History, on the surface, doesn't seem like a great subject for audiobooks. Getting through almost any serious work of history involves some speed reading, as it's not unusual for award-winning books like Mary Fulbrook's Reckonings, the winner of the 2019 Wolfson Prize, to stretch to 500+ pages. (And if you're working your way through a tome by the Annales school of historians, you'd be getting off lightly with 500 pages).
Below is a list of all the most recommended titles in our history section, specially selected so they are also manageable as audiobooks.
Ordinary Men
by Christopher Browning
How was it that a group of middle-aged men from Hamburg, most not even members of the Nazi party, led by a 53-year-old career policeman, carried out some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust? Ordinary Men by American historian Christopher Browning, first published in 1992, sifts through their testimony to try and find some answers. In doing so, it reveals some unsettling truths for any human being reading its pages.
Clausewitz's on War: A Biography
by Hew Strachan
Clausewitz’s On War is one of our most recommended history books and clearly a vital book to read if you take history seriously. It’s quite hard to listen to as an audiobook, however. As a result, we recommend listening, instead, to the audiobook of Clausewitz’s on War: A Biography by military historian Sir Hew Strachan. It’s part of a series called ‘books that changed the world’ published by Grove Atlantic. It’s fascinating—not least to see how the reputation of an important book evolves over time.
“This book tells the fascinating story of Martin Guerre: a mysterious tale of imposture, love, and honour among sixteenth-century French peasants. It is a brilliant bit of historical detective work and a captivating read that plunges the reader deep into the world of the past.” Read more...
“Everything changes when you suddenly find yourself in the Battle of Britain. It was incredibly harrowing. I can’t even begin to tell you how difficult it was, physically and mentally, to fly three times a day in those sorts of conditions – knowing that any moment might be your last.” Read more...
The best books on Perspectives of World War II
James Holland, Military Historian and Veteran
The Histories
by Herodotus
***We recommend the Landmark edition of Herodotus’s Histories***
Herotodus’s Histories, which dates from around 425BC, is the earliest continuous Greek text in prose to survive, according to Regius Professor of Greek Emeritus at Oxford University, Christopher Pelling. It’s a book that changed the meaning of ‘history’ forever, because in ancient Greek the word historie suggested ‘enquiry.’ Herodotus was investigating the wonders of the world, rather than writing a history as such. Find out more in our interviews with historians below.
Life and Fate
by Vasily Grossman and translated by Robert Chandler
Life and Fate, the masterpiece by Soviet writer Vasily Grossman, is one of our most recommended books (even in history interviews—even though it’s a novel). Modeled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, it bore witness to the horrors of both the Soviet experience of World War II and the Holocaust. Sadly for Grossman, it was considered too harmful to be published in his lifetime.
If you want to listen to Life and Fate as an audiobook, there’s no unabridged version, BUT there is a dramatised version, starring Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant, that lasts a manageable 8 hours.
(Stalingrad is the precursor to Life and Fate, newly translated into English.)
“It is a book about what it is like to be a regular ordinary American teenager and suddenly find yourself neck-deep in a jungle fighting a war that you neither understand nor care about.” Read more...
The best books on Human Dramas
R J Ellory, Novelist
