The Chess Players, a Novel of the Cold War at Sea
The Chess Players, a Novel of the Cold War at Sea

Author: Francis J. Partel

Publisher: Navy Log LLC

Published: 2011-03

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 0615414516

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The Chess Players is both a naval story and a love story and opens with an audacious, espionage mission, a Soviet submarine penetration of Stavanger, Norway, and closes with a thrilling, bizarre episode between a missile-equipped, Russian nuclear submarine and a US Navy destroyer escort in the Mediterranean Sea. Commander Pebbles, Operations Officer of anti-submarine carrier, Essex, on a career track for admiral, mentors the well-educated and competent, but inexperienced young Ensign Cannon. Based in part on untold, historical events typical of the Cold War at sea, their task group encounters several provocative incidents at the hands of the Russian Bear above the Arctic Circle and in the Mediterranean Sea prior to and after the 1967 Six Day Arab-Israeli War. The love story begins when beautiful Laetitia Martin, a Ph. D. candidate in art history, meets Ensign Cannon, both members of a wedding on Martha's Vineyard, shortly before Essex deploys for NATO exercises in the Eastern Atlantic. She is a consummate "belonger" with a growth motive and catches a whiff of the women's movement and begins to find her upper-class life stifling. Cannon doesn't flinch at women's liberation, but he has other anxiety-producing issues related to women. Her research into the turbulent life of the painter, Caravaggio, the novel's fourth character, if you will, will also take her to Europe in the summer of 1967 and provides the opportunity for their romance to bud and bloom in London and in Malta as she succeeds in explaining Caravaggio's self-destructive behavior in modern psychological terms.

White King and Red Queen
White King and Red Queen

Author: Daniel Johnson

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 9780547133379

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Daniel Johnson--journalist, scholar, and chess enthusiast--is the perfect guide to one of history's most remarkable periods, when chess matches were front-page news and captured the world's imagination.

The Peace War
The Peace War

Author: Vernor Vinge

Publisher: Tor Books

Published: 2007-04-01

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1429915110

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First in a quintessential hard-science fiction adventure, Hugo Award-winning author Vernor Vinge's The Peace War follows a scientist determined to put an end to the militarization of his greatest invention--and of the government behind it. The Peace Authority conquered the world with a weapon that never should have been a weapon--the "bobble," a spherical force-field impenetrable by any force known to mankind. Encasing governmental installations and military bases in bobbles, the Authority becomes virtually omnipotent. But they've never caught Paul Hoehler, the maverick who invented the technology, and who has been working quietly for decades to develop a way to defeat the Authority. With the help of an underground network of determined, independent scientists and a teenager who may be the apprentice genius he's needed for so long, he will shake the world. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

A cultural history of chess-players
A cultural history of chess-players

Author: John Sharples

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2017-08-15

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1526120550

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This inquiry concerns the cultural history of the chess-player. It takes as its premise the idea that the chess-player has become a fragmented collection of images, underpinned by challenges to, and confirmations of, chess’s status as an intellectually-superior and socially-useful game, particularly since the medieval period. Yet, the chess-player is an understudied figure. No previous work has shone a light on the chess-player itself. Increasingly, chess-histories have retreated into tidy consensus. This work aspires to a novel reading of the figure as both a flickering beacon of reason and a sign of monstrosity. To this end, this book, utilising a wide range of sources, including newspapers, periodicals, detective novels, science-fiction, and comic-books, is underpinned by the idea that the chess-player is a pluralistic subject used to articulate a number of anxieties pertaining to themes of mind, machine, and monster.

The Cultural Cold War
The Cultural Cold War

Author: Frances Stonor Saunders

Publisher: New Press, The

Published: 2013-11-05

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 1595589147

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During the Cold War, freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal democracy’s most cherished possession—but such freedom was put in service of a hidden agenda. In The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders reveals the extraordinary efforts of a secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West were working for or subsidized by the CIA—whether they knew it or not. Called "the most comprehensive account yet of the [CIA’s] activities between 1947 and 1967" by the New York Times, the book presents shocking evidence of the CIA’s undercover program of cultural interventions in Western Europe and at home, drawing together declassified documents and exclusive interviews to expose the CIA’s astonishing campaign to deploy the likes of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Lowell, George Orwell, and Jackson Pollock as weapons in the Cold War. Translated into ten languages, this classic work—now with a new preface by the author—is "a real contribution to popular understanding of the postwar period" (The Wall Street Journal), and its story of covert cultural efforts to win hearts and minds continues to be relevant today.

The Grand Chessboard
The Grand Chessboard

Author: Zbigniew Brzezinski

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2016-12-06

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0465093086

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Bestselling author and eminent foreign policy scholar Zbigniew Brzezinski's classic book on American's strategic mission in the modern world. In The Grand Chessboard, renowned geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski delivers a brutally honest and provocative vision for American preeminence in the twenty-first century. The task facing the United States, he argues, is to become the sole political arbiter in Eurasian lands and to prevent the emergence of any rival power threatening our material and diplomatic interests. The Eurasian landmass, home to the greatest part of the globe's population, natural resources, and economic activity, is the "grand chessboard" on which America's supremacy will be ratified and challenged in the years to come. In this landmark work of public policy and political science, Brzezinski outlines a groundbreaking and powerful blueprint for America's vital interests in the modern world. In this revised edition, Brzezinski addresses recent global developments including the war in Ukraine, the re-emergence of Russia, and the rise of China.

