Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

New York

Book that examines the 1948 presidential race between Henry Wallace and Harry Truman & their debates over the origins and intentions of Russia and the Cold War.

Henry Wallace

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#hardcover #1961 #berlin #coldwar #fiction #historical #romance #wall 

Indiana

A Novel

A Kirkus Best Book of 2018

"Unlike anything I've read. With its broad scope and its intimacy and exactness, it cuts through the apparatus of life to the vivid moment. Haunting and huge, and funny and sensuous. It's wonderful."--Tessa Hadley

The Costa Award-winning author of The Pike makes her literary fiction debut with an extraordinary historical novel in the spirit of Wolf Hall and Atonement--a great English country house novel, spanning three centuries, that explores surprisingly timely themes of immigration and exclusion.

It is the seventeenth century and a wall is being raised around Wychwood, transforming the great house and its park into a private realm of ornamental lakes, grandiose gardens, and majestic avenues designed by Mr. Norris, a visionary landscaper. In this enclosed world everyone has something to hide after decades of civil war. Dissenters shelter in the woods, lovers rendezvous in secret enclaves, and outsiders--migrants fleeing the plague--find no mercy.

Three centuries later, far away in Berlin, another wall is raised, while at Wychwood, an erotic entanglement over one sticky, languorous weekend in 1961 is overshadowed by news of historic change. Young Nell, whose father manages the estate, grows up amid dramatic upheavals as the great house is invaded: a pop festival by the lake, a television crew in the dining room, a Great Storm brewing. In 1989, as the Cold War peters out, a threat from a different kind of conflict reaches Wychwood's walls.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett conjures an intricately structured, captivating story that explores the lives of game keepers and witches, agitators and aristocrats; the exuberance of young love and the pathos of aging; and the way those who try to wall others out risk finding themselves walled in. With poignancy and grace, she illuminates a place where past and present are inextricably linked by stories, legends, and history--and by one patch of peculiar ground.

Peculiar Ground

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Hedrick Smith

Published 1990, 1st Edition/Dust Jacket ex-library copy. Staining around outer edge of pages.

New Jersey

The New Russians

53584fb2-64af-4fcb-bc11-5be0a732891c-1

#hardcover #Historical #coldwar #Berlin #Romance

Michigan

A tragic love story set in Cold War Berlin and present-day Manhattan.

The Moment

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North Carolina

A thrilling tale of secretaries turned spies, of love and duty, and of sacrifice--inspired by the true story of the CIA plot to infiltrate the hearts and minds of Soviet Russia, not with propaganda, but with the greatest love story of the twentieth century: Doctor Zhivago. At the height of the Cold War, two secretaries are pulled out of the typing pool at the CIA and given the assignment of a lifetime. Their mission: to smuggle Doctor Zhivago out of the USSR, where no one dare publish it, and help Pasternak's magnum opus make its way into print around the world. Glamorous and sophisticated Sally Forrester is a seasoned spy who has honed her gift for deceit all over the world--using her magnetism and charm to pry secrets out of powerful men. Irina is a complete novice, and under Sally's tutelage quickly learns how to blend in, make drops, and invisibly ferry classified documents. The Secrets We Kept combines a legendary literary love story--the decades-long affair between Pasternak and his mistress and muse, Olga Ivinskaya, who was sent to the Gulag and inspired Zhivago's heroine, Lara--with a narrative about two women empowered to lead lives of extraordinary intrigue and risk. From Pasternak's country estate outside Moscow to the brutalities of the Gulag, from Washington, D.C. to Paris and Milan, The Secrets We Kept captures a watershed moment in the history of literature--told with soaring emotional intensity and captivating historical detail. And at the center of this unforgettable debut is the powerful belief that a piece of art can change the world.

