Collects the writings of a diverse group of people who survived imprisonment in the Gulag, recounting their experiences and relationships, and offering insight into the psychological aspects of life in the camps.

The prison memoirs of the Soviet dissident and Jewish activist relate the harrowing events of his nine years in KGB custody, from interrogation to release.

"In 1977, after serving as a leading activist for the democratic dissident movement in the Soviet Union, Natan Sharansky was arrested. He spent nine years as a political prisoner convicted of treason against the state. In fact Sharanksy was fighting for individual freedom in the face of overt tyranny, a struggle that would come to define the rest of his life. Written with frankness, affection, and humor, the book offers us profound insights from a man who embraced the essential human struggle: to find his own voice, his own faith, and the people to whom he could belong."--back cover

Biography of the Russian dissident whose campaigns in the Soviet Union on behalf of his fellow Jews resulted in his arrest and imprisonment in 1978. Reconstructing Shcharansky's nine-year ordeal against the Soviet system, the story illuminates his faith and determination as well as the unflagging efforts of his family and friends to secure his release and bring the plight of Russian Jews to world attention.

In 1941, as a Red Army soldier fighting the Nazis on the Belarussian front, Janusz Bardach was arrested, court-martialed, and sentenced to ten years of hard labor. Twenty-two years old, he had committed no crime. He was one of millions swept up in the reign of terror that Stalin perpetrated on his own people. In the critically acclaimed Man Is Wolf to Man, Bardach recounted his horrific experiences in the Kolyma labor camps in northeastern Siberia, the deadliest camps in Stalin’s gulag system. In this sequel Bardach picks up the narrative in March 1946, when he was released. He traces his thousand-mile journey from the northeastern Siberian gold mines to Moscow in the period after the war, when the country was still in turmoil. He chronicles his reunion with his brother, a high-ranking diplomat in the Polish embassy in Moscow; his experiences as a medical student in the Stalinist Soviet Union; and his trip back to his hometown, where he confronts the shattering realization of the toll the war has taken, including the deaths of his wife, parents, and sister. In a trenchant exploration of loss, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and existential loneliness, Bardach plumbs his ordeal with honesty and compassion, affording a literary window into the soul of a Stalinist gulag survivor. Surviving Freedom is his moving account of how he rebuilt his life after tremendous hardship and personal loss. It is also a unique portrait of postwar Stalinist Moscow as seen through the eyes of a person who is both an insider and outsider. Bardach’s journey from prisoner back to citizen and from labor camp to freedom is an inspiring tale of the universal human story of suffering and recovery.

The exiled Argentine newspaper publisher details his advocacy of human rights, his 1977 arrest, his thirtymonths of imprisonment, interrogation, and torture, the revocation of his citizenship, and his expulsion from Argentina

From the makers of the major motion picture Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, a completely unique biography and thematic telling of the story of Nelson Mandela. This book, which provided key source material for the film, is an unexpurgated collection of the views and opinions of South Africa's first Black president, and it draws on Danny Schechter’s forty-year relationship with "Madiba," as Nelson Mandela is known in his native South Africa. Each chapter of this unique portrait corresponds to a letter of the alphabet, and the letters cover major and minor, unexpected and fascinating themes in Mandela’s life and his impact on others: Athlete, Bully, Comrade, Forgiveness, Indigenous, Jailed, Militant, and President, to name a few. The book quotes liberally from Mandela himself, his ex-wives and other family members, global leaders, Mandela's cellmates and guards on Robben Island, the team behind Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom , former president F. W. de Klerk, members of the South African Police, and his comrades including his successor Thabo Mbeki. Madiba A to Z reveals sides of Nelson Mandela that are not often discussed and angles of the anti-apartheid movement that most choose to brush under the table in order to focus on the happy-ending version of the story. As Schechter reports in the book, according to Mandela's successor as president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, “the fundamental problems of South Africa, poverty, inequality, have remained unchanged since 1994.” This is partly because, as Schechter writes, “six months before the 1994 elections, when South Africa was being governed jointly by the ANC and the National Party under a Transitional Executive Council (TEC), there were secret negotiations about the economic future.” There are many rarely spoken of revelations in Madiba A to Z , a book about Mandela’s brilliance, his courage, his tremendous impact in saving his country and its people of all races, but one that also shows how far South Africa still has to go.

