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Dan Fesperman’s 13th Thriller, “Winter work”, takes place just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Stasi, the brutal Cold War intelligence agency in East Germany, was destroying evidence. The CIA was just as busy trying to uncover the secrets of the enemy organization.
“The CIA initially had people calling ex-Stasi agents,” Fesperman said in this week’s podcast. “They got their hands on a phone book with the phone numbers of some of these foreign intelligence officers from the Stasi. And they started calling them unsolicited – like salespeople, like these annoying calls we get at home, except the Stasi, it was the CIA that called. “Hey, do you want to share your secrets with us? We can pay you.’ Most of them got stuck, lots of angry lectures. And when that quickly failed, they went door to door, which didn’t work much better.”
Isaac Fitzgerald visits the podcast to talk about his new memoir, “Garbage Bag, Massachusetts,” who recalls his difficult childhood and his eventual association with those responsible for it.
“In this book, I was able to give my parents a little more grace,” Fitzgerald says. “And part of that was recognizing that my story didn’t begin with my birth; my story starts with the things that happened to them.”
Also in this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing industry; and Dwight Garner and Molly Young talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. John Williams is the landlord.
Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We Read”:
We’d love to hear what you think about this episode, and about the Book Review podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].