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...

"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 ...

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...

"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 ...

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...

Long before space travel was possible, the idea of life beyond Earth transfixed humans. In this fascinating book, astronomer Jon Willis explores the science of astrobiology and the possibility of locating other life in our own galaxy.Describing the most recent discoveries by space exploration missions, including the Kepler space telescope, the Mars Curiosity rover, and the New Horizons probe, Willis asks listeners to imagine—and choose among—five scenarios for fin...

Whose Middle Ages? is an interdisciplinary collection of short, accessible essays intended for the nonspecialist reader and ideal for teaching at an undergraduate level. Each of twenty-two essays takes up an area where digging for meaning in the medieval past has brought something distorted back into the present: in our popular entertainment; in our news, our politics, and our propaganda; and in subtler ways that inform how we think about our histories, our countries, and ourselves. Each a...

The definitive account of how regime change in the Middle East has proven so tempting to American policymakers for decades—despite never achieving the far-reaching aims of its proponents—and how it’s finally time to forge a new path forward.Since the end of World War II, the United States has set out to oust governments in the Middle East on an average of once per decade**—**in places as diverse as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan (twice), Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The reaso...

This timely book focuses on President Obama's deeply considered strategy toward Iran's nuclear program and reveals how the historic agreement of 2015 broke the persistent stalemate in negotiations that had blocked earlier efforts.The deal accomplished two major feats in one stroke: it averted the threat of war with Iran and prevented the possibility of an Iranian nuclear bomb. Trita Parsi, a Middle East foreign policy expert who advised the Obama White House throughout the talks an...

Brilliant, reminiscent of Lewis Hyde's The Gift in its reach and of Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time in its haunting evocation of human lives, offers a sweeping view of a surprisingly revealing aspect of human history—from the stone lamps of the Pleistocene to the LEDs embedded in fabrics of the future.Brox plumbs the class implications of light—who had it, who didn't—through the many centuries when crude lamps and tallow candles constricted waking hour...