This "heartbreaking biography" of the Communist revolutionary "is filled with high drama," daring escapes, and eventual imprisonment in Nazi Germany ( Publishers Weekly).A German-born Jew, Olga Benario was one of the most remarkable Communist activists of the twentieth century. With a genius for organization and an unwavering devotion, she crisscrossed the globe educating and activating legions to combat the worldwide plagues of Nazism and fascism. At the a...

Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life is the definitive, authorized biography of one of the world's most popular and widely read authors—and the story of how his enormously popular novel The Alchemist came to be. Fernando Morais, the preeminent biographer in Brazil and a groundbreaking journalist, traces Coelho's roots in Brazil to his time as a musician and pop lyricist to his wild days of rock and roll to the publication of the The Alchemist and beyond, telling the tr...

Here is the story of political prisoners finally freed in December 2014, after being held captive by the United States since the late 1990s.Through the 1980s and 1990s, violent anti-Castro groups based in Florida carried out hundreds of military attacks on Cuba, bombing hotels and shooting up Cuban beaches with machine guns. The Cuban government struck back with the Wasp Network—a dozen men and two women—sent to infiltrate those organizations.The Last S...

The first – and long-awaited – major biography of Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da SilvaLula is among the greatest political figures in Brazilian history. The only president in the country with a working-class background, combined with a party that was profoundly original in its roots, he exercised charismatic power and influence in a more lasting way than any other public figure in the republican period.Since 2011, Fernando Morais, one of Brazil's l...

Fernando Morais’ Dirty Hearts is a tour de force of literary journalism that investigates the discriminatory treatment of the Japanese immigrant community in Brazil during World War II and in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat and unconditional surrender. In contrast to the internment camps and compulsory military service that characterized the Japanese American wartime experience, this book traces the rise to power of Shindō Renmei, an ultranationalist secret society that formed in ...

Here is the story of political prisoners finally freed in December 2014, after being held captive by the United States since the late 1990s.Through the 1980s and 1990s, violent anti-Castro groups based in Florida carried out hundreds of military attacks on Cuba, bombing hotels and shooting up Cuban beaches with machine guns. The Cuban government struck back with the Wasp Network--a dozen men and two women--sent to infiltrate those organizations.The Last...

The "extraordinary" true story of the St. Louis, a German ship that, in 1939, carried Jews away from Hamburg—and into an unimaginable ordeal ( The New York Times).On May 13, 1939, the luxury liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, one of the last ships to leave Nazi Germany before World War II erupted. Aboard were 937 Jews—some had already been in concentration camps—who believed they had bought visas to enter Cuba. The voyage of the damned h...

A New York Times Notable Book of the year.Acclaimed around the world and a national best-seller, this is the definitive work on Che Guevara, the dashing rebel whose epic dream was to end poverty and injustice in Latin America and the developing world through armed revolution.Jon Lee Anderson’s biography traces Che’s extraordinary life, from his comfortable Argentine upbringing to the battlefields of the Cuban revolution, from the h...

When Hitler’s army rolled into Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1939, Sam and Manya Schillinger had to act fast to save their family from the Nazi terror that was reigning on Europe. The Schillingers booked a trip to Cuba on the S.S. Saint Louis. But when the ship was refused in Cuba and the United States, more than 900 Jewish passengers returned to Europe to face an unknown future. It was then that Sam and Manya put into motion their “plan B.” In Over the Big Water, Manya and Sam each tell their...

The bestselling author of STALINGRAD and BERLIN: THE DOWNFALL on the Spanish Civil War, drawing on masses of newly discovered material from the Spanish, Russian and German archives.The civil war that tore Spain apart between 1936 and 1939 and attracted liberals and socialists from across the world to support the cause against Franco was one of the most hard-fought and bitterest conflicts of the 20th century: a war of atrocities and political genocide and a military...

Selected as the Sunday Times History Book of the Year for 2012, this is a meticulous work of scholarship from the foremost historian of 20th-century Spain.The culmination of more than a decade of research, ‘The Spanish Holocaust’ seeks to reflect the intense horrors visited upon Spain during its ferocious civil war, the consequences of which still reverberate bitterly today.The brutal, murderous persecution of Spaniards between 1936 and 1945 is a truth that should have been...

A rousing and full-blooded account of the Spanish Civil War and the rise to prominence of General Franco.No modern conflict has inflamed the passions of both civilians and intellectuals as much as the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39. Burned into our collective historical consciousness, it not only prefigured the imminent Second World War but also ushered in a new and horrific form of warfare that would come to define the twentieth century. At the same time it echoed the revolutionary ...