-
The Language of Thieves
- My Family's Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate
- Narrated by: Qarie Marshall
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $20.00
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Publisher's summary
Centuries ago in middle Europe, a coded language appeared, scrawled in graffiti and spoken only by people who were wiz (in the know). This hybrid language, dubbed Rotwelsch, facilitated survival for people in flight - whether escaping persecution or just down on their luck. It was a language of the road associated with vagabonds, travelers, Jews, and thieves that blended words from Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Romani, Czech, and other European languages and was rich in expressions for police, jail, or experiencing trouble, such as being in a pickle. This renegade language unsettled those in power, who responded by trying to stamp it out, none more vehemently than the Nazis.
As a boy, Martin Puchner learned this secret language from his father and uncle. Only as an adult did he discover, through a poisonous 1930s tract on Jewish names buried in the archives of Harvard’s Widener Library, that his own grandfather had been a committed Nazi who despised this language of thieves. Interweaving family memoir with an adventurous foray into the mysteries of language, Puchner crafts an entirely original narrative. In a language born of migration and survival, he discovers a witty and resourceful spirit of tolerance that remains essential in our volatile present.
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Gangsters vs. Nazis
- How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in Wartime America
- By: Michael Benson
- Narrated by: Gabriel Vaughan
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As Adolph Hitler rose to power in 1930s Germany, a growing wave of fascism began to take root on American soil. Nazi activists started to gather in major American cities, and by 1933, there were more than one hundred anti-Semitic groups operating openly in the United States. Few Americans dared to speak out or fight back—until an organized resistance of notorious mobsters waged their own personal war against the Nazis in their midst. Gangland-style.
-
-
What, you couldn’t find one culturally Jewish narrator?
- By Deborah Bancroft on 12-29-22
By: Michael Benson
-
Arabs
- A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes, and Empires
- By: Tim Mackintosh-Smith
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 25 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This kaleidoscopic book covers almost 3,000 years of Arab history and shines a light on the footloose Arab peoples and tribes who conquered lands and disseminated their language and culture over vast distances. Tracing this process to the origins of the Arabic language, rather than the advent of Islam, Tim Mackintosh-Smith begins his narrative more than a thousand years before Muhammad and focuses on how Arabic, both spoken and written, has functioned as a vital source of shared cultural identity over the millennia.
-
-
Good book bad narration
- By Anonymous User on 09-18-19
-
Weavers, Scribes, and Kings
- A New History of the Ancient Near East
- By: Amanda H. Podany
- Narrated by: Amanda H. Podany
- Length: 18 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this sweeping history of the ancient Near East, Amanda Podany takes listeners on a gripping journey from the creation of the world's first cities to the conquests of Alexander the Great. The book is built around the life stories of many ancient men and women, from kings, priestesses, and merchants to brickmakers, musicians, and weavers. Their habits of daily life, beliefs, triumphs, and crises, and the changes that people faced over time are explored through their own written words and the buildings, cities, and empires in which they lived.
-
-
word of advice
- By Jim Davis on 08-04-23
By: Amanda H. Podany
-
1774
- The Long Year of Revolution
- By: Mary Beth Norton
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 16 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From one of our most acclaimed and original colonial historians, a groundbreaking book - the first to look at the critical "long year" of 1774 and the revolutionary change that took place from December 1773 to mid-April 1775, from the Boston Tea Party and the First Continental Congress to the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
-
-
The US revolutionary war was baked in by 1775
- By Randall Parker on 04-18-20
By: Mary Beth Norton
-
The Serpent and the Rainbow
- A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic
- By: Wade Davis
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In April 1982, ethnobotanist Wade Davis arrived in Haiti to investigate two documented cases of zombies - people who had reappeared in Haitian society years after they had been officially declared dead and had been buried. Drawn into a netherworld of rituals and celebrations, Davis penetrated the vodoun mystique deeply enough to place zombification in its proper context within vodoun culture. In the course of his investigation, Davis came to realize that the story of vodoun is the history of Haiti.
