An account of one of the Cold War era's most harrowing nuclear accidents documents the maiden voyage of the Soviet nuclear submarine, during which a serious reactor leak spurred a perilous race against time.

    Packed with details of everyday life from giving birth in a Soviet hospital to living in a Moscow communal apartment. Forced to give up her American citizenship during Stalin's reign, Wettlin was coerced into becoming an informant for the KGB. She describes what Russia was like during and after World War II, her travels from the Baltic states to Siberia, Outer Mongolia, Leningrad, Uzbekistan and Georgia. Her mesmerizing book offers a background for understanding Soviet events that molded the Russian mind--from revolutionary enthusiasm to a complete repudiation of communism.

    This is a fascinating and unique guide to the capital that takes the reader off the beaten track and into unexplored territory. This book allows the reader to travel through time to six key periods in the history of London. From Shakespeare to the plague, medieval London to the swinging 60s, readers can totally immerse themselves in the sights, sounds and smells of our capital at each particular moment.It's vividly written, and after reading this book you'll never rush through the streets of Covent Garden or St Paul's again without pausing for at least a moment to think of all the mad characters and epic lives that ran through the same streets centuries before.Whether you are a tourist looking for an alternative way to see the city, or a Londoner that wants to learn more about the world around you, this is a must-have guide.

    Jim Mullen was not one of them. He loved his Manhattan existence: parties, openings, movie screenings. He could walk to hundreds of restaurants, waste entire afternoons at the Film Forum, people-watch from his window. Then, one day, calamity. His wife quits smoking and buys a weekend house in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York -- in a tiny town diametrically opposed to Manhattan in every way. Slowly, however, the man who once boasted, "Life is just a cab away," begins to warm to the place -- manure and compost and strangers who wave and all -- and to embrace the kind of life that once gave him the shakes.

    But once in Russia, she quickly becomes entangled in a country she can’t escape. Many years later, Florence’s son, Julian, will make the opposite journey, immigrating back to the United States. His work in the oil industry takes him on frequent visits to Moscow, and when he learns that Florence’s KGB file has been opened, he arranges a business trip to uncover the truth about his mother, and to convince his son, Lenny, who is trying to make his fortune in the new Russia, to return home. What he discovers is both chilling and heartbreaking: an untold story of what happened to a generation of Americans abandoned by their country.The Patriots is a riveting evocation of the Cold War years, told with brilliant insight and extraordinary skill. Alternating between Florence’s and Julian’s perspectives, it is at once a mother-son story and a tale of two countries bound in a dialectic dance; a love story and a spy story; both a grand, old-fashioned epic and a contemporary novel of ideas. Through the history of one family moving back and forth between continents over three generations, The Patriots is a poignant tale of the power of love, the rewards and risks of friendship, and the secrets parents and children keep from one another.