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Group Reads -> June 2020 -> Nomination Thread (A book about the Cold War won by Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream by Francis Spufford)
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Top 10 books about the cold war
Books on The Cold War | Waterstones
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I'm not familiar with The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow - a quick perusal suggests it looks promising
I've decided to nominate....
Funeral In Berlin (1964) by Len Deighton
Len Deighton is a firm favourite now - thanks to Susan and others in this group. I nominated Funeral In Berlin once before, for our Berlin themed read so, perhaps, second time lucky. Here's what you need to know...
The classic and gripping spy novel of Cold War Berlin, with MI5's Harry Palmer played by Michael Caine in the film.
Funeral In Berlin is a spellbinding tale of espionage and its counter in which double and triple crosses are common. Berlin with its infamous wall symbolized the Cold War as did no other place. It was like theatre, but is war for real.
"Len Deighton has always been fascinated with the Cold War in a way that could be called scholarly...one always feels that the intricacies of espionage and of the Soviet Union's spy apparatus rest on serious research. And he writes with effortless mastery." (The Wall Street Journal)
"A most impressive book, a chronicle of our times, in which the tension, more like a chronic ache than a stab of pain, never lets go." (The London Evening Standard)
"There was plenty of activity at Checkpoint Charlie. Photoflashes sliced instants from eternity. The pavement shone with water and detergent under the pressmen's feet. Way down towards Hallesches Tor a US military ambulance flasher sped towards the emergency ward and was all set to change direction to the morgue."
Funeral in Berlin by Len Deighton
The recommended book for history A-level is The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad. I am not nominating this at the moment, because I haven't read it and am not sure I want to suggest we all plough through 600 pages.We have read quite a few of the novels already, in other topics.
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Nigeyb, another spy series that has been highly recommended to me is Charlie Muffin. I think I will nominate the first in the series:
Charlie M
A decidedly un-Bond-like British spy outwits the Soviets—and his bosses—in this thriller from a multimillion-selling author that offers “pure delight” (Chicago Tribune).
Charlie Muffin is an anachronism. He came into the intelligence service in the early 1950s, when the government, desperate for foot soldiers in the impending Cold War, dipped into the middle class for the first time. Despite a lack of upper-class bearing, Charlie survived twenty-five years on the espionage battle’s front line: Berlin. But times have changed: The boys from Oxford and Cambridge are running the shop again, and they want to get rid of the middle-class spy who’s a thorn in their side. They have decided that it’s time for Charlie to be sacrificed. But Charlie Muffin didn’t survive two decades in Berlin by being a pushover. He intends to go on protecting the realm, and won’t let anyone from his own organization get in his way.
That is, unless we feel it is out of the time period?
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Charlie M by Brian Freemantle sounds wonderful
NOMINATIONS SO FAR....
Nigeyb: Funeral In Berlin by Len Deighton
Susan: Charlie M by Brian Freemantle
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.The blurb:
Drawing on newly declassified government files, this is the dramatic story of how a forbidden book in the Soviet Union became a secret CIA weapon in the ideological battle between East and West.
In May 1956, an Italian publishing scout took a train to a village just outside Moscow to visit Russia’s greatest living poet, Boris Pasternak. He left carrying the original manuscript of Pasternak’s first and only novel, entrusted to him with these words: “This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world.” Pasternak believed his novel was unlikely ever to be published in the Soviet Union, where the authorities regarded it as an irredeemable assault on the 1917 Revolution. But he thought it stood a chance in the West and, indeed, beginning in Italy, Doctor Zhivago was widely published in translation throughout the world.
From there the life of this extraordinary book entered the realm of the spy novel. The CIA, which recognized that the Cold War was above all an ideological battle, published a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago and smuggled it into the Soviet Union. Copies were devoured in Moscow and Leningrad, sold on the black market, and passed surreptitiously from friend to friend. Pasternak’s funeral in 1960 was attended by thousands of admirers who defied their government to bid him farewell. The example he set launched the great tradition of the writer-dissident in the Soviet Union.
In The Zhivago Affair, Peter Finn and Petra Couvée bring us intimately close to this charming, passionate, and complex artist. First to obtain CIA files providing concrete proof of the agency’s involvement, the authors give us a literary thriller that takes us back to a fascinating period of the Cold War—to a time when literature had the power to stir the world.
I would happily re-read if this won. It's available on Kindle and brings up issues of state censorship as well as the politicised role of literature. And its interesting to see the CIA doing battle by book.
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Who else is nominating?
Or thinking about it?
NOMINATIONS SO FAR....
Nigeyb: Funeral In Berlin by Len Deighton
Susan: Charlie M by Brian Freemantle
Roman Clodia: The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée
Susan wrote: "Thanks, Nigeyb. I will have a browse and a think about the theme. One of the kindle deals I posted today, about Christine Keeler, is on one of the lists. I have long had [book:The Book of Daniel|41..."I started this some time ago. I like Doctorow. I think I decided, after I had started, to try to read him in order. And I think that is why I put it down.
I have always liked his theory of writing - it is like driving at night and all you can do is follow your headlights and go where the story takes you.
I found The Book of Daniel and, although I only got as far as page 29, I could nominate it. I will pick it back up.
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If so, anything else to say about it?
