Book picks similar to
Kicking the Kremlin: Russia's New Dissidents and the Battle to Topple Putin by Marc Bennetts
russia
non-fiction
nonfiction
politics
The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter
Linda Scarpa - 2015
She called him Dad . . .“We were always worried. Always looking over our shoulders . . .”Linda Scarpa had the best toys, the nicest clothes, and a close-knit family. Yet classmates avoided her; boys wouldn’t date her. Eventually she learned why: they were afraid of her father.A made man in the Colombo crime family, Gregory Scarpa, Sr. was a stone-cold killer nicknamed the “Grim Reaper.” But to Linda, he was also a loving, devoted father who played video games with her for hours. In riveting detail, she reveals what it was like to grow up in the violent world of the mob and to come to grips with the truth about her father and the devastation he wrought.
Jihadi John: The Making of a Terrorist
Robert Verkaik - 2016
Suddenly Islamic State had a face and the whole world knew the extent of their savagery. Weeks later, when his identity was revealed, Robert Verkaik was shocked to realise that this was a man he’d interviewed years earlier. Back in 2010, Mohammed Emwazi was a twenty-one-year-old IT graduate who claimed the security services were ruining his life. They had repeatedly approached him, his family and his fiancée. Had they been tracking an already dangerous extremist or did they push him over the edge? In the aftermath of the US air strike that killed Emwazi in November 2015, Verkaik’s investigation leads him to deeply troubling questions. What led Emwazi to come to him for help in the first place? And why do hundreds of Britons want to join Islamic State? In an investigation both frightening and urgent, Verkaik goes beyond the making of one terrorist to examine the radicalisation of our youth and to ask what we can do to stop it happening in future.
The Corruption Chronicles: Obama's Big Secrecy, Big Corruption, and Big Government
Tom Fitton - 2012
president; it was the very cornerstone of his campaign. No secrets. No masks. No smoke and mirrors. No excuses. But over the next four years, President Obama’s administration would prove to be one of the most guarded and duplicitous of our time. Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, America’s largest nonpartisan government watchdog (challenging George W. Bush as well as Bill Clinton), has been investigating Obama ever since he splashed onto the national scene in 2006. Now Fitton exposes devastating secrets the Obama administration has desperately fought—even in court—to keep from the American public. For a while, the Obama stonewall seemed to be holding. Until now. And the revelations are astonishing. Judicial Watch has unearthed the truth behind such high-profile issues as the bailouts, Obamacare, Guantanamo, Obama’s true ties to Bill Ayers and to the Black Panthers voting intimidation scandal, and the Constitution-defying government czars. He reveals Obama’s personal war against FOX News, his real link to ACORN, and his radical Chicago connections. Through scores of smoking-gun government files, some replicated here and many unearthed after lengthy court battles, Fitton also discloses the facts of the Obama-backed $535-million loan guarantee to Solyndra, promoted by the president as a model for economic recovery—only months before its disastrous bankruptcy filing. Here too is the truth behind the gunrunning scandal, code-named Fast and Furious, which was a program generated in secrecy by the U.S. government that supplied thousands of firearms to murderous criminals in Mexico—an unconscionable act, and only one in a series of historical lows for an administration that few, if any, major media in this country dare to expose. This book details how the Obama machine is aggressively employing Chicago-style tactics to steal, if necessary, the 2012 elections. And how Judicial Watch is prepared to go to court with historic lawsuits to make sure the elections are fair and honest. Why do Obama supporters turn a blind eye to his astoundingly unethical and abusive approach to governing this country? The Corruption Chronicles boldly, honestly, and factually makes the case that the federal government is now off the rails and out of control, and has literally built its foundation on broken promises, fatal miscalculations, and a cynical manipulation of its trusting public. But it’s not over. Tom Fitton and Judicial Watch are proof that the Tea Party approach to government corruption can make a difference. A grassroots group can take on the president, the Congress, and the judiciary, and finally force the government to be held accountable. The uncontestable facts are here, in The Corruption Chronicles. To see what is true, you only have to look. THE FULLY DOCUMENTED FACTS BEHIND: • The Solyndra Debacle • Obama’s Watergate: Operation Fast and Furious • The Obama Administration’s $20 Billion Government Extortion Scheme • The Unprecedented Threat to the Integrity of the 2012 Elections • The Czar Investigation Stonewall • The Undermining of Our Nation’s Immigration Laws • 9/11 Secrets
The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West
Edward Lucas - 2008
Multiple parties campaigned for seats in the Duma, the nation’s parliament. The media criticized the government freely. Eight years later as Putin completes his second term as president of Russia and announces his bid for prime minister, the country is under a repressive regime. Human rights abuses are widespread. The Kremlin is openly hostile to the West. Yet the United States and Europe have been slow to confront the new reality, in effect, helping Russia win what experts are now calling the New Cold War.Edward Lucas, former Moscow Bureau Chief for The Economist, offers a harrowing portrait from inside Russia as well as a sobering political assessment of what the New Cold War will mean for the world. In this big, hard hitting and urgently needed book, he shows how* Russia is pursuing global energy markets* Neighboring nations are being coerced back into the former Soviet orbit* Journalists and dissidents are being silenced* Foreign investments and private enterprises are routinely defrauded* Putin is laying the groundwork for controlling industry and planning his new role as prime ministerDrawing on new and hitherto reported material, The New Cold War brilliantly anticipates what is in store for the new Russia and what the world should be doing.