The Secrets We Kept

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Oregon

Code to Zero

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#hardcover #PeterSis #IronCurtain #CaldecottHonor #TheWall #TheRobertFSiebertMetal #Illustrated #History #ColdWar #JuvenileNon-Fiction box 28￼ Please note: there is a $7.50 purchase minimum when buying from our shop. There is a platform fee, packaging, and travel costs. Our prices are extremely low and so please if you don’t need another book, please buy one for a friend. Thanks for understanding. 😊

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Texas

Growing up Behind the Iron Curtain

ANEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER

"I was born at the beginning of it all, on the Red side--the Communist side--of the Iron Curtain." Through annotated illustrations, journals, maps, and dreamscapes, Peter Sís shows what life was like for a child who loved to draw, proudly wore the red scarf of a Young Pioneer, stood guard at the giant statue of Stalin, and believed whatever he was told to believe. But adolescence brought questions. Cracks began to appear in the Iron Curtain, and news from the West slowly filtered into thecountry. Sís learned about beat poetry, rock 'n' roll, blue jeans, and Coca-Cola. He let his hair grow long, secretly read banned books, and joined a rock band. Then came the Prague Spring of 1968, and for a teenager who wanted to see the world and meet the Beatles, this was a magical time. It was short-lived, however, brought to a sudden and brutal end by the Soviet-led invasion. But this brief flowering had provided a glimpse of new possibilities--creativity could be discouraged but not easily killed.

By joining memory and history, Sís takes us on his extraordinary journey: from infant with paintbrush in hand to young man borne aloft by the wings of his art. This title has Common Core connections.

The Wall is a 2007 New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Book of the Year, a 2008 Caldecott Honor Book, a 2008 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year, the winner of the 2008 Boston Globe - Horn Book Award for Nonfiction, and a nominee for the 2008 Eisner Award for Best Publication for Kids.

The Wall - read description 

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Running from her father's brutal legacy, Joseph Stalin's daughter defects to the United States during the turbulence of the 1960s. For fans of We Were the Lucky Ones and A Gentleman in Moscow, this sweeping historical novel and unexpected love story is inspired by the remarkable life of Svetlana Alliluyeva.

"The Red Daughter does exactly what good historical fiction should do: It sends you down the rabbit hole to read and learn more."--The New York Times Book Review

In one of the most momentous events of the Cold War, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of the Soviet despot Joseph Stalin, abruptly abandoned her life in Moscow in 1967, arriving in New York to throngs of reporters and a nation hungry to hear her story. By her side is Peter Horvath, a young lawyer sent by the CIA to smuggle Svetlana into America.

She is a contradictory celebrity: charismatic and headstrong, lonely and haunted, excited and alienated by her adopted country's radically different society. Persuading herself that all she yearns for is a simple American life, she attempts to settle into a suburban existence in Princeton, New Jersey. But one day an invitation from the widow of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright arrives, and Svetlana impulsively joins her cultlike community at Taliesin West. When this dream ends in disillusionment, Svetlana reaches out to Peter, the one person who understands how the chains of her past still hold her prisoner. Their relationship changes and deepens, moving from America to England to the Soviet Union and back again, unfolding under the eyes of her CIA minders, and Svetlana's and Peter's private lives are no longer their own.

Novelist John Burnham Schwartz's father was in fact the young lawyer who escorted Svetlana Alliluyeva to the United States. Drawing upon private papers and years of extensive research, Schwartz imaginatively re-creates the story of an extraordinary, troubled woman's search for a new life and a place to belong, in the powerful, evocative prose that has made him an acclaimed author of literary and historical fiction.

Praise for The Red Daughter

"Svetlana Alliluyeva's life was endlessly fascinating, often heartbreaking, and ultimately heroic. I don't think any writer alive could have told her story more beautifully than John Burnham Schwartz."--David Benioff, co-creator of HBO's Game of Thrones and author of City of Thieves

"The Red Daughter is an intimate, intricate look at the collision of geopolitics with a private life: surprising and engaging from beginning to end."--Jennifer Egan

The Red Daughter

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John Le Carré

Exciting espionage story from the spy master.

Wisconsin

Coming September 5, a new novel from New York Times bestselling author John le Carr�

A Legacy of Spies

2a4dce4a-f9b5-4852-b936-8c79f780a6a8

Ohio

Back Lash

Lara Prescott

Tennessee

John le Carré

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Pennsylvania

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the New York Times bestselling author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London, and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley and Peter Guillam himself, are to be scrutinized by a generation with no memory of the Cold War and no patience with its justifications. Interweaving past with present so that each may tell its own intense story, John le Carré has spun a single plot as ingenious and thrilling as the two predecessors on which it looks back: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In a story resonating with tension, humor and moral ambivalence, le Carré and his narrator Peter Guillam present the reader with a legacy of unforgettable characters old and new.

