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Sixteen-year-old Richard Pipes escaped from Nazi-occupied Warsaw with his family in October 1939. Their flight took them to the United States by way of Italy, and Pipes went on to earn a college degree, join the US Air Corps, serve as professor of Russian history at Harvard for nearly 40 years, and become adviser to President Reagan on Soviet and Eastern European affairs. Here, he remembers the events of his own remarkable life as well as the unfolding of some of the 20th century's most extraordinary political events. the conflicts inside the Reagan administration over American policies toward the USSR, Pipes offers observations as well as portraits of such cultural and political figures as Isaiah Berlin, Ronald Reagan and Alexander Haig. Perhaps most interesting of all, Pipes depicts his evolution as a historian and his understanding of how history is witnessed and how it is recorded.
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It’s 1979 in Czechoslovakia, ten years into the crushing restoration of repressive communism known as normalization, and Ludvík Vaculík has writer’s block. It has been nearly a decade since he wrote his last novel, and even longer since he wrote the 1968 manifesto, "Two Thousand Words,” which the Soviet Union used as one of the pretexts for invading Czechoslovakia. On the advice of a friend, Vaculík begins to keep a diary: "a book about things, people and events.” Fifty-four weeks later, what Vaculík has written is a unique mixture of diary, dream journal, and outright fiction – an inverted roman à clef in which the author, his family, his mistresses, the secret police and leading figures of the Czech underground play major roles.