Book picks similar to
Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police by Rob Evans
non-fiction
politics
true-crime
history
The Leveller Revolution
John Rees - 2016
In this thrilling narrative, John Rees brings to life the men—including John Lilburne, Rich-ard Overton, Thomas Rainsborough—and women who ensured victory at war, and brought England to the edge of radical repub-licanism.From the raucous streets of London and the clattering printers’ workshops that stoked the uprising, to the rank and file of the New Model Army and the furious Putney debates where the levellers argued with Oliver Cromwell for the future of English democracy, this story reasserts the revolutionary nature of the 1642–48 wars, and the role of ordinary people in this pivotal moment in history.The legacy of the Levellers can be seen in the modern struggles for freedom and democracy across the world.
Growing Up bin Laden: Osama's Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World
Jean Sasson - 2009
In gripping detail, they recount the drama, tensions, and everyday activities of the man they knew as a husband and father. Married at fifteen, Najwa describes the transformation of the quiet, serious young man she fell in love with into an authoritarian husband and stern father, an entrepreneur, and – finally – the leader of a complex international terrorist network. Uprooted from a life of extraordinary luxury and privilege in Saudi Arabia, they suddenly found themselves living life on the run, fleeing from country to country under assumed names and fake passports. Omar describes how he and his siblings were brought up in remote ranches and fortified Afghani mountain camps, handling Kalashnikovs and learning desert survival skills. Their eventual escape from Afghanistan would come just days before the terrible events of 9/11 changed the world forever. With unprecedented access and exclusive family photographs, Jean Sasson, author of the bestselling Princess, presents the story that we were never meant to hear.
Rebels: The Irish Rising of 1916
Peter de Rosa - 1990
It was a rash, doomed, symbolic uprising, and the rebel leaders knew it. Crack British troops killed and wounded hundreds of the rebels in the week of fighting, and British artillery shells left Dublin's city center in ruins.But the Rising of 1916 was not in vain. The short-lived insurrection and the subsequent executions of sixteen rebel leaders galvanized the Irish people. The overthrow of seven centuries of British rule in Ireland began on Easter Monday, 1916.In Rebels, Peter de Rosa, author of the bestselling Vicars of Christ, tells the story of the 1916 Rising in all its terror and beauty. With the dramatic flair of a novelist and the scrupulous accuracy of a professional historian, de Rosa brings to life the people, passions, politics, and repercussions of this historic event.
Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy
Kevin Bales - 1999
Kevin Bales's disturbing story of contemporary slavery reaches from Pakistan's brick kilns and Thailand's brothels to various multinational corporations. His investigations reveal how the tragic emergence of a "new slavery" is inextricably linked to the global economy. This completely revised edition includes a new preface.All of the author's royalties from this book go to fund antislavery projects around the world.
Russian Roulette: A Deadly Game - How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Global Plot
Giles Milton - 2013
But Lenin would not be satisfied with overthrowing the tsar. His goal was a global revolt that would topple all Western capitalist regimes — starting with the British Empire.Russian Roulette tells the spectacular and harrowing story of the British spies in revolutionary Russia whose mission was to stop Lenin’s red tide from washing across the free world. They were an eccentric cast of characters, led by Mansfield Cumming, a one-legged, monocle-wearing former sea captain, and included novelist W. Somerset Maugham, beloved children’s author Arthur Ransome, and the dashing, ice-cool Sidney Reilly, the legendary Ace of Spies and a model for Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Cumming’s network would pioneer the field of covert action and would one day become MI6.Living in disguise, constantly switching identities, they infiltrated Soviet commissariats, the Red Army, and Cheka (the feared secret police), and would come within a whisker of assassinating Lenin. As Giles Milton chronicles for the first time, in a sequence of bold exploits that stretched from Moscow to the central Asian city of Tashkent, this unlikely band of agents succeeded in foiling Lenin’s plot for global revolution.
