Freedom Memoir

On April 16, 1963, as the violent events of the Birmingham campaign unfolded in the city's streets, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., composed a letter from his prison cell in response to local religious leaders' criticism of the campaign. The resulting piece of extraordinary protest writing, "Letter from Birmingham Jail", was widely circulated and published in numerous periodicals. After the conclusion of the campaign and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, King further developed the ideas introduced in the letter in Why We Can't Wait.

Argentina, 1960. A car speeds through the streets of Buenos Aires. Inside are four Israeli secret agents and their prisoner: Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious war criminals of Nazi Germany. In this detailed memoir, Rafi Eitan tells the story of his remarkable life and career. He describes how as a teenager, he smuggled Jewish refugees into Palestine, and how, as a spy in the newly established Mossad, he swam through sewers to blow up a British radar station. He goes on to describe in detail his involvement in the extraordinary hunt for the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

At the age of 16, R. Dwayne Betts - a good student from a lower-middle-class family - carjacked a man with a friend. He had never held a gun before, but within a matter of minutes he had committed six felonies. A bright young kid, he served his nine-year sentence as part of the adult population in some of the worst prisons in the state. A Question of Freedom chronicles Betts's years in prison, reflecting back on his crime, and looking ahead to how his experiences and the books he discovered while incarcerated would define him.

Ahed Tamimi is a world-renowned Palestinian activist, born and raised in the small West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, which became a center of the resistance to Israeli occupation when an illegal, Jewish-only settlement blocked off its community spring. Tamimi came of age participating in nonviolent demonstrations against this action and the occupation at large. Her global renown reached an apex in December 2017, when, at sixteen years old, she was filmed slapping an Israeli soldier who refused to leave her front yard. The video went viral, and Tamimi was arrested.

As one of al-Qaeda's most respected bomb-makers, Aimen Dean rubbed shoulders with the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden himself. As a double agent at the heart of al-Qaeda's chemical weapons program, he foiled attacks on civilians and saved countless lives, brushing with death so often that his handlers began to call him their spy with nine lives. This is the story of how a young Muslim, determined to defend his faith, found himself fighting on the wrong side - and his fateful decision to work undercover for his sworn enemy.

Prior to World War II, Josephine Baker was a music-hall diva renowned for her singing and dancing, her beauty and sexuality; she was the most highly paid female performer in Europe. When the Nazis seized her adopted city, Paris, she was banned from the stage, along with all "negroes and Jews". Yet, instead of returning to America, she vowed to stay and to fight the Nazi evil. Overnight she went from performer to Resistance spy. In Agent Josephine best-selling author Damien Lewis uncovers this little known history of the famous singer's life.

In early 2019, after three years of careful planning, Rahaf Mohammed finally escaped her abusive family in Saudi Arabia—but made it only to Bangkok before being stripped of her passport. If forced to return home, she was sure she would be killed, like other rebel women in her country. As men pounded at the door of her barricaded hotel room, she opened a Twitter account. The teenager reached out to the world, and the world answered—she gained 45,000 followers in one day, and those followers helped her seek asylum in the West. Now Rahaf Mohammed tells her remarkable story in her own words.

From the KGB to the Kremlin: a multidimensional portrait of the man at war with the West. Where do Vladimir Putin's ideas come from? How does he look at the outside world? What does he want, and how far is he willing to go? The great lesson of the outbreak of World War I in 1914 was the danger of misreading the statements, actions, and intentions of the adversary. Today, Vladimir Putin has become the greatest challenge to European security and the global world order in decades.

In the whirlwind of accusations and recriminations that has attended the post 9/11 world, one man's vital testimony has been conspicuously absent. Candid and compelling, At the Center of the Storm is George Tenet's memoir of his life at the CIA - a revelatory look at the inner workings of America's top intelligence agency and its dealings with national leaders at home and abroad.

Arguably the most important American lawyer of the 20th century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the US Supreme Court when he became embroiled in a case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and to cost him his life. In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor with the help of Sheriff Willis V. McCall, who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve....

In his explosive New York Times best seller, top CIA operative Robert Baer paints a chilling picture of how terrorism works on the inside and provides startling evidence of how Washington politics sabotaged the CIA's efforts to root out the world's deadliest terrorists, allowing for the rise of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and the continued entrenchment of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

When Maziar Bahari left London in June 2009 to cover Iran's presidential election, he assured his pregnant fiancée, Paola, that he'd be back in just a few days, a week at most. Little did he know, as he kissed her good-bye, that he would spend the next three months in Iran’s most notorious prison, enduring brutal interrogation sessions at the hands of a man he knew only by his smell: Rosewater.

In this, Frederick Douglass’s second memoir, the abolitionist leader reflects further on the inhuman oppression he had personally endured and explores the larger impact of such injustice on society as a whole. At the time of writing, Douglass had emerged from chattel slavery in Maryland to a qualified freedom in the North and become a renowned speaker on the power of literacy and self-reliance. This story goes deeper than what Douglass was able to address in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass....

The leafy Avenue de Foch, one of the most exclusive residential streets in Nazi-occupied France, was Paris' hotbed of daring spies, murderous secret police, amoral informers, and Vichy collaborators. So when American physician Sumner Jackson, who lived with his wife and young son, Phillip, at Number 11, found himself drawn into the Liberation network of the French resistance, he knew the stakes were impossibly high.

The story of a student who went to extraordinary lengths - including living in a van on a campus parking lot - to complete his education without sacrificing his financial future. In a frank and self-deprecating voice, memoirist Ken Ilgunas writes about the existential terror of graduating from college with $32,000 in student debt. Inspired by Thoreau, Ilgunas set himself a mission: get out of debt as soon as humanly possible. To that end, he undertook an extraordinary three-year transcontinental journey.

Who were the three men the American and Soviet superpowers exchanged at Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge and Checkpoint Charlie in the first prisoner exchange of the nuclear age? Bridge of Spies vividly traces their paths to that electrifying moment on February 10, 1962, when their fates helped to define the conflicts and lethal undercurrents of the most dangerous years of the cold war.

In Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom, Christopher S. Wren overturns the myth of Ethan Allen as a legendary hero of the American Revolution and a patriotic son of Vermont and offers a different portrait of Allen and his Green Mountain Boys. Based on original archival research, this is a groundbreaking account of an important and little-known front of the Revolutionary War, of George Washington (and his good sense), and of a major American myth.

The Great War of Our Time offers an unprecedented assessment of the CIA while at the forefront of our nation's war against al-Qa'ida and during the most remarkable period in the history of the agency. Called the "Bob Gates of his generation", Michael Morell is a top CIA officer who saw it all - the only person with President Bush on 9/11/01 and with President Obama on 5/1/11, when Usama Bin Laden was brought to justice.

Amid escalating nuclear tensions, Kim Jong-un and North Korea's other leaders have kept a tight grasp on their one-party state, quashing any nascent opposition movements and sending all suspected dissidents to its brutal concentration camps for "re-education". Kang Chol-Hwan is the first survivor of one of these camps to escape and tell his story to the world, documenting the extreme conditions in these gulags and providing a personal insight into life in North Korea.

In the late 1970s, the National Security Agency still did not officially exist - those in the know referred to it dryly as the No Such Agency. So why, when NSA engineer Charles Gandy filed for a visa to visit Moscow, did the Russian Foreign Ministry assert with confidence that he was a spy? Outsmarting honey traps and encroaching deep enough into enemy territory to perform complicated technical investigations, Gandy accomplished his mission in Russia but discovered more than State and CIA wanted him to know.