Book buzz: Enemies of the people
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, revelations about the conduct and control behind the Iron Curtain are still coming up in shocking detail. Author Kati Marton details life in Communist Hungary in her new book Enemies of the People. Compiled using secret polices files from the Communist era, Morton chronicled the trials ...
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, revelations about the conduct and control behind the Iron Curtain are still coming up in shocking detail. Author Kati Marton details life in Communist Hungary in her new book Enemies of the People.
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, revelations about the conduct and control behind the Iron Curtain are still coming up in shocking detail. Author Kati Marton details life in Communist Hungary in her new book Enemies of the People.
Compiled using secret polices files from the Communist era, Morton chronicled the trials and tribulations of her mother and father, two journalists risking their lives to work for the Western press in Budapest in the period following World War II.
Her eyewitness account includes harrowing details of her parents’ arrests, imprisonment, and torture, as well as her family’s period of separation before they were able to relocate to the United States.
"I knew it was a risky business opening up the Pandora’s Box which is the vault of the Hungarian secret police archives," she said. "I needed to do this because whereas my parents have passed away, they had too much history. I didn’t have enough."
This is Marton’s seventh book. She is best known for The Great Escape, a look into nine scientists who fled Nazi Germany. Previously, she was also an award winning correspondent for NPR and ABC news, among others.
Marton spoke about the book, which will be released Thursday, at a reception at the New America Foundation, hosted by NAF President Steve Coll. Other significant attendees including New America foreign-policy chief and editor of The Washington Note Steve Clemons, the new Hungarian Ambassador to Washington Bela Szombati, and her husband Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke.
In one anecdote, Marton relayed that her childhood French nanny was actually an informant on the family. "She was using my sister and me to get information … I never liked her and it turns out I was right!"
Josh Rogin covers national security and foreign policy and writes the daily Web column The Cable. His column appears bi-weekly in the print edition of The Washington Post. He can be reached for comments or tips at josh.rogin@foreignpolicy.com.
Previously, Josh covered defense and foreign policy as a staff writer for Congressional Quarterly, writing extensively on Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, U.S.-Asia relations, defense budgeting and appropriations, and the defense lobbying and contracting industries. Prior to that, he covered military modernization, cyber warfare, space, and missile defense for Federal Computer Week Magazine. He has also served as Pentagon Staff Reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading daily newspaper, in its Washington, D.C., bureau, where he reported on U.S.-Japan relations, Chinese military modernization, the North Korean nuclear crisis, and more.
A graduate of George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, Josh lived in Yokohama, Japan, and studied at Tokyo's Sophia University. He speaks conversational Japanese and has reported from the region. He has also worked at the House International Relations Committee, the Embassy of Japan, and the Brookings Institution.
Josh's reporting has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, CBS, ABC, NPR, WTOP, and several other outlets. He was a 2008-2009 National Press Foundation's Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellow, 2009 military reporting fellow with the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the 2011 recipient of the InterAction Award for Excellence in International Reporting. He hails from Philadelphia and lives in Washington, D.C. Twitter: @joshrogin
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