Five Days that Shocked the World by Nicholas Best

Five Days that Shocked the World by Nicholas Best

On 28 April 1945 Benito Mussolini was dragged from his mistress’s bed, taken outside and executed. Only two days later, surrounded by the Soviet Army, Adolf Hitler put a gun to his head and committed suicide as the Allies raced to secure the heart of the Reich - Berlin. This is the story of the final days of the war in Europe. Drawing on a wealth of unfamiliar material and first-hand accounts, Nicholas Best tells the compelling tale of the men and women who witnessed the final days of the war, from Jack Kennedy at the UN conference in San Fransico to Bob Dole, wounded and recuperating in an Italian hospital, and Private Henry Kissinger, back on German soil for the first time since his family fled before the war. While Audrey Hepburn was starving in Holland, Roman Polanski was playing with grenades in Krakow and a future Pope was on his way home, terrified of being shot for deserting the Wehrmacht. Blending historical discourse with the thoughts and reactions of these and many other famous and ordinary individuals, Five Days that Shocked the World is an insightful new look at the most dramatic 120 hours in our history.

Nicholas Best grew up in Kenya, of Anglo-Irish origin, and was educated there, in England, and at Trinity College, Dublin. He served a spell in Britain's Grenadier Guards, during which he was airlifted to Belize to prevent its invasion by Guatemalan tanks - an experience that gave him his first short story (in Penthouse) and a satirical novel Where were you at Waterloo? Thereafter he worked in London as a financial journalist before becoming a full time writer. He is the author of Happy Valley: the story of the English in Kenya, Tennis and the Masai (a comic novel later serialised on BBC Radio 4), and more than a dozen history books, including the critically acclaimed Trafalgar and The Greatest Day in History: How the Great War Really Ended. His work has been translated into several foreign languages. He has written also for BBC radio, the Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Sunday Times and the Times Literary Supplement etc. He lives in Cambridge, England.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781782006244
ISBN 10	1782006249
Title	Five Days that Shocked the World
Author	Nicholas Best
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Year published	2013-06-20
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.