Caribbean & West Indies

Johnny Nicholas had many faces. To some he was “Major John Nicholas,” a downed black American pilot who parachuted into France on a secret intel- ligence mission. To others he was a key player in the French Resistance and a doctor who’d set up a practice in Paris as a cover for his clandestine activities. At a well built 6 feet, he was a bon vivant who loved the high life, and a film producer with a penchant for boldly thumbing his nose at the Nazis in World War II Paris. To Florence, his blonde girlfriend, he was an enigma who cheated on her; she betrayed him to her German handlers.
Nicholas was arrested by the Gestapo and wound up in 1943 in Buchenwald as a slave laborer, later working with thousands of other prisoners to hollow out a secret underground plant under construction at Camp Dora where V-1 and V-2 rocket bombs were built. He was the only black and only “American” at Dora.
Who was Johnny Nicholas and how did he survive four death sentences?
What was his real mission and ultimate fate? More than 20 years and 600 contacts worldwide have gone into The Search for Johnny Nicholas, the dramatic untold story of an unsung hero.

The Search for Johnny Nicholas is beautifully written, heartbreaking, full of intrigue, espionage, heroism, uncertainty, and romance. McCann and Smith have written a page-turning story that is equal parts popular history and spy novel. These are scenes from American and European history that you have not read before, involving a one-of-a-kind man. Fans of Stephen Ambrose and Allen Furst will not be disappointed. —Doug Stanton, New York Times bestselling author of In Harm’s Way and Horse Soldiers

Named one of the Washington Post Book World's Best Books of 2009, The Least Worst Place offers a gripping narrative account of the first one hundred days of Guantanamo. Greenberg, one of America's leading experts on the Bush Administration's policies on terrorism, tells the story through a group of career officers who tried--and ultimately failed--to stymie the Pentagon's desire to implement harsh new policies in Guantanamo and bypass the Geneva Conventions. Peopled with genuine heroes and villains, this narrative of the earliest days of the post-9/11 era centers on the conflicts between Gitmo-based Marine officers intent on upholding the Geneva Accords and an intelligence unit set up under the Pentagon's aegis. The latter ultimately won out, replacing transparency with secrecy, military protocol with violations of basic operation procedures, and humane and legal detainee treatment with harsh interrogation methods and torture. Greenberg's riveting account puts a human face on this little-known story, revealing how America first lost its moral bearings in the wake of 9/11.

“Have mercy on me, Lord, I am Cuban.” In 1962, Carlos Eire was one of 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba—exiled from his family, his country, and his own childhood by the revolution. The memories of Carlos's life in Havana, cut short when he was just eleven years old, are at the heart of this stunning, evocative, and unforgettable memoir.

Waiting for Snow in Havana is both an exorcism and an ode to a paradise lost. For the Cuba of Carlos’s youth—with its lizards and turquoise seas and sun-drenched siestas—becomes an island of condemnation once a cigar-smoking guerrilla named Fidel Castro ousts President Batista on January 1, 1959. Suddenly the music in the streets sounds like gunfire. Christmas is made illegal, political dissent leads to imprisonment, and too many of Carlos's friends are leaving Cuba for a place as far away and unthinkable as the United States. Carlos will end up there, too, and fulfill his mother's dreams by becoming a modern American man—even if his soul remains in the country he left behind.

Narrated with the urgency of a confession, Waiting for Snow in Havana is a eulogy for a native land and a loving testament to the collective spirit of Cubans everywhere.

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He became a myth in his own lifetime and an international martyr-figure upon his death; he was a revolutionary fighter, a military strategist, a social philosopher, an economist, a medical doctor, and a friend and confidant of Fidel Castro. Che Guevara's dream was an epic one - to unite Latin America and the rest of the developing world through armed revolution, and to end once and for all the poverty, injustice and petty nationalisms that had bled it for centuries. In the end, Che failed in his quest but he is recognized as that one-in-a-million personality who just might have pulled it off. "Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life" shuttles between the revolutionary capitals of Havana and Algiers to the battlegrounds of Bolivia and the Congo; from the halls of power in Moscow and Washington to the exile havens of Miami, Mexico and Guatemala, in a gripping tale of revolution, international intrigue and covert operations. It has an epic sweep as it evokes an era of tumultuous change, describing major events like the Bay of Pigs invasion, the October Missile crisis and Kennedy's assassination. Among its cast of characters are scores of historic personalities including Castro, Kennedy, Kruschev, Mao Tse-tung, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, to name but a few. Jon Lee Anderson has been given unprecedented access to the Cuban Government's archives and has had total co-operation from Che's widow, Aleida March, who has never previously spoken for publication about her late husband. He has obtained hitherto unpublished documents, including several of Che's personal diaries and, in the course of his research, broke open a twenty-eight-year-old mystery - the whereabouts of Che's body in Bolivia. There is no doubt that this monumental work will stand as the definitive portrait of one of the twentieth century's most fascinating, yet largely unexplored, historical figures.