Kirjahaku

In 1952, Elizabeth II has just settled on to the throne of England, and the CIA is baffled at the breaches in security that are taking place. Worst of all, the leaks have been traced directly to the queen's chambers.

In his latest installment in the Blackford Oakes series William F. Buckley, Jr., continues to astonish and delight. The year is 1995, and an energetic senator wants to disarm, perhaps even eliminate, the CIA. To accumulate the evidence necessary to persuade the Senate, he needs the cooperation of Blackford Oakes, now retired. He wants from Oakes an account of his covert activity ten years earlier, when Oakes served as chief of covert activities for the CIA. One such activity, as sensitive a secret as any member of the government ever husbanded, had to do with a plot by young veterans of the Soviet war against Afghanistan to assassinate the man who had just assumed the reins of government in Moscow: Mikhail Gorbachev. President Reagan was in the White House in 1985. What was his reaction when apprised of a plot by non-Americans to assassinate a man commonly acknowledged as a tyrant? What will the frustrated senator do to compel cooperation from Blackford Oakes? A Very Private Plot takes the reader inside the Kremlin, exhibiting a detailed knowledge and savoir faire characteristic of the author. And inside the Reagan White House, known well to the author, and inside the Clinton White House as well. The forces unleashed in 1985 threaten any resolution between the United States and the Soviet Union and threaten the lives of a very small unit of young Russians who remain in the memory as the tale reaches a climax. A Very Private Plot caps the ten novels that began when, at age twenty-four, Blackford Oakes was seduced by the Queen of England, launching him and American readers on travels unrivaled in cold war fiction for wit and imagination.

For most of the last century, William F. Buckley Jr. was the leading figure in the conservative movement in America. The magazine he founded in 1955, National Review, brought together writers representing every strand of conservative thought, and refined those ideas over the decades that followed. Buckley's own writings were a significant part of this development. He was not a theoretician but a popularizer, someone who could bring conservative ideas to a vast audience through dazzling writing and lively wit. Culled from millions of published words spanning nearly sixty years, Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations offers Buckley's commentary on the American and international scenes, in areas ranging from Kremlinology to rock music. The subjects are widely varied, but there are common threads linking them all: a love for the Western tradition and its American manifestation; the belief that human beings thrive best in a free society; the conviction that such a society is worth defending at all costs; and an appreciation for the quirky individuality that free people inevitably develop.

For most of the last century, William F. Buckley Jr. was the leading figure in the conservative movement in America. The magazine he founded in 1955, National Review, brought together writers representing every strand of conservative thought, and refined those ideas over the decades that followed. Buckley's own writings were a significant part of this development. He was not a theoretician but a popularizer, someone who could bring conservative ideas to a vast audience through dazzling writing and lively wit. Culled from millions of published words spanning nearly sixty years, Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations offers Buckley's commentary on the American and international scenes, in areas ranging from Kremlinology to rock music. The subjects are widely varied, but there are common threads linking them all: a love for the Western tradition and its American manifestation; the belief that human beings thrive best in a free society; the conviction that such a society is worth defending at all costs; and an appreciation for the quirky individuality that free people inevitably develop.

John V. Lindsay was elected mayor of New York City in 1965. But that year's mayoral campaign will forever be known as the Buckley campaign. "As a candidate," Joseph Alsop conceded, "Buckley was cleverer and livelier than either of his rivals." And Murray Kempton concluded that "The process which coarsens every other man who enters it has only refined Mr. Buckley." The Unmaking of a Mayor is a time capsule of the political atmosphere of America in the spring of 1965, diagnosing the multitude of ills that plagued New York and other major cities: crime, narcotics, transportation, racial bias, mismanagement, taxes, and the problems of housing, police, and education. Buckley's nimble dissection of these issues constitutes an excellent primer of conservative thought. A good pathologist, Buckley shows that the diseases afflicting New York City in 1965 were by no means of a unique strain, and compared them with issues that beset the country at large. Buckley offers a prescient vision of the Republican Party and America's two-party system that will be of particular interest to today's conservatives. The Unmaking of a Mayor ends with a wistful glance at what might have been in 1965--and what might yet be.

An intricate plot involves the restoration of war-damaged windows in a famous German chapel. When Blackford Oakes takes a sabbatical from his work with the CIA, he finds neither peace nor sanctuary.

Master of espionage fiction and National Book Award winner William F. Buckley Jr. brings us another in his best-selling series starring the intrepid CIA agent Blackford Oakes. When a shadowy Russian mole threatens to undermine the free world's defenses by infiltrating President Eisenhower's National Security Counsel, CIA super-secret agent Blackford Oakes is called in to unmask the imposter. Then, Oakes turns the tables on the Communists by piloting a U-2 spy plane on a Gary Powers-style one-way mission behind the Iron Curtain. Sentenced to death and trapped in the depths of the Lubyanka prison, Oakes may have turned his last trick. Or has he?

The year is 1964. Lyndon Baines Johnson and Barry Goldwater are vying for the presidency, and CIA master spy Blackford Oakes has been sent to South Vietnam to halt its infiltration by men and materiel coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Working out of Saigon with Tucker Montana, a shadowy Texan who designs a brilliant system for breaking the North's supply route, Blackford Oakes is caught up in the ambiguity and confusion generated as America's involvement in the conflict escalates. As Tucker's murky past, his torrid romance with the seductive Lao Dai, and the growing menace of global war come into focus, Oakes—and Tucker—find their loyalty called into question. Both men are forced to make a decisive move that will have consequences neither man can foresee.