It’s one of the iconic photographs of American history: a Black teenager, a policeman and his lunging German Shepherd. Birmingham, Alabama, May 1963. In May 2020, as reporter Paul Kix stared at a different photo --- that of a Minneapolis police officer suffocating George Floyd --- he kept returning to the other photo taken half a century earlier, haunted by its echoes. What, Kix wondered, was the full legacy of the Birmingham photo? And of the campaign it stemmed from? In YOU HAVE TO BE PREPARED TO DIE BEFORE YOU CAN BEGIN TO LIVE, Paul Kix takes the reader behind the scenes as he tells the story of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s pivotal 10-week campaign in 1963 to end segregation in Birmingham, Alabama.

Robert de La Rochefoucald was a scion of one of the most storied families in France. When the Nazis invaded and imprisoned his father, La Rochefoucald escaped to England and learned the dark arts of anarchy and combat from the officers of Special Operations Executive, the collection of British spies who altered the war in Europe with tactics that earned it notoriety as the “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” With his newfound skills, La Rochefoucauld returned to France and organized Resistance cells, blew up fortified compounds and munitions factories, interfered with Germans’ war-time missions, and executed Nazi officers. THE SABOTEUR recounts La Rochefoucauld’s enthralling adventures.