Victoria: A Life
A.N. Wilson - 2014
She was a mother of nine and grandmother of forty-two and the matriarch of royal Europe through her children’s marriages. To many, Queen Victoria is a ruler shrouded in myth and mystique, an aging, stiff widow paraded as the figurehead to an all-male imperial enterprise. But in truth, Britain's longest-reigning monarch was one of the most passionate, expressive, humorous and unconventional women who ever lived, and the story of her life continues to fascinate.A. N. Wilson's exhaustively researched and definitive biography includes a wealth of new material from previously unseen sources to show us Queen Victoria as she’s never been seen before. Wilson explores the curious set of circumstances that led to Victoria's coronation, her strange and isolated childhood, her passionate marriage to Prince Albert and his pivotal influence even after death and her widowhood and subsequent intimate friendship with her Highland servant John Brown, all set against the backdrop of this momentous epoch in Britain’s history — and the world’s.Born at the very moment of the expansion of British political and commercial power across the globe, Victoria went on to chart a unique course for her country even as she became the matriarch of nearly every great dynasty of Europe. Her destiny was thus interwoven with those of millions of people — not just in Europe but in the ever-expanding empire that Britain was becoming throughout the nineteenth century. The famed queen had a face that adorned postage stamps, banners, statues and busts all over the known world.Wilson's Victoria is a towering achievement, a masterpiece of biography by a writer at the height of his powers.
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam
John A. Nagl - 2002
Nagl--a veteran of both Operation Desert Storm and the conflict in Iraq--considers the now crucial question of how armies adapt to changing circumstances during the course of conflicts.
They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper
Bruce Robinson - 2015
Thompson and Errol Morris, Bruce Robinson offers a radical reinterpretation of Jack the Ripper, contending that he was not the madman of common legend, but the vile manifestation of the Victorian Age's moral bankruptcy.In exploring the case of Jack the Ripper, Robison goes beyond the who that has obsessed countless others and focuses on the why. He asserts that any "gentlemen" that walked above the fetid gutters of London, the nineteenth century's most depraved city, often harbored proclivities both violent and taboo—yearnings that went entirely unpunished, especially if he also bore royal connections. The story of Jack the Ripper hinges on accounts that were printed and distributed throughout history by the same murderous miscreants who frequented the East End of her Majesty's London, wiping the fetid muck from their boots when they once again reached the marble floors of society's finest homes.Supported by primary sources and illustrated with 75 to 100 black and white photographs, this breathtaking work of cultural history dismisses the theories of previous "Ripperologists." A Robinson persuasively makes clear with his unique brilliance, The Ripper was far from a poor resident of Whitechapel . . . he was a way of life.
Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary
Catherine Fogarty - 2021
For four intense days, the prisoners held the guards hostage while their leaders negotiated with a citizens' committee of journalists and lawyers, drawing attention to the dehumanizing realities of their incarceration, including overcrowding, harsh punishment and extreme isolation. But when another group of convicts turned their pent-up rage towards some of the weakest prisoners, tensions inside the old stone walls erupted, with tragic consequences. As heavily armed soldiers prepared to regain control of the prison through a full military assault, the inmates were finally forced to surrender.Murder on the Inside tells the harrowing story of a prison in crisis against the backdrop of a pivotal moment in the history of human rights. Occurring just months before the uprising at Attica Prison, the Kingston riot has remained largely undocumented, and few have known the details--yet the tense drama chronicled here is more relevant today than ever. A gripping account of the standoff and the efforts for justice and reform it inspired, Murder on the Inside is essential reading for our times.Includes 24 pages of photographs.
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 Warren Commission Report: The Official Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
Warren Commission - 1964
Kennedy. This report looks into President Kennedy's assassination, the murder of the President's killer Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby, & other important & interesting aspects of one of the most documented & investigated crimes of the last century.
