Books about Eavesdropping from Amazon.com

Kitchen Confidential meets Sex and the City in this delicious, behind-the-scenes memoir from the first female captain at one of New York City's most prestigious restaurants

While Phoebe Damrosch was figuring out what to do with her life, she supported herself by working as a waiter. Before long she was a captain at the New York City four-star restaurant Per Se, the culinary creation of master chef Thomas Keller.

Service Included is the story of her experiences there: her obsession with food, her love affair with a sommelier, and her observations of the highly competitive and frenetic world of fine dining.

She also provides the following dining tips:

• Please do not ask your waiter what else he or she does.
• Please do not steal your waiter's pen.
• Please do not say you're allergic when you don't like something.
• Please do not send something back after eating most of it.
• Please do not make faces or gagging noises when hearing the specials—someone else at the table might like to order one of them.

After reading this book, diners will never sit down at a restaurant table the same way again.

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Price: $8.30 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Learn to detect and evade surveillance efforts that threaten your personal security. These time-tested tactics of observation, detection and evasion are proven effective against the most sophisticated surveillance techniques used in the world..
Price: $12.18 [Notify me when price goes down.]

How does our government eavesdrop? Whom do they eavesdrop on? And is the interception of communication an effective means of predicting and preventing future attacks? These are some of the questions at the heart of Patrick Radden Keefe’s brilliant new book, Chatter.

In the late 1990s, when Keefe was a graduate student in England, he heard stories about an eavesdropping network led by the United States that spanned the planet. The system, known as Echelon, allowed America and its allies to intercept the private phone calls and e-mails of civilians and governments around the world. Taking the mystery of Echelon as his point of departure, Keefe explores the nature and context of communications interception, drawing together fascinating strands of history, fresh investigative reporting, and riveting, eye-opening anecdotes. The result is a bold and distinctive book, part detective story, part travel-writing, part essay on paranoia and secrecy in a digital age.

Chatter starts out at Menwith Hill, a secret eavesdropping station covered in mysterious, gargantuan golf balls, in England’s Yorkshire moors. From there, the narrative moves quickly to another American spy station hidden in the Australian outback; from the intelligence bureaucracy in Washington to the European Parliament in Brussels; from an abandoned National Security Agency base in the mountains of North Carolina to the remote Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.

As Keefe chases down the truth of contemporary surveillance by intelligence agencies, he unearths reams of little-known information and introduces us to a rogue’s gallery of unforgettable characters. We meet a former British eavesdropper who now listens in on the United States Air Force for sport; an intelligence translator who risked prison to reveal an American operation to spy on the United Nations Security Council; a former member of the Senate committee on intelligence who says that oversight is so bad, a lot of senators only sit on the committee for the travel.

Provocative, often funny, and alarming without being alarmist, Chatter is a journey through a bizarre and shadowy world with vast implications for our security as well as our privacy. It is also the debut of a major new voice in nonfiction..
Price: $9.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Pros know that the real secret of surveillance lies in the skill of the operators, not in high-tech gadgets. This book is for the true practitioners of the craft. It focuses on tactics that can only be learned from stalking the streets and standing in the shadows..
Price: $15.31 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A memoir of blindness and listening rendered with a poet's delight by the author of the acclaimed Planet of the Blind.

Blind people are not casual listeners Blind since birth, Stephen Kuusisto recounts with a poet's sense of detail the surprise that comes when we are actively listening to our surroundings. There is an art to eavesdropping.

Like Annie Dillard's An American Childhood or Dorothy Allison's One or Two Things I Know for Sure, Kuusisto's memoir highlights periods of childhood when a writer first becomes aware of his curiosity and imagination. As a boy he listened to Caruso records in his grandmother's attic and spent hours in the New Hampshire woods learning the calls of birds. As a grown man the writer visits cities around the world in order to discover the art of sightseeing by ear. Whether the reader is interested in disability, American poetry, music, travel, or the art of eavesdropping, he or she will find much to hear and even "see" in this unique celebration of a hearing life..
Price: $13.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

I'm Lucy Rose, and here's the thing about 4th: that grade is busy like you can't believe! Especially if you are a person who is already PLENTY busy on account of having RESPONSIBILITIES and I am that kind exactly I am already collecting a vocabulary, plus I have to think up new palindromes and now I have to do the most P-U thing which is the MULTIPLICATION tables, which I would say is a thing I hate, if I was allowed to say hate, which I am not.
PLUS I have to do the greatest thing and that is be in the play of Annie and I'm sure I will get to be Annie because 1. I have red hair and 2. if I don't I will absolutely perish to death.
PLUS there is another thing I have to do absolutely constantly and that is what my mom calls eavesdropping but I call LISTENING VERY QUIETLY SO I CAN KNOW THINGS. But that turns out to be halfway sickening because now I know a thing about my mom and it's that she has a FRIEND that is a MAN and I think they are having DATES. That makes me feel like I'm horrified to pieces and part of me doesn't want to know a single more thing but the other part does because how else can I figure out how to keep those 2 apart?
And here is the thing about that: it can make a girl exhausted.


