Farewell to the 70's: A Canadian salute to a confusing decade (A discovery book)

Porter, Anna

Harris, Marjorie

T. Nelson

In 1989, Adam Michnik said that Central Europe came “as a messenger not only of freedom and tolerance but also of hatred and intolerance. It is here, in Central Europe, that the last two wars began.” Nearing the twentieth anniversary of Communism’s collapse, acclaimed author Anna Porter traveled to Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary to discover whether and how democracy has taken root in these former Iron Curtain countries. The former borderlands of the long-defunct Hapsburg Empire and the more recently dispersed Soviet Empire have attempted to invent their own forms of democracy and capitalism. However, disturbing signs of old attitudes have returned, bringing into question Central Europe’s ability to reform its elites and to effectively control public demonstrations of hatred, the rise of racial tensions, and the emergence of fascist parties. Porter interviewed the young and the old, the winners and the losers, in this grand European transformation. Porter walks Wenceslas Square with those who suffered the violence of the state police and helped to organize the ’89 revolution. She meets with revolutionary leaders such as Václav Havel and Adam Michnik, as well as custodians of the new regimes, among them Radek Sikorski, Michael Kocáb, and Ferenc Gyurcsány. She takes us to Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance and Budapest’s House of Terror Museum—fascinating if controversial attempts to reckon with dark periods of history. She interviews the wealthiest man in Hungary, the general who ordered martial law in Poland, attends an ultraright rally, and visits a Gypsy village where a newly burgeoning yet all-too-familiar racism has destroyed a family. Gradually, a portrait emerges of a Europe struggling under the weight of history and memory, its peoples divided over half-forgotten events, old ethnic rivalries, borders drawn and redrawn—ghosts that had lurked, unacknowledged, under Communism’s force-fed stories of peaceful coexistence and a common front toward the Western enemy. Now, Central European rhetoric veers between historical reckoning, revisionism, and the politics of retribution. Penetrating, fascinating, and powerfully observed, The Ghosts of Europe illuminates themes of tyranny, nationalism, racism, and denial in nations with a tumultuous history and a future very much in the balance.

The Ghosts of Europe: Central Europe's Past and Uncertain Future

History

Europe

Thomas Dunne Books

Bookfair Murders

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Little. Brown and Company

Would a man about to kill himself make a dental appointment? Judith Hayes, a freelance journalist, doesn't think so. She was the last person to see George Harris alive before he left his Toronto publishing company and stepped - or was it pushed - in front of a speeding subway train.The police called his death a suicide. Judith thinks it's murder. Gutsy and good-looking, Judith Hayes once worked for the handsome Harris. She knows his company is in the red, with millions owed to the bank. But when she'd interviewed him that afternoon for a magazine feature, he hadn't talked like a man planning his own death. He'd talked like a high-powered businessman with a breakthrough deal in the works and big dreams about to come true. But had one of those dreams turned into the nightmare that had gotten him killed?

Hidden Agenda

BERKLEY

Strange things are happening in downtown Toronto. An expensively dressed corpse has been unceremoniously dumped in front of Brandy's Restaurant. Meanwhile, the notoriously reclusive millionaire Paul Zimmerman has suddenly granted an interview to Toronto journalist Judith Hayes. And Judith becomes convinced that there is more than meets the eye to Zimmerman's rise from penniless Hungarian immigrant to mastermind of breathtaking corporate takeovers.What secret lies behind the opulent marble pillars of his Bridle Path mansion and the white gables of Xanadu, his extravagant retreat in Bermuda? To find the answers, Judith seeks out Zimmerman's family and the super-rich acolytes of his empire, tracking them down in Toronto, New York, Bermuda, and Paris whenever she can evade the self-righteous demands of her ex-husband and the needs of her loveable but unruly kids. Finally, she and her on-and-off lover Detective Inspector David Parr have to travel to Hungary before the pieces of the jigsaw fit disquietingly into place. The mortal sins of the title give a surprisingly lethal kick to an ingeniously executed thriller.

Mortal Sins

Onyx

Freelance reporter Judith Hayes is cheated out of an interview with businessman Paul Zimmerman by his untimely death, but the story that emerges from his demise provides more interesting--and dangerous--copy

United States

Dutton

Journalist Judith Hayes and editor Marsha Hillier stumble on a sinister plot when a celebrated Canadian publisher is killed by a subway, a second publisher is fatally stabbed in New York, and a third dies in London

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

Seal Books

Journalist Judith Hayes and editor Marsha Hillier stumble on a sinister plot when a celebrated Canadian publisher is killed by a subway, a second publisher is fatally stabbed in New York, and a third dies in London

Book Soc of Canada Ltd

The heroic story of the "Hungarian Oscar Schindler" who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazis, only to be accused of collaboration and assassinated in Israel twelve years after WWII ended. Oscar Schindler's and Raoul Wallenberg's efforts to save people from Nazi extinction are legendary; Rezso Kasztner, by contrast, is practically unknown, even though he may have been the greatest rescuer of Jews during World War II. He was also the most controversial, and that, along with the relative lack of focus on events in Hungary toward the end of the war, has no doubt led to his anonymity. Now, with the publication of Anna Porter's remarkable chronicle, Kasztner's achievements are in full view. 
When the German army invaded its ally Hungary in March 1944, followed soon after by Adolf Eichmann and his SS, Rezso Kasztner and a small group of Zionist activists stood in the way of mass deportations. They had met the well-informed Schindler, providing him with funds for food and clothing, and had been involved in previous efforts to rescue Jews from Slovakia and Poland. Now, in meeting after meeting with Eichmann and other SS officers, Kasztner negotiated for freedom, exploiting the Nazi weaknesses of greed and need―"blood for goods," as the Nazis called it―organizing a train out of Hungary for almost 2,000 while several thousand more were protected in work camps in Austria. Inevitably he saved some and not others. After testifying at the Nuremberg trials, Kasztner emigrated to Israel where, in 1956, he was stunningly convicted of collaborating with the Nazis more than a decade before. As he awaited the appeal that would ultimately exonerate him, he was assassinated by right-wing activists in Tel Aviv on March 4, 1957. 
Based on interviews with those who were on the train and with family members of those denied a place on it, as well as documents and correspondence not previously published, Anna Porter tells the dramatic full story of one of the heroes of the twentieth century.

Kasztner's Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust

Americas

Walker Books

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Books by Porter, Anna

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Porter, Anna. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Farewell to the 70's: A Canadian salute to a confusing decade (A discovery book)

The Ghosts of Europe: Central Europe's Past and Uncertain Future

Bookfair Murders

Hidden Agenda

Mortal Sins

Mortal Sins

Hidden Agenda

Hidden Agenda

Hidden Agenda

Kasztner's Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust