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Long Way Back to the River Kwai
- A Harrowing True Story of Survival in World War II
- Narrated by: Danny Campbell
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
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Publisher's summary
The astounding memoir of a World War II veteran who spent three and a half years in the slave-labor camps made famous by The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Loet Velmans was 17 when the Germans invaded Holland. He and his family fled to London on the Dutch Coast Guard cutter Seaman’s Hope and then sailed to the Dutch East Indies - now Indonesia - where he joined the Dutch army. In March 1942, the Japanese invaded the archipelago and made prisoners of the Dutch soldiers. For the next three and a half years Velmans and his fellow POWs toiled in slave-labor camps, building a railroad through the dense jungle on the Burmese-Thailand border so the Japanese could invade India. Some 200,000 POWs and slave laborers died building this Death Railway. Velmans, though suffering from malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, and unspeakable mistreatment, never gave up hope. Fifty-seven years later he returned to revisit the place where he should have died and where he had buried his closest friend. From that emotional visit sprung this stunning memoir.
Long Way Back to the River Kwai is a simply told but searing memoir of World War II - a testimonial to one man’s indomitable will to live that will take its place beside the Diary of Ann Frank, Bridge over the River Kwai, and Edith’s Story.
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While many know the fiction from having seen the movie Bridge On the River Kwai, few alive know the facts. Loet Velmans, a 17-year-old Dutch émigré was beaten, enslaved, and set to work on the Burmese railroad in camps where as many as 200,000 died. His memoir, performed with a tone of reasonableness that belies the story’s outrage, is one of a mental and emotional struggle. With a return to the River Kwai 57 years after an indomitable spirit allowed him to survive as a catalyst, Velmans searches for an answer to a paradox of humanity: How can one group of people impose near-unimaginable, inhumane horrors on another?/p>
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Story
In the days and months after Pearl Harbor, the lives of Japanese Americans across the continent and Hawaii were changed forever. In this unforgettable chronicle of war-time America and the battlefields of Europe, Daniel James Brown portrays the journey of Rudy Tokiwa, Fred Shiosaki, and Kats Miho, who volunteered for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and were deployed to France, Germany, and Italy, where they were asked to do the near impossible. Brown also tells the story of these soldiers' parents, immigrants who were forced to submit to life in concentration camps on U.S. soil.
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Wow
- By Tbone McCoy on 06-13-21
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We Band of Angels
- The Untold Story of the American Women Trapped on Bataan
- By: Elizabeth M. Norman
- Narrated by: Dina Pearlman
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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We Band of Angelsis the story of women searching for adventure, caught up in the drama and danger of war. On the same day the Japanese Imperial Navy launched its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, it also struck American bases in the Far East, chief among them the Philippines. That raid led to the first major land battle for America in World War II and, in the end, to the largest defeat and surrender of American forces.
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A very moving tribute!
- By mark nelsen on 05-17-17
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No Surrender
- A Father, a Son, and an Extraordinary Act of Heroism That Continues to Live on Today
- By: Christopher Edmonds, Douglas Century
- Narrated by: James Lurie
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Part contemporary detective story, part World War II historical narrative, No Surrender is the inspiring true story of Roddie Edmonds, a Knoxville-born enlistee who risked his life during the final days of World War II to save others from murderous Nazis, and the lasting effects his actions had on thousands of lives - then and now.
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Personal and impactful
- By Rodney on 10-10-19
By: Christopher Edmonds, and others
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The Nine
- The True Story of a Band of Women Who Survived the Worst of Nazi Germany
- By: Gwen Strauss
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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The Nine follows the true story of the author’s great aunt Hélène Podliasky, who led a band of nine female resistance fighters as they escaped a German forced labor camp and made a 10-day journey across the front lines of World War II from Germany back to Paris. Drawing on incredible research, this powerful, heart-stopping narrative is a moving tribute to the power of humanity and friendship in the darkest of times.
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Soooo good!
