Derek Perkins’s powerful narration of Oxford historian Eugene Rogan’s sweeping history of the Arab peoples and nations is audio listening at its very best. The pace never slackens, the hours fly by, and the story that unfolds is as dramatic and fraught as any novel. We in the West know little of the history of the Middle East and even less of its long, troubled relations with the European colonial powers. Rogan, writing largely from an Arab point of view, fills in dozens of blanks in today’s headline stories and offers a perspective that is illuminating, and persuasive. Perkins, as always, is a master of articulation, handling with fluency and confidence a challenging text—one more challenging for the eye than for the ear.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2016
Duration: 27 hrs, 30 mins
Publisher: Tantor Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
Buruma’s subtle and effective narration style is essential to this chronicle.
Bard College historian Buruma has a personal link to WWII-era Berliners, his Dutch father having been a forced laborer in wartime Berlin. Buruma’s account highlights instances of the survival and rescue of Jews and of the Berlin residents who came forward to assist them. But of most Berliners, he says, “Their main aim was to stay out of trouble.” Buruma’s performance as both historian and narrator is a model of restraint and reliance on fact. He shapes a powerful narrative around Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad and year-by-year shifts in civilian morale. As deprivation and disillusion with the Nazi regime set in, the struggle for survival extended to all Berliners.
Buruma’s subtle and effective narration style is essential to this chronicle.Pub Date: March 17, 2026
Duration: 12 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9798217282210
Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
A hint of hijinks in sleepy Königsberg sets ears ablaze.
The obscure uproar so vividly portrayed in this brief audiobook couldn’t be farther from today’s media commotions—or nearer. This “small vortex of turbulence” sounds like a stage farce: It’s set in backwater Königsberg, capital of East Prussia, in the 1830s, during the lull between the Napoleonic wars and the 1848 Revolution. Take a preposterous but compelling religious cult and two guileless but strikingly handsome Lutheran clergymen, add only a hint of fornication, and gossip does the rest. Vidish Athavale’s measured, finely nuanced narration gives edge and authority to a narrative without a wasted word or useless detail. And he clearly relishes the polysyllabic 19th-century German names.
A hint of hijinks in sleepy Königsberg sets ears ablaze.Pub Date: March 10, 2026
Duration: 4 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9798217282234
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
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