Books about Correspondent from Amazon.com

From Alan Furst, whom The New York Times calls “America’s preeminent spy novelist,” comes an epic story of romantic love, love of country, and love of freedom–the story of a secret war fought in elegant hotel bars and first-class railway cars, in the mountains of Spain and the backstreets of Berlin. It is an inspiring, thrilling saga of everyday people forced by their hearts’ passion to fight in the war against tyranny.

By 1938, hundreds of Italian intellectuals, lawyers and journalists, university professors and scientists had escaped Mussolini’s fascist government and taken refuge in Paris. There, amid the struggles of émigré life, they founded an Italian resistance, with an underground press that smuggled news and encouragement back to Italy. Fighting fascism with typewriters, they produced 512 clandestine newspapers. The Foreign Correspondent is their story.

Paris, a winter night in 1938: a murder/suicide at a discreet lovers’ hotel. But this is no romantic traged–it is the work of the OVRA, Mussolini’s fascist secret police, and is meant to eliminate the editor of Liberazione, a clandestine émigré newspaper. Carlo Weisz, who has fled from Trieste and secured a job as a foreign correspondent with the Reuters bureau, becomes the new editor.
Weisz is, at that moment, in Spain, reporting on the last campaign of the Spanish civil war. But as soon as he returns to Paris, he is pursued by the French Sûreté, by agents of the OVRA, and by officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service. In the desperate politics of Europe on the edge of war, a foreign correspondent is a pawn, worth surveillance, or blackmail, or murder.

The Foreign Correspondent is the story of Carlo Weisz and a handful of antifascists: the army officer known as “Colonel Ferrara,” who fights for a lost cause in Spain; Arturo Salamone, the shrewd leader of a resistance group in Paris; and Christa von Schirren, the woman who becomes the love of Weisz’s life, herself involved in a doomed resistance underground in Berlin.

The Foreign Correspondent is Alan Furst at his absolute best–taut and powerful, enigmatic and romantic, with sharp, seductive writing that takes the reader through darkness and intrigue to a spectacular denouement.


From the Hardcover edition..
Price: $6.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A National Public Radio reporter covering the last stand of the Taliban in their home base of Kandahar in Afghanistan's southern borderland, Sarah Chayes became deeply immersed in the unfolding drama of the attempt to rebuild a broken nation at the crossroads of the world's destiny. Her NPR tour up in early 2002, she left reporting to help turn the country's fortunes, accepting a job running a nonprofit founded by President Hamid Karzai's brother. With remarkable access to leading players in the postwar government, Chayes witnessed a tragic story unfold-the perverse turn of events whereby the U.S. government and armed forces allowed and abetted the return to power of corrupt militia commanders to the country, as well as the reinfiltration of bands of Taliban forces supported by U.S. ally Pakistan. In this gripping and dramatic account of her four years on the ground, working with Afghanis in the battle to restore their country to order and establish democracy, Chayes opens Americans' eyes to the sobering realities of this vital front in the war on terror.

She forged unparalleled relationships with the Karzai family, tribal leaders, U.S. military and diplomatic brass, and such leading figures in the Kandahar government as the imposing and highly effective chief of police-an incorruptible supporter of the Karzai regime whose brutal assassination in June 2005 serves as the opening of the book. Chayes lived in an Afghan home, gaining rich insights into the country's culture and politics and researching the history of Afghanistan's legendary resistance to foreign interference. She takes us into meetings with Hamid Karzai and the corrupt Kandahar governor, Gul Agha Shirzai, into the homes of tribal elders and onto the U.S. military base. Unveiling the complexities and traumas of Afghanistan's postwar struggles, she reveals how the tribal strongmen who have regained power-after years of being displaced by the Taliban-have visited a renewed plague of corruption and violence on the Afghan people, under the complicit eyes of U.S. forces and officials.

