An account of the USSR's defeat in Afghanistan drawing on many interviews with Soviet veterans: "Fascinating. . . . A highly readable history of the conflict." — The New York Times Book ReviewIn this groundbreaking account of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, former NPR Moscow correspondent Gregory Feifer vividly depicts the war that contributed greatly to the demise of the USSR, and that offers striking lessons for the twenty-first century as well. Told ...

**In this riveting memoir, gain a remarkable insider's view of the KGB's prolonged conflict with the United States, spanning fron Stalin's death in 1953 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991."Gripping." —The Wall Street Journal**Victor Cherkashin's story is rich in episode and drama. He took part in some of the highest-profile Cold War cases, including tracking down U.S. and British spies around the world. He was posted to stations in the U.S., Australia, India, ...

From former NPR Moscow correspondent Gregory Feifer comes an incisive portrait that draws on vivid personal stories to portray the forces that have shaped the Russian character for centuries-and continue to do so today.Russians explores the seeming paradoxes of life in Russia by unraveling the nature of its people: what is it in their history, their desires, and their conception of themselves that makes them baffling to the West? Using the insights of his d...

The Soviet war in Afghanistan was a grueling debacle that has striking lessons for American foreign policy today. In The Great Gamble, Gregory Feifer examines the war from the perspective of the soldiers on the ground. During the last years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union sent some of its most elite troops to unfamiliar lands in Central Asia to fight a vaguely defined enemy, which eventually defeated their superior number with unconventional tactics. Although the Soviet leadersh...

While there have been other books about Aldrich Ames, Circle of Treason is the first account written by CIA agents who were key members of the CIA team that conducted the intense “Ames Mole Hunt.” Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille were two of the five principals of the CIA team tasked with hunting one of their own and were directly responsible for identifying Ames as the mole, leading to his arrest and conviction. One of the most destructive traitors in American history, CIA officer Al...

Masterful, ambitious, and groundbreaking, this is a major new history of our country by one of our most respected thinkers and historians -- a book every Canadian should own.From the acclaimed biographer and historian Conrad Black comes the definitive history of Canada -- a revealing, groundbreaking account of the people and events that shaped a nation.Spanning 874 to 2014, and beginning from Canada's first inhabitants and the early explorers, this masterful ...

The New York Times bestselling author of The Gates of Europe offers “a stirring account of an extraordinary moment” in Russian history (Wall Street Journal)On Christmas Day, 1991, President George H. W. Bush addressed the nation to declare an American victory in the Cold War: earlier that day Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned as the first and last Soviet president. The enshrining of that narrative, one in which the end of the Cold War was li...

**WINNER OF THE 2026 PULITZER PRIZE FOR OPINION WRITINGThe National Book Award winner's biography of a ruthless man's ascent to near-absolute power.**“In a country where journalists critical of the government have a way of meeting untimely deaths, Gessen has shown remarkable courage in researching and writing this unflinching indictment of the most powerful man in Russia.” —The Wall Street Journal“Thanks to fearless reporting and ac...

Built in the fifth century b.c., the Parthenon has been venerated for more than two millennia as the West’s ultimate paragon of beauty and proportion. Since the Enlightenment, it has also come to represent our political ideals, the lavish temple to the goddess Athena serving as the model for our most hallowed civic architecture. But how much do the values of those who built the Parthenon truly correspond with our own? And apart from the significance with which we have invested it, what exa...

A magnificent new biography that revolutionizes our understanding of Stalin and his worldIt has the quality of myth: a poor cobbler’s son, a seminarian from an oppressed outer province of the Russian empire, reinvents himself as a top leader in a band of revolutionary zealots. When the band seizes control of the country in the aftermath of total world war, the former seminarian ruthlessly dominates the new regime until he stands as absolute ruler of a vast and terr...

The New York Times–bestselling inside look at one of the world’s most powerful and mysterious institutionsFor more than twenty-five years, John Thavis held one of the most remarkable journalistic assignments in the world: reporting on the inner workings of the Vatican. In The Vatican Diaries, Thavis reveals Vatican City as a place struggling to define itself in the face of internal and external threats, where Curia cardinals fight private wars and...

In recent years neuroscientists have uncovered the countless ways our brain trips us up in day-to-day life, from its propensity toward irrational thought to how our intuitions deceive us. The latest research on sleep, however, points in the opposite direction. Where old wives tales have long advised to "sleep on a problem," today scientists are discovering the truth behind these folk sayings,and how the busy brain radically improves our minds through sleep and dreams. In The Secret Wor...