The Fire and the Darkness
The Bombing of Dresden, 1945
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Narrated by:
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Leighton Pugh
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By:
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Sinclair McKay
About this listen
“Beautifully-crafted, elegiac, compelling - The Fire and the Darkness delivers with a dark intensity and incisive compassion rarely equalled. Authentic and authoritative, a masterpiece of its genre.” (Damien Lewis, author of Zero Six Bravo)
A gripping work of narrative nonfiction recounting the history of the Dresden Bombing, one of the most devastating attacks of World War II.
On February 13, 1945 at 10:03 p.m., British bombers began one of the most devastating attacks of WWII: the bombing of Dresden. The first contingent killed people and destroyed buildings, roads, and other structures. The second rained down fire, turning the streets into a blast furnace, the shelters into ovens, and whipping up a molten hurricane in which the citizens of Dresden were burned, baked, or suffocated to death.
Early the next day, American bombers finished off what was left. Sinclair McKay’s The Fire and the Darkness is a pulse-pounding work of history that looks at the life of the city in the days before the attack, tracks each moment of the bombing, and considers the long period of reconstruction and recovery. The Fire and the Darkness is powered by McKay’s reconstruction of this unthinkable terror from the points of view of the ordinary civilians: Margot Hille, an apprentice brewery worker; Gisela Reichelt, a 10-year-old schoolgirl; boys conscripted into the Hitler Youth; choristers of the Kreuzkirche choir; artists, shop assistants, and classical musicians, as well as the Nazi officials stationed there.
What happened that night in Dresden was calculated annihilation in a war that was almost over. Sinclair McKay’s brilliant work takes a complex, human view of this terrible night and its aftermath in a gripping audiobook.
A Macmillan Audio production fron St. Martin's Press
"McKay’s rich narrative and descriptive gifts provide us with an elegant yet unflinching account of that terrible night...to be recommended as a very readable and finely crafted addition to the literature on one of modern history’s most morally fraught military operations.” (Wall Street Journal)
©2020 Sinclair McKay (P)2020 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Based on official American, French, and German documents, histories, personal memoirs, and the author's interviews with several of the story's key participants, Escape from Paris crosses the traditional lines of World War II history with tense drama of air combat over Europe, the intrigue of occupied Paris, and courageous American and Allied pilots and French resistance fighters pitted against Nazi thugs. All of this set in one of the world's most beautiful and captivating cities.
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Listen
- By MDowns on 03-07-20
By: Stephen Harding
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The Correspondents
- Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II
- By: Judith Mackrell
- Narrated by: Julie Teal
- Length: 17 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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On the front lines of the Second World War, a contingent of female journalists were bravely waging their own battle. Barred from combat zones and faced with entrenched prejudice and bureaucratic restrictions, these women were forced to fight for the right to work on equal terms with men.
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Narration was nails on a chalkboard
- By aunt deb on 12-20-21
By: Judith Mackrell
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Checkmate in Berlin
- The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World
- By: Giles Milton
- Narrated by: Giles Milton
- Length: 13 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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From a master of popular history, the lively, immersive story of the race to seize Berlin in the aftermath of World War II as it’s never been told before.
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Excellent history of the early days of the Cold War
- By Matt on 08-28-21
By: Giles Milton
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Firestorm
- Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden
- By: Marshall De Bruhl
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 13 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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On February 13 and 14, 1945, three successive waves of British and U.S. aircraft rained down thousands of tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on the largely undefended German city of Dresden. Night and day, Dresden was engulfed in a vast sea of flame, a firestorm that generated 1,500-degree temperatures and hurricane-force winds. Thousands suffocated in underground shelters where they had fled to escape the inferno above.
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slanted view of air attacks during war
- By Ed Yusis on 03-31-14
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Dutch Girl
- Audrey Hepburn and World War II
- By: Robert Matzen, Luca Dotti - foreword
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Twenty-five years after her passing, Audrey Hepburn remains the most beloved of all Hollywood stars, known as much for her role as UNICEF ambassador as for films like Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany's. Several biographies have chronicled her stardom, but none has covered her intense experiences through five years of Nazi occupation in the Netherlands. According to her son, Luca Dotti, "The war made my mother who she was."
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Good story, poor narration
- By sas on 07-09-19
By: Robert Matzen, and others
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The Last Jews in Berlin
- By: Leonard Gross
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, approximately 160,000 Jews called Berlin home. By 1943 less than 5,000 remained in the nation's capital, the epicenter of Nazism, and by the end of the war, that number had dwindled to 1,000. All the others had died in air raids, starved to death, committed suicide, or been shipped off to the death camps. In this captivating and harrowing book, Leonard Gross details the real-life stories of a dozen Jewish men and women who spent the final 27 months of World War II underground, hiding in plain sight.
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Very good WWll Jewish lives in Berlin
- By it.is grat!' on 10-30-24
By: Leonard Gross
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Invasion
- The Inside Story of Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival
- By: Luke Harding
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In a damning, inspiring, and breathtaking narrative of what is likely to be a turning point for Europe—and the world—Guardian correspondent and New York Times bestselling author Luke Harding reports firsthand on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. When, just before dawn on February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin launched a series of brutal attacks, Harding was there, on the ground in Kyiv. But this senseless violence was met with astounding resilience—from, among others, the country’s embattled president—and the courage of a people prepared to risk everything to preserve their nation’s freedom.