- By anne simpson on 09-28-21
By: Gwen Strauss
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Midnight in Broad Daylight
- A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds
- By: Pamela Rotner Sakamoto
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 11 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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After their father's death, Harry, Frank, and Pierce Fukuhara - all born and raised in the Pacific Northwest - moved to Hiroshima, their mother's ancestral home. Eager to go back to his own land - America - Harry returned in the late 1930s. Then came Pearl Harbor. Despite being sent to an internment camp, Harry dutifully volunteered to serve his country. Back in Hiroshima, his brothers, Frank and Pierce, became soldiers in the Japanese Imperial Army.
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A must listen
- By Jon on 02-01-16
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The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1
- An Experiment in Literary Investigation
- By: Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
- Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
- Length: 25 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Volume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.
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Should be required reading in US schools
- By Richard on 01-01-21
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A Guest of the Reich
- The Story of American Heiress Gertrude Legendre's Dramatic Captivity and Escape from Nazi Germany
- By: Peter Finn
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Gertrude "Gertie" Legendre was a big-game hunter from a wealthy industrial family who lived a charmed life in Jazz Age America. Her adventurous spirit made her the inspiration for the Broadway play Holiday, which became a film starring Katharine Hepburn. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Legendre, by then married and a mother of two, joined the OSS, the wartime spy organization that preceded the CIA.
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Fascinating woman in a horrible period in history
- By Marlette on 12-03-19
By: Peter Finn
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The Note Through the Wire
- The Incredible True Story of a Prisoner of War and a Resistance Heroine
- By: Doug Gold
- Narrated by: Conrad Coleby
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In the heart of Nazi-occupied Europe, two people meet fleetingly in a chance encounter. One an underground resistance fighter, a bold young woman determined to vanquish the enemy occupiers; the other a prisoner of war, a man longing to escape the confines of the camp so he can battle again. A crumpled note passes between these two strangers, slipped through the wire of the compound, and sets them on a course that will change their lives forever.
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Such devotion
- By smilin29 on 01-01-24
By: Doug Gold
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The Crowded Hour
- Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century
- By: Clay Risen
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 12 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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The “gripping” (The Washington Post) story of the most famous regiment in American history: the Rough Riders, a motley group of soldiers led by Theodore Roosevelt, whose daring exploits marked the beginning of American imperialism in the 20th century. Both a portrait of these men, few of whom were traditional soldiers, and of the Spanish-American War itself, The Crowded Hour dives deep into the daily lives and struggles of Roosevelt and his regiment. Using diaries, letters, and memoirs, Risen illuminates an influential moment in American history.
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Dissapointed
- By Bill on 09-13-19
By: Clay Risen
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The Boy Between Worlds
- A Biography
- By: Annejet van der Zijl, Kristen Gehrman - translator
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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When they fell in love in 1928, Rika and Waldemar could have not been more different. She was a thirty-seven-year-old Dutch-born mother, estranged from her husband. He was her immigrant boarder, not yet twenty, and a wealthy Surinamese descendant of slaves. The child they have together, brown skinned and blue eyed, brings the couple great joy yet raises some eyebrows. Until the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands explodes their promising life. What unfolds is more than the astonishing story of a love that prevailed over convention. It’s also the quest of a young boy.
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Should Be Required Reading
- By Pam Pearson on 08-20-19
By: Annejet van der Zijl, and others
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Ivan's War
- Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945
- By: Catherine Merridale
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 16 hrs
- Unabridged
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Of the 30 million who fought in the eastern front of World War II, 8 million died, driven forward in suicidal charges, shattered by German shells and tanks. They were the men and women of the Red Army, a ragtag mass of soldiers who confronted Europe's most lethal fighting force and by 1945 had defeated it. Sixty years have passed since their epic triumph, but the heart and mind of Ivan - as the ordinary Russian soldier was called-remain a mystery. We know something about how the soldiers died, but nearly nothing about how they lived, how they saw the world, or why they fought.
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Bird's eye view of the Eastern Front in WW2.
- By Mike From Mesa on 01-16-20
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The Patient Assassin
- A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge, and India's Quest for Independence
- By: Anita Anand
- Narrated by: Anita Anand
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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The “compelling [and] vivid” (The New York Times Book Review) true story of a man who claimed to be a survivor of a 1919 British massacre in India, his elaborate 20-year plan for revenge, and the mix of truth and legend that made him a hero to hundreds of millions.
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more interesting history
- By Autodidact on 09-07-19
By: Anita Anand