A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940 Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I have been called many things during my 35-year writing career, but not, until now, a "Marxist". I have also learned the overall futility of taking up cudgels in a public forum with a hostile critic, but the reader from Colorado's screed is so bizarrely off the mark that I cannot refrain.
Look, pal, ALL wars have "two sides" to them. Stalin did not simply wake up one morning and announce to the Politburo: "Hey, wouldn't it be fun to invade Finland next week?" Soviet foreign policy was certainly naive, bullying, and disasterously uninformed about outside realities. But from the viewpoint of a Soviet strategist in 1939, Finland was suspect. Fact: there WAS a powerful pro-fascist clique in the country that had welcomed German aid before (in 1917) and would do so again (in 1941). Fact: The Red uprising in 1917 WAS put down with ruthless savagery. Fact: Stalin apparently really DID believe Finland would acede to his demands. For me not to have mentioned these things, would have been utterly irresponsible.
As for my comments about Finland "opting for a thoroughly bourgeoise form of government" -- the TONE here is decidedly IRONIC, not ideological. Irony, evidently, sails right past this reader's head.
Be that as it may, his whole hysterical tirade collapses in the face of what I wrote on page 17: "ultimately, of course,it came back down to an irreducible case of right versus wrong. Finland was a sovereign nation, and it had every legal and moral right to refuse any Russian demands for territory. And the Soviet Union, for its part, had no legal or moral right to pursue its policies by means of armed aggression."
I don't know how I could possibly make this point more clearly.
If this reader had bothered even to finish my book, I think he would have seen how fiercely my admiration for the Finns -- indeed, my deepy passionate love for that nation -- burns through the book. Certainly, none of the Finnish reviewers who praised the book saw anything "Marxist" about it, and several lauded its historical even-handedness.
Finally, if my book were indeed the sort of bilious "Daily Worker" tract this reader thinks it is, I hardly think it would have been awarded the Finlandia Foundation's Arts and Letters Prize.
I invite curious readers to judge the book on its own merits and on my skills as a story-teller; I did not write it with any agenda in mind other than that of accuracy, completeness, and narrative vitality. Ninety-nine percent of those who have read it seem to agree that I did at least a passable job shedding light on an otherwise obscure and almost-forgotten, but stirringly heroic, episode.
William R. Trotter

Click Here to see more reviews about: A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940

Get 33% OFF

Click here for more information about A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940

Read More...

Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Utterly fascinating. This book is important for anyone with an interest in why the arms race dragged on so long, but it's a must if you have a secret thing for spy planes. Considering its impact on world events, the story of Gary Powers' final flight over Russia in 1960 is surely one of the most neglected of the Cold War. It has been told before, but to my knowledge this is the first time a western writer has tracked down the Russians who actually brought Powers down. Whittell has put together the final hours leading up to the shoot-down in a way that finally lays to rest the theory that Powers somehow brought it on himself by flying too low. He also claims that but for the shoot-down there would have been no Cuban missile crisis and Nixon might have beaten Kennedy in 1960. What is not in doubt is that the collapse of the superpower summit two weeks after Powers was taken prisoner set the scene for the Berlin spy swap on the bridge in the book's title. There were supposed to be no civilian witnesses to the exchange, but one of those involved was an American post-grad falsely accused of working for the CIA, and one of those who saw the tail-end of the swap on the bridge was a young Reuters correspondent who never got a byline for her story. The author interviews them both, and many more. Brilliantly written, this is an essential addition to any Cold War buff's collection.


Click Here to see more reviews about: Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

Who were the three men the American and Soviet superpowers exchanged at Berlin's Glienicke Bridge and Checkpoint Charlie in the first and most legendary prisoner exchange between East and West? Bridge of Spies vividly traces their paths to that exchange on February 10, 1962, when their fate helped to define the conflicts and lethal undercurrents of the most dangerous years of the Cold War.Bridge of Spies is the true story of three extraordinary characters – William Fisher, alias Rudolf Abel, a British born KGB agent arrested by the FBI in New York City and jailed as a Soviet superspy for trying to steal America's most precious nuclear secrets; Gary Powers, the American U-2 pilot who was captured when his plane was shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission over the closed cities of central Russia; and Frederic Pryor, a young American graduate student in Berlin mistakenly identified as a spy, arrested and held without charge by the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. By weaving the three strands of this story together for the first time, Giles Whittell masterfully portrays the intense political tensions and nuclear brinkmanship that brought the United States and Soviet Union so close to a hot war in the early 1960s. He reveals the dramatic lives of men drawn into the nadir of the Cold War by duty and curiosity, and the tragicomedy of errors that eventually induced Khrushchev to send missiles to Castro. Two of his subjects — the spy and the pilot — were the original seekers of weapons of mass destruction. The third, an intellectual, fluent in German, unencumbered by dependents, and researching a Ph.D. thesis on the foreign trade system of the Soviet bloc, seemed to the Stasi precisely the sort of person the CIA should have been recruiting. He was not. In over his head in the world capital of spying, he was wrongly charged with espionage and thus came to the Agency's notice by a more roundabout route. The three men were rescued against daunting odds by fate and by their families, and then all but forgotten. Yet they laid bare the pathological mistrust that fueled the arms race for the next 30 years. Drawing on new interviews conducted in the United States, Europe and Russia with key players in the exchange and the events leading to it, among them Frederic Pryor himself and the man who shot down Gary Powers, Bridge of Spies captures a time when the fate of the world really did depend on coded messages on microdots and brave young men in pressure suits. The exchange that frigid day at two of the most sensitive points along the Iron Curtain represented the first step back from where the superpowers had stood since the building of the Berlin Wall the previous summer – on the brink of World War III.