Checkmate in Berlin
Checkmate in Berlin

Author: Giles Milton

Publisher: Henry Holt and Company

Published: 2021-07-13

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1250247551

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From a master of popular history, the lively, immersive story of the race to seize Berlin in the aftermath of World War II as it’s never been told before BERLIN’S FATE WAS SEALED AT THE 1945 YALTA CONFERENCE: the city, along with the rest of Germany, was to be carved up among the victorious powers— the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. On paper, it seemed a pragmatic solution. In reality, once the four powers were no longer united by the common purpose of defeating Germany, they wasted little time reverting to their prewar hostility toward—and suspicion of—one another. The veneer of civility between the Western allies and the Soviets was to break down in spectacular fashion in Berlin. Rival systems, rival ideologies, and rival personalities ensured that the German capital became an explosive battleground. The warring leaders who ran Berlin’s four sectors were charismatic, mercurial men, and Giles Milton brings them all to rich and thrilling life here. We meet unforgettable individuals like America’s explosive Frank “Howlin’ Mad” Howley, a brusque sharp-tongued colonel with a relish for mischief and a loathing for all Russians. Appointed commandant of the city’s American sector, Howley fought an intensely personal battle against his wily nemesis, General Alexander Kotikov, commandant of the Soviet sector. Kotikov oozed charm as he proposed vodka toasts at his alcohol-fueled parties, but Howley correctly suspected his Soviet rival was Stalin’s agent, appointed to evict the Western allies from Berlin and ultimately from Germany as well. Throughout, Checkmate in Berlin recounts the first battle of the Cold War as we’ve never before seen it. An exhilarating tale of intense rivalry and raw power, it is above all a story of flawed individuals who were determined to win, and Milton does a masterful job of weaving between all the key players’ motivations and thinking at every turn. A story of unprecedented human drama, it’s one that had a profound, and often underestimated, shaping force on the modern world – one that’s still felt today.

The Grandmaster
The Grandmaster

Author: Brin-Jonathan Butler

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Published: 2019-11-12

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1501172611

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“A bravura performance…An entertaining book” (Kirkus Reviews) about the dramatic 2016 World Chess Championship between Norway’s Magnus Carlsen and Russia’s Sergey Karjakin, which mirrored the world’s geopolitical unrest and rekindled a global fascination with the sport. The first week of November 2016, hundreds of people descended on New York City’s South Street Seaport to watch the World Chess Championship between Norway’s Magnus Carlsen and Russia’s Sergey Karjakin. By the time it was over would be front-page news and thought by many the greatest finish in chess history. With both Carlsen and Karjakin just twenty-five years old, it was the first time the championship had been waged among those who grew up playing chess against computers. Originally from Crimea, Karjakin had recently repatriated to Russia under the direct assistance of Putin. Carlsen, meanwhile, had expressed admiration for Donald Trump, and the first move of the tournament he played was called a Trompowsky Attack. Then there was the Russian leader of the World Chess Federation being barred from attending due to US sanctions, and chess fanatic and Trump adviser Peter Thiel being called on to make the honorary first move in sudden death. That the tournament even required sudden death was a shock. Oddsmakers had given Carlsen, the defending champion, an eighty percent chance of winning. It would take everything he had to retain his title. Author Brin-Jonathan Butler was granted unique access to the two-and-half-week tournament and watched every move. The Grandmaster “is not the usual chronicle of a world-championship chess match….Butler offers insight into what it takes to become the best chess player on the planet...A vibrant and provocative look at chess and its metaphorical battle for territory and power” (Booklist).

Peter von Zahn's Cold War Broadcasts to West Germany
Peter von Zahn's Cold War Broadcasts to West Germany

Author: Eli Nathans

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-08-08

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 3319506153

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This book examines the pioneering radio broadcasts and television documentaries about the United States made in the 1950s by the influential West German journalist Peter von Zahn. Part intellectual biography, part analysis of significant debates in West Germany, part study of an intensive encounter with the United States, the book helps explain the transformation of postwar West Germany. As a soldier in the Wehrmacht in World War II, Zahn held the militantly elitist views typical of young men in Germany’s educated middle class. He reconsidered these positions in his postwar broadcasts. At the same time he coldly assessed the capacity of the United States to win the Cold War. His broadcasts examined McCarthyism, the African-American civil rights movement, and numerous aspects of American culture and politics. Zahn’s broadcasts were one important voice in West German debates about the defects and virtues of modern democratic societies and especially of the United States, debates whose intensity reflected recent German experiences with the failure of the Weimar Republic and with Nazism. Zahn’s analyses of the United States remain startlingly relevant today.

Act of War
Act of War

Author: Jack Cheevers

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2013-12-03

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 1101638648

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WINNER OF THE SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON AWARD FOR NAVAL LITERATURE “I devoured Act of War the way I did Flyboys, Flags of Our Fathers and Lost in Shangri-la.”—Michael Connelly, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author In 1968, the small, dilapidated American spy ship USS Pueblo set out to pinpoint military radar stations along the coast of North Korea. Though packed with advanced electronic-surveillance equipment and classified intelligence documents, its crew, led by ex–submarine officer Pete Bucher, was made up mostly of untested young sailors. On a frigid January morning, the Pueblo was challenged by a North Korean gunboat. When Bucher tried to escape, his ship was quickly surrounded by more boats, shelled and machine-gunned, forced to surrender, and taken prisoner. Less than forty-eight hours before the Pueblo’s capture, North Korean commandos had nearly succeeded in assassinating South Korea’s president. The two explosive incidents pushed Cold War tensions toward a flashpoint. Based on extensive interviews and numerous government documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, Act of War tells the riveting saga of Bucher and his men as they struggled to survive merciless torture and horrendous living conditions set against the backdrop of an international powder keg.