-
-
Wade Davis is a wonderful storyteller
- By J Plotnikoff on 10-31-22
By: Wade Davis
-
Teasing Secrets from the Dead
- My Investigations at America’s Most Infamous Crime Scenes
- By: Emily Craig PhD
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Emily Craig has been a witness to history, helping to seek justice for thousands of murder victims, both famous and unknown. It’s a personal story that you won’t soon forget. Emily first became intrigued by forensics work when, as a respected medical illustrator, she was called in by the local police to create a model of a murder victim’s face. Her fascination with that case led to a dramatic midlife career change: She would go back to school to become a forensic anthropologist - and one of the most respected and best-known “bone hunters” in the nation.
-
-
A vanity project.
- By Book fiend Kel on 07-17-22
By: Emily Craig PhD
-
Gangsters vs. Nazis
- How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in Wartime America
- By: Michael Benson
- Narrated by: Gabriel Vaughan
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As Adolph Hitler rose to power in 1930s Germany, a growing wave of fascism began to take root on American soil. Nazi activists started to gather in major American cities, and by 1933, there were more than one hundred anti-Semitic groups operating openly in the United States. Few Americans dared to speak out or fight back—until an organized resistance of notorious mobsters waged their own personal war against the Nazis in their midst. Gangland-style.
-
-
What, you couldn’t find one culturally Jewish narrator?
- By Deborah Bancroft on 12-29-22
By: Michael Benson
-
Arabs
- A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes, and Empires
- By: Tim Mackintosh-Smith
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 25 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This kaleidoscopic book covers almost 3,000 years of Arab history and shines a light on the footloose Arab peoples and tribes who conquered lands and disseminated their language and culture over vast distances. Tracing this process to the origins of the Arabic language, rather than the advent of Islam, Tim Mackintosh-Smith begins his narrative more than a thousand years before Muhammad and focuses on how Arabic, both spoken and written, has functioned as a vital source of shared cultural identity over the millennia.
-
-
Good book bad narration
- By Anonymous User on 09-18-19
-
Weavers, Scribes, and Kings
- A New History of the Ancient Near East
- By: Amanda H. Podany
- Narrated by: Amanda H. Podany
- Length: 18 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this sweeping history of the ancient Near East, Amanda Podany takes listeners on a gripping journey from the creation of the world's first cities to the conquests of Alexander the Great. The book is built around the life stories of many ancient men and women, from kings, priestesses, and merchants to brickmakers, musicians, and weavers. Their habits of daily life, beliefs, triumphs, and crises, and the changes that people faced over time are explored through their own written words and the buildings, cities, and empires in which they lived.
-
-
word of advice
- By Jim Davis on 08-04-23
By: Amanda H. Podany
-
1774
- The Long Year of Revolution
- By: Mary Beth Norton
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 16 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From one of our most acclaimed and original colonial historians, a groundbreaking book - the first to look at the critical "long year" of 1774 and the revolutionary change that took place from December 1773 to mid-April 1775, from the Boston Tea Party and the First Continental Congress to the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
-
-
The US revolutionary war was baked in by 1775
- By Randall Parker on 04-18-20
By: Mary Beth Norton
-
The Serpent and the Rainbow
- A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic
- By: Wade Davis
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In April 1982, ethnobotanist Wade Davis arrived in Haiti to investigate two documented cases of zombies - people who had reappeared in Haitian society years after they had been officially declared dead and had been buried. Drawn into a netherworld of rituals and celebrations, Davis penetrated the vodoun mystique deeply enough to place zombification in its proper context within vodoun culture. In the course of his investigation, Davis came to realize that the story of vodoun is the history of Haiti.
-
-
Wade Davis is a wonderful storyteller
- By J Plotnikoff on 10-31-22
By: Wade Davis
-
Teasing Secrets from the Dead
- My Investigations at America’s Most Infamous Crime Scenes
- By: Emily Craig PhD
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Emily Craig has been a witness to history, helping to seek justice for thousands of murder victims, both famous and unknown. It’s a personal story that you won’t soon forget. Emily first became intrigued by forensics work when, as a respected medical illustrator, she was called in by the local police to create a model of a murder victim’s face. Her fascination with that case led to a dramatic midlife career change: She would go back to school to become a forensic anthropologist - and one of the most respected and best-known “bone hunters” in the nation.
-
-
A vanity project.
