In The Consul's Wife, W.T. Tyler returns once more to Africa, specifically to the Congo, where his protagonist, Hugh Mathews, a young foreign service officer, must cope with his embassy's ineptitude and its shallow-thinking bureaucrats even as he comes to terms with the confusion of feuding tribes and rebel factions living in the timeless and all but impenetrable wilderness surrounding the capital. Featuring a huge cast of characters - petty dictators,...

The bestselling author of "Devil in the White City" turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler's rise to power. The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.

Old home movies, newsreels and a prison diary are interwoven to link personal and public history in this assessment of human rights abuses in Guinea-Conakry. Allah Tantou is the first African film to confront the immense personal and political costs of the widespread human rights abuses on the continent. It follows filmmaker David Achkar's search for his father, his father's search for himself inside a Guinean prison and Africa's search for a new...

In 1951 Michael Jenkins, then 14 years old, spent the summer with "the aunts in Flanders." His "aunts" were a group of elderly women whose connection to his family had never been explained but they immediately embraced him and he quickly became entwined in the lives of an extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins. The warmth of their life awakes Michael to the complicated world of relationships as he falls in love for the first time. Michael Jenkin's...

September 1938. Hitler is determined to start a war. Chamberlain is desperate to preserve the peace.The issue is to be decided in a city that will forever afterwards be notorious for what takes place there. Munich. As Chamberlain's plane judders over the Channel and the Fuhrer's train steams relentlessly south from Berlin, two young men travel with secrets of their own. Hugh Legat is one of Chamberlain's private secretaries; Paul Hartmann a German...

This memoir presents the life of a distinguished civil servant and gives a fascinating look into a dramatic political career spanning from Singapore to New York City. With an unerring eye for humor blended with thoughtful insight, this autobiography provides a diplomat's viewpoint to some of the most important political events of the mid 20th century, including two revolutions, a war in Nigeria, and a peaceful attainment of independence.--Provided...

Lady Frances Ffolkes is incensed when she finds out that her dear friends Gwendolyn and Thomasina have been subject to vicious threats. Promising to uncover their attacker, she travels with them to Kestrel's Eyrie, the fabled estate belonging to Gwen's family. But soon Frances faces an even greater problem, when Gwens father, a powerful diplomat, is stabbed to death with his prized ruby dagger. Frances, with her loyal maid June Mallow at her side,...

"In this magisterial biography, the eminent scholar John B. Boles does not ignore the aspects of Jefferson that trouble us today, but strives to see him in full, and to understand him amid the sweeping upheaval of his times. We follow Jefferson from his early success as an abnormally precocious student and lawyer in colonial Virginia through his drafting of the Declaration of Independence at age 33, his travels in Europe on the eve of the French Revolution,...

In a narrative both panoramic and intimate, Tom Chaffin captures the four-decade friendship of Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette. Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette shared a singularly extraordinary friendship, one involved in the making of two revolutions, and two nations. Jefferson first met Lafayette in 1781, when the young French-born general was dispatched to Virginia to assist Jefferson, then the state's governor, in...

Withering from alcoholism, British consul Geoffrey Firmin stumbles through a small Mexican village amidst the Day of the Dead fiesta, attempting to reconnect with his estranged wife, but only further alienating himself.