Description: The Vikings famously took no prisoners, relished cruel retribution, and prided themselves on their bloodthirsty skills as warriors. But their prowess in battle is only a small part of their story, which stretches from their Scandinavian origins to America in the West and as far as Baghdad in the East. As the Vikings did not write their own history, we have to discover it for ourselves; and that discovery, as Neil Oliver reveals, tells an extraordinary story of a people who, from the brink of destruction, reached a quarter of the way around the globe and built an empire that lasted nearly two hundred years.
Drawing on the latest discoveries that have only recently come to light, Scottish archaeologist Neil Oliver goes on the trail of the real Vikings. Where did they emerge from? How did they really live? And just what drove them to embark on such extraordinary voyages of discovery over 1,000 years ago? The Vikings: A New History explores many of those questions for the first time in an epic story of one of the world's great empires of conquest.Brief description: James A. Gillies has been a familiar voice across BBC television and radio for nearly a quarter of a century. He has worked as an actor, continuity announcer, program narrator, and newsreader, even reading the Shipping Forecast. Trained at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire in the 1970s, he taught speech and drama and theater studies for much of the next decade, developing many of the country's first school examinations in the subject. Finding himself in demand as a professional voice actor along the way, he was recruited by the BBC in the early 1990s. In 2013, he left in order to concentrate on his favorite part of the job: performance and, in particular, storytelling. Since then he has been in demand worldwide, recording generally one audiobook per month, voicing television ads in the U.K., U.S., Russia, Scandinavia, and the Middle East, and providing voice tracks for television, film, gaming, and on Ulineprojects. James lives with his wife, a former orchestral violist turned book editor, and two Norwegian Forest cats in the picturesque old weaving village of Kilbarchan in the beautiful West of Scotland.
Review Quotes: Anyone interested in finding out more about these real-life raiders will enjoy everything Oliver reveals.--Publishers Weekly "Publishers Weekly"