- By Book fiend Kel on 07-17-22
By: Emily Craig PhD
-
A World Undone
- The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918
- By: G. J. Meyer
- Narrated by: Robin Sachs
- Length: 27 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a summer day in 1914, a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. While the world slumbered, monumental forces were shaken. In less than a month, a combination of ambition, deceit, fear, jealousy, missed opportunities, and miscalculation sent Austro-Hungarian troops marching into Serbia, German troops streaming toward Paris, and a vast Russian army into war, with England as its ally. As crowds cheered their armies on, no one could guess what lay ahead in the First World War.
-
-
A great book!
- By Jodi Bernard on 07-11-23
By: G. J. Meyer
-
A New World Begins
- The History of the French Revolution
- By: Jeremy D. Popkin
- Narrated by: Pete Cross, Jeremy D. Popkin
- Length: 21 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The principles of the French Revolution remain the only possible basis for a just society - even if, after more than 200 years, they are more contested than ever before. In A New World Begins, Jeremy D. Popkin offers a riveting account of the revolution that puts the listener in the thick of the debates and the violence that led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a new society.
-
-
Narration
- By Kindle Customer on 04-26-22
By: Jeremy D. Popkin
-
Islands of Abandonment
- Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape
- By: Cal Flyn
- Narrated by: Cal Flyn
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Some of the only truly feral cattle in the world wander a long-abandoned island off the northernmost tip of Scotland. A variety of wildlife not seen in many lifetimes has rebounded on the irradiated grounds of Chernobyl. A lush forest supports thousands of species that are extinct or endangered everywhere else on earth in the Korean peninsula's narrow DMZ.
-
-
Stunningly necessary
- By Mattia on 09-02-21
By: Cal Flyn
-
The Urge
- Our History of Addiction
- By: Carl Erik Fisher
- Narrated by: Mark Deakins
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As a psychiatrist in training fresh from medical school, Carl Erik Fisher found himself face-to-face with an addiction crisis that nearly cost him everything. Desperate to make sense of his condition, he turned to the history of addiction, learning that our society’s current quagmire is only part of a centuries-old struggle to treat addictive behavior.
-
-
Nailed it
- By Paully on 11-23-22
By: Carl Erik Fisher
-
Empires of the Sky
- Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men's Epic Duel to Rule the World
- By: Alexander Rose
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 22 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the dawn of the 20th century, when human flight was still considered an impossibility, Germany’s Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin vied with the Wright Brothers to build the world’s first successful flying machine. As the Wrights labored to invent the airplane, Zeppelin fathered the remarkable airship, sparking a bitter rivalry between the two types of aircraft and their innovators that would last for decades, in the quest to control one of humanity’s most inspiring achievements. And it was the airship—not the airplane—that led the way.
-
-
Actually, a One-Sided Story
- By JP on 08-03-20
By: Alexander Rose
-
Journey of the Mind
- How Thinking Emerged from Chaos
- By: Ogi Ogas, Sai Gaddam
- Narrated by: Cary Hite
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Why do minds exist? How did mud and stone develop into beings that can experience longing, regret, love, and compassion - beings that are aware of their own experience? Until recently, science offered few answers to these existential questions. Journey of the Mind is the first book to offer a unified account of the mind that explains how consciousness, language, the Self, and civilization emerged incrementally out of chaos.
-
-
Consciousness: objectively physical yet subjective
- By Jeffrey W. Rudisel on 04-16-22
By: Ogi Ogas, and others
-
Who Says You're Dead?
- Medical & Ethical Dilemmas for the Curious & Concerned
- By: Jacob M. Appel MD
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Drawing upon the author's two decades teaching medical ethics, as well as his work as a practicing psychiatrist, this profound and addictive little book offers up challenging ethical dilemmas and asks listeners, What would you do? In short, engaging scenarios, Dr. Appel takes on hot-button issues that many of us will confront: genetic screening, sexuality, privacy, doctor-patient confidentiality. He unpacks each hypothetical with a brief reflection drawing from science, philosophy, and history, explaining how others have approached these controversies in real-world cases.
-
-
Happens everyday
- By janeen dahn on 01-02-21
-
Ripped from the Headlines!
- The Shocking True Stories Behind the Movies' Most Memorable Crimes
- By: Harold Schechter
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Bestselling true-crime master Harold Schechter explores the real-life headline-making psychos, serial murderers, thrill-hungry couples, and lady-killers who inspired a century of classic films.
