Book cover of Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer
Europe

Beyond the Wall

In 1990, a country disappeared. When the Iron Curtain fell, East Germany simply ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the GDR presented a radically different German identity to anything that had come before, and anything that exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: this was a Germany forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics. […Learn More]

Book cover of Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution by Tania Branigan
Asia

Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution

An indelible exploration of the invisible scar that runs through the heart of Chinese society and the souls of its citizens.

“It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution,” Tania Branigan writes. During this decade of Maoist fanaticism between 1966 and 1976, children turned on parents, students condemned teachers, and as many as two million people died for their supposed political sins, while tens of millions were hounded, ostracized, and imprisoned. […Learn More]

Book cover of A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father by David Maraniss
Biography & Autobiography

A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father

In a riveting book with powerful resonance today, Pulitzer Prize–winning author David Maraniss captures the pervasive fear and paranoia that gripped America during the Red Scare of the 1950s through the chilling yet affirming story of his family’s ordeal, from blacklisting to vindication. […Learn More]

Book cover of Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party by A. James McAdams
History

Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party

The first comprehensive political history of the communist party

Vanguard of the Revolution is a sweeping history of one of the most significant political institutions of the modern world. The communist party was a revolutionary idea long before its supporters came to power. A. James McAdams argues that the rise and fall of communism can be understood only by taking into account the origins and evolution of this compelling idea. […Learn More]

Book cover for The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un by Anna Fifield
Asia

The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un

The behind-the-scenes story of the rise and reign of the world’s strangest and most elusive tyrant, Kim Jong Un, by the journalist with the best connections and insights into the bizarrely dangerous world of North Korea.
Since his birth in 1984, Kim Jong Un has been swaddled in myth and propaganda, from the plainly silly — he could supposedly drive a car at the age of three — to the grimly bloody stories of family members who perished at his command. […Learn More]

Biography & Autobiography

Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich

This unsettling and illuminating history reveals how Germany’s fractured republic gave way to the Third Reich, from the formation of the Nazi party to the rise of Hitler.

Amid the ravages of economic depression, Germans in the early 1930s were pulled to political extremes both left and right. Then, in the spring of 1933, Germany turned itself inside out, from a deeply divided republic into a one-party dictatorship. In Hitler’s First Hundred Days, award-winning historian Peter Fritzsche offers a probing account of the pivotal moments when the majority of Germans seemed, all at once, to join the Nazis to construct the Third Reich. […Learn More]

Asia

Maoism: A Global History

For decades, the West has dismissed Maoism as an outdated historical and political phenomenon. Since the 1980s, China seems to have abandoned the utopian turmoil of Mao’s revolution in favour of authoritarian capitalism. But Mao and his ideas remain central to the People’s Republic and the legitimacy of its Communist government. With disagreements and conflicts between China and the West on the rise, the need to understand the political legacy of Mao is urgent and growing. […Learn More]