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Seth Rosenfeld is an independent investigative journalist and author of the New York Times best-seller Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power. As a staff reporter for The San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle, he specialized in using public records and won national honors including the George Polk Award. Subversives, based on thousands of pages of FBI records released to him as a result of several Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, won the PEN Center USA’s Literary Award for Research Nonfiction Prize, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sunshine Award, and other honors.
Inspired by the true story of Melita Norwood, who was exposed in 1999 as the KGB’s longest-running British spy, Red Joan is an enthralling novel that vividly reconstructs her life and explores with great authorial compassion her conflicting emotions and unsettling ambiguities as she is drawn deeper and deeper into atomic espionage by a college lover at the dawn of the Cold War.
'If you loved William Boyd's Restless, you'll enjoy this' Viv Groskop, Red
Cambridge University in 1937 is awash with ideas and idealists - to unworldly Joan it is dazzling.
After a chance meeting with Russian-born Sonya and Leo, Joan is swept up in the glamour and energy of the duo, and finds herself growing closer and closer to them both.
But allegiance is a slippery thing. Out of university and working in a government ministry with access to top-secret information, Joan finds her loyalty tested as she is faced with the most difficult question of all: what price would you…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
Growing up in a globe-trotting diplomatic service family, I listened avidly to my parents’ tales of their romance in Moscow at the height of the Cold War in 1958, how they were trailed by the KGB and ripped listening devices out of apartment walls. They spoke thrillingly of the constant threat and the dangers they faced. There were other stories, of other places, including Peking at the start of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a few scenes of which I was just old enough to witness. So I have always been curious about this era and read Cold War intelligence histories, many of them recommended by my remarkable mother.
Love, loyalty, and betrayal combine in a chillingly real early-1960s Cold War nightmare for Lily, the wife of a civil servant inadvertently caught up in a no-win situation after helping a friend, then accused of passing papers to the Russians in London.
What resonates with me is the terrible aftermath and the effect on his family of political intrigue more powerful than any of them knows. Or does Lily’s husband know exactly what he has done? What I love about this novel is the quiet way the tension grips until the marriage and family are no longer ordinary.
The writing, as always from Helen Dunmore, is lyrical, elegant, and restrained, adding another dimension of pleasure.
“A spy novel but one that has been quietly and ingeniously deepened well beyond the ambitions of genre . . . [it] is one of those books that you read with your heart in your mouth, your mind fully engaged, and with a sense of desolation as you note the dwindling number of pages left before it comes to an end.”—Chicago Tribune
“Dunmore has always been fantastic on the complexity of people's motivations and the secret reasons they act as they do. This book is no exception . . . a page turner...as much a surprising love story as it…
I (Robert) am primarily interested in modern British history. During my postgraduate studies, I worked mainly with government papers that had just been declassified. Like many historians, I enjoy unraveling the mystery that archival research offers and shedding light on forgotten or unheard stories. Meanwhile, Peter, my co-author, is passionate about the intersection between national security and human rights. He developed this interest during his PhD research, which examined the institutionalization of torture during the Iraq War. This research relied heavily on documents released via freedom of information requests and leaks, both of which are relevant to our book on the Official Record.
Written by Mary Graham of the Harvard University-affiliated The Transparency Policy Project, this book explores how eight presidents stretching backward from Barack Obama to George Washington have dealt with the tensions inherent in government secrecy within a society that (at least in theory and often only for some) allows citizens to feed into the management of government affairs.
Graham illustrates that secrecy has been utilized as much to hide mistakes as it has been to protect national security, as well as exploring key moments in the history of secrecy in the US, such as the labyrinth inquiries that followed the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the Nixon administration.
How presidents use secrecy to protect the nation, foster diplomacy, and gain power
Ever since the nation's most important secret meeting-the Constitutional Convention-presidents have struggled to balance open, accountable government with necessary secrecy in military affairs and negotiations. For the first one hundred and twenty years, a culture of open government persisted, but new threats and technology have long since shattered the old bargains. Today, presidents neither protect vital information nor provide the open debate Americans expect.
Mary Graham tracks the rise in governmental secrecy that began with surveillance and loyalty programs during Woodrow Wilson's administration, explores how it developed…
The Guardian of the Palace is the first novel in a modern fantasy series set in a New York City where magic is real—but hidden, suppressed, and dangerous when exposed.
When an ancient magic begins to leak into the world, a small group of unlikely allies is forced to act…
I’m passionate about spying. It was an absolute privilege for me to have been able to spend my life in the shadows, so to speak. I was undercover my entire career doing espionage and covert action operations for our country and the CIA. I discovered very early on that I had a particular fascination for the arcane and Byzantine subspecialty of counterintelligence. It’s hard to describe the exhilaration I felt when we nabbed an American traitor and brought him or her to justice. It doesn’t get any better than that.
This case makes me very angry. As a former CIA officer myself, I felt deeply the malignancy of this betrayal from within. I was riveted by Denson’s account of how Howard James Nicholson, a CIA clandestine service colleague, let his personal problems and amorality get the better of him. Selling out to the Russians was certainly not the right answer for him, nor was dragging his son into spying. Denson has written a compelling counterintelligence treatise.
The riveting true story of the father-and-son co-conspirators who sold US national secrets to Russia.
Jim Nicholson was the highest-ranking CIA officer ever convicted of espionage. A single father, respected mentor, and brilliant case officer, he was also a double agent selling thousands of state secrets to the Russians. However, it was from behind the bars of a federal prison that he conducted his greatest betrayal. Just 12 years after Jim's conviction, his youngest son, Nathan, was arrested for the same crime.
Through interviews, private letters, and access to Jim's personal journal, Pulitzer Prize finalist Bryan Denson pieces together a…
I am a political scientist, a professor emeritus at Webster University, with scholarly publications about Latin American and U.S. politics. My interest in conspiracy theories was piqued by a reviewer who dismissed my book on the “democratic façade” of U.S. politics as a “conspiracy theory.” I took umbrage and denied being a “conspiracy theorist.” Years later, conversing with a colleague about Oliver Stone’s JFK, I dismissed his doubts about the lone gunman theory as a conspiracy theory. He asked whether I would similarly dismiss questions about official stories regarding assassinations in South Asia or Latin America. This all set me on the path to studying the role of conspiracies.
A positive NY Times review “in brief” of this “journey through the Deep State” caught my attention and mind immediately.
Most political scientists and top-tier journalists, like Ms. Howley, want no part of any association with the “deep state,” yet here was Hawley straying from the usual tone of dismissal, disdain, or stigma about the idea.
As I started reading about Reality Winner’s harrowing experience, I first thought I had mistakenly taken it for non-fiction. In fact, Winner’s name and her experiences are all too real. If there is any paranoia in Winner’s encounter with the deep state, it is to be found in the darker world of the national security state, not Hawley or her subject.
A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR A VANITY FAIR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
“Riveting and darkly funny and in all sense of the word, unclassifiable.”–The New York Times
A wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America—from the acclaimed author of Thrown
Who are you? You are data about data. You are a map of connections—a culmination of everything you have ever posted, searched, emailed, liked, and followed. In this groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction, Kerry Howley investigates the curious implications of living in the age of the indelible. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs…
When I covered the White House as a young reporter I was always more interested in understanding what was happening in the upstairs residence than in what briefings we were getting from the president’s advisers in the Roosevelt Room. I was raised with the understanding that in the end everyone is equal and that no one, no matter how powerful they are, gets out of the human experience. I think that’s what makes me interested in iconic women, from Elizabeth Taylor to Betty Ford. There’s nothing I like better than reading their letters and trying to understand what made them tick, and how they navigated their complicated and very public lives.
My friend Denise Kiernan shines a light on the thousands of women who worked on the Manhattan Project.
If you’ve seen Oppenheimer and you’re interested in the story behind the development of the atomic bomb, then this book will help you understand the hidden figures behind its creation. What I love the most about Denise’s writing is the way that she brings the mysterious origins of Oak Ridge, a Tennessee town created to house the people working on the bomb, to life.
At a time when the stakes couldn’t have been higher, women were at the center of the story.
The New York Times bestseller, now available in paperback—an incredible true story of the top-secret World War II town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the young women brought there unknowingly to help build the atomic bomb.
“The best kind of nonfiction: marvelously reported, fluidly written, and a remarkable story...As meticulous and brilliant as it is compulsively readable.” —Karen Abbott, author of Sin in the Second City
At the height of World War II, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was home to 75,000 residents, and consumed more electricity than New York City, yet it was shrouded in such secrecy that it did not…
Aury and Scott travel to the Finger Lakes in New York’s wine country to get to the bottom of the mysterious happenings at the Songscape Winery. Disturbed furniture and curious noises are one thing, but when a customer winds up dead, it’s time to dig into the details and see…
I remember as a child reading all sorts of books about spooky things like UFOs. When, as an adult, a scholar of religion, and academic I decided I wanted to write something about how technology and science and the Cold War impacted how Americans believed things, and what they believed in outside the boundaries of traditional religion, I remembered those books. I began poking around in the world of UFO sightings, reading both believers and academics like me fascinated by how this particular network of stories and beliefs have gotten such a chokehold on American popular culture. And I’ve found the rabbit hole just keeps going.
Bullard, a scholar of literature and folklore, has exhaustively catalogued more UFO encounters than a casual reader might imagine have ever occurred.
The book delves into dozens of cases, from well-known stories like the supposed UFO crash at Roswell to popularly overlooked events like the Chicago sightings of 2006.
He then distills this myriad of stories down to their mythic bones, trying to understand how the strange raw material of a sighting—somebody seeing an odd light in the sky—is translated again and again through the narratives of film and television, popular culture and academic analysis, and how the UFO becomes a myth: a story that means something to people in our time, and perhaps tells us something about ourselves too.