-
-
Fascinating Look at Films Based on True Crimes
- By Admiralu on 08-06-20
By: Harold Schechter
-
Unworthy Republic
- The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory
- By: Claudio Saunt
- Narrated by: Stephen Bowlby
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In May 1830, the United States formally launched a policy to expel Native Americans from the East to territories west of the Mississippi River. Justified as a humanitarian enterprise, the undertaking was to be systematic and rational, overseen by Washington's small but growing bureaucracy. But as the policy unfolded over the next decade, thousands of Native Americans died under the federal government's auspices, and thousands of others lost their possessions and homelands in an orgy of fraud, intimidation, and violence.
-
-
A Slow Burn
- By Hervé DuThé on 04-20-20
By: Claudio Saunt
-
The Verge
- Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years That Shook the World
- By: Patrick Wyman
- Narrated by: Patrick Wyman
- Length: 11 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the best-selling tradition of The Swerve and A Distant Mirror, The Verge tells the story of a period that marked a decisive turning point for both European and world history. Here, author Patrick Wyman examines two complementary and contradictory sides of the same historical coin: the world-altering implications of the developments of printed mass media, extreme taxation, exploitative globalization, humanistic learning, gunpowder warfare, and mass religious conflict in the long term, and their intensely disruptive consequences in the short-term.
-
-
Like the Podcast but Better.
- By Michael S. Labrow on 07-21-21
By: Patrick Wyman
-
Edison's Ghosts
- The Untold Weirdness of History's Greatest Geniuses
- By: Katie Spalding
- Narrated by: Susie Riddell
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“As Albert Einstein almost certainly never said, everyone is a genius—but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” So begins Katie Spalding’s spunky takedown of the Western canon, and how genius may not be as irrefutably great as we commonly understand. While most of us may never become Einstein, it may surprise you to learn that there’s probably a bunch of stuff you can do that Einstein couldn’t. And, as Spalding shows, the famous prodigies she explores here were quite odd by any definition.
-
-
Wonderful Wonderful Read.
- By marc edge on 06-01-23
By: Katie Spalding
-
Women's Work
- The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times
- By: Elizabeth Wayland Barber
- Narrated by: Donna Postel
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Twenty thousand years ago, women were making and wearing the first clothing created from spun fibers. In fact, right up to the Industrial Revolution the fiber arts were an enormous economic force, belonging primarily to women. Despite the great toil required in making cloth and clothing, most books on ancient history and economics have no information on them. Much of this gap results from the extreme perishability of what women produced, but it seems clear that until now descriptions of prehistoric and early historic cultures have omitted virtually half the picture.
-
-
Respectful treatment of the archeological record.
- By fiberflair on 02-23-21
Related to this topic
-
Those Who Forget
- By: Geraldine Schwarz
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
During World War II, Géraldine Schwarz’s German grandparents were neither heroes nor villains; they were merely Mitlaüfer - those who followed the current. Decades later, while delving through filing cabinets in the basement of their apartment building in Mannheim, Schwarz discovers that in 1938, her grandfather took advantage of Nazi policies to buy a business from a Jewish family for a low price. Weaving together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe’s process of post-war reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology.
-
-
Not what it purports to be
- By DPM on 10-10-20
-
When We Were Arabs
- A Jewish Family's Forgotten History
- By: Massoud Hayoun
- Narrated by: Massoud Hayoun
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
There was a time when being an "Arab" didn't mean you were necessarily Muslim. It was a time when Oscar Hayoun, a Jewish Arab, strode along the Nile in a fashionable suit, long before he and his father arrived at the port of Haifa to join the Zionist state only to find themselves hosed down with DDT and then left unemployed on the margins of society. In that time, Arabness was a mark of cosmopolitanism, of intellectualism.
-
-
painful to read.
- By Eli Cukierman on 03-13-20
By: Massoud Hayoun
-
Plunder
- A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure
- By: Meir Menachem Kaiser
- Narrated by: Meir Menachem Kaiser
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Menachem Kaiser’s brilliantly told story, woven from improbable events and profound revelations, is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather’s former battle to reclaim the family’s apartment building in Sosnowiec, Poland. Soon, he is on a circuitous path to encounters with the long-time residents of the building, and with a Polish lawyer known as “The Killer.” A surprise discovery leads to Kaiser being adopted as a virtual celebrity by a band of Silesian treasure seekers who revere the memoir as the indispensable guidebook to Nazi plunder.
