Non-Fiction Books

No death certificates were issued at Auschwitz, but today Swiss bankers still demand them before they will release to relatives the assets of account holders killed in the Holocaust. Based on newly declassified documents and archival research, Hitler's Secret Banks reveals the full, hitherto unknown extent of Swiss economic collaboration with the Nazis.

It began in Bosnia, where Islamic nationalism was reborn as Serb shells rained down on Europe's ancient Muslim heartland. It was the start of a three-year odyssey into the hearts and minds of Muslim Europe and America, a journey by which Adam LeBor set out to discover what it means to be a Muslim in the 90s, living in the West, but with a heart turned east. He met Muslim soldiers on the front lines of Bosnia who, abandoned by Europe, rediscovered Islam. He met with exiled Muslim dissidents in London - a city now referred to as the intellectual capital of the Arab world. He spoke to Turkish rappers in Berlin and young Algerian artists in Marseilles, both in the vanguard of a new European-Muslim culture that straddles the gulf between two disparate worlds. And in the United States he met with Muslim lobbyists who are demanding a presence in the corridors of power as a new wave of Black Americans are turning to Islam in their rage against the white establishment. Islam and Christianity are at a crossroads, argues LeBor, but a global media, a global economy, and a new mix of cultures mean that a symbiosis of the best of both worlds will be the result, not the violent clash of creeds that so many on both sides expect.

"A macabrely fascinating work…recommended."― Booklist It may seem impossible to explain how an entire nation could allow itself to be seduced by a man such as Adolf Hitler. By examining the everyday lives of Germans under Nazi rule, Seduced by Hitler proposes an explanation more complex, strange and morally ambiguous than one might imagine. In doing so, they bring to life the steady decline in national morality in the Third Reich as the German people let themselves be taken in by Hitler. Drawing on new research and recently declassified documents, authors Adam LeBor, author of Hitler's Secret Bankers , and Roger Boyes, The Times of London correspondent in Berlin, reveal a tapestry of ordinary lives lived under extraordinary circumstances―ranging from subversion and confrontation to passive acceptance and eager complicity. Seduced by Hitler shows in startling detail how almost every waking hour of Hitler's reign offered insidious choices―from degrees of compromise to outright resistance―to the average German in their interactions with each other and the regime, whether at work, home or leisure.

Slobodan Milosevic, a man the world hoped it would never see again, is currently on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague for crimes against humanity. This engrossing biography documents the life of the former Serbian leader, whose policies instigated wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo as well as the bloody campaigns of ethnic cleansing that destroyed a once multi-national country. Drawing on his unrivalled access to many of those closest to Milosevic, author and journalist Adam LeBor describes his subject's unhappy childhood, his marriage, and important friendships. He offers details about the ascendancy of crime over politics in the new republic and the secret channels used by Milosevic and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman as they conspired to carve up Bosnia. LeBor recounts the history of the negotiations between Milosevic and the Western diplomats, politicians, and businessmen with whom he dealt, and tells the tragic story of the wars. Finally he portrays the unprecedented international operation that brought down the Milosevic regime in 2001 and led to his trial at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.

A profoundly human take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, seen through the eyes of six families, three Arab and three Jewish. The millennia-old port of Jaffa, now part of Tel Aviv, was once known as the "Bride of Palestine," one of the truly cosmopolitan cities of the Mediterranean. There Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived, worked, and celebrated together―and it was commonplace for the Arabs of Jaffa to attend a wedding at the house of the Jewish Chelouche family or for Jews and Arabs to both gather at the Jewish spice shop Tiv and the Arab Khamis Abulafia's twenty-four-hour bakery. Through intimate personal interviews and generations-old memoirs, letters, and diaries, Adam LeBor gives us a crucial look at the human lives behind the headlines―and a vivid narrative of cataclysmic change. 16 pages of photographs; 3 maps

