The Dangerous Otto Katz

Author : Jonathan Miles
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1596916613
Total Pages : 379 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Dangerous Otto Katz written by Jonathan Miles and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-10-26 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This biography of the spy who became the inspiration for Casablanca's Victor Laszlo describes his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, Stalin's secret meetings, Trotsky's murder and the lives of Hollywood celebrities as he sought fame, fortune and glory .

Author : Jonathan Miles
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 0593062299
Total Pages : 394 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Nine Lives of Otto Katz written by Jonathan Miles and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He was one of the most effective agents ever to work for Soviet Russia. For the first half of the twentieth century his fingerprints can be found on one world-changing event after another. But who was Otto Katz? To the FBI, he was 'an extremely dangerous man'. The British Secret Service wondered if he was the 'Director of all Communist policy in the West.' In Prague and Berlin he was a drinking companion with the likes of Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht. To Marlene Dietrich, he was one of her many lovers. But to others, Katz was a passionate anti-fascist who witnessed Hitler's rise to power and was among the first to alert the world to the Nazi threat. He was a staunch Communist, part of the Soviet infiltration of England during the period when the Cambridge spies were being recruited. In Hollywood, he was a playboy socialite, political mentor to director Fritz Lang and a star among stars. His example inspired the character of Victor Laszlo in Casablanca and Kurt Muller, the hero of the Academy Award Winning Watch on the Rhine. To Noël Coward, he was a potential double agent. In the Spanish Civil War, he did Stalin's dirty work. Years later, some even blamed him for the assassination of Trotsky. In a captivating detective story, Jonathan Miles goes in search of the real Otto Katz - a brilliant, daring charmer, a double-dealing man with an unquestionable taste for the finer things in life who, nonetheless, served one of history's darkest masters - Joseph Stalin. Using recently released FBI, MI5 and Czech files, Jonathan Miles has created an action-packed story of the life (or lives) of one of the world's most intriguing, influential and successful spies.

Author : Laura Beers
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674971523
Total Pages : 569 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Red Ellen written by Laura Beers and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-10 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ellen Wilkinson viewed herself as part of an international radical community and became involved in socialist, feminist, and pacifist movements that spanned the globe. By focusing on the extent to which Wilkinson’s activism transcended Britain’s borders, Laura Beers adjusts our perception of the British Left in the early twentieth century.

Author : Brian E. Birdnow
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 144084996X
Total Pages : 140 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Subversive Screen written by Brian E. Birdnow and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting chronicle of Communist Party efforts to propagate Communism in the United States, concurrent with Hollywood's "Golden Age" of creativity that came to define classical Hollywood cinema. From the Great Depression through World War II, the American Communist Party tried to take control of the motion picture industry. This comprehensive and chronological account of Communist influence in Hollywood surveys the topic from the Popular Front's fight against Fascism during the 1930s to the height of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in the late 1940s. Birdnow, an established historian and chronicler of domestic Communism, outlines Communist International's organizational efforts promoting international communism, focusing on the work of Communist political activists such as Willi Münzenberg, a media mogul with an international network; Gerhart Eisler, patron of a Hollywood composer; and Otto Katz, a high-profile publicist of the party line involved in movies in the 1930s and 1940s. The book explores the covert ways in which Hollywood Communists and Soviet sympathizers attempted to tailor movie scripts to suit the Soviet agenda and discusses Communist front groups such as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in great detail. Final chapters offer convincing proof that the directors, producers, and screenwriters blacklisted by studios for their possible Communist affiliations, known as the Hollywood Ten, were members of the Communist Party.