Chuck Klosterman X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century
Chuck Klosterman - 2017
His writing spans the realms of culture and sports, while also addressing interpersonal issues, social quandaries, and ethical boundaries. Klosterman has written nine previous books, helped found and establish Grantland, served as the New York Times Magazine Ethicist, worked on film and television productions, and contributed profiles and essays to outlets such as GQ, Esquire, Billboard, The A.V. Club, and The Guardian.Chuck Klosterman's tenth book (aka Chuck Klosterman X) collects his most intriguing of those pieces, accompanied by fresh introductions and new footnotes throughout. Klosterman presents many of the articles in their original form, featuring previously unpublished passages and digressions. Subjects include Breaking Bad, Lou Reed, zombies, KISS, Jimmy Page, Stephen Malkmus, steroids, Mountain Dew, Chinese Democracy, The Beatles, Jonathan Franzen, Taylor Swift, Tim Tebow, Kobe Bryant, Usain Bolt, Eddie Van Halen, Charlie Brown, the Cleveland Browns, and many more cultural figures and pop phenomena. This is a tour of the past decade from one of the sharpest and most prolific observers of our unusual times.
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
James Forman Jr. - 2017
Critics have assailed the rise of mass incarceration, emphasizing its disproportionate impact on people of color. As James Forman, Jr., points out, however, the war on crime that began in the 1970s was supported by many African American leaders in the nation’s urban centers. In Locking Up Our Own, he seeks to understand why.Forman shows us that the first substantial cohort of black mayors, judges, and police chiefs took office amid a surge in crime and drug addiction. Many prominent black officials, including Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Barry and federal prosecutor Eric Holder, feared that the gains of the civil rights movement were being undermined by lawlessness—and thus embraced tough-on-crime measures, including longer sentences and aggressive police tactics. In the face of skyrocketing murder rates and the proliferation of open-air drug markets, they believed they had no choice. But the policies they adopted would have devastating consequences for residents of poor black neighborhoods.A former D.C. public defender, Forman tells riveting stories of politicians, community activists, police officers, defendants, and crime victims. He writes with compassion about individuals trapped in terrible dilemmas—from the men and women he represented in court to officials struggling to respond to a public safety emergency. Locking Up Our Own enriches our understanding of why our society became so punitive and offers important lessons to anyone concerned about the future of race and the criminal justice system in this country.
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
Michael Wolff - 2018
Brilliantly reported and astoundingly fresh, Fire and Fury shows us how and why Donald Trump has become the king of discord and disunion.
The Unwritten Law: A True Crime of Passion
Danny Cantrell - 2013
Morgan's wife, Ina, disguised in borrowed clothing, guns Pearl down when she finds her on a midnight train with her arms around Morgan. The next day, Pearl's body is placed on public display for a town of strangers, and her killer is applauded in the streets by hundreds of country women.A "dream team" of defense attorneys is hired, and the stage is set for a sensational jazz age clash between two distinct views of a woman's role in modern society--that of the "virtuous" rural mother dressed in gingham and the "scarlet woman" from the city who would deny a mother and her babies the necessities of life. Should death ever be the price for adultery? That is the question the jury--and readers--are faced with in THE UNWRITTEN LAW. Gripping, thought-provoking, and engaging--the reader of The Unwritten Law becomes a participant in one of the most morally divisive murder trials in American history!
