A Mountain of Crumbs

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing

Anya von Bremzen · 338 pages

Born in a surreal Moscow communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, the author grew up singing odes to Lenin, black-marketeering Juicy Fruit gum at school, and longing for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy and, finally, intolerable.

After The Wall

Jana Hensel · 202 pages

Hensel was born in Leipzig, East Germany, in 1976 and was 13 when the Berlin Wall fell. This memoir, a bestseller in Germany, portrays the disorientation of her generation, whose upbringing under communism ended abruptly with the integration of East and West Germany.

Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford

Clint Hill, Lisa McCubbin · 457 pages

Retired Secret Service agent Clint Hill brings history to life with this portrait of the American presidency. Hill delivers the perspective of an everyman who saw some of the most historic moments of the 20th century during his seventeen years protecting the most powerful office in the nation. Hill walked alongside Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, seeing them through a lon

Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir

Laura M. Flynn

When Laura Flynn was a little girl, her beautiful, dynamic mother, Sally, was the center of her imagination. It wasn’t long, however, before Sally’s fun-loving side slowly and methodically became absorbed by madness. As Laura’s parents divorced and her father struggled to gain custody, Sally’s symptoms bloomed in earnest while Laura and her sisters united in flights of fancy of the sort their moth

The Reagan Diaries

Ronald Reagan · 696 pages

A Girl from Yamhill

Beverly Cleary · 279 pages

Generations of children have grown up with Henry Huggins, Ramona Quimby, and all of their friends, families, and assorted pets. For everyone who has enjoyed the pranks and schemes, embarrassing moments, and all of the other poignant and colorful images of childhood brought to life in Beverly Cleary books, here is the fascinating true story of the remarkable woman who created them.

My Life: A Spoken Autobiography

Fidel Castro, Ignacio Ramonet · 608 pages

Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

Jack Devine, Vernon Loeb · 324 pages

A CIA veteran with extensive experience in covert operations presents a guide to the art of spycraft while illuminating the CIA's essential role, sharing a cautionary message about its recent transition toward paramilitary activities.

Master of Disguise

Antonio J. Mendez · 351 pages

The Persecutor

Sergei Kourdakov · 254 pages

His job in the Russian police was to inflict terror and suffering on Christians, and he did it well. Sergei Kourdakov, whose daring escape from a Russian naval ship made headlines throughout the free world, tells the unforgettable story of his life in the Russian secret police and his remarkable flight to freedom. This book is an eye-opening, first-hand account of one man's journey to freedom and

With God in Russia

Walter J. Ciszek, Daniel L. Flaherty · 329 pages

A Pennsylvania-born Jesuit priest tells the story of his twenty-three years in Russia, fifteen of them spent in prison, indicted as a "Vatican spy."

The File: A Personal History

Timothy Garton Ash · 256 pages

In 1978, fresh out of Oxford, Timothy Garton Ash set out for Berlin to see what he could learn from the divided city about freedom and despotism. As he moved from west to east - from Berlin glamour to Berlin danger - the East German secret police, the so-called Stasi, was compiling a secret file on his activities, monitoring his Berlin days and nights and tracking his growing involvement with the

Scoundrel Time

Lillian Hellman, Kathy Bates, Garry Wills · 155 pages

In 1952, Hellman joined the ranks of intellectuals and artists called before Congress to testify about political subversion. Terrified yet defiant, Hellman refused to incriminate herself or others, and managed to avoid trial. Nonetheless the experience brought devastating controversy and loss. Her retelling of the time features a remarkable cast of characters, including her lover, novelist Dashiel

The Last Man on the Moon: Astronaut Eugene Cernan and America's Race in Space

Eugene Cernan, Donald A. Davis · 356 pages

Eugene Cernan came of age as an astronaut during the most exciting and dangerous decade of space flight. His career spanned the entire Gemini and Apollo programs, from being the first person to spacewalk all the way around our world to the moment when he left man's last footprint on the Moon as commander of Apollo 17. Between those two historic events lay more adventures than an ordinary person c

A Tale of Love and Darkness

Amos Oz · 533 pages

Love and darkness are just two of the many forces which run through Amos Oz's extraordinary, moving autobiographical novel. He takes us on a bold, courageous journey through his childhood and adolescence, and into the infernal marriage of two kind, well-meaning people: his parents. At the tragic heart of the story, its defining moment, is the suicide of his mother, when Amos was twelve-and-a-half

In God's Underground

Richard Wurmbrand · 270 pages

The Liars' Club

Mary Karr · 320 pages

The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They're the Liars' Club.

Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table

Ruth Reichl · 294 pages

For better or worse, almost all of us grow up at the table. It is in this setting that Ruth Reichl's brilliantly written memoir takes its form. For, at a very early age, Reichl discovered that "food could be a way of making sense of the world . . . if you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were." Tender at the Bone is the story of a life determined, enhanced, and defined in eq

Growing Up

Russell Baker, Gilbert Riswold · 348 pages

Pulitzer prize-winning writer Russell Baker shares his memories of growing up between the two world wars, telling of his life in Virginia, New Jersey, and Baltimore, and discussing his loving mother and family, teachers, schoolmates, and how they all survived the Depression years.

Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag

Janusz Bardach, Kathleen Gleeson · 392 pages

It is a true story of an idealistic Jewish man who who gets caught up in and believes the political ideologies of communism and a progressive, social justice political system until he actually experiences living under that system which sends him and countless other political prisoners to cruel prison camps and a gulag in Siberia. This is one of those kinds of books that you don’t want to put

Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

Daniel Ellsberg · 505 pages

In 1971 former Cold War hard-liner Daniel Ellsberg made history by releasing the Pentagon Papers-a 7,000-page top-secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam-to the New York Times and Washington Post. The document set in motion a chain of events that ended not only the Nixon presidency but the Vietnam War. In this remarkable memoir, Ellsberg describes in dramatic detail the two years he spent

Aquarium: The Career and Defection of a Soviet Military Spy

Viktor Suvorov · 416 pages

"We have a very simple rule. It's a rouble to get in, but two to get out." Thus begins the extraordinary chronicle of Viktor Suvorov's early preferment within the Soviet Army which brought him to Vienna as a spy in military intelligence and ended in his defection to the West. Suvorov's path into espionage was a long one, and not one he chose for himself. Throughout this astonishing record of li

Wait Till Next Year

Doris Kearns Goodwin · 266 pages

Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, *Wait Till Next Year* re-creates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans. We meet the people who most influenced Goodwin’s early life: her mother, who taught her the joy of books but whose debilitating illness left her housebound: and her father,

The Tender Bar

J.R. Moehringer · 384 pages

JR Moehringer grew up listening for a voice, the voice of his missing father, a disc jockey who disappeared before JR spoke his first words. As a boy, JR would press his ear to a battered clock radio, straining to hear in that resonant voice the secrets of identity and masculinity. When the voice disappeared, JR found new voices in the bar on the corner. A grand old New York saloon, the bar was a