-
-
Enjoyable but tiresome
- By Cecily Drucker on 04-04-21
-
The Art of Inventing Hope
- Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel
- By: Howard Reich
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Art of Inventing Hope offers an unprecedented, in-depth conversation between the world's most revered Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, and a son of survivors, Howard Reich. During the last four years of Wiesel's life, he met frequently with Reich in New York, Chicago, and Florida - and spoke often on the phone - to discuss the subject that linked them: both Wiesel and Reich's father, Robert Reich, were liberated from Buchenwald death camp on April 11, 1945. What started as an interview assignment from the Chicago Tribune evolved into a friendship and partnership.
-
-
a view into post holocaust survivors recovery
- By Lance Strosser on 02-17-21
By: Howard Reich
-
House of Glass
- The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family
- By: Hadley Freeman
- Narrated by: Hadley Freeman
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hadley Freeman knew her grandmother, Sara, lived in France just as Hitler started to gain power, but rarely did anyone in her family talk about it. Long after her grandmother’s death, she found a shoebox tucked in the closet containing photographs of her grandmother with a mysterious stranger, a cryptic telegram from the Red Cross, and a drawing signed by Picasso. This discovery sent Freeman on a decade-long quest to uncover the significance of these keepsakes, taking her from Picasso’s archives in Paris to a secret room in a farmhouse in Auvergne to Long Island to Auschwitz.
-
-
Performance
- By Derek on 08-30-22
By: Hadley Freeman
-
Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely
- By: Andrew S. Curran
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world's first comprehensive Encyclopedie into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity - for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality.
-
-
lifelong coverage of his life.
- By Michael Daly on 03-22-21
By: Andrew S. Curran
-
Those Who Forget
- By: Geraldine Schwarz
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
During World War II, Géraldine Schwarz’s German grandparents were neither heroes nor villains; they were merely Mitlaüfer - those who followed the current. Decades later, while delving through filing cabinets in the basement of their apartment building in Mannheim, Schwarz discovers that in 1938, her grandfather took advantage of Nazi policies to buy a business from a Jewish family for a low price. Weaving together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe’s process of post-war reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology.
-
-
Not what it purports to be
- By DPM on 10-10-20
-
When We Were Arabs
- A Jewish Family's Forgotten History
- By: Massoud Hayoun
- Narrated by: Massoud Hayoun
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
There was a time when being an "Arab" didn't mean you were necessarily Muslim. It was a time when Oscar Hayoun, a Jewish Arab, strode along the Nile in a fashionable suit, long before he and his father arrived at the port of Haifa to join the Zionist state only to find themselves hosed down with DDT and then left unemployed on the margins of society. In that time, Arabness was a mark of cosmopolitanism, of intellectualism.
-
-
painful to read.
- By Eli Cukierman on 03-13-20
By: Massoud Hayoun
-
Plunder
- A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure
- By: Meir Menachem Kaiser
- Narrated by: Meir Menachem Kaiser
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Menachem Kaiser’s brilliantly told story, woven from improbable events and profound revelations, is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather’s former battle to reclaim the family’s apartment building in Sosnowiec, Poland. Soon, he is on a circuitous path to encounters with the long-time residents of the building, and with a Polish lawyer known as “The Killer.” A surprise discovery leads to Kaiser being adopted as a virtual celebrity by a band of Silesian treasure seekers who revere the memoir as the indispensable guidebook to Nazi plunder.
-
-
Enjoyable but tiresome
- By Cecily Drucker on 04-04-21
-
The Art of Inventing Hope
- Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel
- By: Howard Reich
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Art of Inventing Hope offers an unprecedented, in-depth conversation between the world's most revered Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, and a son of survivors, Howard Reich. During the last four years of Wiesel's life, he met frequently with Reich in New York, Chicago, and Florida - and spoke often on the phone - to discuss the subject that linked them: both Wiesel and Reich's father, Robert Reich, were liberated from Buchenwald death camp on April 11, 1945. What started as an interview assignment from the Chicago Tribune evolved into a friendship and partnership.
