Simon Reid-Henry Bücher

In this epic narrative of the events that have shaped our own times, Simon Reid-Henry shows how liberal democracy, and Western history with it, was profoundly re-imagined when the postwar Golden Age ended. As the institutions of liberal rule were reinvented, a new generation of politicians emerged: Thatcher, Reagan, Mitterrand, Kohl. The late twentieth-century heyday they oversaw carried the Western democracies triumphantly to victory in the C old War and into the economic boom of the 1990s. But equally it led them into the fiasco of Iraq, to the high drama of the financial crisis in 2007/8, and ultimately to the anti-liberal surge of our own times. The present crisis of liberalism enjoins us to revisit these as yet unscripted decades. The era we have all been living through is closing out, democracy is turning on its axis once again. As this panoramic history poignantly reminds us, the choices we make going forward require us first to come to terms with where we have been.

The story of a friendship whose secrets hold the key to understanding some of the most significant events of the 20th century. The book follows Fidel and Che from their dramatic political journey in Mexico, through the war in the Cuban mountains, to the height of the Cold War. The author draws on archival research in Havana, Washington, Moscow, Miami, Princeton, Boston, London, and Berlin, as well as interviews with some of the key figures in this story. It presents a new series of sources that tell for the first time, and in full, the story of one of the most remarkable friendships of the 20th century. Simon Reid-Henry takes us to the heart of Fidel and Che, an unparalleled relationship that began as a political alliance and became the deepest friendship of their lives. It is the story of two men who share a common dream, who became friends, brothers, and comrades-in-arms, and who ultimately faced an epic choice between their friendship and their beliefs.