The author captured the feeling of being a foreigner in a place which you intimately know very well. It is a feeling many of us get after visiting our childhood home town, after many years of absence.
A non-fiction book which covers the beginning of World War II full of pictures, many of which I have never seen, each one with an engrossing caption.
D-Day Girls The Spies Who Armed the Resistance Sabotaged the Nazis and Helped Win World War II -historical accounts of women spies, tied into a single narrative
Atlas of World War II is incredible, it covers all theaters of the war, provides copies of the maps the generals used (along with their notes on them)
The Allies: Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II – recounts how Russia became and unlikely ally with the US & England
The novel read as if the author had access to old KGB files (maybe he did) deciphering the bureaucratic code used to hide atrocities and turn it into an amazing, gripping tale. Another outstanding work from an outstanding scholar which is well worth reading.
In 1906 Gorky went on a fund raising trip, on behalf of the Bolsheviks, to the United States. During the trip he wrote his novel The Mother when visiting the Adirondack Mountains. Gorky also created a scandal because he was traveling with actress Maria Andreyeva, his lover, instead of his wife. Despite feeling contempt for the bourgeois soul, Gorky came to admire the American spirit.
The center of the story is a group of kids from various classes who get arrested and interrogated. Most of the kids are children to upper class parents (generals, politicians, entertainers) and think they’ll be all right. However, Stalin sees this as an opportunity to test the loyalty of the parents to the state (meaning himself) and uses them to his benefit.