Robert Conquest

This biography of the Soviet dictator uses post-glasnost research to present evidence of the monstrous tyranny of the Stalin years.

Stalin - Breaker of Nations

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#hardcover #sovietunion #Coldwar #history #red

The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War

To the amazement of the public, pundits, and even the policymakers themselves, the ideological and political conflict that had endangered the world for half a century came to an end in 1990. How did that happen? What caused the cold war in the first place, and why did it last as long as it did?
The distinguished historian Melvyn P. Leffler homes in on four crucial episodes when American and Soviet leaders considered modulating, avoiding, or ending hostilities and asks why they failed: Stalin and Truman devising new policies after 1945; Malenkov and Eisenhower exploring the chance for peace after Stalin's death in 1953; Kennedy, Khrushchev, and LBJ trying to reduce tensions after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; and Brezhnev and Carter aiming to sustain detente after the Helsinki Conference of 1975. All these leaders glimpsed possibilities for peace, yet they allowed ideologies, political pressures, the expectations of allies and clients, the dynamics of the international system, and their own fearful memories to trap them in a cycle of hostility that seemed to have no end.
Leffler's important book illuminates how Reagan, Bush, and, above all, Gorbachev finally extricated themselves from the policies and mind-sets that had imprisoned their predecessors, and were able to reconfigure Soviet-American relations after decades of confrontation.

For the Soul of Mankind

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#hardcover #fiction #historicalfiction #espionage #historical #thriller #coldwar #book 

Illinois

Georgina Harding

Florida

Years after their German refugee mother disappears on the same day the media releases a story about a spy family, Anna and her brother, Peter, struggle to sort out facts and lies about their mother's identity and wonder if she had a secret life. By the author of The Solitude of Thomas Cave.

The Spy Game

9ff011dc-6747-41ff-aa93-f0c466c49e16-1

South Carolina

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A HELLO SUNSHINE x REESE WITHERSPOON BOOK CLUB PICK ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE WASHINGTON POST - NPR - ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY - THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS - ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH - LIBRARY JOURNAL - THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY At the height of the Cold War, Irina, a young Russian-American secretary, is plucked from the CIA typing pool and given the assignment of a lifetime. Her mission: to help smuggle Doctor Zhivago into the USSR, where it is banned, and enable Boris Pasternak's magnum opus to make its way into print around the world. Mentoring Irina is the glamorous Sally Forrester: a seasoned spy who has honed her gift for deceit, using her magnetism and charm to pry secrets out of powerful men. Under Sally's tutelage, Irina learns how to invisibly ferry classified documents--and discovers deeply buried truths about herself. The Secrets We Kept combines a legendary literary love story--the decades-long affair between Pasternak and his mistress and muse, Olga Ivinskaya, who inspired Zhivago's heroine, Lara--with a narrative about two women empowered to lead lives of extraordinary intrigue and risk. Told with soaring emotional intensity and captivating historical detail, this is an unforgettable debut: a celebration of the powerful belief that a work of art can change the world. "Prescott combines Mad Men-esque period style with a spy story worthy of John le Carré." -Entertainment Weekly "Enthralling. . . . This is the rare page-turner with prose that's as wily as its plot." --Vogue "A gorgeous and romantic feast of a novel." --The New York Times

#paperback #Russia #USA #history #currentevents #war #ColdWar #russianusrelations

Understanding Russia and U. S. -Russia Relations

With Russia and the U.S. currently having 1,700 nuclear weapons pointed at each other on hair trigger alert, our relationship with Russia is one of the most critical, requiring a rational policy. But in order to conduct a rational foreign policy, we must understand the other country's point of view and what has shaped it - including it's history, culture and geography. That doesn't mean one must agree with Russia, but we must know how Russia perceives its own interests so we can determine what they may be willing to risk or sacrifice on behalf of those perceived interests and where there might be areas of cooperation. The American media generally has a very poor track record in providing this crucial service with respect to many of the nations with whom we've already gone to war. The so-called experts they consult often have conflicts of interest, nefarious agendas, and lack an objective understanding of the nation they are speaking about. This has certainly been the case when it comes to reporting on Russia, a country with which the stakes are potentially much higher. This book is an antidote to the malpractice of much of the American media when it comes to understanding the Russian point of view and formulating a reasoned policy toward the world's other nuclear superpower.

