The first reports seemed absurd. A Russian dissident, formerly an employee of the KGB and its successor, the FSB, had seemingly been poisoned in a London hotel. As Alexander Litvinenko's condition worsened, however, and he was transferred to hospital and placed under armed guard, the story took a sinister turn. On 23 November 2006, Litvinenko died, apparently from polonium-210 radiation poisoning. He himself, in a dramatic statement from his deathbed, accused his former employers at the Kremlin of being responsible for his murder. Who was Alexander Litvinenko? What had happened in Russia since the end of the Cold War to make his life there untenable, and even in severe jeopardy in Britain? How did he really die, and who killed him? In his spokesman and close friend, Alex Goldfarb, and widow Marina, we have two people who know more than anyone about the real Sasha Litvinenko, and about his murder. Their riveting book sheds astonishing light not just on these strange and troubling events but also on the biggest crisis in relations with Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In 1960 a mysterious car crash killed Albert Camus and his publisher Michel Gallimard, who was behind the wheel. Based on meticulous research, Giovanni Catelli builds a compelling case that the 46-year-old French Algerian Nobel laureate was the victim of premeditated murder: he was silenced by the KGB. The Russians had a motive: Camus had campaigned tirelessly against the Soviet crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and vociferously supported the awarding of the Nobel Prize to the dissident novelist Boris Pasternak, which enraged Moscow. Sixty years after Camus' death, Catelli takes us back to a murky period in the Cold War. He probes the relationship between Camus and Pasternak, the fraught publication of Doctor Zhivago, the penetration of France by Soviet spies, and the high price paid by those throughout Europe who resisted the USSR.
A mother and son recall a childhood of limited resources, tensions, and religiously advocated child abuse during the politically tempestuous '50s and '60s in Iran. Photos.
Originally published in 1969, The Death of the Novel and Other Stories remains among the most memorable creations of an unforgettable age. Irrepressibly experimental in both content and form, these anti-fictions set out to rescue experience from its containment within artistic convention and bourgeois morality. Equal parts high modernist aesthete and borscht belt comedian, Sukenick joins avant-garde art with street slang and cartoons, expressing his generation's anxieties by simultaneously mocking and validating them. These are original works by a writer who will try absolutely anything.
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Eternal Dissident offers rare insight into one of the most inspiring and controversial Reform rabbis of the twentieth century, Leonard Beerman, who was renowned both for his eloquent and challenging sermons and for his unrelenting commitment to social action. Beerman was a man of powerful word and action—a probing intellectual and stirring orator, as well as a nationally known opponent of McCarthyism, racial injustice, and Israeli policy in the occupied territories. The shared source of Beerman’s thought and activism was the moral imperative of the Hebrew prophets, which he believed bestowed upon the Jewish people their role as the “eternal dissident.” This volume brings Beerman to life through a selection of his most powerful writings, followed by commentaries from notable scholars, rabbis, and public personalities that speak to the quality and ongoing relevance of Beerman’s work.
'Blowing Up Russia' contains the attacks of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko against his former spymasters in Moscow which led to his being murdered in London by poisoning. Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky detail how, since 1999, the secret service has been hatching a secret plot to return to the terror that was the hallmark of the KGB.
A shocking assassination in the heart of London. In a bizarre mix of high-stakes global politics and radioactive villainy, a man pays with his life. At this time of global crises and a looming new Cold War, A Very Expensive Poison sends us careering through the shadowy world of international espionage from Moscow to Mayfair. Lucy Prebble (Enron, The Effect) brings a shocking story to the stage, adapted from the book by Luke Harding, with an astute mix of real events, vaudeville and thriller. This edition was published to coincide with the World Premiere at the Old Vic Theatre, London, in 2019.
