"The Russia that Satter depicts in this brave, engaging book cannot be ignored . . . Required reading for anyone interested in the post-Soviet state" ( Newsweek ).Anticipating a new dawn of freedom after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russians could hardly have foreseen the reality of their future a decade later: A country impoverished and controlled at every level by organized crime. This riveting book views the ...

In December 2013, David Satter became the first American journalist to be expelled from Russia since the Cold War. The Moscow Times said it was not surprising he was expelled, "it was surprising it took so long." Satter is known in Russia for having written that the apartment bombings in 1999, which were blamed on Chechens and brought Putin to power, were actually carried out by the Russian FSB security police.In this book, Satter tells the story of the apartment bombings and how Bo...

"Every page of this splendid and eloquent and impassioned book reflects an extraordinarily acute understanding of the Soviet system." — Washington TimesThe first state in history to be based explicitly on atheism, the Soviet Union endowed itself with the attributes of God. In this book, David Satter, a reporter in Moscow for the Financial Times of London, shows through individual stories what it meant to construct an entire state ...

A veteran writer on Russia and the Soviet Union explains why Russia refuses to draw from the lessons of its past and what this portends for the futureRussia today is haunted by deeds that have not been examined and words that have been left unsaid. A serious attempt to understand the meaning of the Communist experience has not been undertaken, and millions of victims of Soviet Communism are all but forgotten. In this book David Satter, a former Moscow correspondent and longtime writ...

This thrilling memoir documents the early life of Russian journalist and human rights activist Alexander Podrabinek as he and other dissidents fearlessly fought against the Soviet Union.Between Prison and Freedom chronicles Alexander Podrabinek’s deeply personal recollections of his early life fearlessly opposing the injustices of the Soviet Union. He vividly describes his turbulent journey from silently protesting at Pushkin Square as a teenager to his ex...

David Satter arrived in the Soviet Union in June, 1976 as the correspondent of the Financial Times of London and entered a country that was a giant theater of the absurd. After 1982, he was banned from the Soviet Union but allowed back in 1990, and finally expelled in 2013 on the grounds that the secret police regarded his presence as “undesirable.” From 1976 to the present, he saw four different Russias, which differed from each other radically while remaining essentially the same. From 1...

"The Russia that Satter depicts in this brave, engaging book cannot be ignored . . . Required reading for anyone interested in the post-Soviet state" (Newsweek).Anticipating a new dawn of freedom after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russians could hardly have foreseen the reality of their future a decade later: a country impoverished and controlled at every level by organized crime. This riveting book views the 1990s reform period through the expe...

In 2002, Sam Faddis was named to head a CIA team that would enter Iraq to facilitate the deployment of follow-on conventional military forces numbering over 40,000 American soldiers. This force, built around the 4th Infantry Division, would, in partnership with Kurdish forces and with the assistance of Turkey, engage Saddam's army in the North as part of a coming invasion. Faddis expected to be on the ground in Iraq within weeks, the entire campaign likely to be over by summer.The ...

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a devastating exploration of the racial disparities in violent death and injury in America and a blueprint for ending this fundamental social injusticeAbout 170,000 black Americans have died in homicides just since the year 2000. Violence takes more years of life from black men than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined; a young black man in the United States has a fifteen times greater chance of dying from violence than his white co...

A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian recounts the tale of the unwanted president who ran afoul of Congress over Reconstruction and was nearly removed from officeAndrew Johnson never expected to be president. But just six weeks after becoming Abraham Lincoln's vice president, the events at Ford's Theatre thrust him into the nation's highest office. Johnson faced a nearly impossible task—to succeed America's greatest chief executive, to bind the nation's wounds after t...

Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years by Carl Sandburg is a two-volume biography that explores Lincoln's life from his childhood through his early political career, ending just before he became president. Published in 1926, Sandburg’s work combines detailed historical research with a lyrical, almost poetic style, reflecting his background as both a poet and a historian. The narrative captures the spirit of the American frontier, vividly portraying the world that shaped Lincoln’s char...

The collected memoirs of a 1913 San Francisco sex worker, their effect on society at the time, and where they fit in today’s worldIn 1913 the San Francisco Bulletin published a serialized, ghostwritten memoir of a prostitute who went by Alice Smith. “A Voice from the Underworld” detailed Alice’s humble Midwestern upbringing and her struggle to find aboveboard work, and candidly related the harrowing events she endured after entering “the life.”Whil...