Argo by Antonio Mendez and Matt Baglio - the declassified CIA story behind the Oscar-winning film

WINNER OF BEST PICTURE AT THE ACADEMY AWARDS, THE BAFTAS AND THE GOLDEN GLOBES

Tehran, November 1979. Militant students stormed the American embassy and held sixty Americans captive for a gruelling 444 days. But until now the CIA has never revealed the twist to the Iran Hostage Crisis: six Americans escaped.

The escape plot was run by Antonio Mendez, head of the CIA's extraction team and a master of disguise. Mendez came up with an idea so daring and potentially foolish that it seemed destined for Hollywood... and indeed it was. He invented a fake sci-fi film called 'Argo' (from the actual name of the CIA mission, a reference to Jason and the Argonauts). After announcing the production to the movie industry, Mendez put together a team of real 1970s Hollywood actors, directors and producers - along with covert CIA officers. They would travel to revolutionary Iran under a foreign film visa, and while 'scouting locations' throughout the country they would track down the six Americans who were hiding out. After giving them false identities as part of the film crew, they would spirit them back across the border.

One part 'Ocean's 11' and another part 'Black Hawk Down', Mendez's mind-bogglingly complicated and risky gamble paid off: each escapee was extracted without a shot being fired. Mendez is considered one of the greatest officers in CIA history. The story of this, his greatest mission, has never been told.

Now an acclaimed film directed by and starring Ben Affleck, with Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin and John Goodman'

Antonio Mendez was cited by Richard Clarke as one of the top two or three CIA agents in history. He received the CIA's Intelligence Medal of Merit, the Trailblazer Medallion and the Intelligence Star - for his rescue of six Americans from revolutionary Iran. He and his wife, also a famed agent, were technical consultants on the television series 'The Agency' and founding board members of the International Spy Museum in Washington.

Matt Baglio is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist. His writing appears regularly in the Daily Mail and the Associated Press.

Based on Nixon s overlooked recordings, New York Times bestselling author John W. Dean connects the dots between what we ve come to believe about Watergate and what actually happened
Watergate forever changed American politics, and in light of the revelations about the NSA s widespread surveillance program, the scandal has taken on new significance. Yet remarkably, four decades after Nixon was forced to resign, no one has told the full story of his involvement in Watergate.
In The Nixon Defense, former White House Counsel John W. Dean, one of the last major surviving figures of Watergate, draws on his own transcripts of almost a thousand conversations, a wealth of Nixon s secretly recorded information, and more than 150,000 pages of documents in the National Archives and the Nixon Library to provide the definitive answer to the question: What did President
Nixon know and when did he know it?
Through narrative and contemporaneous dialogue, Dean connects dots that have never been connected, including revealing how and why the Watergate break-in occurred, what was on the mysterious 18 1/2 minute gap in Nixon s recorded conversations, and more.
In what will stand as the most authoritative account of one of America s worst political scandals, The Nixon Defense shows how the disastrous mistakes of Watergate could have been avoided and offers a cautionary tale for our own time."

Studie over de Sovjet-Unie in de jaren 1938-1968 in de vorm van een verhaal over Sovjet-burgers en -bestuurders die onder het communisme een veelbelovende toekomst tegemoet lijken te gaan.

Verslag van het functioneren van de Duitse contraspionagedienst in Nederland tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog en van het gebruik dat zij daarbij maakten van de Nederlander Anton van der Waals.

Reconstructie van de moord in 1941 op de joodse inwoners van het Poolse dorpje Jedwabne door de Poolse inwoners van het dorp.

One of our most eminent historians presents a powerful look at the buildup to and aftermath of one of the most decisive moments of the Second World War - Kristallnacht - not only for the Jewish population suddenly identified as a group to be destroyed, but also in terms of the international response it inspired and its larger implications. In Kristallnacht, Martin Gilbert seamlessly combines a moving account of the suffering of the victims of the Nazi regime with a sophisticated analysis of the gradual process, which made the horrors of the Third Reich possible. Broadening his canvas, Gilbert also powerfully depicts how the rest of the world failed Europe's increasingly desperate Jewish population: in the aftermath to Kristallnacht almost every country was asked to help; most would not do so, despite the transport of a staggering 10,000 German Jewish children to Britain.

Een familie van fanatieke nazi's hield van haar als van hun eigen dochter. Zelf werd ze verliefd op een Duitse ingenieur die tot in de laatste dagen van de oorlog Messerschmitts fabriceerde. De Volksduitse uit Polen Annie Gmitruk vertelde niemand wie ze werkelijk was: Mala Riva Kizel, een joods meisje uit een groot orthodox gezin uit Warschau. Terwijl haar familie werd omgebracht in de vernietigingskampen van Belzec en Treblinka, wist Mala door een mix van veerkracht, geluk, charme en een liefde voor taal te ontkomen aan Duitse soldaten, antisemitische Poolse boeren en een Oekraïense verrader die haar Jiddisch had horen praten in haar slaap. Via Israël belandt ze uiteindelijk in Nederland. Daar woont ze nu nog altijd. 'Liever dier dan mens' is de reconstructie van de onwaarschijnlijke overlevingstocht van een uitzonderlijke vrouw. Haar herinneringen brachten Van Os naar mensen, archieven en plaatsen waar de inktzwarte twintigsteeeuwse geschiedenis van Polen en Duitsland zich in al haar gruwelijke details openbaart. Deze reconstructie leest als een roman en tegelijk als aanklacht tegen de obsessie, van toen en nu, met identiteit en nationaliteit.

