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    Unavailable
    The Last Palace: Europe's Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House
    Unavailable
    The Last Palace: Europe's Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House
    Unavailable
    The Last Palace: Europe's Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House
    Audiobook15 hours

    The Last Palace: Europe's Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House

    Written by Norman Eisen

    Narrated by Jeff Goldblum

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A sweeping yet intimate narrative about the last hundred years of turbulent European history, as seen through one of Mitteleuropa's greatest houses—and the lives of its occupants

    When Norman Eisen moved into the US ambassador's residence in Prague, returning to the land his mother had fled after the Holocaust, he was startled to discover swastikas hidden beneath the furniture in his new home. These symbols of Nazi Germany were remnants of the residence's forgotten history, and evidence that we never live far from the past.

    From that discovery unspooled the twisting, captivating tale of four of the remarkable people who had called this palace home. Their story is Europe's, and The Last Palace chronicles the upheavals that transformed the continent over the past century. There was the optimistic Jewish financial baron, Otto Petschek, who built the palace after World War I as a statement of his faith in democracy, only to have that faith shattered; Rudolf Toussaint, the cultured, compromised German general who occupied the palace during World War II, ultimately putting his life at risk to save the house and Prague itself from destruction; Laurence Steinhardt, the first postwar US ambassador whose quixotic struggle to keep the palace out of Communist hands was paired with his pitched efforts to rescue the country from Soviet domination; and Shirley Temple Black, an eyewitness to the crushing of the 1968 Prague Spring by Soviet tanks, who determined to return to Prague and help end totalitarianism—and did just that as US ambassador in 1989.

    Weaving in the life of Eisen's own mother to demonstrate how those without power and privilege moved through history, The Last Palace tells the dramatic and surprisingly cyclical tale of the triumph of liberal democracy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 4, 2018
    ISBN9781984827043
    Unavailable
    The Last Palace: Europe's Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House

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    Reviews for The Last Palace

    4/5

    3 ratings1 review

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    • 4/5
      An interesting foil for the history of Central Europe in the 20th century and a Learning experience. While the writing style I found to be overwritten in parts, the story carried me through. My one complaint, such as it is, is with the narrator who had a disconcerting habit of modulating his voice depending on the character in the story.