July 2, 2025
5 PRC Members will win a book-not a member? Join today
A war fought with books.
For nearly five decades after the Second World War, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, forming the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the war was fought psychologically. It was a battle for hearts, minds, and intellects. Few understood this more clearly than George Minden, head of a covert intelligence operation known as the “CIA book program,” which aimed to undermine Soviet censorship and inspire revolt by offering different visions of thought and culture.
A CIA Novel
The New York Times bestselling spy novel The Company lays bare the history and inner workings of the CIA.
This critically acclaimed blockbuster from internationally renowned novelist Robert Littell seamlessly weaves together history and fiction to create a multigenerational, wickedly nostalgic saga of the CIA--known as "the Company" to insiders.
Racing across a landscape spanning the legendary Berlin Base of the '50s, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Bay of Pigs, Afghanistan, and the Gorbachev putsch, The Company tells the thrilling story of agents imprisoned in double lives, fighting an amoral, elusive, formidable enemy--and each other--in an internecine battle within the Company itself.
As thrilling as the events it portrays.
A MOTHER ALWAYS KNOWS
5 Paris Readers Circle members will win a copy
Stella O’Neill seems to be a perfectly normal young woman with a perfectly normal job working at the public library, and she has worked hard to accomplish it. No one except her father and step-mother knows her bizarre history. When she was a toddler her mother became smitten by a spiritual leader who advocated leaving all worldly goods and conveniences behind to move into a community in the woods in remote northern Vermont. Stella’s mother took her and did just that, where Stella lived as a free, wild, uneducated happy child until she was 10. Her mother wanted to leave the community, but was not allowed to do so. She had a gift of divination, and brought in thousands of dollars to the leader by conducting sessions with a wealthy old woman in the upscale town not far away. On the night Stella thought they were leaving, her mother was murdered, and Stella was there. It was a widely covered, never solved murder, and Stella’s father took her away and tried to keep her safe. Twenty years later the cult seemed to have found her, sending texts, and threatening her life. She was the only witness to the murder she believes the cult leader ordered. Stella goes on the run, for her life. Her story is harrowing, and complicated, but with a lesson in friendship Stella had never before known. Patricia Diekmann
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Members Comment
Thank you so much for the recent wonderful books! The Annotated Great Gatsby was thoroughly enjoyed and would also would have been enjoyed by a college student working on a Gatsby paper that I tutored a few years ago. Susan Simons
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