The View from Moscow

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#paperback #cia #charliewilsonswar #majormotionpicture #spies #thriller #coldwar

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times

It''s common knowledge that the U.S. armed the Afghans in their fight against the Soviet Union, but until now, the fact that this was possibly the biggest, meanest covert operation in history has been absent from press reports. In one of the most detailed descriptions of a CIA operation every written, the bizarre twists and turns of the full story are told in CHARLIE WILSON''S WAR. Veteran 60 Minutes producer George Crile explains how one Congressman was able to provide the CIA with hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the Afghan program, dwarfing the price tag for arming the Nicaraguan Contras that occurred at virtually the same time.

"The scope and nature of this campaign has still not registered in the consciousness of most Americans," Crile writes in the book''s Epilogue. "Nor is it understood that such secret undertakings inevitably have unforeseen and unintended consequences which, in this case, remain largely ignored."

When Crile produced his first story about Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson for 60 Minutes in 1989, he too underestimated the vastness of the program and its consequences. It was a later trip to the Arab world with Wilson, the Wilson''s "princely" reception, and the events of 9/11 that opened his eyes to the far bigger picture of CHARLIE WILSON''S WAR.

Among the book''s more startling revelations:

* By the latter years of the 1980s the CIA was not just providing arms to a half million Afghans, it had taken 150,000 of them and transformed them into what it called a force of "techno holy warriors." "From today''s perspective," Crile observes, "that may seem more than a bit ill advised-particularly when you factor in the specialized training in urban warfare that the Agency sponsored to include the use of pipe bombs, bicycle bombs, car bombs, camel bombs, along with a host of other tactics to wreak havoc with the army of a modern superpower."

* The United States continued to fund the Afghan rebels long after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union. Incredibly, the subsidies continued despite the fact that one of the most important mujahid leaders sided with Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War.

* In addition to $200 million in aid from the U.S. and $200 million from Saudi Arabia, in 1991 and 1992 the rebels received Iraqi weapons captured by U.S. forces during the Gulf War. At the same time, the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The Cold War was effectively over but what began as a war against Communism was continuing to be funded.

"The question that has puzzled so many Americans: ''Why do they hate us?'' is not so difficult to understand if you put yourself into the shoes of the Afghan veterans in the aftermath of the Soviet departure," Crile says. To them, the real superpower in their struggle was Allah. The United States eventually cut off its support in the 1990s. In the Afghan''s minds, Allah did not.

CHARLIE WILSON''S WAR is nothing short of a critical missing chapter in our political consciousness. Without a clear understanding of its impact, it may be impossible to comprehend the two world changing events that shook the United States on either side of the millennium: the sudden and mysterious collapse of the Soviet Union and the equally inexplicable appearance of a new global foe in the form of militant Islam. At its core, it tells of an unorthodox alliance-of a scandal-prone Texas Congressman named Charlie Wilson and an out-of-favor CIA operative named Gust Avrakotos-that armed and sustained the Afghan jihad and turned Afghanistan into the Soviet Union''s Vietnam.

"The origins of this book go back to a time when the Afghans were viewed by most everyone in the U.S. government as freedom fighters and allies against a common foe," Crile writes in the Epilogue. In 1988, Crile produced a 60 Minutes profile of Wilson that he now realizes barely scratched the surface of this fascinating story. Later, while, accompanying Wilson on a trip to Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan just prior to the first Gulf War, Crile was amazed at the "princely" reception accorded Wilson in the Arab world. "The trip was just the beginning of a decade-long odyssey uncovering the many dimensions of the CIA''s Afghan War," he recalls. "In short order I realized that it had been anything but a typical CIA program."

