5 results for "Biography"

How to win an information war: the propagandist who outwitted Hitler

Pomerantsev, Peter
"From one of our leading experts on disinformation, this inventive biography of the rogue WWII propagandist Thomas Sefton Delmer confronts hard questions about the nature of information war: what if you can't fight lies with truth? Can a propaganda war ever be won? In the summer of 1941, Hitler ruled Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. Britain was struggling to combat his powerful propaganda machine, crowing victory and smearing his enemies as liars and manipulators over his frequent radio speeches, blasted out on loudspeakers and into homes. British claims that Hitler was dangerous had little impact against this wave of disinformation. Except for the broadcasts of someone called Der Chef, a German who questioned Nazi doctrine. He had access to high-ranking German military secrets and spoke of internal rebellion. His listeners included German soldiers and citizens, as well as politicians in Washington DC who were debating getting into the war. And--most importantly--Der Chef was a fiction. He was a character created by the British propagandist Thomas Sefton Delmer, a unique weapon in the war. Then, as author Peter Pomerantsev seeks to tell Delmer's story, he is called into a wartime propaganda effort of his own: the US response to the invasion of Ukraine. In flashes forward to the present day, Pomerantsev weaves in what he's learning from Delmer as he seeks to fight against Vladimir Putin's tyranny and lies. This book is the story of Delmer and his modern investigator, as they each embark on their own quest to manipulate the passions of supporters and enemies, and to turn the tide of an information war, an extraordinary history that is informing the present before our eyes"--
PublicAffairs 2024-03 277 pages

The white darkness

Grann, David
Henry Worsley was a devoted husband and father and a decorated British special forces officer who believed in honor and sacrifice. He was also a man obsessed. He spent his life idolizing Ernest Shackleton, the nineteenth-century polar explorer, who tried to become the first person to reach the South Pole, and later sought to cross Antarctica on foot. Shackleton never completed his journeys, but he repeatedly rescued his men from certain death, and emerged as one of the greatest leaders in history. Worsley felt an overpowering connection to those expeditions. He was related to one of Shackleton's men, Frank Worsley, and spent a fortune collecting artifacts from their epic treks across the continent. He modeled his military command on Shackleton's legendary skills and was determined to measure his own powers of endurance against them. He would succeed where Shackleton had failed, in the most brutal landscape in the world. In 2008, Worsley set out across Antarctica with two other descendants of Shackleton's crew, battling the freezing, desolate landscape, life-threatening physical exhaustion, and hidden crevasses. Yet when he returned home he felt compelled to go back. On November 13, 2015, at age 55, Worsley bid farewell to his family and embarked on his most perilous quest: to walk across Antarctica alone. David Grann tells Worsley's remarkable story with the intensity and power that have led him to be called "simply the best narrative nonfiction writer working today." Illustrated with more than fifty stunning photographs from Worsley's and Shackleton's journeys, The White Darkness is both a gorgeous keepsake volume and a spellbinding story of courage, love, and a man pushing himself to the extremes of human capacity.
Simon Schuster 2018 146 pages

Stalin's British victims

Beckett, Francis
First published in 2004, this book tells the stories of four remarkable British women, whose lives were scorched by Stalin's purges. One was shot as a spy; one nearly died as a slave labourer in Kazakhstan; and two saw their husbands taken away to the gulag and had to spirit their small children out of the country. We think of the horrors of the middle of the twentieth century- the Holocaust in Central Europe, the purges in the Soviet Union- as something foreign: terrible, but remote. Rosal Rust, Rose Cohen, Freda Utley, and Pearl Rimel were all Londoners. Like hundreds of young, idealistic Britons in the 1930s, they looked to the Soviet Union for inspiration, for a way in which society could be run better, without the exploitation and poverty which unrestrained capitalism had created. They were less fortunate than most of us: they saw their dreams fulfilled. In this book, Francis Beckett draws on personal letters, interviews with surviving relatives and archivists to create a picture of four courageous, intelligent, and very different women. The result is a harrowing human document with vivid and unforgettable insights into the world of Stalin's Russia: its secret trials, labour camps, random disappearances, and concealed executions.
Routledge 2017-02-21 210 pages