The author sheds light on a little-known chapter of U.S.-Soviet relations, using diaries, memoirs, and letters to recall the efforts of nearly 300 relief workers in easing the suffering of Russians during one of the country's worst famines.

“At last, a biography of Herbert Hoover that captures the man in full… [Jeansonne] has splendidly illuminated the arc of one of the most extraordinary lives of the twentieth century.”—David M. Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning Author of Freedom from Fear Prizewinning historian Glen Jeansonne delves into the life of our most misunderstood president, offering up a surprising new portrait of Herbert Hoover—dismissing previous assumptions and revealing a political Progressive in the mold of Theodore Roosevelt, and the most resourceful American since Benjamin Franklin. Orphaned at an early age and raised with strict Quaker values, Hoover earned his way through Stanford University. His hardworking ethic drove him to a successful career as an engineer and multinational businessman. After the Great War, he led a humanitarian effort that fed millions of Europeans left destitute, arguably saving more lives than any man in history. As commerce secretary under President Coolidge, Hoover helped modernize and galvanize American industry, and orchestrated the rehabilitation of the Mississippi Valley after the Great Flood of 1927. As president, Herbert Hoover became the first chief executive to harness federal power to combat a crippling global recession. Though Hoover is often remembered as a “do-nothing” president, Jeansonne convincingly portrays a steadfast leader who challenged congress on an array of legislation that laid the groundwork for the New Deal. In addition, Hoover reformed America’s prisons, improved worker safety, and fought for better health and welfare for children. Unfairly attacked by Franklin D. Roosevelt and blamed for the Depression, Hoover was swept out of office in a landslide. Yet as FDR’s government grew into a bureaucratic behemoth, Hoover became the moral voice of the GOP and a champion of Republican principles—a legacy re-ignited by Ronald Reagan and which still endures today. A compelling and rich examination of his character, accomplishments and failings, this is the magnificent biography of Herbert Hoover we have long waited for. INCLUDES PHOTOS

Russia is famous for its vodka, and its culture of extreme intoxication. But just as vodka is central to the lives of many Russians, it is also central to understanding Russian history and politics. In Vodka Politics, Mark Lawrence Schrad argues that debilitating societal alcoholism is not hard-wired into Russians' genetic code, but rather their autocratic political system, which has long wielded vodka as a tool of statecraft. Through a series of historical investigations stretching from Ivan the Terrible through Vladimir Putin, Vodka Politics presents the secret history of the Russian state itself-a history that is drenched in liquor. Scrutinizing (rather than dismissing) the role of alcohol in Russian politics yields a more nuanced understanding of Russian history itself: from palace intrigues under the tsars to the drunken antics of Soviet and post-Soviet leadership, vodka is there in abundance. Beyond vivid anecdotes, Schrad scours original documents and archival evidence to answer provocative historical questions. How have Russia's rulers used alcohol to solidify their autocratic rule? What role did alcohol play in tsarist coups? Was Nicholas II's ill-fated prohibition a catalyst for the Bolshevik Revolution? Could the Soviet Union have become a world power without liquor? How did vodka politics contribute to the collapse of both communism and public health in the 1990s? How can the Kremlin overcome vodka's hurdles to produce greater social well-being, prosperity, and democracy into the future? Viewing Russian history through the bottom of the vodka bottle helps us to understand why the "liquor question" remains important to Russian high politics even today-almost a century after the issue had been put to bed in most every other modern state. Indeed, recognizing and confronting vodka's devastating political legacies may be the greatest political challenge for this generation of Russia's leadership, as well as the next.

SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, FT AND EVENING STANDARD BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 The momentous new book from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag and Iron Curtain. In 1932-33, nearly four million Ukrainians died of starvation, having been deliberately deprived of food. It is one of the most devastating episodes in the history of the twentieth century. With unprecedented authority and detail, Red Famine investigates how this happened, who was responsible, and what the consequences were. It is the fullest account yet published of these terrible events. The book draws on a mass of archival material and first-hand testimony only available since the end of the Soviet Union, as well as the work of Ukrainian scholars all over the world. It includes accounts of the famine by those who survived it, describing what human beings can do when driven mad by hunger. It shows how the Soviet state ruthlessly used propaganda to turn neighbours against each other in order to expunge supposedly 'anti-revolutionary' elements. It also records the actions of extraordinary individuals who did all they could to relieve the suffering. The famine was rapidly followed by an attack on Ukraine's cultural and political leadership - and then by a denial that it had ever happened at all. Census reports were falsified and memory suppressed. Some western journalists shamelessly swallowed the Soviet line; others bravely rejected it, and were undermined and harassed. The Soviet authorities were determined not only that Ukraine should abandon its national aspirations, but that the country's true history should be buried along with its millions of victims. Red Famine, a triumph of scholarship and human sympathy, is a milestone in the recovery of those memories and that history. At a moment of crisis between Russia and Ukraine, it also shows how far the present is shaped by the past.

'On the Ideological Front' centres on the 1922-23 expulsion from Soviet Russia of some 100 prominent intellectuals. Finkel's account is a scholarly examination of this which sets it in the context of Bolshevik curbs, prohibitions, and punishment of intellectuals who resisted ideological conformity.

This is a story of war and peace. It may have been the greatest crime of the century after the Bolshevik coup and Russian Revolution and the murder of the Russian Romanov Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Tsarina Alexandra and their five young children: four Grand Duchesses Olga, Anastasia, Tatiana, Marie and the Tsarevich, Alexis. It is our story. And I want to share it with you now because it is your story too.

The untold story of how American Jews reinvented modern humanitarianism during the Great War and rebuilt Jewish life in Jewish homelands.

It will appeal to readers with a more general interest in Jewish studies and refugee studies, Holocaust museum professionals, and those engaged in Jewish and other relief and resettlement programs.

Explores the transnational movements of people, plants, agricultural sciences, and techniques from Russia's steppes to North America's Great Plains.

Leon Trotsky was the charismatic intellectual of the Russian Revolution, an authoritarian organizer, who might have succeeded Lenin and become the ruler of the Soviet Union. But by the time the Second World War broke out he was in exile, living in Mexico in a villa borrowed from the great artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, guarded only by several naïve young American acolytes. The household was awash with emotional turmoil - tensions grew between Trotsky and Rivera, as questions arose over his relations with Frida Kahlo. His wife was restless and jealous.Outside of the villa, Mexican communists tried to storm the house, the Trotskys' sons were being persecuted and killed in Europe, and in Moscow, Stalin personally ordered his secret police to kill his fiercest left-wing critic - at any cost. By the summer of 1940, they had found a man who could penetrate the tight security around the house in far-away Mexico . . .Bertrand Patenaude's book reconstructs a famous state crime with chilling precision and a page-turning quality. It tells the amazing story of a deadly rivalry, revolutionary fanaticism and tragic violence and loss.