Blue Blood
Edward Conlon - 2004
While there is action here, there's also political hassle, the rich and often troubling history of a department not unfamiliar with corruption, and the day to day life of people charged with preserving order in America's largest city. Conlon's book is, in part, a memoir as he progresses from being a rookie cop working the beat at troubled housing projects to assignments in the narcotics division to eventually becoming a detective. But it's also the story of his family history within the enormous NYPD as well as the evolving role of the police force within the city.Conlon relates the controversies surrounding the somewhat familiar shooting of Amadou Diallou and the abuse, at the hands of New York cops, of Abner Louima. But being a cop himself, Conlon lends insight and nuance to these issues that could not possibly be found in the newspapers. And as an outstanding writer, he draws the reader into that world. In the book's most remarkable passage, Conlon tells of the grim but necessary work done at the Fresh Kills landfill, sifting through the rubble and remains left in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11 (a section originally published in The New Yorker).In many ways, Blue Blood comes to resemble the world of New York City law enforcement that Conlon describes: both are expansive, sprawling, multi-dimensional, and endlessly fascinating. And Conlon's writing is perfectly matched to his subject, always lively, keenly observant, and possessing a streetwise energy.
Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present
Peter Vronsky - 2018
15,000 BC) to today. Delving further back into human history and deeper into the human psyche than Serial Killers--Vronsky's 2004 book, which has been called "the definitive history of the phenomenon of serial murder"--he focuses strictly on sexual serial killers: thrill killers who engage in murder, rape, torture, cannibalism and necrophilia, as opposed to for-profit serial killers, including hit men, or "political" serial killers, like terrorists or genocidal murderers.These sexual serial killers differ from all other serial killers in their motives and their foundations. They are uniquely human and--as popular culture has demonstrated--uniquely fascinating.
When Corruption Was King: How I Helped the Mob Rule Chicago, Then Brought the Outfit Down
Robert Cooley - 2004
During the 1970s and ‘80s, Cooley bribed judges, juries, and cops to keep his Mob clients out of jail. Paid handsomely for his services, he lived fast and enjoyed the protection of the men he served. Yet, by the end of the ‘90s, without a pending conviction, he became the star witness in nine federal trials that took down the most powerful Mafia family in the history of organized crime. When Corruption Was King is the story of a Mob lawyer turned mole with a million-dollar contract on his head who went back and forth between sin and sainthood—a turbulent youth, a stint on Chicago's police force, law school, and then the inner sanctum of Chicago's wiseguys. He dined with Mob bosses and shared "last suppers" with friends before their gangland executions. In a startling act of conscience, Cooley walked into the office of the U.S. Organized Crime Strike Force and agreed to wear a wire on the very same Mafia overlords who had made him a player. This book, including eight pages of memorable photographs, reveals the personal story behind the federal government's most successful Mafia investigation.
Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul
Karen Abbott - 2007
Operating in Chicago’s notorious Levee district at the dawn of the last century, the Club’s proprietors, two aristocratic sisters named Minna and Ada Everleigh, welcomed moguls and actors, senators and athletes, foreign dignitaries and literary icons, into their stately double mansion, where thirty stunning Everleigh “butterflies” awaited their arrival. Courtesans named Doll, Suzy Poon Tang, and Brick Top devoured raw meat to the delight of Prince Henry of Prussia and recited poetry for Theodore Dreiser. Whereas lesser madams pocketed most of a harlot’s earnings and kept a “whipper” on staff to mete out discipline, the Everleighs made sure their girls dined on gourmet food, were examined by an honest physician, and even tutored in the literature of Balzac.Not everyone appreciated the sisters’ attempts to elevate the industry. Rival Levee madams hatched numerous schemes to ruin the Everleighs, including an attempt to frame them for the death of department store heir Marshall Field, Jr. But the sisters’ most daunting foes were the Progressive Era reformers, who sent the entire country into a frenzy with lurid tales of “white slavery-the allegedly rampant practice of kidnapping young girls and forcing them into brothels. This furor shaped America’s sexual culture and had repercussions all the way to the White House, including the formation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.With a cast of characters that includes Jack Johnson, John Barrymore, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., William Howard Taft, “Hinky Dink” Kenna, and Al Capone, Sin in the Second City is Karen Abbott’s colorful, nuanced portrait of the iconic Everleigh sisters, their world-famous Club, and the perennial clash between our nation’s hedonistic impulses and Puritanical roots. Culminating in a dramatic last stand between brothel keepers and crusading reformers, Sin in the Second City offers a vivid snapshot of America’s journey from Victorian-era propriety to twentieth-century modernity.