Resultados para

'Entertaining and vivid… This is a gripping account of an intriguing and little-known Cold War moment' OBSERVER'Reads like a thriller' THE SUNThe astonishing story of the ten million books that were smuggled across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.For almost five decades after the Second World War, Europe was divided by the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. The Iron Curtain, a near-impenetrable barrier of wire and wall, tank traps, minefields, watchtowers and men with dogs, stretched for 4,300 miles from the Arctic to the Black Sea. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the conflict would be fought in the psychological sphere. It was a battle for hearts, minds and intellects.No one understood this more clearly than George Minden, the head of a covert intelligence operation known as the ‘CIA books programme’, which aimed to win the Cold War with literature.From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden’s global CIA ‘book club’ would infiltrate millions of banned titles into the Eastern Bloc, written by a vast and eclectic list of authors, including Hannah Arendt and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell and Agatha Christie. Volumes were smuggled on trucks and aboard yachts, dropped from balloons, and hidden in the luggage of hundreds of thousands of individual travellers. Once inside Soviet bloc, each book would circulate secretly among dozens of like-minded readers, quietly turning them into dissidents. Latterly, underground print shops began to reproduce the books, too. By the late 1980s, illicit literature in Poland was so pervasive that the system of communist censorship broke down, and the Iron Curtain soon followed.Charlie English tells this true story of spycraft, smuggling and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who risked their lives to stand up to the intellectual strait-jacket Stalin created. People like Miroslaw Chojecki, an underground Polish publisher who endured beatings, force-feeding and exile in service of this mission. And Minden, the CIA’s mastermind, who didn’t waver in his belief that truth, culture, and diversity of thought could help free the ‘captive nations’ of Eastern Europe. This is a story about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. Books, it shows, can set you free.About the authorCharlie English is the former head of international news at the Guardian. A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, he is the author of several widely acclaimed histories including The Snow Tourist, The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu and The Gallery of Miracles and Madness. He lives in London.

From the senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, a mesmerizing real-time portrayal of that day, why we weren?t told the truth, and why our nation is still at risk. As one of the primary authors of the 9/11 Commission Report, John Farmer is proud of his and his colleagues? work. Yet he came away from the experience convinced that there was a further story to be told, one he was uniquely qualified to write. Now that story can be told. Tape recordings, transcripts, and contemporaneous records that had been classified have since been declassified, and the inspector general?s investigations of government conduct have been completed. Drawing on his knowledge of those sources, as well as his years as an attorney in public and private practice, Farmer reconstructs the truth of what happened on that fateful day and the disastrous circumstances that allowed it: the institutionalized disconnect between what those on the ground knew and what those in power did. He details ?terrifyingly and illuminatingly?the key moments in the years, months, weeks, and days that preceded the attacks, then descends almost in real time through the attacks themselves, portraying them as they have never before been seen. Ultimately, Farmer builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version not only is almost entirely untrue but serves to create a false impression of order and security. The ground truth that Farmer captures suggests a very different scenario?one that is doomed to be repeated unless the systemic failures he reveals are confronted and remedied.

“A deeply-researched and well-written account of” (Peter Bergen, author of United States of Jihad) M19—the first and only domestic terrorist group founded and led by women—as they waged a violent war against racism, sexism, and imperialism in Ronald Reagan’s America.1981: Ronald Reagan declared that it is “morning in America” but a small band of well-educated women were planning to combat the status quo at any cost.Having spent their entire adult lives embroiled in political struggles—Vietnam War protests, Hispanic, Native American, and Black liberation, and more—these women had determined that it was time for a final stand. They might not be able to overthrow the government, but they could certainly disrupt it. Together, they formed the May 19th Communist Organization, or “M19,” a name derived from the birthday shared by Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, two of their revolutionary idols. Together, these six women carried out some of the most shocking operations in the history of domestic terrorism—from prison breakouts and murderous armed robberies to a bombing campaign that wreaked havoc on the nation’s capital, its military installations, and New York City.For the first time, the full, fascinating, and terrifying story of M19 is explored by Cold War historian and counterterrorism expert William Rosenau in this “gripping account of this hitherto forgotten terrorist campaign” (Bruce Hoffman, author of Inside Terrorism). Three decades may have passed since these women fought what they saw as an essential battle for self-determination and dignity, but we’re still struggling to decipher which side of history their actions fall on and what we should learn from their motivations.

Bobby Kennedy's last campaign—an homage to a leader who might have changed history and a reconstruction of the conspiracy to stop him, in a magisterial feat of epic investigative poetry. June 5, 2018, is the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, and there are still unanswered questions about whether his murder was the result of a conspiracy. Broken Glory is a graphic history told in epic verse of Bobby Kennedy's life and times leading up to the fateful 1968 election campaign, with 100 illustrations by artist Rick Veitch. It encompasses the story of his convicted killer, Sirhan Sirhan, as well as a large cast of characters that includes Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, and Eugene McCarthy, who was the first to challenge the sitting president of his own party in the 1968 election, and it recalls the major events that made 1968 a turning point in American history: the Tet offensive and battle of Hue, followed soon after by the My Lai massacre, the assassination of Martin Luther King, and the riots that ensued. The authors illuminate the evidence for a conspiracy, fostered perhaps by elements of the CIA, that fielded a second shooter and made of Sirhan Sirhan a patsy, mirroring the part played by Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, an event that haunted JFK’s younger brother until his dying day.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The dramatic, untold history of the heroic women recruited by Britain’s elite spy agency to help pave the way for Allied victory in World War II“Gripping. Spies, romance, Gestapo thugs, blown-up trains, courage, and treachery (lots of treachery)—and all of it true.”—Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake In 1942, the Allies were losing, Germany seemed unstoppable, and every able man in England was on the front lines. To “set Europe ablaze,” in the words of Winston Churchill, the Special Operations Executive  (SOE), whose spies were trained in everything from demolition to sharpshooting, was forced to do something unprecedented: recruit women. Thirty-nine answered the call, leaving their lives and families to become saboteurs in France. In D-Day Girls, Sarah Rose draws on recently de­classified files, diaries, and oral histories to tell the thrilling story of three of these remarkable women. There’s Andrée Borrel, a scrappy and streetwise Parisian who blew up power lines with the Gestapo hot on her heels; Odette Sansom, an unhappily married suburban mother who saw the SOE as her ticket out of domestic life and into a meaningful adventure; and Lise de Baissac, a fiercely independent member of French colonial high society and the SOE’s unflap­pable “queen.” Together, they destroyed train lines, ambushed Nazis, plotted prison breaks, and gathered crucial intelligence—laying the groundwork for the D-Day invasion that proved to be the turning point in the war.Rigorously researched and written with razor-sharp wit, D-Day Girls is an inspiring story for our own moment of resistance: a reminder of what courage—and the energy of politically animated women—can accomplish when the stakes seem incalculably high.Praise for D-Day Girls“Rigorously researched . . . [a] thriller in the form of a non-fiction book.”—Refinery29“Equal parts espionage-romance thriller and historical narrative, D-Day Girls traces the lives and secret activities of the 39 women who answered the call to infiltrate France. . . . While chronicling the James Bond-worthy missions and love affairs of these women, Rose vividly captures the broken landscape of war.”—The Washington Post“Gripping history . . . thoroughly researched and written as smoothly as a good thriller, this is a mesmerizing story of creativity, perseverance, and astonishing heroism.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)