Benjamin Heath Malkin Bücher

The Cold War meets Mad Men in form of Karel Koechner, the most successful double agent who lived a life of shifting morals and blow-out hedonism from New York to Moscow. In the mid-1970s, the CIA and KGB both suspected Karel Koecher was working for the enemy. They were both right. With his wife Hana, Koecher arrived in the US as a KGB agent, posing as an anti-communist defector, and he soon learned that performing well in academia was the fastest path to the CIA. After graduating from Columbia he swiftly entered the ranks of the CIA, becoming a double agent during the height of the cold war. The Koechers eventually embraced the 1970s Manhattan high life -- cocaine, swinging, parties. Hana made money as a diamond dealer, occasionally relaying messages to Karel's handlers. The Koechers' lifestyle reflected both the times and their risk-taking. It was the apex of Karel's career, spy by day, swinger by night. The Koechers made it and even the once shy Hana got carried away with the euphoria. Life is good, and the Koechers felt unstoppable. But it was too good to last. Using newly declassified documents, interrogation tapes and extraordinary first-hand accounts from the Koechers themselves, Cunningham reconstructs their double lives and the fading Cold War, where a strange moral fog made it hard to know what truth was being fought for, and to what end.

This is the most wide-ranging and provocative look at punk rock as a social change movement over the past forty-five years, told through first-hand accounts of roughly 250 musicians and activists. John Malkin brings together punk's most famous figures as well as underground voices, creating a new and insightful history of punk throughout the ages.

Bureaucracy, once considered moderate and mild, drives people wild. It provokes both a rational fanaticism for more bureaucracy and a fanaticism that would, if only it could, do away with it once and for all. This confusion of rationalization and ex

In this book, leading member of the Railway Performance Society Alan Varley discusses and analyzes a lifetime of railway travel across the French Railways (SNCF) network - over a million kilometers worth! The performance of different types of train is assessed on the wide variety of routes on which they operated, giving the opportunity to see the impact of modernization, first from steam to diesel, and latterly to the dedicated high speed lines of the Trains a Grande Vitesse (TGV).