As incredible as anything in the pages of Tom Clancy or John le Carré, CHARLIE WILSON''S WAR is a gripping story of international intrigue, booze, drugs, sex, high society and arms deals. Between its covers, we meet:

* The charismatic Congressman Charlie Wilson. While Ronald Reagan and William Casey were unable to persuade Congress to fund the Nicaraguan Contras, Wilson was procuring hundreds of millions of dollars to support his Afghan "freedom fighters" through back-room machinations that would have made even LBJ blush. A colorful man of many contradictions, he worked hard and played hard, earning the reputation as the "wildest man in Congreeeeeess" while representing an archconservative Bible-belt district in Texas.

* The out-of-favor CIA operative, Gust Avrakotos, whose working-class Greek-American background made him an anomaly in the patrician world of American spies. Nicknamed "Dr. Dirty", this blue collar James Bond was an aggressive agent who served on the front lines of the Cold War where he learned how to stretch the Agency''s rules to the breaking point.

* The eccentric staff of CIA outcasts hand-picked by Avrakotos to run the operation. Among them were "Hilly Billy", the logistics wizard who could open an un-numbered Swiss bank account for the U.S. government in 12 hours when others took months; Art Alper, the "devilish" tinkerer from the Technical Services division who roamed the world creating such novelties as exploding typewriters and developed portable amplifiers that spread propaganda among the Soviet troops; and especially Mike Vickers, the former Green Beret so junior in status that he couldn''t send his own cables. His military genius allowed him to single-handedly redesign the CIA''s war plan. Through his highly specific blueprint, he created a systematic plan that turned a rabble of shepherds and tribesmen into an army of techno Holy warriors who gave the legendary Red Army their greatest defeat. Today, Mike Vickers is consulting for the Pentagon on the War on Terrorism and war planning for Iraq.
The many women who shared the Congressman''s jihad. It all began with a Houston socialite, Joanne Herring who enlisted Wilson to the Afghan cause via her deep-seated hatred of Communism and her influence in Pakistan. Carol Shannon, Wilson''s personal belly dancer who he took with him to the jihad. Charlie''s Angels, Wilson''s female staffers so strikingly beautiful that they became a legend on Capitol Hill. And finally, Annelise Illschenko, aka "Sweetums", the former U.S. representative in the Miss World competition who traveled with Wilson deep into the Islamic world in outfits that were not the most appropriate attire in the eyes of Muslim men

* The Pakistani dictator Zia ul Haq, who early on realized that the way to millions of dollars in American aid was through Charlie Wilson and his covert war in Afghanistan. A dictator whom many held personally responsible for the execution of his democratically elected predecessor, Zia used his favorable status as an ally of the U.S. against the Soviets to divert attention from his own nuclear weapons program while providing the all-important safe haven and operations center for the CIA''s Afghan operations .

CHARLIE WILSON''S WAR is the CIA and Congress as they have never been seen before, engaged in the last great battle of the Cold War. This is a book that has direct implications for today''s world situation.





Charlie Wilson's War♻️

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Giles Milton

The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World

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.

Save this search

Richard J. Walton

Henry Wallace

Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Peculiar Ground

Hedrick Smith

The New Russians

Douglas Kennedy

The Moment

Lara Prescott

The Secrets We Kept

Ken Follett

Code to Zero

Peter Sis (Illustrator)

The Wall - read description

John Burnham Schwartz

The Red Daughter

John Le Carré

A Legacy of Spies

BRAD THOR

Back Lash

Lara Prescott

The Secrets We Kept

John le Carré

A Legacy of Spies

Lara Prescott

The Secrets We Kept

Robert Conquest

Stalin - Breaker of Nations

Melvyn P. Leffler

For the Soul of Mankind

Lara Prescott

The Secrets We Kept

Lara Prescott

The Secrets We Kept

Georgina Harding

The Spy Game

Lara Prescott

The Secrets We Kept

Natylie Baldwin

The View from Moscow

George Crile

Charlie Wilson's War♻️

Giles Milton

Checkmate in Berlin

Lara Prescott

The Secrets We Kept

Lara Prescott

The Secrets We Kept