The story Chayes tells is a powerful, disturbing revelation of misguided U.S. policy and of the deeply entrenched traditions of tribal warlordism that have ruled Afghanistan through the centuries..
Price: $6.32 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $16.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Evelyn Waugh was one of literature's great curmudgeons and a scathingly funny satirist Scoop is a comedy of England's newspaper business of the 1930s and the story of William Boot, a innocent hick from the country who writes careful essays about the habits of the badger. Through a series of accidents and mistaken identity, Boot is hired as a war correspondent for a Fleet Street newspaper. The uncomprehending Boot is sent to the fictional African country of Ishmaelia to cover an expected revolution. Although he has no idea what he is doing and he can't understand the incomprehensible telegrams from his London editors, Boot eventually gets the big story..
Price: $7.49 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Kevin Sites is a man on a mission Venturing alone into the dark heart of war, armed with just a video camera, a digital camera, a laptop, and a satellite modem, the award-winning journalist covered virtually every major global hot spot as the first Internet correspondent for Yahoo! News. Beginning his journey with the anarchic chaos of Somalia in September 2005 and ending with the Israeli-Hezbollah war in the summer of 2006, Sites talks with rebels and government troops, child soldiers and child brides, and features the people on every side, including those caught in the cross fire. His honest reporting helps destroy the myths of war by putting a human face on war's inhumanity. Personally, Sites will come to discover that the greatest danger he faces may not be from bombs and bullets, but from the unsettling power of the truth.

.
Price: $0.96 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A blistering new thriller about the horrors of war and the struggle to survive in the face of pure evil.

Foreign correspondent Connie Burns is hunting a British mercenary that she believes is responsible for the rape and murder of five women in Sierra Leone in 2002. Two years later she finds him training Iraqi police in Baghdad. Connie is determined to expose his crimes, but then she is kidnapped and released after three days of unspeakable torture. Silently, she returns to England and attempts to isolate herself, but it soon becomes apparent that the horrors of the world and her own nightmarish past aren’t so easy to escape from..
Price: $2.79 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Curzio Malaparte spent most of World War II as an Italian consul to other fascist states: Germany, Romania, Finland. His novelistic account of the war, surreptitiously written, presents the conflict from the point of view of those doomed to lose it. Malaparte's account is marked by sharp, lyrical observations, as when he encounters a detachment of German soldiers fleeing a Ukrainian battlefield: "When Germans become afraid, when that mysterious German fear begins to creep into their bones, they always arouse a special horror and pity. Their appearance is miserable, their cruelty sad, their courage silent and hopeless." Bleak and hopeless indeed, Malaparte's is a remarkable testimonial..
Price: $9.08 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $8.49 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The Assembly of God Tabernacle in Decatur, Georgia, has succeeded at doing what most institutions in America have failed at--achieving full integration. White parishioners who thought of blacks in the worst terms in the past have now decided that all believers--black and white--are going to the same heaven, so they might as well get used to it here on earth. After a black man hugs an elderly white woman, he says, "Man, 30 or 40 years ago I would have been hung for just touching this lady." While there is genuine affection between many of the parishioners, all the complex feelings and questions that plague the races at the turn of the century are being reckoned with here. Is integration a blessing or a sellout, blacks wonder. Is it ever acceptable--or even helpful--to make race the issue, or must a preacher and his congregation always feign colorblindness? What are the burdens of blending in, and are they worth it? And will this last, or is the church just like so many neighborhoods--enjoying a fleeting moment of integration on the way to becoming predominantly black? These are just some of the touchy issues explored in this remarkable and eye-opening book.

Originally published as a series in The New York Times, the 15 stories are the outcome of a yearlong examination by a team of reporters who managed to overcome the taboo of discussing private attitudes toward race and uncover the daily experience of race relations in schools, friendships, sports, popular culture, worship, and the workplace. The result is a wide range of intimate portraits, from bringing up slavery in the Old South, to drug cops reacting silently to the Amadou Diallo verdict, to the making of the HBO special The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood.

Race clearly remains a source of misunderstanding and alienation, but there are also heartening signs of reaching out, reconciliation, and even unity. This book is an important leap into an area most fear to tread, yet also yearn to change. --Lesley Reed.
Price: $1.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]