Book and Film Recommendations

Director: Chris Columbus | 28 August 2025

Four irrepressible retirees, including a former intelligence officer, spend their time solving cold case murders for fun, but their casual sleuthing takes a thrilling turn when they find themselves with a real whodunit on their hands.

Itai Shapira | Routledge | 17 June 2026

This book provides a cultural analysis of the Israeli defense and intelligence establishments before and after the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023.

The Hamas attack was one of the most colossal intelligence and security failures in modern times, and brought Israel to one of the darkest points in its history. The book outlines the traits of Israeli strategic and intelligence cultures, such as hubris and a lack of critical thinking, which account for this failure. It also examines the traits responsible for Israeli security resilience during the regional war throughout 2024–25, which peaked in the campaigns against Hizballah, in September 2024, and Iran, in June 2025, such as flexibility and practice preceding theory. Drawing on academic and professional literature in English and Hebrew, as well as elite interviews with former Israeli practitioners, the book offers a novel cultural perspective on October 7 and its aftermath, a topic that will be of considerable interest for many years to come. By discussing the cultural roots of Israeli strategic surprise and resilience, the book contributes to the study of the interaction between culture and security performance and to our understanding of cultural change over time.

This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, strategic studies, Israeli politics, Middle Eastern Studies, and international relations.

Devon Kade | Independently published | 3 March 2026

For forty-five years, the world held its breath.

Two superpowers. Thousands of nuclear warheads. One wrong move, and civilization ends.

THE COLD WAR & ESPIONAGE Summarized pulls you past the dry timelines of treaties and summits into the gritty, high-stakes reality of the shadow war. This was a conflict fought not on battlefields, but in the back alleys of Berlin, the safe houses of Vienna, and the dark corners of the Kremlin.

Author Devon Kade and The Sum It Collective pivot the history of the Cold War from a geopolitical study to a psychological thriller. You will discover that the true history of this era wasn't just about ideologies; it was about paranoia, betrayal, and the terrifying logic of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

Inside this dossier of secrets, you’ll encounter:

• The Logic of Madness: Understand the terrifying game theory of MAD, where the only way to be safe was to guarantee your own suicide, and how a single Soviet naval officer saved the world during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
• Spycraft 101: Learn the real tools of the trade—from "dead drops" and "brush passes" to the unbreakable One-Time Pad and the CIA’s "Jack-in-the-Box" escape maneuver.
  
  
• The Great Betrayals: Go inside the minds of the Cambridge Five, the British gentlemen who spied for Stalin, and Aldrich Ames, the CIA officer who sold out America for a Jaguar and a bigger house.
  
  
• Active Measures: Uncover the KGB’s department of disinformation, which planted fake news stories (like Operation INFEKTION) to rot Western society from within—a tactic that is still used today.
  
  
• The Tech Race: From the beep of Sputnik to the "Star Wars" missile defense system, see how the race for military supremacy birthed the internet and the GPS system you use every day.

This is history with the dust blown off. It reveals how the spies, the traitors, and the technocrats played a game of 3D chess with the fate of humanity—and how close we really came to midnight.

Karen Abbott | Harper | 2 September 2014

After shooting a Union soldier in her front hall with a pocket pistol, Belle Boyd became a courier and spy for the Confederate army, using her charms to seduce men on both sides. Emma Edmonds cut off her hair and assumed the identity of a man to enlist as a Union private, witnessing the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. The beautiful widow, Rose O’Neale Greenhow, engaged in affairs with powerful Northern politicians to gather intelligence for the Confederacy, and used her young daughter to send information to Southern generals. Elizabeth Van Lew, a wealthy Richmond abolitionist, hid behind her proper Southern manners as she orchestrated a far-reaching espionage ring, right under the noses of suspicious rebel detectives.

Using a wealth of primary source material and interviews with the spies’ descendants, Abbott seamlessly weaves the adventures of these four heroines throughout the tumultuous years of the war. With a cast of real-life characters including Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, General Stonewall Jackson, detective Allan Pinkerton, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, and Emperor Napoleon III, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy draws you into the war as these daring women lived it.

Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy contains 39 black & white photos and 3 maps.