Conspirators

A timeless story of decaying middle-class English life after wwI and the generation that tried to escape its values Christopher Isherwood was only twenty-one when he began his first novel, All the Conspirators. in his introduction to the American edition, Isherwood explains: “All the Conspirators records a minor engagement in what Shelley calls ‘the great war between the old and young.’ And what a war it was!” in many ways this novel (like the classic Berlin Stories) is a period piece growing out of a particular historical situation—clashes between parents and children with all their passionate moral struggles. Isherwood’s vivid portrayal of an older generation trying to hold on while a younger generation tries to wrench free still resonates and disarms.

This work argues for the existence of a committee of 300, an elite body which controls every aspect of politics, religion, commerce and industry, answerable to no one except itself. It maintains that the confusion of social and moral values in the free world has been deliberately created.

Galicia, Austria-Hungary, 1913. In the castle of a frontier town, on the border between Europe and the East, the worldly, corrupt Count-Governor Wiladowski watches helplessly while a wave of assassinations sweeps the empire, and his province. When a member of his own family is murdered, the count gives broad police powers to his spymaster, Jakob Tausk: a brilliant young Jew whose ruthless war on terror extends into every corner of the province and beyond, enlisting union organizers, financiers, aristocrats and their servants, and a young novelist and playwright, newly arrived in the Vienna of Franz Josef and Freud, hungry for literary success. In the wake of new terrorist attacks, a mysterious preacher appears in the provincial capital--one of the so-called "wonder rabbis" from the shtetls of the East-trailing a band of fanatical disciples who proclaim him the messiah. Word of the charismatic leader spreads quickly from the Jewish quarter to the castle itself, and soon Tausk finds himself serving two masters: the count and the richest man in the province, Moritz Rotenburg, who has a private interest in the wonder rabbi and whose only son has returned from university, burning for revolution, to gather disciples of his own. Moving from underground meetings and makeshift synagogues to the bedrooms of country estates and the secret high councils of the ailing thousand-year-old Habsburg Empire, Michael André Bernstein's compelling first novel evokes a densely believable world on the edge of collapse, full of the haunting suggestiveness of a fable or nightmare, and the erotic, mystical, and apocalyptic passions of an age.

The tenth novel in Cherryh’s Foreigner space opera series, a groundbreaking tale of first contact and its consequences… The civil war among the alien atevi has ended. Tabini-aiji, powerful ruler of the Western Association, along with Cajeiri, his son and heir, and his human paidhi, Bren Cameron, have returned to Bujavid, their seat of power. But factions that remain loyal to the opposition are still present, and the danger these rebels pose is far from over. Since the rebellion, Bren Cameron's apartment in the capital has been occupied by an old noble family from the Southern district—the same district from which the coup was initiated. This family now claims loyalty to Tabini, but the aiji is dubious. To avoid conflict, Bren has decided to absent himself from the Bujavid and visit Najida, his country estate on the west coast. Tabini-aiji is training his young son in the traditional ways of the atevi, and has Cajeiri under strict supervision. But after two years in space, surrounded by human children, Cajeiri bristles in this boring environment. Desperate for freedom and adventure, disregarding the obvious danger, Cajeiri escapes the Bujavid with his young bodyguards and sets out to join Bren on the coast. Determined to insure his son's safety, Tabini recalls Ilisidi from her home in the East, asking her to find Cajeiri and secure him at Bren's estate. But it has been a long time since Bren has been to Najida, and the war has shifted allegiances in many quarters. A district that was once considered a safe haven may now be a trap. And with Bren, Cajeiri, and Ilisidi all under one roof and separated from their allies, that trap is now baited. The long-running Foreigner series can also be enjoyed by more casual genre readers in sub-trilogy installments. Conspirator is the 10th Foreigner novel, and the 1st book in the fourth subtrilogy.

New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison's decision to arrest Clay Shaw on March 1, 1967, set off a chain of events that culminated in the only prosecution undertaken in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In the decades since Garrison captured headlines with this high-profile legal spectacle, historians, conspiracy advocates, and Hollywood directors alike have fixated on how a New Orleans–based assassination conspiracy might have worked. Cruising for Conspirators settles the debate for good, conclusively showing that the Shaw prosecution was not based in fact but was a product of the criminal justice system's long-standing preoccupation with homosexuality. Tapping into the public's willingness to take seriously conspiratorial explanations of the Kennedy assassination, Garrison drew on the copious files the New Orleans police had accumulated as they surveilled, harassed, and arrested increasingly large numbers of gay men in the early 1960s. He blended unfounded accusations with homophobia to produce a salacious story of a New Orleans-based scheme to assassinate JFK that would become a national phenomenon. At once a dramatic courtroom narrative and a deeper meditation on the enduring power of homophobia, Cruising for Conspirators shows how the same dynamics that promoted Garrison's unjust prosecution continue to inform conspiratorial thinking to this day.