Murderer with a Badge
Edward Humes - 1992
Pulitzer Prize-winner Humes, the first to break the story, conducted exclusive jail-cell interviews with convicted LAPD officer Bill Leasure to give an enthralling account of his chilling crimes. 8-page insert.
Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State
Mark Lawrence Schrad - 2013
But just as vodka is central to the lives of many Russians, it is also central to understanding Russian history and politics.In Vodka Politics, Mark Lawrence Schrad argues that debilitating societal alcoholism is not hard-wired into Russians' genetic code, but rather their autocratic political system, which has long wielded vodka as a tool of statecraft. Through a series of historical investigations stretching from Ivanthe Terrible through Vladimir Putin, Vodka Politics presents the secret history of the Russian state itself-a history that is drenched in liquor. Scrutinizing (rather than dismissing) the role of alcohol in Russian politics yields a more nuanced understanding of Russian history itself: from palaceintrigues under the tsars to the drunken antics of Soviet and post-Soviet leadership, vodka is there in abundance.Beyond vivid anecdotes, Schrad scours original documents and archival evidence to answer provocative historical questions. How have Russia's rulers used alcohol to solidify their autocratic rule? What role did alcohol play in tsarist coups? Was Nicholas II's ill-fated prohibition a catalyst for theBolshevik Revolution? Could the Soviet Union have become a world power without liquor? How did vodka politics contribute to the collapse of both communism and public health in the 1990s? How can the Kremlin overcome vodka's hurdles to produce greater social well-being, prosperity, and democracy intothe future?Viewing Russian history through the bottom of the vodka bottle helps us to understand why the liquor question remains important to Russian high politics even today-almost a century after the issue had been put to bed in most every other modern state. Indeed, recognizing and confronting vodka'sdevastating political legacies may be the greatest political challenge for this generation of Russia's leadership, as well as the next.
I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Hearts, Souls, and Wars in Hungary
Marianne Szegedy-Maszak - 2013
He was a rising star in the foreign ministry—a vocal anti-Fascist who was in talks with the Allies when he was arrested and sent to Dachau. She was the granddaughter of Manfred Weiss, the industrialist patriarch of an aristocratic Jewish family that owned factories, were patrons of intellectuals and artists, and entertained dignitaries at their baronial estates. Though many in the family had converted to Catholicism decades earlier, when the Germans invaded Hungary in March 1944, they were forced into hiding. In a secret and controversial deal brokered with Heinrich Himmler, the family turned over their vast holdings in exchange for their safe passage to Portugal. Aladár survived Dachau, a fragile and anxious version of himself. After nearly two years without contact, he located Hanna and wrote her a letter that warned that he was not the man she’d last seen, but he was still in love with her. After months of waiting for visas and transit, she finally arrived in a devastated Budapest in December 1945, where at last they were wed. Framed by a cache of letters written between 1940 and 1947, Szegedy-Maszák’s family memoir tells the story, at once intimate and epic, of the complicated relationship Hungary had with its Jewish population—the moments of glorious humanism that stood apart from its history of anti-Semitism—and with the rest of the world. She resurrects in riveting detail a lost world of splendor and carefully limns the moral struggles that history exacted—from a country and its individuals. Praise for I Kiss Your Hands Many Times “I Kiss Your Hand Many Times is the sweeping story of Marianne Szegedy-Maszák’s family in pre– and post–World War II Europe, capturing the many ways the struggles of that period shaped her family for years to come. But most of all it is a beautiful love story, charting her parents’ devotion in one of history’s darkest hours.”—Arianna Huffington, president and editor-in-chief, the Huffington Post Media Group “In this panoramic and gripping narrative of a vanished world of great wealth and power, Marianne Szegedy-Maszák restores an important missing chapter of European, Hungarian, and Holocaust history.”—Kati Marton, author of Paris: A Love Story and
Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America
“How many times can a heart be broken? Hungarians know, Marianne Szegedy-Maszák’s family more than most. History has broken theirs again and again. This is the story of that violence, told by the daughter of an extraordinary man and extraordinary woman who refused to surrender to it. Every perfectly chosen word is as it happened. So brace yourself. Truth can break hearts, too.”—Robert Sam Anson, author of War News: A Young Reporter in Indochina“This family memoir is everything you could wish for in the genre: the story of a fascinating family that illuminates the historical time it lived through. . . . Informative and fascinating in every way, [I Kiss Your Hands Many Times] is a great introduction to World War II Hungary and a moving tale of personal relationships in a time of great duress.”—Booklist (starred review)
Kimjongilia
Victor Fox - 2015
No one told her he was capriciously cruel and sexually deviant.Chinese guerrilla fighter Peter Chang, ordered to protect Kim Suk from her new husband, is an angry man haunted by his mother's death and his father's abandonment. No one told him he wasn't expected to survive his newest assignment in the Kim household.While the two secretly carry out their orders from different superiors, they become romantically entangled, each struggling to protect the other from the darkest secrets of conspiracy and manipulation.A Note From the PublisherAfter North Korea allegedly hacked Sony pictures, many publishers were afraid to publish this explosive book. To them, it was just too risky. Regardless of the warnings and threats, I have decided to go ahead and make this book available to you without censoring any information.
