-
A River in Darkness
In 1960, aged thirteen, Masaji Ishikawa was taken from Japan to North Korea with his family — part of a mass “repatriation” both governments wanted and the Japanese press called humanitarian. He got out thirty-six years later, alone, swimming a flooded river in the dark. This is his account of those years: the caste system…
-
Voices from Chernobyl
Three years of interviews in Belarus, arranged so that the people the accident happened to speak and the author does not. A fireman’s widow watching her husband’s skin come away in layers; an old woman who came back through the forest to a village that was buried; hunters ordered to shoot the pets of the…
-
A Promised Land
Volume one of Obama’s presidential memoir runs from a Hawaiian boyhood to the night the SEALs went into Abbottabad — with the 2008 campaign, the financial crisis, the Affordable Care Act, the *Deepwater Horizon* spill, and the Arab Spring in between. He meant to write five hundred pages in a year; it took three and…
-
Becoming
From four rooms above a piano teacher on the South Side of Chicago to eight years in the White House and out the other side — with Princeton, a law career she walked away from, two grandfathers denied union cards, a father who never missed a shift, IVF, marriage counselling, and Iowa in between. She…
-
The Spy and the Traitor
In May 1985, KGB officers wire Oleg Gordievsky’s Moscow flat and lock, on the way out, a third dead bolt he has no key for. For eleven years he has been Britain’s agent inside Soviet intelligence — risen, by now, to KGB station chief in London — and in Washington, a CIA officer with debts…
-
A Higher Loyalty
What does a lifetime of studying bosses — Mafia dons, prosecutors, presidents — teach about leadership? Comey prosecuted the Gambinos, faced down the Bush White House at John Ashcroft’s hospital bedside, steered the FBI through the impossible year of 2016, and then sat at a private White House dinner while a new president told him:…
An Official Ferrand Repository
Every book gives back