History

The gripping true story of a front-line trauma surgeon in the world's most dangerous war zones.

Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Ceausescu, Mengistu of Ethiopia and Duvalier of Haiti. No dictator can rule through fear and violence alone. Naked power can be grabbed and held temporarily, but it never suffices in the long term. A tyrant who can compel his ow...n people to acclaim him will last longer. The paradox of the modern dictator is that he must create the illusion of popular support. Throughout the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of people were condemned to enthusiasm, obliged to hail their leaders even as they were herded down the road to serfdom. In How to Be a Dictator, Frank Dikoetter returns to eight of the most chillingly effective personality cults of the twentieth century. From carefully choreographed parades to the deliberate cultivation of a shroud of mystery through iron censorship, these dictators ceaselessly worked on their own image and encouraged the population at large to glorify them. At a time when democracy is in retreat, are we seeing a revival of the same techniques among some of today's world leaders? This timely study, told with great narrative verve, examines how a cult takes hold, grows, and sustains itself. It places the cult of personality where it belongs, at the very heart of tyranny.
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From the best-selling author of Fatherland and Munich comes a WWII thriller about a German rocket engineer, a former actress turned British spy, and the Nazi rocket program. It's November 1944--Willi Graf, a German rocket engineer, is launching Nazi Germany's V2 rockets at London... from Occupied Holland. Kay Connolly, once an actress, now a young English Intelligence officer, ships out for Belgium to locate the launch sites and neutralize the threat. But when rumors of a defector circulate through the German ranks, Graf becomes a suspect. Unknown to each other, Graf and Connolly find themselves on opposite sides of the hunt for the saboteur. Their twin stories play out against the background of the German missile campaign, one of the most epic and modern but least explored episodes of the Second World War. Their destinies are on a collision course.
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Chicago, 1950 Rosalind Porter has always defied expectations - in her work as a physicist on the Manhattan Project to design the atomic bomb, and in her passionate love affair with coworker Thomas Wheeler. Five years after the end of both, her guilt over the results of her work a...nd her heartbreak over Wheeler are intertwined. She has almost succeeded in resigning herself to a more conventional life. Then Wheeler gets back in touch - but so does the FBI. Agent Charlie Szydlo wants Rosalind to spy on Wheeler, whom the FBI suspects of selling nuclear secrets to Russia. Rosalind final assignment launches her on a mission to find the truth . . . no matter where it leads.
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In a book that is both deeply personal and highly political, Melani Anae recalls the radical activism of Auckland's Polynesian Panthers - the movement modelled on the US Black Panther Party 'but without guns'.