Anna Porter forged a significant career in Canadian publishing, rising from editorial coordinator to vice president and editor-in-chief. She collaborated with a distinguished roster of authors, significantly shaping the literary landscape. Later, she co-founded Key Porter Books, further cementing her influence by publishing a diverse array of notable voices. Porter's dedication to literature has left an indelible mark on Canadian letters.
"A chilling and suspenseful novel about a young woman who tries to find her father, who has mysteriously disappeared from their family cottage in Georgian Bay, and is consumed by dreams of the past--for fans of Gillian Flynn, Paula Hawkins, and Lucy Foley."--
Helena Marsh, a spirited art fraud investigator, embarks on a thrilling quest to recover a long-lost Artemisia painting. As she navigates the treacherous world of art theft, she must outsmart ruthless Eastern European mobsters who are determined to claim the artwork at any cost, even resorting to violence. This gripping tale combines elements of suspense and intrigue, showcasing Helena's wit and tenacity in a high-stakes chase for both art and survival.
Focusing on George Soros's journey as a billionaire philanthropist and social activist, the book explores his influential role in championing various social causes through his Open Society Foundations. Anna Porter provides an in-depth analysis of Soros's personal growth, the impact of his initiatives, and the complexities of his successes and failures in effecting change in the world.
In 1989, Adam Michnik said that Central Europe came as a messenger not only of freedom and tolerance but also of hatred and intolerance. It is here, in Central Europe, that the last two wars began. Nearing the twentieth anniversary of Communism's collapse, acclaimed author Anna Porter traveled to Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary to discover whether and how democracy has taken root in these former Iron Curtain countries. The former borderlands of the long-defunct Hapsburg Empire and the more recently dispersed Soviet Empire have attempted to invent their own forms of democracy and capitalism. However, disturbing signs of old attitudes have returned, bringing into question Central Europe's ability to reform its elites and to effectively control public demonstrations of hatred, the rise of racial tensions, and the emergence of fascist parties. Porter interviewed the young and the old, the winners and the losers, in this grand European transformation. Porter walks Wenceslas Square with those who suffered the violence of the state police and helped to organize the '89 revolution. She meets with revolutionary leaders such as Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik, as well as custodians of the new regimes, among them Radek Sikorski, Michael Kocab, and Ferenc Gyurcsany. She takes us to Poland's Institute of National Remembrance and Budapest's House of Terror Museum--fascinating if controversial attempts to reckon with dark periods of history. She interviews the wealthiest man in Hungary, the general who ordered martial law in Poland, attends an ultraright rally, and visits a Gypsy village where a newly burgeoning yet all-too-familiar racism has destroyed a family. Gradually, a portrait emerges of a Europe struggling under the weight of history and memory, its peoples divided over half-forgotten events, old ethnic rivalries, borders drawn and redrawn--ghosts that had lurked, unacknowledged, under Communism's force-fed stories of peaceful coexistence and a common front toward the Western enemy. Now, Central European rhetoric veers between historical reckoning, revisionism, and the politics of retribution. Penetrating, fascinating, and powerfully observed, The Ghosts of Europe illuminates themes of tyranny, nationalism, racism, and denial in nations with a tumultuous history and a future very much in the balance.
The true, heart-wrenching story of Rezsö Kasztner, a Hungarian lawyer and journalist, who rescued thousands of Jews during the last days of the Second World War - and the ultimate price he paid. Summer 1944 - Rezsö Kasztner meets with Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust, in Budapest. With the Final Solution at its terrible apex and tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews being sent to Auschwitz every month, the two men agree to allow 1,684 Jews to leave for Switzerland by train. The wealthy Jews of Budapest will pay an average of $1,500 for each family member to be included; the poor will pay nothing. In addition to those on the train, Kasztner negotiates with Eichmann to keep 20,000 Hungarian Jews alive - Eichmann called them 'Kasztner's Jews' or the 'Jews on ice' - for a deposit of approximately $100 per head. These deals would haunt Kasztner to the end of his life. After the war, Kasztner was vilified in an infamous Israeli libel trial for having 'sold his soul to the devil' in collaborating with the Nazis. In 1957, he was murdered while he awaited the Supreme Court verdict that eventually vindicated him. Kasztner's Train explores the nature of Kasztner: the cool hero, the proud Zionist, the man who believed that promises, even to the Nazis, had to be kept. The deals he made raise questions about moral choices that continue to haunt the world today.