Rabu, 28 Agustus 2013

How To Find A Good Cold War Author

By Amanda Baird


Anyone who lived in the years between 1945 and 1990 will know about the Cold War. This era in world politics was a time of great tension and was often the theme of gripping stories. If you're looking for some riveting reading, you can't go wrong with a Cold War author, whether you like easy-to-read airport novels or serious, Nobel Prize-winning literature.

The Cold War was different from most wars in history. The two main powers involved, the USA and the USSR, never fought each other directly even though they did get involved in armed conflicts all over the world. Instead, the era was one of extreme political tension where everyone was afraid of firing the first shot in case it would trigger a third world war.

Where countries don't trust one another, there will be spies. By far the most popular genre dealing with the era is the spy thriller. After all, the espionage theme has almost unlimited possibilities for adventure, action, intrigue and romance.

The king of the spy thriller is John Le Carre, who penned such classics as 'The Spy Who Came In from the Cold', 'The Russia House' and 'The Constant Gardener'. Like another popular writer in the genre, Graham Greene, Le Carre used to work for his country's secret service and had first-hand knowledge of the world of espionage. Journalists like Frederick Forsythe also made good authors of spy thrillers.

The espionage genre gave rise to some of the most popular fictional characters. Secret agents like Jack Ryan, created by Tom Clancy, and Jason Bourne, created by Robert Ludlum, returned in several novels and were immortalized on the silver screen too. The one that became the man every man wanted to be and every woman wanted to be with was Ian Fleming's martini-drinking, tuxedo-wearing Brit best known by his secret agent code, 007.

Life behind the Iron Curtain also inspired writers from communist countries, like political activist and later president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel. Some writers got into trouble with the authorities though. The Czech writer Milan Kundera lived in exile, for instance, while the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas and the Soviet writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn both spent time in prison and eventually were forced to leave their home soil.

If you prefer non-fiction, you'll find a wealth of books that deal with every aspect of the era. There are political analyses, accounts of incidents like the Cuban Missile Crisis and biographies of key figures in the world arena. The stories of regular people are particularly moving, like those told in Anna Funder's 'Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall', about life in communist East Germany.

It's easy to find books on the era that defined the second half of the 1900s. A simple online search will point you in the right direction but you can also ask at any library or bookstore. Once you've found a Cold War author whose work you like, you'll be hooked.




About the Author:



Tidak ada komentar:

Posting Komentar