FREE/BARGAIN — Non-Fiction

[issybird]

Athene Palace: Hitler's "New Order" Comes to Rumania by R.G. Waldeck is down to $2.99 everywhere, from $12.99 to $19.99 depending on the store. (Free at KU).

"The most vivid report, long or short, I have ever seen on Romania . . . brilliantly written and mercilessly barbed . . . unusually skillful and readable." —The New York Times

On the day that Paris fell to the Nazis, R. G. Waldeck was checking into the swankiest hotel in Bucharest, the Athene Palace. A cosmopolitan center during the war, the hotel was populated by Italian and German oilmen hoping to secure new business opportunities in Romania, international spies cloaked in fake identities, and Nazi officers whom Waldeck discovered to be intelligent but utterly bloodless. A German Jew and a reporter for Newsweek, Waldeck became a close observer of the Nazi invasion. As King Carol first tried to placate the Nazis, then abdicated the throne in favor of his son, Waldeck was dressing for dinners with diplomats and cozying up to Nazi officers to get insight and information. From her unique vantage, she watched as Romania, a country with a pro-totalitarian elite and a deep strain of anti-Semitism, suffered civil unrest, a German invasion, and an earthquake, before turning against the Nazis.