A New York Times Editors' Choice A Washington Independent Review of Books Favorite Book of 2021 A writer’s humorous and often-heartbreaking tale of losing his sight—and how he hid it from the world. At age sixteen, James Tate Hill was diagnosed with Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy, a condition that left him legally blind. When high-school friends stopped calling and a disability counselor advised him to aim for C’s in his classes, he tried to escape the stigma by pretending he could still see. In this unfailingly candid yet humorous memoir, Hill discloses the tricks he employed to pass for sighted, from displaying shelves of paperbacks he read on tape to arriving early on first dates so women would have to find him. He risked his life every time he crossed a street, doing his best to listen for approaching cars. A good memory and pop culture obsessions like Tom Cruise, Prince, and all things 1980s allowed him to steer conversations toward common experiences. For fifteen years, Hill hid his blindness from friends, colleagues, and lovers, even convincing himself that if he stared long enough, his blurry peripheral vision would bring the world into focus. At thirty, faced with a stalled writing career, a crumbling marriage, and a growing fear of leaving his apartment, he began to wonder if there was a better way.

Discover the secret history of America's submarine warfare in this fast-paced and deeply researched chronicle of adventure and intrigue during the Cold War that reads like a spy thriller. Blind Man's Bluff is an exciting, epic story of adventure, ingenuity, courage, and disaster beneath the sea. This New York Times bestseller reveals previously unknown dramas, such as: The mission to send submarines wired with self-destruct charges into the heart of Soviet seas to tap crucial underwater telephone cables. How the Navy's own negligence may have been responsible for the loss of the USS Scorpion, a submarine that disappeared, all hands lost, in 1968. The bitter war between the CIA and the Navy and how it threatened to sabotage one of America's most important undersea missions. The audacious attempt to steal a Soviet submarine with the help of eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, and how it was doomed from the start. A magnificent achievement in investigative reporting, Blind Man's Bluff reads like a spy thriller, but with one important difference -- everything in it is true.

Perversely, but perhaps appropriately, Aidan Higgins—one of the few contemporary writers worthy of comparison with Beckett and Joyce, now celebrating his 85th year—has chosen to wait until his sight has nearly left him to assemble this collection of visual treats. A commonplace book of anecdotes and cartoons—the latter never before published, though familiar to all of Higgins's correspondents from the margins of his letters and postcards—Blind Man's Bluff is a compendium of tart and comic insights into sight itself, as well as other varied indignities: personal, historical, and literary.

“Fascinating . . . a distinctively well-crafted intelligence-community memoir” by a leader of the US Navy’s clandestine undersea projects (Publishers Weekly). The Cold War was the first major conflict between superpowers in which victory and defeat were unambiguously determined without the firing of a shot. Without the shield of a strong, silent deterrent or the intellectual sword of undersea espionage, that war could not have been won. John P. Craven was a key figure in the Cold War beneath the sea. As chief scientist of the Navy’s Special Projects Office, which supervised the Polaris missile system, then later as head of the Deep Submergence Systems Project (DSSP) and the Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle program (DSRV), he was intimately involved with planning and executing America’s submarine-based nuclear deterrence and espionage activities—considered so important by the Soviets that they assigned a full-time KGB agent to spy on him. Some of Craven’s highly classified activities have been mentioned in such books as Blind Man’s Bluff—but in this memoir, he gives us his own insights into the deadly cat-and-mouse game that U.S. and Soviet forces played deep in the world’s oceans. Craven tells riveting stories about the most treacherous years of the Cold War, including: the near-disaster that almost sent Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear-powered sub, to the bottom of the ocean, taking the Navy’s missile program with it the rivalry between advocates of deterrence and military men and scientists such as Edward Teller, who believed the US had to prepare to win a nuclear conflict with the Soviets the argument that raged in the Navy over the reasons for the tragic loss of Thresher the search for the rogue Soviet sub that became the model for The Hunt for Red October—and what the Navy discovered when it eventually found the sunken boat Craven takes readers inside highly secret programs, sophisticated intelligence operations, salvage operations, and the program’s takeover by the CIA during the Nixon administration. A compelling tale of intrigue, both within our own government and between the US and Soviet navies, The Silent War is a “compelling” account of how the submarine service kept the peace during those dangerous days (Chicago Tribune). “A must-read for those interested in the technology, management, and intelligence-gathering challenges triggered by tense Cold War competition beneath the seas.” —Proceedings of the US Naval Institute

“Red November delivers the real life feel and fears of submariners who risked their lives to keep the peace.” —Steve Berry, author of The Paris Vendetta W. Craig Reed, a former navy diver and fast-attack submariner, provides a riveting portrayal of the secret underwater struggle between the US and the USSR in Red November. A spellbinding true-life adventure in the bestselling tradition of Blind Man’s Bluff, it reveals previously undisclosed details about the most dangerous, daring, and decorated missions of the Cold War, earning raves from New York Times bestselling authors David Morrell, who calls it, “palpably gripping,” and James Rollins, who says, “If Tom Clancy had turned The Hunt for Red October into a nonfiction thriller, Red November might be the result.”

Hard-boiled noir meets academic satire in Academy Gothic. Tate Cowlishaw is late for another faculty meeting when he discovers the body of Scoot Simkins, dean of Parshall College. Cowlishaw might be legally blind but sees that a man with three bullets in his head didn't put them there himself. The police disagree. When Cowlishaw investigates, he is told his teaching contract won't be renewed. Suspects aren't hard to come by at the college annually ranked "Worst Value" by U.S. News & World Report. While the faculty brace for a visit from the accreditation board, Cowlishaw's investigation leads him to another colleague on eternal sabbatical. Before long, his efforts to save his job become efforts to stay alive. A farcical tale of incompetence and corruption, Academy Gothic scathingly redefines higher education as it chronicles the last days of a dying college.

Submarines had a vital, if often unheralded, role in the superpower navies during the Cold War. Their crews carried out intelligence-collection operations, sought out and stood ready to destroy opposing submarines, and, from the early 1960s, threatened missile attacks on their adversary's homeland, providing in many respects the most survivable nuclear deterrent of the Cold War. For both East and West, the modern submarine originated in German U-boat designs obtained at the end of World War II. Although enjoying a similar technology base, by the 1990s the superpowers had created submarine fleets of radically different designs and capabilities. Written in collaboration with the former Soviet submarine design bureaus, Norman Polmar and K. J. Moore authoritatively demonstrate in this landmark study how differing submarine missions, antisubmarine priorities, levels of technical competence, and approaches to submarine design organizations and management caused the divergence.