A former member of the French Resistance encounters an SS officer who interrogated her twenty years earlier in this novel that’s part thriller and part love story Twenty years after World War II, at a smart cocktail party in New York City, architect Karl Amstat finds himself face-to-face with Terese Masson. A courier in the Resistance, then eighteen-year-old Terese had been questioned by SS officer Alfred Brunnerman. The scion of an elite family, Brunnerman joined the Gestapo in 1940. Though experienced in counter-espionage and famed for his intellectual approach to prisoners, he secretly detested brutality of any kind. After the war, Brunnerman fled to Switzerland, where he reinvented himself as Karl Amstat. But he never forgot Terese. The now married Terese has no memory of this long-ago ordeal, and, unaware of Amstat’s true identity, she finds herself irresistibly attracted to him. But he’s a hunted outcast who has been living a lie for twenty years. When he’s reported to Israeli Intelligence, Amstat is ready to make the greatest sacrifice for the woman he loves more than life itself—the woman who has given him back his identity.
A young woman in a Paris cafe awaits her mother, all the while dismissing men trying to pick her up. She is Louise, and in a monologue she describes her life and her relationship with her mother, a glamorous woman about whom men also swarm like bees.
Fighter pilot Butch O'Hare became one of America's heroes in 1942 when he saved the carrier Lexington in what has been called the most daring single action in the history of combat aviation. In fascinating detail the authors describe how O'Hare shot down five attacking Japanese bombers and severely damaged a sixth and other awe-inspiring feats of aerial combat that won him awards, including the Medal of Honor. They also explain his key role in developing tactics and night-fighting techniques that helped defeat the Japanese. In addition, the authors investigate events leading up to O'Hare's disappearance in 1943 while intercepting torpedo bombers headed for the Enterprise. First published in 1997, this biography utilizes O'Hare family papers and U.S. and Japanese war records as well as eyewitness interviews. It is essential reading for a true understanding of the development of the combat naval aviation and the talents of the universally admired and well-liked Butch O'Hare.
When he stands before Giorgione's La Tempesta, Booker Prize-winning author John Berger sees not only the painting but our whole notion of time, sweeping us away from a lost Eden. A photograph of a gravely joyful crowd gathered on a Prague street in November 1989 provokes reflection on the meaning of democracy and the reunion of a people with long-banished hopes and dreams. With the luminous essays in Keeping a Rendezvous, we are given to see the world as Berger sees it -- to explore themes suggested by the work of Jackson Pollock or J. M. W. Turner, to contemplate the wonder of Paris. Rendezvous are manifold: between critic and art, artist and subject, subject and the unknown. But most significant are the rendezvous between author and reader, as we discover our perceptions informed by Berger's eloquence and courageous moral imagination.
The remarkable untold story of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the five extraordinary men he used to pull America into World War II In the dark days between Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 and Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt sent five remarkable men on dramatic and dangerous missions to Europe. The missions were highly unorthodox and they confounded and infuriated diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic. Their importance is little understood to this day. In fact, they were crucial to the course of the Second World War. The envoys were magnificent, unforgettable characters. First off the mark was Sumner Welles, the chilly, patrician under secretary of state, later ruined by his sexual misdemeanors, who was dispatched by FDR on a tour of European capitals in the spring of 1940. In summer of that year, after the fall of France, William “Wild Bill” Donovan—war hero and future spymaster—visited a lonely United Kingdom at the president’s behest to determine whether she could hold out against the Nazis. Donovan’s report helped convince FDR that Britain was worth backing. After he won an unprecedented third term in November 1940, Roosevelt threw a lifeline to the United Kingdom in the form of Lend-Lease and dispatched three men to help secure it. Harry Hopkins, the frail social worker and presidential confidant, was sent to explain Lend-Lease to Winston Churchill. Averell Harriman, a handsome, ambitious railroad heir, served as FDR’s man in London, expediting Lend-Lease aid and romancing Churchill’s daughter-in-law. Roosevelt even put to work his rumpled, charismatic opponent in the 1940 presidential election, Wendell Willkie, whose visit lifted British morale and won wary Americans over to the cause. Finally, in the aftermath of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Hopkins returned to London to confer with Churchill and traveled to Moscow to meet with Joseph Stalin. This final mission gave Roosevelt the confidence to bet on the Soviet Union. The envoys’ missions took them into the middle of the war and exposed them to the leading figures of the age. Taken together, they plot the arc of America’s trans¬formation from a divided and hesitant middle power into the global leader. At the center of everything, of course, was FDR himself, who moved his envoys around the globe with skill and élan. We often think of Harry S. Truman, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and George F. Kennan as the authors of America’s global primacy in the second half of the twentieth century. But all their achievements were enabled by the earlier work of Roosevelt and his representatives, who took the United States into the war and, by defeating domestic isolationists and foreign enemies, into the world. In these two years, America turned. FDR and his envoys were responsible for the turn. Drawing on vast archival research, Rendezvous with Destiny is narrative history at its most delightful, stirring, and important.
"Frightening and believable … great story line … and a little romance … in an end of the world as we know it book " — Amazon review. The Rendezvous, volume two of the Planets Shaken series, ramps up the action while it continues the story of the Rogue, a planet-sized comet which threatens to unleash the nightmare prophesied in Luke 21:26, "the powers of the heavens shall be shaken." Christian apocalyptic fiction with a scientific whallop. Irina is detained in FEMA 286 on Homeland Security charges. Ariele eludes the authorities and makes her way to the Compound, a preppers' redoubt near Two Dot, Montana. Her new friends mastermind a plan to break Irina out.