-
-
a view into post holocaust survivors recovery
- By Lance Strosser on 02-17-21
By: Howard Reich
-
House of Glass
- The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family
- By: Hadley Freeman
- Narrated by: Hadley Freeman
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hadley Freeman knew her grandmother, Sara, lived in France just as Hitler started to gain power, but rarely did anyone in her family talk about it. Long after her grandmother’s death, she found a shoebox tucked in the closet containing photographs of her grandmother with a mysterious stranger, a cryptic telegram from the Red Cross, and a drawing signed by Picasso. This discovery sent Freeman on a decade-long quest to uncover the significance of these keepsakes, taking her from Picasso’s archives in Paris to a secret room in a farmhouse in Auvergne to Long Island to Auschwitz.
-
-
Performance
- By Derek on 08-30-22
By: Hadley Freeman
-
Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely
- By: Andrew S. Curran
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world's first comprehensive Encyclopedie into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity - for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality.
-
-
lifelong coverage of his life.
- By Michael Daly on 03-22-21
By: Andrew S. Curran
-
Children of Nazis
- The Sons and Daughters of Himmler, Göring, Höss, Mengele, and Others - Living with a Father’s Monstrous Legacy
- By: Tania Crasnianski, Molly Grogan - translator
- Narrated by: Christa Lewis
- Length: 7 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1940, the German sons and daughters of infamous Nazi dignitaries Himmler, Göring, Hess, Frank, Bormann, Speer, and Mengele were children of privilege at four, five, or 10 years old, surrounded by affectionate, all-powerful parents. Although innocent and unaware of what was happening at the time, they eventually discovered the extent of their fathers' occupations: These men were leaders of the Third Reich and would later be convicted as monstrous war criminals.
-
-
Fantastic
- By Anonymous User on 12-30-22
By: Tania Crasnianski, and others
-
Genius & Anxiety
- How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947
- By: Norman Lebrecht
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 18 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Norman Lebrecht has devoted half of his life to pondering and researching the mindset of the Jewish intellectuals, writers, scientists, and thinkers who turned the tides of history and shaped the world today as we know it. In Genius & Anxiety, Lebrecht begins with the Communist Manifesto in 1847 and ends in 1947, when Israel was founded. This robust, magnificent volume, beautifully designed, is an urgent and necessary celebration of Jewish genius and contribution.
-
-
Post-anxiety
- By Amaze on 03-27-20
By: Norman Lebrecht
-
On Juneteenth
- By: Annette Gordon-Reed
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
- Length: 3 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond.
-
-
A short but compelling combination of history and
- By BK on 05-18-21
-
Learning from the Germans
- Race and the Memory of Evil
- By: Susan Neiman
- Narrated by: Christa Lewis
- Length: 20 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights-era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin.
-
-
This is an important book.
- By Amazon Customer on 05-29-20
By: Susan Neiman
-
The Nazi’s Granddaughter
- How I Discovered My Grandfather Was a War Criminal
- By: Silvia Foti
- Narrated by: Gabrielle de Cuir, Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A deathbed promise leads a daughter on an incredible journey to write about her grandfather who was a famous war hero. But this journey had a terrible destination: the discovery that he was a Nazi war criminal.
-
-
A Compelling Story Well Told
- By Catherine S. Read on 03-17-22
By: Silvia Foti
-
The S.S. Officer's Armchair
- Uncovering the Hidden Life of a Nazi
- By: Daniel Lee
- Narrated by: Alex Wyndham
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One night at a dinner party in Florence, historian Daniel Lee was told about a remarkable discovery. An upholsterer in Amsterdam had found a bundle of swastika-covered documents inside the cushion of an armchair he was repairing. They belonged to Dr. Robert Griesinger, a lawyer from Stuttgart, who joined the S.S. and worked at the Reich's Ministry of Economics and Labor in Nazi-occupied Prague during the war.
-
-
good book; strange voice...
