The Second World War

· Weidenfeld & Nicolson · Narrated by Sean Barrett
4.9
18 reviews
Audiobook
39 hr 17 min
Unabridged
Eligible
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About this audiobook

A magisterial, single-volume history of the greatest conflict the world has ever known by our foremost military historian.

The Second World War began in August 1939 on the edge of Manchuria and ended there exactly six years later with the Soviet invasion of northern China. The war in Europe appeared completely divorced from the war in the Pacific and China, and yet events on opposite sides of the world had profound effects. Using the most up-to-date scholarship and research, Beevor assembles the whole picture in a gripping narrative that extends from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific and from the snowbound steppe to the North African Desert.

Although filling the broadest canvas on a heroic scale, Beevor's THE SECOND WORLD WAR never loses sight of the fate of the ordinary soldiers and civilians whose lives were crushed by the titanic forces unleashed in this, the most terrible war in history.

Read by Sean Barrett

(p) 2012 Orion Publishing Group

Ratings and reviews

4.9
18 reviews
Lars Sorbekk
August 8, 2019
Very good book. The reading is so much better than the reading of the "Stalingrad" book, also by Beevor. This is a book you need to have if you are interested in war history, or just history in general. Very detailed, without being boring or tedious in any way. Beevor is the best writer of narrative history we have.
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Frances Sharkey
April 19, 2024
absolutely well worth the money, a really fascinating look at the subject I highly recommend it
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mahmoud sohid
June 20, 2022
good
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About the author

ANTONY BEEVOR is the author of 13 works of nonfiction, including Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (1991), which was awarded a Runciman Prize; Stalingrad (1998), which won the first Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature; and D-Day: The Battle for Normandy (2009), which received the Prix Henry Malherbe in France and the Westminster Medal from the Royal United Services Institute, and was a No 1 Bestseller in seven countries. His most recent work is the 2023 Sunday Times bestseller Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921. Educated at Sandhurst, Beevor served as regular officer with the 11th Hussars, leaving the Army after five years to write.

Sean Barrett has narrated many television documentaries for the BBC and Discovery Channel, notably THE PEOPLE'S CENTURY, WALKING WITH BEASTS, and GREAT LIVES. As a member of the BBC Radio Rep, he has appeared in hundreds of radio plays, and played Father Gillespie in the BBC Worldservice / BBC7 serial WESTWAY throughout its eight year-run. As a film and television actor he has appeared in pieces as diverse as TWELFTH NIGHT and FATHER TED, and he is a doyen of audiobook reading, with acclaimed recordings of authors ranging from Chaucer to Beckett and in 2012 recorded Antony Beevor's THE SECOND WORLD WAR.

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