Long before the waterboarding controversy exploded in the media, one CIA agent had already gone public. In a groundbreaking 2007 interview with ABC News, John Kiriakou called waterboarding torture—but admitted that it probably worked. This book, at once a confessional, an adventure story, and a chronicle of Kiriakou’s life in the CIA, stands as an important, eloquent piece of testimony from a committed American patriot. In February 2002 Kiriakou was the head of counterterrorism in Pakistan. Under his command, in a spectacular raid coordinated with Pakistani agents and the CIA’s best intelligence analyst, Kiriakou’s field officers took down the infamous terrorist Abu Zubaydah. For days, Kiriakou became the wounded terrorist’s personal “bodyguard.” In circumstances stranger than fiction, as al-Qaeda agents scoured the streets for their captured leader, the best trauma surgeon in America was flown to Pakistan to make sure that Zubaydah did not die. In The Reluctant Spy, Kiriakou takes us into the fight against an enemy fueled by fanaticism. He chillingly describes what it was like inside the CIA headquarters on the morning of 9/11, the agency leaders who stepped up and those who protected their careers. And in what may be the book’s most shocking revelation, he describes how the White House made plans to invade Iraq a full year before the CIA knew about it—or could attempt to stop it. Chronicling both mind-boggling mistakes and heroic acts of individual courage, The Reluctant Spy is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the inner workings of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, the truth behind the torture debate, and the incredible dedication of ordinary men and women doing one of the most extraordinary jobs on earth.

The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror

Biographies & Memoirs

Kiriakou, John

Ruby, Michael

Leaders & Notable People

Bantam]

Long before the waterboarding controversy exploded in the media, one CIA agent had already gone public. In a groundbreaking 2007 interview with ABC News, John Kiriakou called waterboarding torture--but admitted that it probably worked. This book, at once a confessional, an adventure story, and a chronicle of Kiriakou's life in the CIA, stands as an important, eloquent piece of testimony from a committed American patriot. In February 2002, Kiriakou was the head of counterterrorism in Pakistan. Under his command, in a spectacular raid coordinated with Pakistani agents and the CIA's best intelligence analyst, Kiriakou's field officers took down the infamous terrorist Abu Zubaydah. For days, Kiriakou became the wounded terrorist's personal "bodyguard." In circumstances stranger than fiction, as al-Qaeda agents scoured the streets for their captured leader, the best trauma surgeon in America was flown to Pakistan to make sure that Zubaydah did not die. In The Reluctant Spy, Kiriakou takes us into the fight against an enemy fueled by fanaticism. He chillingly describes what it was like inside the CIA headquarters on the morning of 9/11, the agency leaders who stepped up and those who protected their careers. And in what may be the book's most shocking revelation, he describes how the White House made plans to invade Iraq a full year before the CIA knew about it--or could attempt to stop it. Chronicling both mind-boggling mistakes and heroic acts of individual courage, The Reluctant Spy is essential listening for anyone who wishes to understand the inner workings of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, the truth behind the torture debate, and the incredible dedication of ordinary men and women doing one of the most extraordinary jobs on earth.

Tantor Audio

Long before the waterboarding controversy exploded in the media, one CIA agent had already gone public. In a groundbreaking 2007 interview with ABC News, John Kiriakou called waterboarding torture-but admitted that it probably worked. This book, at once a confessional, an adventure story, and a chronicle of Kiriakou's life in the CIA, stands as an important, eloquent piece of testimony from a committed American patriot. In February 2002, Kiriakou was the head of counterterrorism in Pakistan. Under his command, in a spectacular raid coordinated with Pakistani agents and the CIA's best intelligence analyst, Kiriakou's field officers took down the infamous terrorist Abu Zubaydah. For days, Kiriakou became the wounded terrorist's personal "bodyguard." In circumstances stranger than fiction, as al-Qaeda agents scoured the streets for their captured leader, the best trauma surgeon in America was flown to Pakistan to make sure that Zubaydah did not die. In The Reluctant Spy, Kiriakou takes us into the fight against an enemy fueled by fanaticism. He chillingly describes what it was like inside the CIA headquarters on the morning of 9/11, the agency leaders who stepped up and those who protected their careers. And in what may be the book's most shocking revelation, he describes how the White House made plans to invade Iraq a full year before the CIA knew about it-or could attempt to stop it. Chronicling both mind-boggling mistakes and heroic acts of individual courage, The Reluctant Spy is essential listening for anyone who wishes to understand the inner workings of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, the truth behind the torture debate, and the incredible dedication of ordinary men and women doing one of the most extraordinary jobs on earth.

Long before the waterboarding controversy exploded in the media, one CIA agent had already gone public. In a groundbreaking 2007 interview with ABC News, John Kiriakou called waterboarding torture-but admitted that it probably worked. This book, at once a confessional, an adventure story, and a chronicle of Kiriakou's life in the CIA, stands as an important, eloquent piece of testimony from a committed American patriot.    In February 2002, Kiriakou was the head of counterterrorism in Pakistan. Under his command, in a spectacular raid coordinated with Pakistani agents and the CIA's best intelligence analyst, Kiriakou's field officers took down the infamous terrorist Abu Zubaydah. For days, Kiriakou became the wounded terrorist's personal "bodyguard." In circumstances stranger than fiction, as al-Qaeda agents scoured the streets for their captured leader, the best trauma surgeon in America was flown to Pakistan to make sure that Zubaydah did not die.    In The Reluctant Spy, Kiriakou takes us into the fight against an enemy fueled by fanaticism. He chillingly describes what it was like inside the CIA headquarters on the morning of 9/11, the agency leaders who stepped up and those who protected their careers. And in what may be the book's most shocking revelation, he describes how the White House made plans to invade Iraq a full year before the CIA knew about it-or could attempt to stop it.     Chronicling both mind-boggling mistakes and heroic acts of individual courage, The Reluctant Spy is essential listening for anyone who wishes to understand the inner workings of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, the truth behind the torture debate, and the incredible dedication of ordinary men and women doing one of the most extraordinary jobs on earth.

