Showing results for "childrens audio books" in Europe

The Viking Age - from 750 to 1050 saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe. But for centuries, the Vikings have been seen through the eyes of others, distorted to suit the tastes of medieval clerics and Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more. None of these appropriations capture the real Vikings, or the richness and sophistication of their culture.

The country that gave us Vlad Dracula, and whose citizens consider themselves descendants of ancient Rome, has traditionally preferred the status of enigmatic outsider. But this beautiful and unexplored land has experienced some of the most disastrous leaderships of the last century. After a relatively benign period led by a dutiful king and his vivacious, British-born queen, the country oscillated wildly.

In 1930s and 1940s Vienna, child psychiatrist Hans Asperger sought to define autism as a diagnostic category, aiming to treat those children, usually boys, he deemed capable of participating fully in society. Depicted as a compassionate and devoted researcher, Asperger was in fact deeply influenced by Nazi psychiatry. Although he did offer individualized care to children he deemed promising, he also prescribed harsh institutionalization and even transfer to Spiegelgrund for children with greater disabilities, who, he held, could not integrate into the community.

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.

For the Children is a narrative memoir that tells the true story of the author's family's escape from Hungary and immigration to Canada in 1956, told from the viewpoint of the seven year old child he was at the time. After numerous attempts to flee from revolution torn Stalinist Hungary ending in capture and disappointment, the author's parents' pursuit to give their children a better life finally bears success as they walk to freedom across a well guarded and mine strewn border.

In a memoir of rare power, John explores the dark heart of Northern Irish sectarianism in the '70s and '80s. With searing honesty and native Belfast wit, he describes the light and darkness of his unique childhood, and his teenage journey through mod culture and ultra-Loyalism, before an escape from Belfast to London - where, still haunted by the shadow of his fractured family history - he began a turbulent and hedonistic adulthood.

If ever you worry about children today, spare a thought for the people of 19th century Britain, when knife-crime was rife and gangs of children roamed the streets and countryside, committing countless horrendous crimes including murder.

In 146 BC, Greece yielded to the military might of the Roman Republic; sixty years later, when Athens and other Greek city-states rebelled against Rome, the general Lucius Cornelius Sulla destroyed the city of Socrates and Plato, laying waste to the famous Academy where Aristotle had studied. However, the traditions of Greek cultural life would continue to flourish during the centuries of Roman rule that followed, in the lives and work of a distinguished array of philosophers, doctors, scientists, geographers, travellers and theologians.

Joe Dunthorne had always wanted to write about his great-grandfather, Siegfried: an eccentric scientist who invented radioactive toothpaste and a Jewish refugee from the Nazis who returned to Germany under cover of the Berlin Olympics to pull off a heist on his own home. The only problem was that Siegfried had already written the book of his life – an unpublished, two-thousand page memoir so dry and rambling that none of his living descendants had managed to read it. And, as it turned out when Joe finally read the manuscript, it told a very different story from the one he thought he knew.

Field has spent his adult life fighting against poverty in Britain, through parliament and through his strong personal influence. Poverty for him has injustice at its root and as he explains in this book, he has found allies on all sides of the political spectrum. He was appointed by Tony Blair to be the Secretary of State for Pensions, but the reforms he advocated were so radical and essentially just, that Tony Blair could not contemplate them and Field stood down. Previously he had been Chairman of the Work and Pensions Select Committee under John Major.

Life in Cockney London was tough in the post-war years. The government's broken promises had led to a chronic housing shortage, rampant crime and families living in squalor. But one thing prevailed: the unbeatable spirit of the East End, a tight-knit community who pulled through the dark times with humour and heart. Drawing on both family history and her own memories of growing up in the 1950s and '60s, as well as her working life as a district nurse and local police officer, Jean Fullerton vividly depicts this fascinating part of London.

Nothing drove Henry VIII, England's wealthiest and most powerful king, more than producing a legitimate male heir and perpetuating his dynasty. To that end he married six wives, became the subject of the most notorious divorce case of the sixteenth century, and broke with the Pope, all in an age of international competition and warfare, social unrest and growing religious intolerance and discord.

In little more than 50 years the regard with which the Royal Family are held has changed out of all recognition. Their private lives are now the stuff of soap opera and it seems any one who comes into contact with them sells their story to the magazines or to the newspapers. The Little Princesses was published in 1950 to a furore we cannot imagine today. Crawfie was demonised by the press, and the Queen Mother, who had been a great friend and who had, Crawfie maintained, given her permission to write the account, never spoke to her again.

The Battle of Hastings and its aftermath nearly wiped out the leading families of Anglo-Saxon England—so what happened to the children this conflict left behind? Conquered offers a fresh take on the Norman Conquest by exploring the lives of those children, who found themselves uprooted by the dramatic events of 1066. Among them were the children of Harold Godwineson and his brothers, survivors of a family shattered by violence who were led by their courageous grandmother Gytha to start again elsewhere.

Mary Seymour is just a few weeks old when her mother, the Dowager Queen Katharine Parr, dies from childbed fever. She cannot know the tragedy that has befallen their home at Sudeley, or the secrets that her father, the Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour, is hiding. Lost in grief, he entrusts baby Mary to the care of Elizabeth Aglionby, one of Katharine's closest companions. But Elizabeth knows that the Lord Admiral has enemies in high places - and that he stands on the edge of a ruinous fall from grace. And, if the worst should happen, what will become of his infant daughter?

In 1938, Jewish families under Nazi rule were scrambling to get out of the Reich. In desperation, children were advertised in the pages of the Manchester Guardian, their virtues and skills extolled in brief. The right words in the right order could mean the difference between life and death. Eighty-three years later, Guardian's Pulitzer prize-winning World Affairs Editor Julian Borger found the intelligent boy was his father, Robert. This led to an investigation to retrace the lives of his family members, and in doing so excavating secrets of the past.

It's a warm and muggy Saturday night in August of 1942. The Nazis are liquidating the ghetto of Shedlitz, an industrial town east of Warsaw, Poland. Zippa, a 27-year-old Jewish woman, finds temporary shelter in a small attic, together with her baby daughter and 100 frightened Jews. When the Nazi noose is tightened around her neck, Zippa asks her husband Jacob, a Jewish policeman in the ghetto, to save their little girl from certain death. The young father manages to smuggle his wife and daughter to the gentile part of town.

Alathea's home life was an unhappy one. Her parents had separated and so during the war she was sent to live with her grandfather, Viscount Fitzalan of Derwent, at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park. There Alathea found the affection and harmony she craved as she became a close friend of the two princesses, visiting them often at Windsor Castle, enjoying parties, balls, cinema evenings, picnics and celebrations with the royal family and other members of the court.

At the age of 16, Flo Wadlow left her family to begin what would become a distinguished life "in service." Starting as a kitchen maid in London, she soon rose through the ranks and worked at many of England's great houses, including Woodhall in Hilgay, where she met scullery maid Mollie Moran, author of Aprons and Silver Spoons; and Hatfield House and Blicking Hall. By her early 20s, Flo was in charge of the kitchen and cooked for prime ministers and royalty. Over a Hot Stove is a must-listen for fans of Downton Abbey.

The Mill - set in early 19th-century Cheshire - was Channel 4's biggest drama launch of 2013, and captivated viewers with the tales of the lives of the young girls and boys in a northern mill. Focusing on the apprentices at Quarry Bank Mill, David Hanson's book uses a wealth of first-person source material including letters, diaries, and mill records, to tell the stories of the children who lived and worked at Quarry Bank throughout the 19th century.