NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The “master storyteller” (San Francisco Chronicle) behind the New York Times bestseller The Spy and the Traitor uncovers the true story behind one of the Cold War’s most intrepid spies.
“[An] immensely exciting, fast-moving account.”—The Washington Post
 
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Foreign Affairs, Kirkus...

"In 2012, the promise of the democratic Egyptian Revolution was tempered by revelations of sexual assault in Tahrir Square in Cairo, the uprising's symbolic birthplace. Among the calls for freedom and liberation, there were also circles of dozens and sometimes hundreds of men that would form around a woman, isolating her, assaulting her, and challenging a woman's right to be in a public space. Radius recounts the formation of Opantish-Operation Anti-Sexual...

The stories of some 400 men and women who, though they experienced the war in widely different ways, were all profoundly affected by it.

"From its founding in the aftermath of World War II, the Central Intelligence Agency has been discovered in the midst of some of the most crucial--and most embarrassing--episodes in United States relations with the world. Richard Nixon's 1969 presidential order that declared CIA covert operations necessary to the attainment of American foreign policy goals was an acknowledgment that secret warfare tools had a much wider application than just the cold...

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan announced that it was "morning in America." He declared that the American dream wasn't over, but the United States needed to lower taxes, shrink government control, and flex its military muscles abroad to herald what some called "the Reagan Revolution." At the same time, a tiny band of American-born, well-educated extremists were working for a very different kind of revolution. By the end of the 1970s, many radicals...

"On June 15, 1942, as thousands of vacationers lounged in the sun at Virginia Beach, two massive fireballs erupted just offshore from a convoy of oil tankers steaming into Chesapeake Bay. While men, women, and children gaped from the shore, two damaged oil tankers fell out of line and began to sink. Then a small escort warship blew apart in a violent explosion. Navy warships and aircraft peppered the water with depth charges, but to no avail. Within...

Women of African descent have contributed to America's food culture for centuries, but their rich and varied involvement is still overshadowed by the demeaning stereotype of an illiterate "Aunt Jemima" who cooked mostly by natural instinct. Tipton-Martin looks at black cookbooks that range from a rare 1827 house servant's manual, the first book published by an African American in the trade, to modern classics. These cookbooks offer firsthand evidence...

"The fateful days and weeks surrounding 6 June 1944 have been extensively documented in histories of the Second World War, but less attention has been paid to the tremendous impact of these events on the populations nearby. The Lost Paratroopers of Normandy tells the inspiring yet heartbreaking story of ordinary people who did extraordinary things in defense of liberty and freedom. On D-Day, when transport planes dropped paratroopers from the 82nd...

We Are Worth Fighting For is the first history of the 1989 Howard University protest. The three-day occupation of the university's Administration Building was a continuation of the student movements of the sixties and a unique challenge to the politics of the eighties. Upset at the university's appointment of the Republican strategist Lee Atwater to the Board of Trustees, students forced the issue by shutting down the operations of the university....