Washtenaw County Jail And Other Writings

WASHTENAW COUNTY JAIL and Other Writings is first and foremost a gritty prison journal by the young poet David Herfort, who served time for drugs as a college student at the University of Michigan in the turbulent early 1970s.  It is also a delicate poetry collection, The Poems of Horatio Pepper, and the poignant European journal and letters of an American hitchhiker who was killed in a car accident in Spain in November 1972.  The book was edited 30 years after Herfort's death by his half-brother, the poet Michael Ruby.

Washtenaw County Jail and Other Writings

Literature & Fiction

Herfort, David

History & Criticism

Xlibris, Corp.

WASHTENAW COUNTY JAIL and Other Writings is first and foremost a gritty prison journal by the young poet David Herfort, who served time for drugs as a college student at the University of Michigan in the turbulent early 1970s. It is also a delicate poetry collection, The Poems of Horatio Pepper, and the poignant European journal and letters of an American hitchhiker who was killed in a car accident in Spain in November 1972. The book was edited 30 years after Herfort's death by his half-brother, the poet Michael Ruby.

The book, a short trilogy in prose and poetry, carefully documents three varieties of unconscious experience: fleeting memories, dreams, and inner voices heard before sleep. The book, which takes a quite different approach than Jung's similarly titled _Memories, Dreams, Reflections_, is meant to be both experimental and readable. The first and third parts, Fleeting Memories and Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep, are the first extensive literary treatments of two vast realms of psychic experience, and thus the work as a whole might be of enduring significance. Fleeting Memories was temporarily lost in a severely damaged building across the street from the World Trade Center, where Ruby worked as a copy editor at The Wall Street Journal, and includes a low-key preface about that experience. While the middle book, Dreams of the 1990s, is not the first dream book ever written-Leiris, Kerouac and Burroughs come immediately to mind-it takes its place as a strong hyperrealist entry in that genre, as well as interacting unpredictably with Fleeting Memories.

Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices

United States

AmazonUs/INDPB

<div>The Star-Spangled Banner spans the 15-year arc from 9/11 to 11/9, concluding with a poem based on voices overheard the night of Trump's election by poet Michael Ruby, a journalist who has covered U.S. politics for decades. Ruby began the book in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when he saw people freely using U.S. national symbols for their own political purposes. He decided to do the same thing for poetic purposes. Every poem in the book, which is dedicated to Jasper Johns and Jimi Hendrix, uses the 81 words of the national anthem and inserts words into the spaces between them. The poems have different vocabularies--sometimes surrealist like Ruby's related book, American Songbook (2013), sometimes documentary and personal like his trilogy Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (2012). The Star-Spangled Banner is an artistic encounter with one of America's leading national symbols, using the frame of Francis Scott Key's War of 1812 lyrics in unexpected ways, and an unusual verbal and emotional portrait of the time from 9/11 to 11/9.</div>

The Star-Spangled Banner

Station Hill Press

Colors and shapes, images, even visions. In CLOSE YOUR EYES, VISIONS, poet Michael Ruby explores this common yet overlooked phenomenon. The two texts in the book extend into the visionary realm Ruby's trilogy, Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices, which chronicled the fleeting memories, dream narratives and fragmentary conversations that also occasionally reach consciousness. Taken together, these works are a guide for readers to some of the most elusive productions of the human mind.

Close Your Eyes, Visions

Poetry

In poems written on the rocky coast of Frenchman Bay in Maine, Michael Ruby begins with wisdom and ends with delight, reversing Frost’s famous dictum about poetry. The Mouth of the Bay begins with the wisdom of the Eleatic philosophers in southern Italy and Sicily—“There is no beginning and there is no end”—and their calls for purification. Ruby writes the words that appear in his mind when he repeats sayings of Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Empedocles and others. In “Elements,” he breaks the coastal landscape into six elements—rocks, water, islands, mountain, sky, sun—and writes a stanza for each, creating a series of 23 poems akin to abstract expressionist landscapes. In the long poem, “Wave Talk,” he listens to small waves lapping against the rocks and writes the conversational phrases that appear in his mind. In the last section, “Foghorns,” he responds to the blue sky and water of Frenchman Bay on clear days and the two-note foghorn at Egg Rock Light on foggy days. The poems end with delight in the sights and sounds around us, the words that appear within us.

The Mouth of the Bay

BlazeVOX Books

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

Books by Ruby, Michael

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

The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror

The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror

The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror

The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror

Washtenaw County Jail and Other Writings

Washtenaw County Jail And Other Writings

Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices

The Star-Spangled Banner

Close Your Eyes, Visions

The Mouth of the Bay