Verslag van de zoektocht naar het vooroorlogse Poolse stadje Nasielsk, dat de grootvader van de Amerikaanse auteur tijdens een vakantie in 1938 op film vastlegde.

When Adolf Hitler seized Vienna in the Anschluss of 1938, he called the city a pearl to which he would give a proper setting. But the setting he left behind seven years later was one of ruin and destruction--a physical, spiritual, and intellectual wasteland.Here is a grippingly narrated and heartbreaking account of the debasement of one of Europe's great cities. Thomas Weyr shows how Hitler turned Vienna from a vibrant metropolis that was the cradle of modernism into a drab provincial town. In this riveting narrative, we meet Austrian traitors like Arthur Seyss-Inquart and mass murderers like Odilo Globocnik. Proconsuls like Joseph Buerckel, who hacked Austria into seven pieces, and Baldur von Schirach, who dreamed of making Vienna into a Nazi capital on the Danube--and failed miserably. More painfully, Weyr chronicles the swift destruction of a rich Jewish culture and the removal of the city's 200,000 Jews through murder, exile, and deportation. Vienna never regained the global role the city had once played. Today, Weyr concludes, only the monuments remain--beautiful but lifeless.This is not only the story of Nazi leaders but of how the Viennese themselves lived and died: those who embraced Hitler, those who resisted, and the many who merely, in the local phrase, "ran after the rabbit." The author draws on his own experiences as a child in Vienna under Nazi rule in 1938, and those of his parents and friends, plus extensive documentary research, to craft a vivid historical narrative that chillingly captures how a once-great city lost its soul under Hitler.

On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched a massive three-pronged attack on the Soviet Union, and in days his troops were within reach of Moscow. The attack was stunning, but Stalin's response was even more astonishing. During the invasion, the mighty Soviet military stood in place while its soldiers were slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands.
Drawing on a wealth of newly available documents, from classified Politburo papers and diaries of key generals to diplomatic cables and secret police memos, the Russian historian Constantine Pleshakov paints a startling portrait of Stalin, one of history's most feared despots, as a vulnerable and paralyzed leader. Refusing to believe that the Germans would strike first, despite repeated warnings, he continued to supply them with war materials in the days before the attack, then tied his generals' hands in the crucial first hours of the invasion. For more than a week, while Hitler rolled over Soviet territory, Stalin cowered in his dacha, leaving the country rudderless and -- as Pleshakov reveals here -- nearly losing power. The Red Army's effort to regain the territory lost in those first ten days cost more than 10 million Soviet lives.
Stalin's Folly is a dramatic hour-by-hour account that sheds light on an enigmatic and ruthless figure while providing a new and far deeper understanding of Russian history.

“Europe is a molehill….” Everything here is worn out…tiny Europe has not enough to offer. We must set off for the Orient; that is where all the greatest glory is to be achieved.”—Napoleon Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt was the first Western attack in modern times on a Middle Eastern country. In this remarkably rich and eminently readable historical account, acclaimed author Paul Strathern reconstructs a mission of conquest inspired by glory, executed in haste, and bound for disaster. In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte, only twenty-eight, mounted the most audacious military campaign of his already spectacular career. With 335 ships, 40,000 soldiers, and a collection of scholars, artists, scientists, and inventors, he set sail for Egypt to establish an Eastern empire in emulation of Alexander the Great. Like everything Napoleon ever attempted, it was a plan marked by unquenchable ambition, heroic romanticism, and not a little madness. Napoleon saw himself as a liberator, freeing the Egyptians from the oppression of their Mameluke overlords. But while Napoleon thought his army would be welcomed as heroes, he tragically misunderstood Muslim culture and grossly overestimated the “gratitude” he could expect from those he’d come to save. Instead Napoleon and his men would face a grim war of attrition against an ad hoc army of Muslims led by the feared Murad Bey. Marching across seemingly endless deserts in the shadow of the pyramids, suffering extremes of heat and thirst, and pushed to the limits of human endurance, they would be plagued by mirages, suicides, and the constant threat of ambush. A crusade begun in honor and intended for glory would degenerate toward chaos and atrocity. But Napoleon’s grand failure in Egypt also yielded vast treasures of knowledge about a culture largely lost to the West, and through the recovery of artifacts like the Rosetta Stone, it prepared the way for the translation of hieroglyphics and modern Egyptology. And it tempered the complex leader who believed it his destiny to conquer the world. A story of war, adventure, politics, and a clash of cultures, Paul Strathern’sNapoleon in Egyptis history at once relevant and impossible to put down. From the Hardcover edition.

