This book relates the true account of the 1979 rescue of six American hostages from Iran. On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the American embassy in Tehran and captured dozens of American hostages, sparking a 444-day ordeal. But there is a little-known footnote to the crisis: six Americans escaped. A midlevel agent named Antonio Mendez devised an ingenious yet incredibly risky plan to rescue them. Armed with foreign film visas, Mendez...

In this book - at once a biography, the intimate portrait of an extraordinary family, and a peculiarly American tragedy - Patricia Bosworth has re-created an entire era: Roosevelt's New Deal, the triumphant Left, the victory of World War II, and then the fall of liberalism and the dawn of the Cold War. Political turmoil followed; anti-Communist hysteria ruined many lives full of promise. Among them was that of Patricia Bosworth's father, Bartley Cavanaugh...