A seasoned foreign correspondent shows how the UN privileges its own neutrality and interests above its founding mission of protecting humanity, with predictably tragic consequences From the killing fields of Rwanda and Srebrenica a decade ago to those of Darfur today, the United Nations has repeatedly failed to confront genocide. This is evinced, author and journalist Adam LeBor maintains, in a May 1995 document from Yasushi Akashi, the most senior UN official in the field during the Yugoslav wars, in which he refused to authorize air strikes against the Serbs for fear they would “weaken” Milosevic.  More recently, in 2003, urgent reports from UN officials in the Sudan detailing atrocities from Darfur were ignored for a year because they were politically inconvenient. This book is the first to examine in detail the crucial role of the Secretariat, its relationship with the Security Council, and the failure of UN officials themselves to confront genocide. LeBor argues the UN must return to its founding principles, take a moral stand and set the agenda of the Security Council instead of merely following the lead of the great powers. LeBor draws on dozens of firsthand interviews with UN officials, current and former, and such international diplomats as Madeleine Albright, Richard Holbrooke, Douglas Hurd, and David Owen. This book will set the terms for discussion when UN Secretary General Kofi Annan steps down to make room for a new head of the world body, and political observers assess Annan’s legacy and look to the future of the world organization.

It was in luxurious Palm Beach, by the manicured lawns and Olympic-sized swimming pool, that financier Bernard Madoff ravaged the world of philanthropy and high society he strove so hard to join; vaporizing the assets of charities, foundations, and individuals that had trusted him with their funds. It seems nothing was sacrosanct to Madoff, possibly the greatest con-man in history—even Elie Wiesel's foundation lost tens of millions. How could Madoff, a pillar of the Jewish community, do this to a Nobel Laureate and Auschwitz survivor? How could some of the most sophisticated and worldly people in America fall victim to a collective delusion for years? To answer these unsettling questions, this book opens up the clubbish world where Madoff operated, tracing the links from Palm Beach and the Hamptons to the clubs of Manhattan society. It details the network of relationships across which flows hundreds of millions of dollars, and shows how despite material success and acclaim, some human impulses remain eternal. It reveals how an underlying sense of insecurity still shapes some of the richest and most successful individuals in America, making them crave ever more status and peer acclaim.

Tower of Basel is the first investigative history of the world's most secretive global financial institution. Based on extensive archival research in Switzerland, Britain, and the United States, and in-depth interviews with key decision-makers—including Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve; Sir Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England; and former senior Bank for International Settlements managers and officials—Tower of Basel tells the inside story of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS): the central bankers' own bank. Created by the governors of the Bank of England and the Reichsbank in 1930, and protected by an international treaty, the BIS and its assets are legally beyond the reach of any government or jurisdiction. The bank is untouchable. Swiss authorities have no jurisdiction over the bank or its premises. The BIS has just 140 customers but made tax-free profits of 1.17 billion in 2011–2012. Since its creation, the bank has been at the heart of global events but has often gone unnoticed. Under Thomas McKittrick, the bank's American president from 1940–1946, the BIS was open for business throughout the Second World War. The BIS accepted looted Nazi gold, conducted foreign exchange deals for the Reichsbank, and was used by both the Allies and the Axis powers as a secret contact point to keep the channels of international finance open. After 1945 the BIS—still behind the scenes—for decades provided the necessary technical and administrative support for the trans-European currency project, from the first attempts to harmonize exchange rates in the late 1940s to the launch of the Euro in 2002. It now stands at the center of efforts to build a new global financial and regulatory architecture, once again proving that it has the power to shape the financial rules of our world. Yet despite its pivotal role in the financial and political history of the last century and during the economic current crisis, the BIS has remained largely unknown—until now.

" The Last Days of Budapes t is a masterpiece. Immaculately researched, it is packed with large-than-life characters and revelations about the unknown espionage history of the Second World War…. This is history as it should be written: utterly engrossing." -Malcolm Brabant, author of the New York Times bestseller The Daughter of Auschwitz Budapest, autumn 1943. After four years of war, Hungary was firmly allied with Nazi Germany. Budapest swirled with intrigue and betrayal, home to spies and agents of every kind. But the city remained an oasis in the midst of conflict where Allied POWs and Polish and Jewish refugees found sanctuary. All that came to an end in March 1944 when the Nazis invaded. By the summer Allied bombers were pounding Budapest’s grand boulevards and historic squares. By late December the city was surrounded and under siege from the advancing Red Army. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians died in the savage fighting as Budapest collapsed into anarchy. Hungarian death squads roamed the streets as the city’s Jews were forced into ghettos or were shot into the Danube. Russian artillery hammered the city into smoking rubble as starving residents struggled to survive the winter. Using newly uncovered diaries, documents, archival material and interviews with the last survivors, Adam LeBor has brilliantly recreated life and death in wartime Budapest.