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Pray For Ukraine
- By Tyler 963 on 12-03-22
By: Luke Harding
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D-Day Girls
- The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II
- By: Sarah Rose
- Narrated by: Sarah Rose
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1942, the Allies were losing, Germany seemed unstoppable, and every able man in England was on the front lines. To "set Europe ablaze," in the words of Winston Churchill, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), whose spies were trained in everything from demolition to sharpshooting, was forced to do something unprecedented: recruit women. Thirty-nine answered the call, leaving their lives and families to become saboteurs in France.
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an excellent story ruined by horrible narration
- By Joshua on 04-23-19
By: Sarah Rose
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The Bomber Mafia
- A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War
- By: Malcolm Gladwell
- Narrated by: Malcolm Gladwell
- Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Malcolm Gladwell, author of New York Times best sellers including Talking to Strangers and host of the podcast Revisionist History, uses original interviews, archival footage, and his trademark insight to weave together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in Central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard. As listeners hear these stories unfurl, Gladwell examines one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history.
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Listen to the same story on his podcast for free
- By Dustin on 04-28-21
By: Malcolm Gladwell
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The Road to Station X
- From Debutante Ball to Fighter-Plane Factory to Bletchley Park: A Memoir of One Woman’s Journey Through World War Two
- By: Sarah Baring
- Narrated by: Polly Lee
- Length: 6 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In 1938, Sarah Baring was enjoying life as a young debutante. Only a few years later, at the height of World War Two, she was working alongside some of the greatest minds of Britain in their code-breaking operations at Bletchley Park. How did she end up in the top-secret world of cyphers and codes?
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Amazing historical fiction
- By Andrea Gengler on 07-23-22
By: Sarah Baring
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Into the Forest
- A Holocaust Story of Survival, Triumph, and Love
- By: Rebecca Frankel
- Narrated by: Natalie Pela
- Length: 11 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods—through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids—until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war, they trekked across the Alps into Italy, where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States.
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Great story with an added benefit
- By Scottsville Stu on 12-30-21
By: Rebecca Frankel
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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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Story
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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Harry Cliff - a University of Cambridge particle physicist and researcher on the Large Hadron Collider - sets out in pursuit of answers. He ventures to the largest underground research facility in the world, deep beneath Italy's Gran Sasso mountains, where scientists gaze into the heart of the Sun using the most elusive of particles, the ghostly neutrino. He visits CERN in Switzerland to explore the "Antimatter Factory," where the stuff of science fiction is manufactured daily (and we're close to knowing whether it falls up).
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Down the rabbit hole in a most fascinating way!
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What listeners say about The Fire and the Darkness
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- vidar
- 04-30-24
Dresden Germany Bombing WWII
Wow, what a book! I liked that it told the story of some of those who lived in Dresden. I talked to a woman who was there. She said she sat on her suitcase in an apartment and waited to die. Great story to learn about the horrors of war, and afterward how former enemies became friends to rebuild the city.
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- Alex H. Rothwell
- 12-02-22
Excellent narration
This book is super, Bravo to Mr. McKay and Mr Pugh ! A complete concise history or this horrible event, leaves the reader as myself much to think about.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Buretto
- 08-14-20
Comprehensive account of terror bombing
The story has a lot of preamble, setting the history and environment of Dresden, and quite a bit of aftermath, political posturing and debate over the legitimacy of the action. But the actual account of the bombings, though rather concise, is chilling in its gruesomeness. The author does a detailed job of conveying the horrors, beyond the common metrics of area destroyed and lives lost (though a fair amount of time is devoted to that). It put me in mind of the book "Symphony for the City of the Dead", about Dmitri Shostakovich and the siege of Leningrad, with its grisly detail of the true destruction. It gives a fair hearing to whether it deserves to be a considered a war crime. But like with the firebombing of Tokyo, and dozens of other cities in Japan and Germany, the conclusion is inescapable. They certainly were, only hidden beneath a veneer of being on the side of justice, and history being written by the victors.
The author does rely a bit on familiar sources regarding Dresden, referencing Kurt Vonnegut and his creation, Billy Pilgrim, extensively. Though why the narrator felt the need to do a Stanley Tucci impersonation in quoting Vonnegut is beyond me. It's his go-to American accent, I suppose. Otherwise, it was quite a captivating story. Slow at times, but merely setting the stage for the fiercely grim specifics of the bombings. As with in Tokyo and other cities, these may be considered even more ghastly than the atomic bombings later, in the terror created with wave after wave, creating firestorms sustained over several hours. A good book for everyone to learn that war crimes aren't only committed by "the bad guys".
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- Kevin Bushnell
- 01-01-24
Hauntingly Prescient
Although this is a historical piece about a particular night in 1945, this book should be read as a warning to all the warmongering in the 21st-century. Having just finished listening to it now in the fall and end of 2023, the abuse of the word Dresden in the wake of October 7 should now be called out as either an ignorant abuse, or a thinly veiled excuse in a failed attempt to defend genocide
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