Get 34% OFF

Click here for more information about Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

Read More...

Into the Far Mountains: A Western Story (Five Star Western Series) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Anyone who has read Fred Grove's material knows first hand that he is both a terrific stylist and talented author; in addition an author of great research, knowledge, and authenticity.
This book deals with a young boy, Jimmy Lattimore, captured in a stagecoach attack by an Apache raiding party led by Juh, a ruthless and cruel war chief who even other Apaches shun, who has moved with the boy to the farthest reaches of the Burro mountain area of New Mexico. The task at hand for Jesse Wilder and the child's mother, Susan Lattimore, is to enlist the help of Miguel Garcia, a mejicano who suffered the same experience as Jimmy, to reach the Apaches and arrange a ransom back of the young child. The Apaches see the activity of ransom as weakness and according to Cochise in the novel have never done it. In the pages of this western novel both fictional and historical characters come alive so the reader can almost feel, touch and taste the desert, the mountains, and feel the dread of being in close proximity to the 'human tigers' of these rough, deadly terrains, the Apaches.
This novel of people in the post civil war west will both entertain and educate the reader as the story unfolds. If you enjoy westerns and human interest yarns, this one should not be missed.
Unfortunately the book is at this late date generally available only through 2nd hand book dealers. But if the interest is there a copy can certainly be obtained. And I'm betting the reader will want to also read the other 2 or 3 books in the Jesse Wilder saga, BITTER TRUMPET and MAN ON A RED HORSE.
Highly recommended by an ole "book"aroo such as myself.
Semper Fi.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Into the Far Mountains: A Western Story (Five Star Western Series)

Click here for more information about Into the Far Mountains: A Western Story (Five Star Western Series)

Read More...

White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919-1920 and The Miracle on the Vistula Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This much goes beyond any doubt in my mind: the history of the Twentieth Century in Europe could have taken on an entirely different path should Poles fail to beat the Bolsheviks at the gates of Warsaw in 1920.
Lenin, following doctrine of Karl Marx, believed that the communist revolution, initiated in Russia, should be taken abroad to the rest of Europe and beyond. He wanted to go global. Time of the capitalistic society was nearing its end, he thought; social conflicts came to their extreme during World War I, hence - it was time to abolish old system and replace it with Socialism, Communism and the so called 'classless society' of eternal justice.
Feeling already victorious in his 'domestic' dispute over who were to rule Russia, Lenin believed time was ripe for other countries.
And let's not forget that the Communist movements elsewhere in Europe following the end of the Great War were strong and lively, especially in Germany. Lenin believed that if Bolsheviks could beat Poland the gates of Berlin would stand wide open to Communist takeover enthusiastically supported by German workers. And then the rest of Europe would fall into their hands.
It did not happen that way, Russians were beaten at the gates of Warsaw, Communist Revolution in Germany run out of steam, Social Democrats and supporters of democracy in general prevailed, Europe was spared horrors of the Gulag System created soon after in the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin.
Norman Davies in his book attempted to explain in detail what exactly had happened and how did it happen. As far as I can tell this book, originally written, I believe, close to thirty years ago (was it not his doctoral dissertation?), still remains the most comprehensive, complete study of the Polish-Bolshevik War of 1920. I tend to agree with some of the reviewers that this book may be somewhat outdated, may be lacking in some illustrative materials such as graphics, maps and so on... bear in mind, thought, this was written when the Iron Curtain was still dividing East from West, archives in Poland and the Soviet Union were not widely opened (if at all) leaving the author certainly to desire much more. Nevertheless, Norman Davies prevailed in writing an (almost) complete story of the war that saved Europe from Communist takeover.


Click Here to see more reviews about: White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919-1920 and The Miracle on the Vistula

Get 24% OFF

Click here for more information about White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919-1920 and The Miracle on the Vistula

Read More...