History -- Europe from I Cannot Live Without Books

The Persecution of the Knights Templar: Scandal, Torture, Trial by Alain Demurger THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES. The trial of the Knights Templar is one of the most infamous in history. Accused of heresy by the king of France, the Templars were arrested and imprisoned, and had their goods seized and their monasteries ransacked. Under brutal… Read more about this item

Crimea: A History by Neil Kent In 2016 Crimea shaped the headlines much as it did some 160 years ago when the Crimean War pitted Britain, France, and Turkey against Russia. Yet few books have been published on the history of the peninsula. For many readers, Crimea seems as remote today as it was when colonized by the ancient Greeks. Neil Kent's… Read more about this item

Elizabeth's Sea Dogs and Their War Against Spain by Brian Best The Sea Dogs were seafaring merchantmen who originally traded mainly with Holland and France. During Queen Elizabeth's reign, however, they began to spread their reach, sailing further and further afield exploring and plundering. The main source of wealth quickly became the Caribbean, which, until then, had been predominantly the domain… Read more about this item

The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780 - 1829 by Antonia Fraser THERE IS A RED "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES. In the summer of 1780, mob violence swept through London. Nearly one thousand people were killed, looting was widespread, and torch-bearing protestors marched on the Prime Minister's residence at 10 Downing Street.… Read more about this item

The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos by Judy Batalion Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland -- some still in their teens -- became the nerves of a wide-ranging resistance network that fought the Nazis. With courage, guile, and… Read more about this item

The People on the Beach: Journeys to Freedom After the Holocaust by Rosie Whitehouse One summer night in 1946, over 1,000 European Jews waited silently on an Italian beach to board a secret ship. They had survived Auschwitz, hidden and fought in forests, and endured death marches -- now they were taking on the Royal Navy, running the British blockade of… Read more about this item

Sudden Courage: Youth in France Confront the Germans, 1940 - 1945 by Ronald C. Rosbottom THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES. On June 14, 1940, German tanks entered a nearly deserted Paris. Eight days later, France accepted a humiliating defeat and foreign occupation. Many adapted to the situation -- even allied themselves with their new overlords. Yet… Read more about this item

Into the Forest: A Holocaust Story of Survival, Triumph, and Love by Rebecca Frankel In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing into the forbidding Biatowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods -- through brutal winters, typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids -- until they were liberated… Read more about this item

"Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself": The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945 by Florian Huber By the end of April 1945 in Germany, the Third Reich had fallen and the invasion was nearly complete. As the Soviet army advanced, horrifying stories spread about the depravity of its soldiers. Many Germans felt there was nothing left but disgrace and despair. Tor… Read more about this item

The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union From Ruin by Douglas Smith After decades of the Cold War and renewed tensions in the wake of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, cooperation between the United States and Russia is difficult to imagine -- and yet, as Douglas Smith reveals, it has a forgotten but… Read more about this item

When Paris Sizzled: The 1920s Paris of Hemingway, Chanel, Cocteau, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, and Their Friends by Mary McAuliffe When Paris Sizzled vividly portrays the City of Light during the fabulous 1920s, les Annees folles, when Parisians emerged from the horror of war to find that a new world greeted them -- one that reverberated with the hard metallic clang… Read more about this item

The Liberation of Paris: How Eisenhower, De Gaulle, and Von Choltitz Saved the City of Light by Jean Edward Smith THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES. Following their breakout from Normandy in late June 1944, the Allies swept across northern France in pursuit of the German army. The Allies intended to bypass Paris and cross the Rhine… Read more about this item

St. Petersburg: Madness, Murder, and Art on the Banks of the Neva by Jonathan Miles St. Petersburg has always felt like an impossible metropolis, rising from the freezing mists and flooded marshland of the River Neva on the western edge of Russia. It was a new capital in an old country. Established in 1703 by the sheer will of its charismatic… Read more about this item

The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson On Winston Churchill's first day as prime minister, Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons.… Read more about this item

African Europeans: An Untold History by Olivette Otele As early as the third century, St. Maurice -- an Egyptian -- became leader of the legendary Roman Theban Legion. Ever since there have been richly varied encounters between those defined as "Africans" and those called "Europeans." Yet Africans and African Europeans are still widely believed to be only a recent presence in… Read more about this item

The Wise King: A Christian Prince, Muslim Spain, and the Birth of the Renaissance by Simon R. Doubleday "If I had been present at the Creation," the thirteenth-century Spanish philosopher-king Alfonso X is said to have stated, "many faults in the universe would have been avoided." Known as El Sabio, "the Wise," Alfonso was renowned by friends and enemies alike for… Read more about this item

When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance by Michael S. Neiberg According to U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the "most shocking single event" of World War II was not the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but rather the Fall of France in spring 1940. Michael Neiberg offers a dramatic history of the American response… Read more about this item

Thunderstruck by Erik Larson In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men -- Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication -- whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time. Set in Edwardian London and on the stormy coasts of Cornwall, Cape Cod,… Read more about this item

In Search of a Kingdom: Francis Drake, Elizabeth I, and the Perilous Birth of the British Empire by Laurence Bergreen Secretly dispatched by Queen Elizabeth to circumnavigate the globe and later called upon to save England from the Spanish Armada, Francis Drake was a hot-tempered, red-haired rogue who made his reputation by plundering and pillaging his way to the ends of… Read more about this item

The Unfathomable Ascent: How Hitler Came to Power by Peter Ross Range THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE TOP PAGE EDGES. On the night of January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler leaned out of a spotlit window of the Reich chancellery in Berlin, butsting with joy. The moment seemed unbelievable, even to Hitler. After an improbable political journey that came close… Read more about this item