- By S. Hall on 11-15-20
By: Daniel Lee
-
Fifth Sun
- A New History of the Aztecs
- By: Camilla Townsend
- Narrated by: Christina Delaine
- Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For the first time, in Fifth Sun, the history of the Aztecs is offered in all its complexity based solely on the texts written by the indigenous people themselves. Camilla Townsend presents an accessible and humanized depiction of these native Mexicans, rather than seeing them as the exotic, bloody figures of European stereotypes.
-
-
Ethnocentric ethnohistory
- By Jeffrey D on 03-24-21
By: Camilla Townsend
-
Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies
- How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature
- By: Elizabeth Winkler
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most horrible, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars admit that the Bard’s biography is a “black hole,” yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) “immoral.” In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo.
-
-
Excellent!
- By Virgil Tracy on 06-03-23
-
Papyrus
- The Invention of Books in the Ancient World
- By: Irene Vallejo, Charlotte Whittle - translator
- Narrated by: Sophie Roberts
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Long before books were mass-produced, scrolls hand-copied on reeds pulled from the Nile were the treasures of the ancient world. Papyrus is the story of the book’s journey from oral tradition to scrolls to codices, and how that transition laid the very foundation of Western culture. Irene Vallejo evokes the great mosaic of literature in the ancient world, all the while illuminating how ancient ideas about education, censorship, authority, and identity still resonate today.
-
-
Great read
- By Hunter Pechin on 12-15-22
By: Irene Vallejo, and others
-
Where the Jews Aren't
- The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region
- By: Masha Gessen
- Narrated by: Christina Delaine
- Length: 5 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1929, the Soviet government set aside a sparsely populated area in the Soviet Far East for settlement by Jews. The place was called Birobidzhan. The idea of an autonomous Jewish region was championed by Jewish Communists, Yiddishists, and intellectuals, who envisioned a haven of post-oppression Jewish culture. By the mid-1930s tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, as well as about a thousand Jews from abroad, had moved there.
-
-
The Jewish World of Our Ancestors
- By Roberta L. Ruben on 06-16-18
By: Masha Gessen
-
Gods of the Upper Air
- How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
- By: Charles King
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled "primitive" or "advanced". What counted as a family, a good meal, or even common sense was a product of history and circumstance, not of nature.
-
-
Great Book, Much Needed despite poor performance
- By J. Kahn on 08-21-19
By: Charles King
-
The Craft
- How the Freemasons Made the Modern World
- By: John Dickie
- Narrated by: Simon Slater
- Length: 16 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Founded in London in 1717 as a way of binding men in fellowship, Freemasonry proved so addictive that within two decades it had spread across the globe. Masonic influence became pervasive. Under George Washington, the Craft became a creed for the new American nation. Masonic networks held the British empire together. Under Napoleon, the Craft became a tool of authoritarianism and then a cover for revolutionary conspiracy. Both the Mormon Church and the Sicilian mafia owe their origins to Freemasonry.
-
-
The best book about Freemasonry out there.
- By Isaac Pea on 02-19-21
By: John Dickie
What listeners say about The Language of Thieves
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Amy Stratton
- 06-30-24
Incredibly captivating story
I thoroughly enjoyed this story and found it thoroughly interesting. I love a book that gets me thinking outside the box and about things I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise! Highly recommend!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- The Frog Lady
- 01-13-21
A surprising look a language I never knew existed
What a wonderful book! It's part memoir and part linguistic exploration. I knew nothing at all about Rotwelsch, the "language of thieves" used by the dispossessed and the underclass in Germany. Of course, I knew nothing about the social context in which it developed and thrived among people who could not get the official documents needed to be "respectable." The language is an amalgam of many languages, including German, Yiddish, Romany, Czech, etc, combined in clever ways designed to be incomprehensible to outsiders. The author makes it clear that not only was the language a secret language, but it also was a lively and creative language.
Along with this explanation of the language itself, Puchner slowly reveals his family's history of studying the language and how that led him to discover buried, unspoken secrets from the Nazi era both from his own family and from the wider society. There's an element of the detective story here along with a poignant coming-to-terms with his own memories.
The performance of the book is excellent. Highly recommended.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
4 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Ernest H Olsen
- 12-13-20
One of the best.
I will listen to this again
As a retired Geologist who looks at rocks in layers, languages are layed out in layers.
This is one of the best books that I have read (listened to) in years.
I highly recommend this book to those with a philological bent.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
3 people found this helpful