Author : Boris Volodarsky
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0199656584
Total Pages : 832 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stalin's Agent written by Boris Volodarsky and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the history of an unprecedented deception operation - the biggest KGB deception of all time. It has never been told in full until now. There are almost certainly people who would like it never to be told. It is the story of General Alexander Orlov. Stalin's most loyal and trusted henchman during the Spanish Civil War, Orlov was also the Soviet handler controlling Kim Philby, the British spy, defector, and member of the notorious 'Cambridge Five'. Escaping Stalin's purges, Orlov fled to America in the late 1930s and lived underground. He only dared reveal his identity to the world after Stalin's death, in his 1953 best-seller The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes, after which he became perhaps the best known of all Soviet defectors, much written about, highly praised, and commemorated by the US Congress on his death in 1973. But there is a twist in the Orlov story beyond the dreams of even the most ingenious spy novelist: 'General Alexander Orlov' never actually existed. The man known as 'Orlov' was in fact born Leiba Feldbin. And while he was a loyal servant of Stalin and the controller of Philby, he was never a General in the KGB, never truly defected to the West after his 'flight' from the USSR, and remained a loyal Soviet agent until his death. The 'Orlov' story as it has been accepted until now was largely the invention of the KGB - and one perpetuated long after the end of the Cold War. In this meticulous new biography, Boris Volodarsky, himself a former Soviet intelligence officer, now tells the true story behind 'Orlov' for the first time. An intriguing tale of Russian espionage and deception, stretching from the time of Lenin to the Putin era, it is a story that many people in the world's intelligence agencies would almost definitely prefer you not to know about.

Author : William H. Mooney
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 0813573041
Total Pages : 178 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dashiell Hammett and the Movies written by William H. Mooney and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-03 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the father of the hardboiled detective genre, Dashiell Hammett had a huge influence on Hollywood. Yet, it is easy to forget how adaptable Hammett’s work was, fitting into a variety of genres and inspiring generations of filmmakers. Dashiell Hammett and the Movies offers the first comprehensive look at Hammett’s broad oeuvre and how it was adapted into films from the 1930s all the way into the 1990s. Film scholar William H. Mooney reveals the wide range of films crafted from the same Hammett novels, as when The Maltese Falcon was filmed first as a pre-Code sexploitation movie, then as a Bette Davis screwball comedy, and finally as the Humphrey Bogart classic. He also considers how Hammett rose to Hollywood fame not through the genre most associated with him, but through a much fizzier concoction, the witty murder mystery The Thin Man. To demonstrate the hold Hammett still has over contemporary filmmakers, the book culminates in an examination of the Coen brothers’ pastiche Miller’s Crossing. Mooney not only provides us with an in-depth analysis of Hammett adaptations, he also chronicles how Hollywood enabled the author’s own rise to stardom, complete with a celebrity romance and a carefully crafted public persona. Giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the complex power relationships, cultural contexts, and production concerns involved in bringing Hammett’s work from the page to the screen, Dashiell Hammett and the Movies offers a fresh take on a literary titan.

Author : Tess Slesinger
Publisher : Boiler House Press
ISBN 13 : 1913861597
Total Pages : 267 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Time: The Present written by Tess Slesinger and published by Boiler House Press. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short stories from the 1930s that remain as timely as the day they were written Falling in love. Falling out of love. Getting a job. Losing a job. Being too young. Being too old. Tess Slesinger's short stories deal with themes as timely as the day they were written. Though an activist in radical politics, her foremost concern was always with the hopes, fears, foibles, and needs of individual men and women. Her gift for subtle observation and gentle satire make the stories in TIME: THE PRESENT richly pleasurable on first reading--and deeply rewarding to revisit. With an introduction by Vivian Gornick and an afterword by Paula Rabinowitz

Author : Gary B. Bullert
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1793627495
Total Pages : 247 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Disputed Legacy of Sidney Hook written by Gary B. Bullert and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-02-16 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Disputed Legacy of Sidney Hook examines the sixty-year career of one of the foremost public intellectuals in the United States. Sidney Hook’s convictions were widely disseminated through books, academic journals, newspapers articles, lectures, and several organizations that he founded. Hook’s legacies include being a leading Marxist-Leninist scholar, his long-standing commitment to secular humanism, his legacy as a legendary polemicist, his cultural conservatism if not neoconservatism, and his defense of democracy and John Dewey’s pragmatic and Cold War liberalism. Bullert concludes that Hook’s core philosophy is best typified by his Deweyan pragmatism, vigilant anti-communism, and secular humanism.