A controversial look at the headline-making story of the last Western prisoner at Guantanamo Bay and the larger implications to national security, justice, and international relations. Omar Khadr is the last Western prisoner at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre, and has been held at the American naval base since October 2002, accused of killing a U.S. sergeant in Afghanistan. Levant takes a provocative look at the definition of "child soldier," life at Guantanamo Bay, the media coverage of the case, and the Canadian government's plan for Omar Khadr's rehabilitation upon his return to Canada.

Text: English, Hebrew (translation)

The memoirs of Lev Razgon, "the last man alive to have actually attended and survived the Communist Party Congress of 1934." Razgon was born in a shetl, became a Communist journalist and writer, was among the Party elite at the beginning of Stalin's reign of terror, and spent seventeen years in labour camps.

Renowned author Kati Marton tells how her journalist parents survived the Nazis in Budapest and were imprisoned by the Soviets.

A personal account of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa chronicles the author's imprisonment in the early 1960s for her participation in the opposition movement of the African National Congress

Award-winning broadcast journalist and public radio correspondent Michael Goldfarb has written the most stirring narrative to emerge from the Second Gulf War. It travels to the frontlines of battle and into the hearts of two men from different cultures whose intimate friendship and mutual passion for freedom can inspire us all. Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace is the author's tribute to Ahmad Shawkat, the Iraqi Kurd who served as Goldfarb's translator during "Major Combat Operations." Under an oppressive regime, Ahmad worked to promote freedom of expression. Goldfarb recounts his powerful yet all-too-brief relationship with Ahmad and introduces readers to the life of a true hero. Eighteen years old when the Ba'ath Party seized control in Iraq, Ahmad intimately and poetically describes his imprisonment and torture twice by Saddam Hussein's regime. Ahmad was banished from his hometown of Mosul for his political writings, and just as he began to taste freedom with the fall of Saddam and his large family's return home, Ahmad was murdered for publicly decrying Islamic terror in newspaper editorials that he began to publish. Ahmad's story of one heroic man will forever change our perception of what all Iraqis have suffered and continue to endure.

This captivating autobiography by a Tibetan educator and former political prisoner is full of twists and turns. Born in 1929 in a Tibetan village, Tsering developed a strong dislike of his country's theocratic ruling elite. As a 13-year-old member of the Dalai Lama's personal dance troupe, he was frequently whipped or beaten by teachers for minor infractions. A heterosexual, he escaped by becoming a drombo, or homosexual passive partner and sex-toy, for a well-connected monk. After studying at the University of Washington, he returned to Chinese-occupied Tibet in 1964, convinced that Tibet could become a modernized society based on socialist, egalitarian principles only through cooperation with the Chinese. Denounced as a 'counterrevolutionary' during Mao's Cultural Revolution, he was arrested in 1967 and spent six years in prison or doing forced labor in China. Officially exonerated in 1978, Tsering became a professor of English at Tibet University in Lhasa. He now raises funds to build schools in Tibet's villages, emphasizing Tibetan language and culture.

The story of Nelson Mandela and his fight for black freedom in South Africa.

Text: English, Russian (translation)

John Beckett was a rising political star. Elected as Labour's youngest M.P. in 1924, he was constantly in the news and tipped for greatness. But ten years later he was propaganda chief for Mosley's fascists, and one of Britain's three best known anti-Semites. Yet his mother, whom he loved, was a Jew. Her ancestors were Solomons, Isaacs and Jacobsons, originally from Prussia. He successfully hid his Jewish ancestry all his life - he said his mother's family were "fisher folk from the east coast." His son, the author of this book, acclaimed political biographer and journalist Francis Beckett, did not discover the truth until John Beckett had been dead for years. He left Mosley and founded the National Socialist League with William Joyce, later Lord Haw Haw, and spent the war years in prison, considered a danger to the war effort. For the rest of his life, and all of Francis Beckett's childhood, John Beckett and his family were closely watched by the security services. Their devious machinations, traced in records only recently released, damaged chiefly his young family. This is a fascinating and brutally honest account of a troubled man in turbulent times.