Akron Public Library

The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings his along his wife, son and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich. She has one affair after another, including one with the first chief of...

"At night, in Huda's fragrant garden, a breeze sweeps in from the desert encircling Baghdad, rustling the leaves of her apricot trees and carrying warning of visitors at her gate. Huda, a secretary at the Australian embassy, lives in fear of the mukhabarat-the secret police who watch and listen for any scrap of information that can be used against America and its allies. They have ordered her to befriend Ally Wilson, the deputy ambassador's wife....

"1945. Marta Nederman has barely survived the brutality of a Nazi concentration camp, where she was imprisoned for her work with the Polish resistance. Lucky to have escaped with her life, she meets Paul, an American soldier, who gives her hope of a happier future. The two make a promise to meet in London, but Paul is in a deadly plane crash and never arrives. Finding herself pregnant and alone in a strange city, Marta finds comfort with a kind British...

A story of a small country caught between Democracy and Communism. An ineffectual ambassador is just one of the handicaps facing the Americans as Southeast Asia is taken over by the communists.

The assassination of an American diplomat in Hungary places a Cairo-based CIA agent, an Egyptian intelligence agent, and an American analyst at the mercy of a dangerous political game of shifting allegiances.

In this book - at once a biography, the intimate portrait of an extraordinary family, and a peculiarly American tragedy - Patricia Bosworth has re-created an entire era: Roosevelt's New Deal, the triumphant Left, the victory of World War II, and then the fall of liberalism and the dawn of the Cold War. Political turmoil followed; anti-Communist hysteria ruined many lives full of promise. Among them was that of Patricia Bosworth's father, Bartley Cavanaugh...

Tells the true story of Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat stationed in Lithuania in 1940 who risked the safety of his own family members and put his job on the line by issuing visas to as many as 10,000 Jews who were facing death at the hands of the Nazis.

A suspenseful thriller based on true events follows the experiences of an American diplomat in Tehran who becomes a firsthand witness to the military violence, religious extremes, and political machinations of the Iranian Revolution.

Mother, wife, scholar, diplomat, and fierce champion of American interests and values, Susan Rice connects the personal and the professional. Taught early, with tough love, how to compete and excel as an African American woman in settings where people of color are few, Susan now shares the wisdom she learned along the way. Laying bare the family struggles that shaped her early life in Washington, DC, she also examines the ancestral legacies that influenced...

The banks of the Nile are torn by an unprecedented war during which a charismatic new religious leader traps hundreds of people in the capital city of Khartoum.