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I was looking for a suitable history, one that is not too long and dry, but gives some sense of how things changed over the years from the chilliest years of the '50s and '60s through the thaw and nuclear disarmament talks of the '70s and '80s. I'm struggling to come up with much enthusiasm for anything though, and the libraries are closed.
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The Cold War: A World History is long (720 pages), however the reviews I've perused suggest it is very readable
That is the one I thought of earlier. People who have read both it and The Cold War: A New History all seem to prefer Westad's. There is also The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction, which is much shorter than either of those, but may be too brief to include anything we don't all already know.
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On phone so no links 🤠
I haven't read it either, but a few people whose reviews I trust have, and they rated it highly.
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GR blurb:
Once upon a time in the Soviet Union....
Strange as it may seem, the grey, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairytale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called 'the planned economy', which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950's, the magic seemed to be working.
Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan, and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, it give the tyranny its happy ending. It's history, it's fiction. It's a comedy of ideas, and a novel about the cost of ideas.
By award-winning (and famously unpredictable) author of The Child That Books Built and Backroom Boys, Red Plenty is as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant - and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.
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For me (and others, I'll guess), the cold war was epitomized by the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was in high school and was aware of it, but too preoccupied with being a teenager to pay enough attention. We didn't have 24-hour news then, just the 6 o'clock news, and I wasn't a newspaper reader. It's probably past time for me to revisit it. I'll nominate Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Robert F. Kennedy.
During the thirteen days in October 1962 when the United States confronted the Soviet Union over its installation of missiles in Cuba, few people shared the behind-the-scenes story as it is told here by the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In this unique account, he describes each of the participants during the sometimes hour-to-hour negotiations, with particular attention to the actions and views of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. In a new foreword, the distinguished historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., discusses the book's enduring importance, and the significance of new information about the crisis that has come to light, especially from the Soviet Union.
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Is anyone else thinking about nominating?
NOMINATIONS SO FAR....
Nigeyb: Funeral In Berlin by Len Deighton
Susan: Charlie M by Brian Freemantle
Roman Clodia: The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée
Judy: Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream by Francis Spufford
Elizabeth: Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Robert F. Kennedy
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I am not going to nominate The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad, but I probably will read it later and will let you know so that we can do a buddy read. I am not going to nominate anything else either.
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Nigeyb wrote: "So is that a nomination Jan? If so, anything else to say about it?"
Yes, it is a nomination.
From the back cover:
"At the height of Cold War hysteria in the 1950s, two American communists, husband and wife, are sent to the electric chair for conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Years later, their son Daniel, now a graduate student at Columbia University, married and with a child of his own, sits alone in the school's library, ostensibly writing his dissertation. But he's actually composing a book that, in reliving his and his sister's agonized childhoods as the offspring of social pariahs, becomes a quest for the truth and meaning of their legacy.
On a large canvas portraying American political life from the radical 1930s to the anti-way 1960s. The Book of Daniel is a powerful fictionalized rendering of actual events by one of the greatest writers of our time. "
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the basis for the characters in the book, actually had two sons. And she had a brother who was the main prosecution witness. The infamous Roy Cohn was on the prosecution team - possibly before he worked for Sen. Joseph McCarthy - not sure of the timing.
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What a fabulous selection for us to choose from - thanks everyone. This group is wonderful
I'll leave it a few hours before getting the polls up, just in case there's any final nominations however I am confident we've got them all now
NOMINATIONS....
Nigeyb: Funeral In Berlin by Len Deighton
Susan: Charlie M by Brian Freemantle
Roman Clodia: The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée
Judy: Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream by Francis Spufford
Elizabeth: Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Robert F. Kennedy
Jan: The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow
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Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream by Francis Spufford
Here's to another wonderful RTTC group read discussion
The accompanying Moderators' choice will be....
On the Beach by Nevil Shute
See you in June for our Cold War inspired book reads and discussions
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I have just started....
Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream by Francis Spufford
I loved Golden Hill which is also by Spufford. I also have a copy of Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin awaiting the right moment
I'm looking forward to discussing Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream by Francis Spufford in a couple of weeks with you lovely people
Once upon a time in the Soviet Union....
Strange as it may seem, the grey, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairytale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called 'the planned economy', which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950's, the magic seemed to be working.
Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan, and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, it give the tyranny its happy ending. It's history, it's fiction. It's a comedy of ideas, and a novel about the cost of ideas.
By award-winning (and famously unpredictable) author of The Child That Books Built and Backroom Boys, Red Plenty is as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant - and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.
Mod
Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream by Francis Spufford"
90 pages in and, I must say, so far it's tremendous
Interesting and very clever.
It also follows on very well from Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore, for those that read it, despite being a very different type of book
Reading the 20th Century
Books mentioned in this topic
Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream (other topics)Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (other topics)
Golden Hill (other topics)
Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream (other topics)
Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Simon Sebag Montefiore (other topics)Francis Spufford (other topics)
Francis Spufford (other topics)
Francis Spufford (other topics)
Nevil Shute (other topics)
More...
It can be either fiction or non-fiction
Please supply the title, author, a brief synopsis, and anything else you'd like to mention about the book, and why you think it might make a good book to discuss.
If your nomination wins then please be willing to fully participate in the subsequent discussion
Happy nominating