The Dark Heart: A True Story of Greed, Murder, and an Unlikely Investigator
Joakim Palmkvist - 2017
When a search yielded nothing, and all physical evidence had seemingly disappeared, authorities had little to go on—except a disturbing phone call five weeks later from Göran’s daughter Maria. She was sure that her sister, Sara, was somehow involved. At the heart of the alleged crime: Sara’s greed, her father’s land holdings, and his bitter feud with Sara’s idler boyfriend. With no body, there was no crime—and the case went as cold and dark as the forests of southern Sweden. But not for Therese Tang. For two years, this case was her obsession.A hard-working ex-model, mother of three, and Missing People investigator, Therese was willing to put her own safety at risk in order to uncover the truth. What she found was a nest of depraved secrets, lies, and betrayal. All she had to do now, in her relentless and dangerous pursuit of justice, was prove that it led to murder.
Into the Abyss: How a Deadly Plane Crash Changed the Lives of a Pilot, a Politician, a Criminal and a Cop
Carol Shaben - 2012
Four survived: the rookie pilot, a prominent politician, a cop, and the criminal he was escorting to face charges. Despite the poor weather, Erik Vogel, the 24-year-old pilot, was under intense pressure to fly--a situation not uncommon to pilots working for small airlines. Overworked and exhausted, he feared losing his job if he refused to fly. Larry Shaben, the author's father and Canada's first Muslim Cabinet Minister, was commuting home after a busy week at the Alberta Legislature. After Paul Archambault, a drifter wanted on an outstanding warrant, boarded the plane, rookie Constable Scott Deschamps decided, against RCMP regulations, to remove his handcuffs--a decision that profoundly impacted the men's survival. As they fought through the night to stay alive, the dividing lines of power, wealth and status were erased and each man was forced to confront the precious and limited nature of his existence. The survivors forged unlikely friendships and through them found strength and courage to rebuild their lives. Into the Abyss is a powerful narrative that combines in-depth reporting with sympathy and grace to explore how a single, tragic event can upset our assumptions and become a catalyst for transformation.
Good for the Money: My Fight to Pay Back America
Robert Benmosche - 2016
It was the peg upon which the nation hung its ire and resentment during the financial crisis: the pinnacle of Wall Street arrogance and greed. When Bob Benmosche climbed aboard as CEO, it was widely assumed that he would go down with his ship. In mere months, he turned things around, pulling AIG from the brink of financial collapse and restoring its profitability. Before three years were up, AIG had fully repaid its staggering debt to the U.S. government - with interest.Good for the Money is an unyielding leader's memoir of a career spent fixing companies through thoughtful, unconventional strategy. With his brash, no-holds-barred approach to the job, Benmosche restored AIG's employee morale and good name. His is a story of perseverance, told with refreshing irreverence in unpretentious terms.Called "an American hero" by Andrew Ross Sorkin, author of Too Big to Fail, Benmosche was a self-made man who never forgot what life is like for the nation's 99-percent; again and again, he pushed back against obstinate colleagues to salvage American jobs and industry. Good for the Money affords you a front-row seat for Benmosche's heated battles with major players from Geithner to Obama to Cuomo, and offers incomparable lessons in leadership from the legendary CEO who changed the way Wall Street does business.