"An anonymous skull, an unsolved murder, sinister rumors from the Cold War era of espionage--Bruno's investigation into a long-standing cold case finds him caught between an enigmatic winegrower and a menacing Communist organization from the past. After attending an exhibit on the facial reconstruction of ancient skulls, Bruno wonders if this technology might provide an invaluable clue to a thirty-year-old cold case. But learning the identity of the...

Radio actor Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold) is a big Newark roughneck blighted by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. An idealistic Communist, a self-educated ditchdigger turned popular performer, a six-foot six-inch Abe Lincoln look-alike, he marries the nation's reigning radio actress and beloved silent-film star, the exquisite Eve Frame (born Chava Fromkin). Their marriage evolves from a glamorous, romantic idyll into...

November 1918. A socialist revolution is sweeping across Germany, wreaking havoc on war-torn Berlin. Amid the ruin of the city's slums, four women are found dead-all with identical scars on their backs. Detective Inspector Nikolai Hoffner and his assistant, Hans Fichte, are baffled by the killings, and when another body is discovered, the case takes an ominous and unexpected turn. The fifth victim is none other than Rosa Luxemburg-a leader of the...

"In April 1938, a man calling himself Josef Hofmann arrives at a boarding house in Hamm, Germany, and lets a room from the widow who owns it. Fifty years later, Walter Gersdorff, the widow's son, who was eleven years old in the spring of 1938, discovers the carefully hidden diary the boarder had kept during his stay, even though he should never have written any of its contents down. What Walter finds is a scathing chronicle of one the most tumultuous...

Walking in the Shade covers the years 1949 to 1962, from Lessing's arrival in London with her son, Peter, and the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, under her arm to the publication of her most famous work of fiction, The Golden Notebook. This was the period of the Cold War, a poisonously political time, but Doris Lessing reminds us - in perhaps the book's most striking achievement - of what has been forgotten: that it was a time...

Two boys are born in Parma, Italy on the day of composer Giuseppe Verdi's death in 1901. Alfredo Berlinghieri is the son of a wealthy landowner and Olmo Dalco is the son of a poverty-stricken peasant who becomes a communist and labor organizer. Though the boys are childhood friends, they increasingly come into conflict as adults as Alfredo panders to the increasingly powerful fascists while Olmo fights relentlessly against Mussolini's followers

Based on audaciously true events. In 1959 Bucharest, five high-ranking Jewish members of the Communist party staged a bank heist that baffled the repressive regime and left the public in an uproar. Their motives were never known. Having been captured, arrested, and sentenced to death, the unusual gang of so-called criminals is given one last punishment before facing the execution squad: reenact the heist for the benefit of a Communist propaganda film....

Karl Marx's theories have shaped and directed political economic, and social thought for 150 years. Here the renowned philosopher Peter Singer describes Marx's life and early ideas before clearly and concisely identifying the central vision that unifies Marx's thought and enables us to grasp it as a whole. In this new edition. Singer explores whether Marx and his ideas remain relevant to politics and society today. Assessing Marx's impact and the...

A one-man play featuring Karl Marx in today's New York. In a monologue, he observes capitalism committing the same abuses he railed against a century and a half earlier in his Communist Manifesto. And just for the record he reminds everyone, "I am not a Marxist." By the author of A People's History of the United States.