey
- Narrated by: Robert Lacey
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling author Robert Lacey tells us what happened in the Middle East's oil-rich powerhouse---while we weren't looking.
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Inside the Kingdom
- By Ibrahim on 03-19-10
By: Robert Lacey
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A Thousand Hills
- Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It
- By: Stephen Kinzer
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Paul Kagame grew up as a wretched refugee. He and a group of comrades, determined to force their way back home after a generation of exile, designed one of the most audacious covert operations in the history of clandestine war. Then, after taking power, they amazed the world by stabilizing and reviving their devastated country.
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Best Most Comprehensive Work on Rwanda
- By Greg on 07-30-10
By: Stephen Kinzer
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Hitler: History in an Hour
- By: Rupert Colley
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 1 hr and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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History for busy people. Hitler in an Hour is the concise biography of Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler.Covering Hitler’s early life, military service in World War I and eventual rise to power, first as the leader of the Nazi party and then to head of state, Hitler in an Hour covers all the key events the life of the 20th century’s most infamous dictator.
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Good Value
- By Slade on 12-13-12
By: Rupert Colley
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A Savage War of Peace
- Algeria 1954-1962
- By: Alistair Horne
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 29 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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The Algerian War lasted from 1954 to 1962. It caused the fall of six French governments, led to the collapse of the Fourth Republic, and came close to provoking a civil war on French soil. More than a million Muslim Algerians died in the conflict, and as many European settlers were driven into exile. From the perspective of half a century, it looks less like the last colonial war than the first postmodern one.
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Excellent history of France's Viet Nam
- By David on 04-10-16
By: Alistair Horne