From the creator of the wildly popular podcast comes Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History: History at the Extremes.

Dan Carlin has created a new way to think about history. His award-winning podcast is revered for its unique blend of high drama, enthralling narration, and Twilight Zone-style twists. A political commentator, Carlin approaches history like a magician, employing completely unorthodox and always entertaining ways of taking a second look at what we think we know about wars, empires, and leaders across centuries and millennia.

In his long-awaited first book, Carlin tackles some of history’s biggest what ifs with all his trademark charm and erudition, from whether historical heroes like Alexander the Great were in fact comparable to Hitler to whether our greatest social upheavals came in the wake of our most deadly epidemics. He puts us in the shoes of good people who were led to do very bad things, compares military might across the ages and makes us think again about how and why civilisations fall.

In asking and answering these questions, Carlin gets to grips with the guts of history, and shows us how the forces of our past continue to shape our present and future.