On May 1, 1865, two weeks after Abraham Lincoln's assassination, recently inaugurated president Andrew Johnson appointed John Frederick Hartranft to command the military prison at the Washington Arsenal, where the U.S. government had just incarcerated the seven men and one woman accused of complicity in the shooting. From that day through the execution of four of the accomplices, the Pennsylvania-born general held responsibility for the most notorious prisoners in American history. A strict adherent to protocol, Hartranft kept a meticulously detailed account of his experiences in the form of a letterbook. In The Lincoln Assassination Conspirators, noted Lincoln scholars Edward Steers, Jr., and Harold Holzer, in partnership with the National Archives, present this fascinating historical record for the first time with contextual materials and expert annotations, providing a remarkable glimpse behind the scenes of the assassination's aftermath. Hartranft oversaw every aspect of the prisoners' daily lives, from making sure they were fed and kept clean to ensuring that no one communicated with them except on the written orders of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. In his Letterbook, Hartranft scrupulously recounts the arrival of each prisoner and describes the prison routine -- which included three simple meals a day, a twice-daily cell inspection by Hartranft himself, and frequent physical examinations by an army physician. The prisoners wore wrist and leg shackles and, controversially, most of them wore special hoods designed to isolate them from their surroundings. When the conspirators' trial began, the nation waited eagerly for news, and many sought retribution against those they held responsible for the nation's grief. Hartranft resisted calls for both vengeance and mercy and continued to treat his notorious charges as humanely as possible, facilitating meetings with clergy and sending letters to and from family members. Yet, as his detached, detailed description of the execution of four of the conspirators shows, he did not allow emotion to impede the performance of his duty. The legal and moral issues surrounding the conspirators' trial -- the extraordinary use of military rather than civil justice, the treatment of the accused while incarcerated, the fine line between swift and precipitous justice -- remain volatile, unsettled issues today. Hartranft's keen observations, ably analyzed by historians Steers and Holzer, will add a riveting new chapter to the story of Lincoln's assassination.

At the end of WWII, American Gar Stanley, returns to his native Philippines to help a good friend try to find her lost husband. His search will take him from one island to another and put him in contact with all levels of humanity. He finds he must move quickly to stay ahead of all the deadly conspirators before they can kill his friend.

Helen Rappaport's Conspirator is a vivid account of Vladimir I. Lenin's years of exile in Europe, showing that this often-overlooked period shaped the life of one of the 20th century's most important figures. In the years leading up to the Russian Revolution, Lenin traveled between the capital cities of Europe, developing a complex network of collaborators and co-conspirators that would play a significant role in the struggle to come. Rappaport sheds a rare light onto Lenin's early life, describing his relationship with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and his extraordinary and unexpected love affair with beautiful activist Inessa Armand. In a riveting narrative, Conspirator describes the courage and the comedy, the setbacks, schisms and disappointments, the extreme persistence and the ruthless dedication that carried Lenin and his colleagues along the inexorable path to the Russian Revolution.

Alan Berkman (1945–2009) was no campus radical in the mid-1960s; he was a promising Ivy League student, football player, Eagle Scout, and fraternity president. But when he was a medical student and doctor, his politics began to change, and soon he was providing covert care to members of revolutionary groups like the Weather Underground and becoming increasingly radicalized by his experiences at the Wounded Knee takeover, at the Attica Prison uprising, and at health clinics for the poor. When the government went after him, he went underground and participated in bombings of government buildings. He was eventually captured and served eight years in some of America's worst penitentiaries, barely surviving two rounds of cancer. After his release in 1992, he returned to medical practice and became an HIV/AIDS physician, teacher, and global health activist. In the final years of his life, he successfully worked to change U.S. policy, making AIDS treatment more widely available in the global south and saving millions of lives around the world. Using Berkman's unfinished prison memoir, FBI records, letters, and hundreds of interviews, Susan M. Reverby sheds fascinating light on questions of political violence and revolutionary zeal in her account of Berkman's extraordinary transformation from doctor to co-conspirator for justice.