Research

Some favorite books and videos on politics,  Authoritarianism,  Russia and other things that influence my work.

Geopolitics

  • Kaplan, Robert D. The Revenge of Geography. New York: Random House, 2012. Print.
  • Marshall, Tim. Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015. Print.

nonfiction

  • Alexievich, Svetlana. Last Witnesses. New York: Random House, 2019. Print.
  • Alexievich, Svetlana. Secondhand Time. New York: Random House, 2017. Print.
  • Alexievich, Svetlana. The Unwomanly Face of War. New York: Random House, 2016. Print.
  • Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Penguin, 1963. Print.
  • Applebaum, Ann. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. New York: Doubleday, 2020. Print.
  • Beever, Anthony. Stalingrad. New York: Penguin, 1998. Print.
  • Belton, Catherine. Putin's People. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. Print.
  • Bernstein, Jake. Secrecy World. New York: Henry Holt, 2017. Print.
  • Blake, Heidi. From Russia with Blood. New York: Hachette, 2019. Print.
  • Browder, Bill. Red Notice: A True Story of Corruption, Murder and One Man's Fight for Justice. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015. Print.
  • Bullough, Oliver. Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2019. Print.
  • Burgis, Tom. Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World. New York: Harper, 2020.
  • Dawisha, Karen. Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015. Print.                       
  • Enrich, David. Dark Towers. New York: Harper Collins, 2020. Print.
  • Garrels, Anne.  Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia . New York: Picador, 2017. Print.
  • Haffner, Sebastian. Defying Hitler: A Memoir. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012. Print.
  • Harding, Luke.  A Very Expensive Poison: The Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and Putin's War with the West.  New York: Vintage , a Division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2017. Print. 
  • Harding, Luke. Mafia State. Great Britain: Guardian Books, 2011. Print.
  • Hoffman, David E. Billion Dollar Spy. Place of Publication Not Identified: Icon, 2017. Print.
  • Galeotti, Mark. The Vory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Print.
  • Gessen, Masha. The Future is History. New York, Riverhead Books, 2017. Print.
  • Goldstone, Patricia. Interlock: Art, Conspiracy, and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2015. Print.
  • Kasparov, G. K., and Mig Greengard. Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped. London: Atlantic, 2016. Print.
  • Krug, Nora. Belonging. New York: Scribner, 2018. Print.
  • Levi, Primo. If Not Now, When? New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. Print.
  • Maddow, Rachel. Blowout. New York: Crown, 2019. Print.
  • Mayer, Milton. They Thought They Were Free: The Germans. 1933-45. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955/2017. Print.
  • Mikhail, Zygar. All the Kremlin's Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin. New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2016. Print.
  • Mueller III, Robert S. The Mueller Report. New York: First Melville House, 2019. Print.
  • Myers, Steven Lee. The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin. London: Simon & Schuster, 2016. Print.
  • Nelson, Anne. Shadow Network. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Print.
  • Ostrovsky, Arkady. The Invention of Russia: The Journey from Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War. London: Atlantic, 2015. Print.
  • Perlroth, Nicole. This is How They Tell Me the World Ends. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. Print.
  • Pomerantsev, Peter. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia. London: Faber & Faber, 2016. Print.          
  • Sacco, Joe. Journalism. New York: Henry Holt, 2012. Print.
  • Sacco, Joe. Palestine. New York: Fantagraphics, 2001. Print.
  • Satter, David. The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep: Russia's Road to Terror and Dictatorship Under Yeltsin and Putin. S.l.: YALE U PRESS, 2017. Print.
  • Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny. New York: Crown, 2017. Print.
  • Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New York: Crown, 2018. Print.
  • Soldatov, Andrei, and Irina Borogan. The Red Web: The Struggle between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries. New York: PublicAffairs, 2015. Print.​
  • Volodarsky, Boris. The KGB's poison factory: from Lenin to Litvinenko. Minneapolis, MN: Zenith Press, 2010. Print.
  • Weissmann, Andrew. Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation. New York: Random House, 2020. Print.

fiction

  • ​Lessing, Doris. Mara and Dann: An Adventure. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Print.
  • Lutes, Jason. Berlin. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. Print.
  • ​Ulitskaya, Ludmila. The Big Green Tent. New York: Picador, 2017. Print.
  • Ulitskaya, Ludmila. Jacob's Ladder. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. Print.

websites

Bellingcat
https://www.bellingcat.com/

ICIJ: International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
https://www.icij.org/

Google Earth
earth.google.com/web/

Documentaries and Videos

People You May Know follows Charles Kriel, specialist advisor to UK Parliament on disinformation, when he discovers Cambridge Analytica collaborating with a software company creating a microtargeting platform for US churches, targeting vulnerable people - the poor, the grieving, the addicted - to radicalize them for far right politics. Includes interviews with Anne Nelson, author of Shadow Network. Available on Sundance Now channel through Amazon Prime.
Seventeen Moments of Spring is a 12 part series created in 1973 that is shown annually in Russia. It is a spy saga set during the final days of WWII. Exceptionally well made. Rumors say it's one of Putin's inspirations. Start watching and you'll be hooked!

articles/reports