FICTION · GENERAL
Michael Dobbs (historian)
Also known as: Michael Dobbs
Most acclaimed
Madeleine Albright
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.
Down with Big Brother
1997
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.