Author : Thomas Doherty
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231535147
Total Pages : 449 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 written by Thomas Doherty and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-02 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1933 and 1939, representations of the Nazis and the full meaning of Nazism came slowly to Hollywood, growing more ominous and distinct only as the decade wore on. Recapturing what ordinary Americans saw on the screen during the emerging Nazi threat, Thomas Doherty reclaims forgotten films, such as Hitler's Reign of Terror (1934), a pioneering anti-Nazi docudrama by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.; I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany (1936), a sensational true tale of "a Hollywood girl in Naziland!"; and Professor Mamlock (1938), an anti-Nazi film made by German refugees living in the Soviet Union. Doherty also recounts how the disproportionately Jewish backgrounds of the executives of the studios and the workers on the payroll shaded reactions to what was never simply a business decision. As Europe hurtled toward war, a proxy battle waged in Hollywood over how to conduct business with the Nazis, how to cover Hitler and his victims in the newsreels, and whether to address or ignore Nazism in Hollywood feature films. Should Hollywood lie low, or stand tall and sound the alarm? Doherty's history features a cast of charismatic personalities: Carl Laemmle, the German Jewish founder of Universal Pictures, whose production of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) enraged the nascent Nazi movement; Georg Gyssling, the Nazi consul in Los Angeles, who read the Hollywood trade press as avidly as any studio mogul; Vittorio Mussolini, son of the fascist dictator and aspiring motion picture impresario; Leni Riefenstahl, the Valkyrie goddess of the Third Reich who came to America to peddle distribution rights for Olympia (1938); screenwriters Donald Ogden Stewart and Dorothy Parker, founders of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League; and Harry and Jack Warner of Warner Bros., who yoked anti-Nazism to patriotic Americanism and finally broke the embargo against anti-Nazi cinema with Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939).

Author : Brewster Chamberlin
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
ISBN 13 : 0700620672
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Hemingway Log written by Brewster Chamberlin and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2015-03-20 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few if any writers have made a mark as broad and deep as Ernest Hemingway, whose life and work—and even image—continue to permeate American culture more than a half-century after his death in 1961. And never has there been a chronology of the writer’s life and times as comprehensive, detailed, and useful as The Hemingway Log. For more than a dozen years, Brewster Chamberlin “has been compiling and wonderfully annotating and continuously updating what amounts to almost a daybook calendar of Hemingway’s life,” as author Paul Hendrickson noted in his acclaimed Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost. At long last available to readers and scholars, this chronology extends from the birth of Mark Twain (whose Huckleberry Finn, Hemingway said, was the source of all modern American literature) to the 2013 publication of the second volume (of a projected seventeen) of the Hemingway letters. Throughout, the events and dates that had any influence whatsoever on the writer are detailed day by day. Who won the Nobel Prize in literature each year, for instance, or the Pulitzer? What works of poetry, fiction, or drama were published? What was happening in the world and in the country, and how did it relate to Hemingway? Within this clarifying context, the chronological facts of the writer’s own life and work unfold: literary production and publishing; travels and households; activities and relevant occurrences; relations with family, friends, lovers, and enemies. Drawing on biographies, memoirs, and various Hemingway collections and websites, as well as the full range of original sources such as letters, fishing logs, notebooks, and manuscripts, The Hemingway Log presents the most extensive and accurate chronology of Hemingway’s life and times—and in the process clears up many of the inconsistencies and factual errors that riddle accounts of the writer’s life and work. Any future scholar of Hemingway will find the book not just invaluable but absolutely necessary, and any serious reader of Hemingway will find it irresistible.