A powerful investigation into a grisly political murder and the authoritarian regime behind it: Do Not Disturb upends the narrative that Rwanda sold the world after one of the deadliest genocides of the twentieth century. We think we know the story of Africa’s Great Lakes region. Following the Rwandan genocide, an idealistic group of young rebels overthrew the brutal regime in Kigali, ushering in an era of peace and stability that made Rwanda the donor darling of the West, winning comparisons with Switzerland and Singapore. But the truth was considerably more sinister. Vividly sourcing her story with direct testimony from key participants, Wrong uses the story of the murder of Patrick Karegeya, once Rwanda’s head of external intelligence and a quicksilver operator of supple charm, to paint the portrait of a modern African dictatorship created in the chilling likeness of Paul Kagame, the president who sanctioned his former friend’s assassination.
Anna Politkovskaya, one of Russia’s most fearless journalists, was gunned down in a contract killing in Moscow in the fall of 2006. Just before her death, Politkovskaya completed this searing, intimate record of life in Russia from the parliamentary elections of December 2003 to the grim summer of 2005, when the nation was still reeling from the horrors of the Beslan school siege. In A Russian Diary, Politkovskaya dares to tell the truth about the devastation of Russia under Vladimir Putin–a truth all the more urgent since her tragic death. Writing with unflinching clarity, Politkovskaya depicts a society strangled by cynicism and corruption. As the Russian elections draw near, Politkovskaya describes how Putin neutralizes or jails his opponents, muzzles the press, shamelessly lies to the public–and then secures a sham landslide that plunges the populace into mass depression. In Moscow, oligarchs blow thousands of rubles on nights of partying while Russian soldiers freeze to death. Terrorist attacks become almost commonplace events. Basic freedoms dwindle daily. And then, in September 2004, armed terrorists take more than twelve hundred hostages in the Beslan school, and a different kind of madness descends. In prose incandescent with outrage, Politkovskaya captures both the horror and the absurdity of life in Putin’s Russia: She fearlessly interviews a deranged Chechen warlord in his fortified lair. She records the numb grief of a mother who lost a child in the Beslan siege and yet clings to the delusion that her son will return home someday. The staggering ostentation of the new rich, the glimmer of hope that comes with the organization of the Party of Soldiers’ Mothers, the mounting police brutality, the fathomless public apathy–all are woven into Politkovskaya’s devastating portrait of Russia today. “If anybody thinks they can take comfort from the ‘optimistic’ forecast, let them do so,” Politkovskaya writes. “It is certainly the easier way, but it is also a death sentence for our grandchildren.” A Russian Diary is testament to Politkovskaya’s ferocious refusal to take the easier way–and the terrible price she paid for it. It is a brilliant, uncompromising exposé of a deteriorating society by one of the world’s bravest writers. Praise for Anna Politkovskaya “Anna Politkovskaya defined the human conscience. Her relentless pursuit of the truth in the face of danger and darkness testifies to her distinguished place in journalism–and humanity. This book deserves to be widely read.” –Christiane Amanpour, chief international correspondent, CNN “Like all great investigative reporters, Anna Politkovskaya brought forward human truths that rewrote the official story. We will continue to read her, and learn from her, for years.” –Salman Rushdie “Suppression of freedom of speech, of expression, reaches its savage ultimate in the murder of a writer. Anna Politkovskaya refused to lie, in her work; her murder is a ghastly act, and an attack on world literature.” –Nadine Gordimer “Beyond mourning her, it would be more seemly to remember her by taking note of what she wrote.” –James Meek
From the author of Harry's Game - A Sunday Times '100 best crime novels and thrillers since 1945' pick Two men who hate each other are committed to working together on a job far more dangerous than they knew when they signed up. These men are surveillance experts, lying in a mosquito-infested Iranian marsh for days, part of a huge international operation designed to kill a celebrated maker of the roadside bombs which kill so many British soldiers. And if things to wrong, as far as Her Majesty's Government is concerned, their part in the plot is totally deniable. Gerald Seymour expertly explores the moral compromises of the secret world upon which we rely for our everyday security - and the amazing reserves of courage which ordinary people can find in extraordinary circumstances.