The only book to tell the full story of how and why Britain voted to leave the EU. Based on unrivalled access to all the key politicians and their advisors - including Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, George Osborne, Nigel Farage and Dominic Cummings, the mastermind of Vote Leave - Tim Shipman has written a political history that reads like a thriller, and offers a gripping, day-by-day account of what really happened behind-the-scenes in Downing Street, both Leave campaigns, the Labour Party, Ukip and Britain Stronger in Europe. Shipman gives his readers a ringside seat on how decisions were made, mistakes justified and betrayals perpetrated. Filled with stories, anecdotes and juicy leaks the book does not seek to address the rights and wrongs of Brexit but to explore how and why David Cameron chose to take the biggest political gamble of his life and explain why he lost. This is a story of calculation, attempted coups, individuals torn between principles and loyalty. All the events are here - from David Cameron's pledge to hold a referendum, through to the campaign itself, his resignation as prime minister, the betrayals and rivalries that occurred during the race to find his successor to the arrival of Theresa May in Downing Street as Britain's second female prime minister. All Out War is a book about leaders and their closest aides, the decisions they make and how and why they make them, as well as how they feel when they turn out to be wrong. It is about men who make decisions that are intellectually consistent and - by their own measure - morally sound that are simultaneously disastrous for themselves and those closest to them. It is about how doing what you know has worked before doesn't always work again. Most of all it is about asking the question: how far are you prepared to go to win?

A former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and an eminent economist tackle the biggest social issue of our time.

Of all the issues swirling around the 2008 election, the staggering projected costs for the upkeep of America's largest entitlement programs—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—loom with gathering intensity. Government revenues alone cannot solve the problem, but a solution must be found. In this book George P. Shultz and John B. Shoven take a practical—and optimistic—look at the issues at hand, offering an agenda for reform that will make these essential programs solvent. Drawing on a trove of original research, they take stock of the current situation, consider plans on offer from major thinkers in the field, and chart a course toward a system that provides income for the elderly and universal access to health care in ways that are fiscally sound. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to make an informed decision about the country's future.

An hour-by-hour account of Flight 007 which was shot down by a Russian interceptor killing all 269 passengers and crew on board the Korean jet.

Dwepen met linkse dictators en de vredesbeweging met al hun goede bedoelingen, waren die niet net zo fout als Joseph Luns? 

Journalistieke analyse van de opkomst en ondergang van Pim Fortuyn en zijn partij LPF.

Verslag van de speurtocht van de auteur naar zijn familie.

Oor- en ooggetuigen van de holocaust

Persoonlijke ervaringen van een Poolse verzetsstrijder tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog.

Boek of brandstapel is geen vrolijk, maar wel een rijk boek. Oorlogen, opstanden en veroveringen met geweld waren er genoeg. Levendige verhalen worden aangevuld met boeiende informatieve teksten. De gravures en vooral de kleurige illustraties, vaak paginagroot, geven de historische figuren een gezicht. Een verademing voor jongeren vanaf 12 jaar die op een verfrissende manier kennis willen maken met de geschiedenis. Ook scholen kunnen er natuurlijk hun voordeel mee doen. Achterin o.a. een kaart van Europa in 1648. Best een belangrijk boek. 

Op 27 januari 2020 is het precies vijfenzeventig jaar geleden dat het concentratiekamp Auschwitz bevrijd werd. Veel ooggetuigen, mensen die het kamp hebben overleefd, zijn inmiddels overleden. Speciaal voor deze nagedachtenis verzamelde Arnon Grunberg teksten die getuigen van het vernietigingskamp en de ontmenselijking, van Primo Levi s vlak na de bevrijding geschreven 'Is dit een mens' en het onbekendere, aangrijpende werk van Tadeusz Borowski tot aan het in 2015 gepubliceerde dagboek 'Zolang er nog tranen zijn' van Hannelore Grünberg-Klein, zijn moeder, Auschwitz-overlevende. In zijn essay dat aan de bloemlezing voorafgaat betoogt Grunberg dat de poging van de nazi s een heel volk te vernietigen erfgoed is dat onze cultuur en ons mensbeeld drastisch heeft gewijzigd. De getuigenissen stellen de vraag wat literatuur vermag op scherp en gaan altijd ook over onze wereld en onze demonen.

Studie over de Duitse razzia op het Veluwse dorp Putten in de herfst van 1944 en over de nationale herinnering daaraan sinds het einde van de oorlog.

Paperback, in goede staat, gebruikssporen, hoekje voorkant onder krult iets op

Onderzoek in hoeverre de beeldvorming over het niet weten van de jodenvervolging tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog, bepaald door o.a. L. de Jong en J. Presser, op waarheid berust.