A journey into the glittering, surreal heart of 21st century Russia: into the lives of Hells Angels convinced they are messiahs, professional killers with the souls of artists, bohemian theatre directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, supermodel sects, post-modern dictators and oligarch revolutionaries. This is a world erupting with new money and new power, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality, where life is seen as a whirling, glamorous masquerade where identities can be switched and all values are changeable. It is home to a new form of authoritarianism, far subtler than 20th century strains, and which is rapidly expanding to challenge the global order. An extraordinary book - one which is as powerful and entertaining as it is troubling - Nothing is True and Everything is Possible offers a wild ride into this political and ethical vacuum

By 1972 Richard Nixon had ended the Vietnam war, achieved diplomatic breakthroughs with Russia and China, presided over a period of economic stability at home, and was on the verge of a landslide re-election . . . until he decided to cover up a third-rate burglary. Watergate was one of the largest scandals in American history and two years later Nixon would resign the presidency—but with neither an admission of guilt nor any sign of remorse. In a drama "as thought-provoking as it is gripping and entertaining" (Charles Spencer, Th e Daily T e l e graph ), acclaimed screenwriter Peter Morgan examines how a British playboy, talk-show host managed what no other journalist or prosecutor could: to extract a confession from our most notorious statesman.

Russian-speaking Jews from the former Soviet Union are a peculiarity in the Jewish world. After decades living in a repressive, nominally atheistic state, these Jews did manage to retain a strong sense of Jewish identity - but one that was almost completely divorced from Judaism. Today, more than ten percent of Jews speak or understand Russian, signaling the importance of an ever-vexing question: why are Russian Jews the way they are? In pursuit of an answer, Anna Shternshis's groundbreaking When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin draws on nearly 500 oral history interviews on the Soviet Jewish experience with Soviet citizens who were adults by the 1940s. Soviet Jews lived through tumultuous times: the Great Terror, World War II, the anti-Semitic policies of the postwar period, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But, like millions of other Soviet citizens, they married, raised children, and built careers, pursuing life as best they could in a profoundly hostile environment. One of the first scholars to record and analyze oral testimonies of Soviet Jews, Shternshis unearths heartbreaking, deeply poignant, and often funny stories of the everyday choices Jews were forced to navigate as a repressed minority living in a totalitarian regime. Shternshis reveals how ethnicity rapidly transformed into a disability, as well as a negative characteristic, for Soviet Jews in the postwar period, and shows how it was something they needed desperately to overcome in order to succeed. That sense of self has persisted well into the twenty-first century, and has impacted the Jewish identities of the children and grandchildren of Shternshis's subjects, the foundational generation of contemporary Russian Jewish culture. An illuminating work of social and cultural history, When Sonia Met Boris traces the fascinating contours of contemporary Russian Jewish identity back to their very roots.

In this powerful oral history, Daphne Patal evokes the rich and varied lives of Brazilian women. Twenty of them tell their own life stories — women in city and country, in comfort and poverty, and in rebellion and resignation. These stories illuminate ordinary "invisible" women from many different walks of life: domestic servants, secretaries, factory workers, nuns, hairdressers, entrepreneurs, seamstresses, prostitutes, landowners, schoolgirls, homemakers, revolutionaries; single, married, widowed, and divorced; Black and White and in between. Patal conducted these interviews in two contrasting regions—cosmopolitan Rio de Janeiro and the more traditional, largely agrarian Northeast: Translated from the Portuguese in vivid, direct, compelling language, the twenty stones convey the feel of contemporary Brazil as experienced by women whose everyday existence and dreams have until now gone almost entirely unrecorded. Through these life stories, we gain a sense of the opportunities and constraints that structure women's lives in Brazil. Patal provides extensive notes to relate the individual lives to the political and economic changes of Brazil, and to corroborate and contrast the women's particular views with information about legal status, health conditions, education, feminist and Black activism, the practice of liberation theology. Afro-Brazilian cults, and the fluctuations of women's economic position. They are not impersonal facts, however, bur rather real women who speak most forcefully in this book. Their self-portraits, brought to life in strong and often eloquent voices, throw a new and even a glaring light on a country, a time, and above all on a profound transformation in women's consciousness. -- back cover.