Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War Audiobook (Free)

A brilliant, invigorating account of the fantastic writers on both sides from the Iron Curtain who played the dangerous video games of espionage, dissidence and subversion that changed the span of the Cold War.

During the Cold War, literature was both sword and noose. Books, essays and poems could earn the hearts and minds of those caught between the contending creeds of capitalism and communism. They may possibly also result in exile, imprisonment or execution if they offended those in power. The clandestine about Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cool War intelligence providers of america, Britain as well as the Soviet Union experienced secret agents and vast propaganda networks specialized in literary warfare. But the battles were personal, too: close friends turning on one another, enthusiasts cleaved by political fissures, artists undermined by inadvertent complicities.

In Cool Warriors, Harvard University’s Duncan White vividly chronicles how this ferocious intellectual struggle was waged on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The book offers at its center five major writers-George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene and Andrei Sinyavsky-but the full cast carries a dazzling array of giants, included in this Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John le Carré, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Boris Pasternak, Gioconda Belli, Arthur Koestler, Vaclav Havel, Joan Didion, Isaac Babel, Howard Fast, Lillian Hellman, Mikhail Sholokhov -and ratings more.

Spanning decades and continents and spectacularly meshing gripping narrative with perceptive literary detective function, Cold Warriors is definitely a welcome reminder that, at an instant when ignorance can be celebrated and reading viewed as increasingly irrelevant, writers and books can transform the world.