Having narrowly dodged death by hiding for months in an attic near Budapest as thousands of fellow Jews in the neighbourhood were dragged off to be murdered, Guttmann later escaped from a slave labour camp. He was one of the lucky ones. His father, sister and wider family perished at the hands of the Nazis.But by 1961, as coach of Benfica, he had lifted one of football's greatest prizes: the European Cup - a feat he repeated the following year. Rising from the death pits of Europe to become its champion in just over sixteen years, Guttmann performed the single greatest comeback in football history.This remarkable story spans two visions of twentieth-century Europe: a continent ruptured by barbarism and genocide, yet lit up by exhilarating encounters in magnificent cities, where great players would strive to win football's holy grail. With dark forces rising once again, the story of Béla Guttmann's life asks the question: which vision of Europe will triumph in our times?

    Greg Martens and his wife, former Interpol agent Anne Rossiter, are called back to Vienna by Anne's former boss at Interpol, since their beautiful Russian friend, Julia Saparova, who is now responsible for monitoring nuclear material at various sites in Russia, has disappeared. Afraid that the "merchants of evil" from the former Soviet Union, who are deeply involved in human trafficking, are behind her disappearance, Greg and Anne embark on an international search for Julia, getting drawn into a messy and disturbing web of human and arms trafficking that takes them first to Hungary and then to Montenegro in a desperate bid to rescue, not only Julia, but a group of girls trafficked from Chelyabinsk oblast as well--girls held hostage to facilitate a nuclear heist...

    They came home, to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives, only to find themselves again placed in harm's way. What if the CHOICES were to live in a country that offered your family a future without freedom or risk everything and everyone in search of a better life? Which would you choose? Read this uplifting, unforgettable story of courage, bravery and the power of human kindness that fills the pages of this epic novel.

    John Zametica has written such a book about the outbreak of World War One. His work will be impossible to ignore despite or indeed because of the plethora of recent titles in this field. More than a century after the event, the circumstances which in 1914 transformed Europe into a slaughterhouse continue to fascinate historians. With "war guilt" the main issue, widely divergent interpretations characterise the ongoing debate. Permanent controversy surrounds this topic. John Zametica's work stands out because he has been able to resolve questions that have successfully confused generations of his predecessors. He has focused his attention on the pre-1914 situation in Austria-Hungary and the Balkans where the conflict began. They have had their fair share of scholarly attention, but remain the areas least understood when the origins of the war are discussed. Zametica's mastery of Serbo-Croat and German sources has put him in a unique position to write this book, a revisionist account that slays many shibboleths of current orthodoxy. The author demolishes one myth after another in showing how far and how often historians have diverged from what the sources say. Thus he documents that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Austro-Hungarian Heir to the Throne, was anything but a "federalist", modern-minded reformer of the multi-national Habsburg Empire; that the people who killed the Archduke in Sarajevo were not proponents of the "Great Serbia" project, but supported a "Yugoslav" ideology which they shared with the young Croat intelligentsia; and that the secret "Black Hand" officers' organization in Serbia, far from organizing the assassination in Sarajevo, had in fact tried to prevent it. While not sparing the Serbian leadership, Zametica shows that Austro-Serbian antagonism arose from the internal agonies of Austria-Hungary and the ineptitude of its statesmen. He argues that there was nothing inevitable about this collision course. The main conclusions of the book are: the contempt and fear felt by Vienna towards Belgrade gave rise to ill-conceived polices which led to the cataclysm; the war came about because Austria-Hungary, a so-called "Great Power", thought the path to its salvation lay in its small neighbour's destruction; and lastly, this ramshackle empire, faced with the prospect of its own demise, was prepared to gamble recklessly with the peace of Europe.