Michael Dobbs (historian)

In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear conflict over the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. In this hour-by-hour chronicle of those tense days, veteran Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs reveals just how close we came to Armageddon.Here, for the first time, are gripping accounts of Khrushchev's plan to destroy the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo; the handling of Soviet nuclear warheads on Cuba; and the extraordinary story of a U-2 spy plane that got lost over Russia at the peak of the crisis.Written like a thriller, One Minute to Midnight is an exhaustively researched account of what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called "the most dangerous moment in human history," and the definitive book on the Cuban missile crisis.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Publisher's description: Shortly after America's entry into World War II, Adolf Hitler ordered an extensive sabotage campaign against the United States to disrupt the production of tanks and airplanes and blow up bridges and railroads. Eight German saboteurs were dispatched across the Atlantic by U-boat, one team landing in Amagansett, Long Island, the other near Jacksonville, Florida. They brought with them enough money and explosives for a two-year operation and traveled inland to explore potential targets. The full story of this audacious endeavor is a remarkable account of a terrorist threat against America. Michael Dobbs describes the saboteurs' training in Nazi Germany, their claustrophobic three-week voyage in submarines, and their infiltration into American life. He explores the reasons each volunteered, and their links to a network of Nazi sympathizers in the United States. He paints a portrait of the group's leaders: George Dasch, a onetime waiter who dreamed of leaving his personal mark on history, and Edward Kerling, a fanatic Nazi caught between his love for his mistress and his love for his wife. And he shows how the FBI might never have captured the saboteurs had one of them not helped J. Edgar Hoover transform a hapless manhunt into one of his proudest accomplishments. A military tribunal, a historic Supreme Court session, and one of the largest mass executions in American history provide a stunning climax to a dangerous but failed mission.

In The Final Decade of the soviet empire, Michael Dobbs was an eyewitness to the extraordinary episodes that led to the unraveling of the Bolshevik Revolution. Covering the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for the Washington Post, Dobbs saw it all: Tito's funeral, the jubilation at the Gdansk shipyard where Solidarity was born, the euphoria and despair of Tiananmen Square, Boris Yeltsin facing down a coup. Down with Big Brother is filled with dramatic scenes and remarkable characters - heroes and villains, idealists and cynics, the tragic and the comic. On Michael Dobbs's watch, playwrights and electricians were magically transformed into presidents, while Communist Party leaders became jailbirds or newly minted tycoons. . Basing his book not only on his presence at seminal events but also on hundreds of interviews, Dobbs identifies the seeds of the destruction and shows how Mikhail Gorbachev, in particular, was the unwitting inspiration for the upheaval of the empire, while he thought he could save the Communist Party by reforming it. Michael Dobbs concludes by saying that though Big Brother may be dead, his dark legacy is still alive, as we can see in the turbulence in Russia, Romania, Bosnia, and the other countries that once made up the most brutal empire of the twentieth century.

Surveys recent Polish history, traces the rise of the Solidarity trade union, and offers a profile of Lech Walesa, its leader.

A novel based on the author's personal experience and knowledge of international politics, a story sizzling with tension and the feel of history in the making.

She was born Maria Jana Korbelova in Prague just before the outbreak of World War II, the first child of Czech Jewish parents. Almost sixty years later Madeleine Korbel Albright was sworn in as the United States secretary of state, the first woman to hold the position. Her dramatic life and rise to power are the focus of this meticulously documented biography, which expands on the ground-breaking research by Michael Dobbs, the Washington Post reporter who, in 1997, first disclosed the incredible and, until then, lost history of Madeleine Albright's early life. At the age of two Madeleine was saved from almost certain death when her family fled to England after Hitler's invasion of her native Czechoslovakia. More than two dozen of her close relatives died in Nazi concentration camps. After the war, deciding to protect themselves and their family from further persecution, Madeleine's parents kept silent about their Jewish roots and raised their children as Catholics. In remarkable detail and with great sensitivity Dobbs pieces together the fascinating and poignant lives of several generations of Madeleine's ancestors, revealing a Jewish family's recurring quest for assimilation as they moved from an Eastern European ghetto to the corridors of power in Washington.