When twelve-year-old Arcady is sent to a children's home after his parents are declared enemies of the state in Soviet Russia, soccer becomes a way to secure extra rations, respect, and protection but it may also be his way out if he can believe in and love another person--and himself.

Notes from the Other Side of Night is a diary-memoir written upon Juliana Geran Pilon's return to her native Romania in 1975, which she had left along with her family when she was just fourteen. Poetically weaving together modern insight and realities with childhood perceptions, Pilon tells the haunting stories of her parents, grandparents, neighbors, and friends. Although the scenery of her native home had remained essentially unchanged since her childhood, Pilon recalls streets that are no more, homes and churches that have been demolished. Yet, the hills and forests, the flowers and mountains, the heat of old Bucharest, remained the same. The scenes and characters described in this book are simply unforgettable. Despite the many tragedies it describes--anti-semitism, political imprisonment, and judicial execution were ruthless realities under communism--Notes from the Other Side of Night is not a depressing book. Pilon writes with a detached melancholy about events and characters that illustrate Hannah Arendt's terrifying "banality of evil." But she remembers, as well, those few who managed to remain human beings until the end. Ultimately, hope triumphs in this memoir. This edition includes a new foreword, which discusses the initial writing and publication of this and previous editions.

"In 1917, a band of communist revolutionaries stormed the Winter Palace of Tsar Nicholas II, a dramatic and explosive act marking that Vladimir Lenin's communist revolution was now underway. But Lenin would not be satisfied with overthrowing the Tsar. His goal was a global revolt that would topple all Western capitalist regimes starting with the British Empire. This book tells the story of the British spies in revolutionary Russia and their mission to stop Lenin's red tide from washing across the free world. They were an eccentric cast of characters, led by Mansfield Cumming, a one-legged, monocle-wearing former sea captain, and included novelist W. Somerset Maugham, beloved children's author Arthur Ransome, and the dashing, ice-cool Sidney Reilly, the legendary Ace of Spies and a model for Ian Fleming's James Bond. Cumming's network would pioneer the field of covert action and would one day become Britain's Military Intelligence 6 (MI -6) -- book jacket.