The Wall is in Berlin, Gorbachev is in the Kremlin, and the gloomy American citizen Adam Hedman is trapped behind the Iron Curtain in the German East. A dangerous game begins when a coworker’s sister vanishes under mysterious circumstances, sparking Adam’s fighting spirit again. A fast-paced adventure brings our hero as far as Russia. Always at his back are the German Stasi and the Russian KGB. Who will win this high-stakes game of life and death? Iron Curtain is the first novel of the Adam Hedman trilogy, set in the last two decades of the Socialist East. Be prepared for an intelligent read if you’re into historical suspense with a twist.

In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.

Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar....Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. From the Baltic, south, those barriers cut across Germany in a gash of barbed wire, concrete, dog runs, and guard towers. Farther south, there may be no visible, no obvious wall. But there remain armed guards and checkpoints all the same -- still a restriction on the right to travel, still an instrument to impose upon ordinary men and women the will of a totalitarian state. Ronald Reagan delivered these words as part of his famous "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech of June 1987. Two years later, that wall did in fact come down. The Lost Border is the astonishing and powerful visual record of that transformation, published on the fifteenth anniversary of the wall's collapse. Acclaimed photographer Brian Rose began shooting the borderlands between East and West -- from the Baltic Sea down to the Adriatic -- in the early 1980s, while the Cold War was still hot, and has been taking pictures of this eerie terrain ever since. The Lost Border documents the gradual disintegration of the Berlin Wall and the busy reclamation of what was -- and sometimes still remains -- a scarred and brutalized landscape.

How amateur programmers in 1980s Czechoslovakia discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression. Aside from the exceptional history of Tetris, very little is known about gaming culture behind the Iron Curtain. But despite the scarcity of home computers and the absence of hardware and software markets, Czechoslovakia hosted a remarkably active DIY microcomputer scene in the 1980s, producing more than two hundred games that were by turns creative, inventive, and politically subversive. In Gaming the Iron Curtain, Jaroslav Švelch offers the first social history of gaming and game design in 1980s Czechoslovakia, and the first book-length treatment of computer gaming in any country of the Soviet bloc. Švelch describes how amateur programmers in 1980s Czechoslovakia discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression. Sheltered in state-supported computer clubs, local programmers fashioned games into a medium of expression that, unlike television or the press, was neither regulated nor censored. In the final years of Communist rule, Czechoslovak programmers were among the first in the world to make activist games about current political events, anticipating trends observed decades later in independent or experimental titles. Drawing from extensive interviews as well as political, economic, and social history, Gaming the Iron Curtain tells a compelling tale of gaming the system, introducing us to individuals who used their ingenuity to be active, be creative, and be heard.

In Nature and the Iron Curtain, the authors contrast communist and capitalist countries with respect to their environmental politics in the context of the Cold War. Its chapters draw from archives across Europe and the U.S. to present new perspectives on the origins and evolution of modern environmentalism on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The book explores similarities and differences among several nations with different economies and political systems, and highlights connections between environmental movements in Eastern and Western Europe.

West Germany and the Iron Curtain takes a fresh look at the history of Cold War Germany and the German reunification process from the spatial perspective of the West German borderlands that emerged along the volatile inter-German border after 1945. These border regions constituted the Federal Republic's most sensitive geographical space where it had to confront partition and engage its socialist neighbor East Germany in concrete ways. Each issue that arose in these borderlands - from economic deficiencies, border tourism, environmental pollution, landscape change, and the siting decision for a major nuclear facility - was magnified and mediated by the presence of what became the most militarized border of its day, the Iron Curtain. In topical chapters, the book addresses the economic consequences of the border for West Germany, which defined the border regions as depressed areas, and examines the cultural practice of western tourism to the Iron Curtain. At the heart of this deeply-researched book stands an environmental history of the Iron Curtain that explores transboundary pollution, landscape change, and a planned nuclear industrial site at Gorleben that was meant to bring jobs into the depressed border regions. The book traces these subjects across the caesura of 1989/90, thereby integrating the "long" postwar era with the post-unification decades. As Eckert demonstrates, the borderlands that emerged with partition and disappeared with reunification did not merely mirror some larger developments in the Federal Republic's history but actually helped to shape them.

Bowling for Communism illuminates how civic life functioned in Leipzig, East Germany's second-largest city, on the eve of the 1989 revolution by exploring acts of "urban ingenuity" amid catastrophic urban decay. Andrew Demshuk profiles the creative activism of local communist officials who, with the help of scores of volunteers, constructed a palatial bowling alley without Berlin's knowledge or approval. In a city mired in disrepair, civic pride overcame resentment against a regime loathed for corruption, Stasi spies, and the Berlin Wall. Reconstructing such episodes through interviews and obscure archival materials, Demshuk shows how the public sphere functioned in Leipzig before the fall of communism. Hardly detached or inept, local officials worked around centralized failings to build a more humane city. And hardly disengaged, residents turned to black-market construction to patch up their surroundings. Because such "urban ingenuity" was premised on weakness in the centralized regime, the dystopian cityscape evolved from being merely a quotidian grievance to the backdrop for revolution. If, by their actions, officials were demonstrating that the regime was irrelevant, and if, in their own experiences, locals only attained basic repairs outside official channels, why should anyone have mourned the system when it was overthrown?

Since the fall of communism, archaeological research in Central and Eastern European countries has seen a large influx of new projects and ideas, fueled by bilateral contacts, Europe-wide circulation of scholars and access to research literature. This volume is the first study which relates these issues specifically to Bronze Age Archaeology.

The Butter Battle Book, Dr. Seuss's classic cautionary tale, introduces readers to the important lesson of respecting differences. The Yooks and Zooks share a love of buttered bread, but animosity brews between the two groups because they prefer to enjoy the tasty treat differently. The timeless and topical rhyming text is an ideal way to teach young children about the issues of tolerance and respect. Whether in the home or in the classroom, The Butter Battle Book is a must-have for readers of all ages. This Read & Listen edition contains audio narration.

The Iron Curtain was seen as the divider between East and West in Cold War Europe. The term refers to a material reality but it is also a metaphor; a metaphor that has become so powerful that it tends to mark our historical understanding of the period. Through the archaeological study of two areas that can be considered part of the former Iron Curtain, the Czech-Austrian border and the Italian-Slovenian border, this research investigates the relationship between the material and the metaphor of the Iron Curtain. As a study of the archaeology of the contemporary past this thesis brings forward methodological issues when dealing with many different sources as well as general reflections on our historical understanding.