From the Hardcover edition..
Price: $2.51 [Notify me when price goes down.]

How does our government eavesdrop? Whom do they eavesdrop on? And is the interception of communication an effective means of predicting and preventing future attacks? These are some of the questions at the heart of Patrick Radden Keefe’s brilliant new book, Chatter.

In the late 1990s, when Keefe was a graduate student in England, he heard stories about an eavesdropping network led by the United States that spanned the planet. The system, known as Echelon, allowed America and its allies to intercept the private phone calls and e-mails of civilians and governments around the world. Taking the mystery of Echelon as his point of departure, Keefe explores the nature and context of communications interception, drawing together fascinating strands of history, fresh investigative reporting, and riveting, eye-opening anecdotes. The result is a bold and distinctive book, part detective story, part travel-writing, part essay on paranoia and secrecy in a digital age.

Chatter starts out at Menwith Hill, a secret eavesdropping station covered in mysterious, gargantuan golf balls, in England’s Yorkshire moors. From there, the narrative moves quickly to another American spy station hidden in the Australian outback; from the intelligence bureaucracy in Washington to the European Parliament in Brussels; from an abandoned National Security Agency base in the mountains of North Carolina to the remote Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.

As Keefe chases down the truth of contemporary surveillance by intelligence agencies, he unearths reams of little-known information and introduces us to a rogue’s gallery of unforgettable characters. We meet a former British eavesdropper who now listens in on the United States Air Force for sport; an intelligence translator who risked prison to reveal an American operation to spy on the United Nations Security Council; a former member of the Senate committee on intelligence who says that oversight is so bad, a lot of senators only sit on the committee for the travel.

Provocative, often funny, and alarming without being alarmist, Chatter is a journey through a bizarre and shadowy world with vast implications for our security as well as our privacy. It is also the debut of a major new voice in nonfiction.


From the Hardcover edition..
Price: $7.19 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Never-before-heard recordings of secretly taped oval office conversations with eight US presidents.

The President doesn't know the position of the administration so you can't know it.—President Lyndon Johnson to Walt Rostow on Vietnam policy, March 4, 1964

Historian John Prados and The New Press have procured recordings made by eight Presidents of their oval office conversations. Never intended for public consumption, these recordings offer portraits of the nation's chief executives responding to and taking action on some of the most critical events of the late twentieth century.

Including phone conversations and confidential meetings, the set offers candid, unscripted exchanges with top aides, political figures, and heads of state. One exchange constitutes the famous "smoking gun" tapes of the Watergate era. Another sequence has Lyndon Johnson finding out from J. Edgar Hoover about the murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi just as he also learns from Robert McNamara about the breaking crisis in Vietnam's Gulf of Tonkin.

The set includes eight digitally remastered CDs of presidential conversations and transcripts of the conversations with historical introductions by John Prados. An additional CD features the companion radio documentary "White House Tapes: The President Calling," produced by Stephen Smith of American RadioWorks® for an upcoming national broadcast on public radio. Boxed set: hardcover with 9 one-hour CDs.

Contents include:
Franklin D. Roosevelt
• the racial integration of the Armed Forces
Dwight D. Eisenhower
• the situation in the Far East
Harry Truman
• the Marshall Plan
John Kennedy
• the March on Washington
• the Diem coup in Vietnam in 1963
Lyndon B. Johnson
• the murders of civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964
• the Gulf of Tonkin Incident
Richard Nixon
• "Smoking Gun" tapes
• The Vietnam War and the invasion of Laos in 1971
• Discussion of Jews in the media, with Billy Graham
Gerald R. Ford
• the first US/Russian joint space mission
• Middle East Peace Agreement in 1975
Ronald Reagan
• the Iran-Contra Affair in 1986.
Price: $9.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]

ECHELON, Somebody's Listening is a factually-based thriller that tells details of recently revealed and formerly highly classified 21st Century eavesdropping methods. The story begins the day the Patriot Act is signed--the first day the CIA and FBI are allowed to sit side-by-side eavesdropping. It is the story of three segments of society--the CIA/FBI, municipal law enforcement and citizens ensnared by CIA/FBI eavesdropping--as they respond to a surprise act of terror at the Miami International Airport. It's a frantic chase that culminates in a stunning conclusion in Washington, D.C. .
Price: $10.71 [Notify me when price goes down.]