When United Airlines workers reported a UFO at O'Hare Airport in November 2006, it was met with the typical denials and hush-up that usually accompany such sightings. But when a related story broke the record for hits at the Chicago Tribune's website, it was clear that such unexplained objects continued to occupy the minds of fascinated readers. Why, wonders Thomas Bullard, don't such persistent sightings command more urgent attention from scientists, scholars, and mainstream journalists?
The answer, in part, lies in Bullard's wide-ranging magisterial survey of the mysterious, frustrating, and ever-evolving phenomenon that refuses to go away and our collective…
I am an experiencer who has had a lot of experiences with otherworldly beings for the last several years now, and I am also an inventor in my own right with one patent. I feel I have the ability to pay attention to detail, and I'm very analytical when it comes to making sense of things I can read, see, and hear. In my book, I give detailed explanations of my experiences from my encounters, and I am a very practical person, where I have the tendency to analyze mostly everything I do.
I highly recommend this book because it offers one of the most balanced and skeptical examinations of the UFO phenomenon available.
Unlike many books that lean heavily into sensational claims, Sheaffer applies the scientific method and critical thinking to famous cases, exposing how misidentifications, cultural myths, and selective reporting often fuel the UFO narrative.
His work provides readers with a broad overview of major sightings and trends in ufology, while also highlighting the importance of questioning extraordinary claims and demanding credible evidence.
Engaging and entertaining, UFO Sightings: The Evidence is the most up-to-date overview of the UFO phenomenon, a controversy that gains strength with each new report of strange happenings in the sky. Written from the skeptical perspective, and applying the scientific method to the cases explored, this book differs greatly from the proparanormal tomes widely available today.
"Most broad survey UFO books contain absolutely uncritical presentations of sensational claims," says author Robert Sheaffer. "Typically, pro-UFO books deliberately omit all facts that tend to discredit the cases."
UFO Sightings is unique because it gives the reader a broad overview of the world…
I’ve been writing for publication since I was a student, crudely the writing has been a way of medicating the fact I’m incurably curious about a range of things and I’ve also suffered from an over-production of ideas my whole life. Wrestling this under control into writing and live speaking where the subjects must fit within a title, word limit, or running time for a talk has been helpful, beyond which the whole writing career has been a trade off between things I’ve chosen to do because they matter a lot to me, and the occasional accepting of an offer I thought too good to refuse.
Many books on this subject have dated, this title, first published in 1969 remains a classic and highly influential.
It argues that twentieth-century claims of UFO sightings and meetings with aliens fit a wider pattern taking in folklore and our history of strange encounters of all kinds.
A hugely influential book that has influenced a library’s worth of other writing but still an ideal beginners guide to anyone seeking to understand where the strangest modern-day claims might fit into the bizarre stories humans have been telling each other throughout history.
Our age has generated, and continues to generate, mythical material almost unparalleled in quantity and quality in the rich records of human imagination. More precisely, people have very frequently reported the observation of wonderful aerial objects, variously designated as flying saucers, unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and so on. But investigators have neglected to recognize one important perspective of the phenomenon: the fact that beliefs identical to those held today have recurred throughout recorded history and under forms best adapted to the believer's country, race, and social regime.
Emissaries from these supernatural abodes come to earth, sometimes under human form and…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Author Greil Marcus’ phrase “the old, weird America” gave me exactly the right words for something I’ve always felt: that there is a specific weirdness to the American landscape, an uncontrollable current of strange that runs beneath the carefully cultivated surface of heroes and neighbors and shared, stable dreams. Of course, as William Faulkner observed, the past isn’t past, and America is as weird as it’s ever been. Maybe weirder. Look at the news. Look out your window. No surprise, then, that I’m drawn to such a perspective when I read other people’s stories, and seldom get completely away from it when I write my own.
The other book face-out on my bookshelves, in some ways almost too obvious—what’s weirder than UFO culture? This photo-laden account of the material expressions of faith that Something Is Out There (including a house shaped like a flying saucer I used to drive by regularly when visiting Pensacola Beach) seems almost innocent after the toxic eruptions of conspiracy paranoia of recent times. With its rich Kodachrome record of how a sideshow can become the main event, a perfect complement to Wisconsin Death Trip. Whenever I look at either book, I find it hard to look away.
Since it was first published in 1985, Douglas Curran's photographic exploration of the strange world of UFO "true believers" has established itself as a classic work not only within the New Age/UFO community, but among sociologists, psychologists, and in the art and photography communities. This new edition, with an expanded text revisiting the Roswell, New Mexico, incident of 1947, brings back this essential work in a handsome new edition. As Tom Wolfe explains in his foreword: "Douglas Curran is not only a photographer but also a reporter, and an extremely gifted one. I am tempted to suggest that he also…
