Anne Applebaum Popular Books

Anne Applebaum Biography & Facts

Anne Elizabeth Applebaum (born July 25, 1964) is an American journalist and historian. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. Applebaum also holds Polish citizenship. She has worked at The Economist and The Spectator, and was a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post (2002–2006). Applebaum won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2004 for Gulag: A History published the previous year. She is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at The Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Early life and education Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C., the eldest of three daughters of Harvey M. and Elizabeth Applebaum. Her father, a Yale alumnus, is senior counsel at Covington & Burling's Antitrust and International Trade Practices. Her mother is a program coordinator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. According to Applebaum, her great-grandparents immigrated to America during the reign of Alexander III of Russia from what is now Belarus. Applebaum has stated that she was brought up in a "very reform" Jewish family. After attending the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., Applebaum entered Yale University, where during the Fall 1982 semester she studied Soviet history under Wolfgang Leonhard. As an undergraduate, she spent the summer of 1985 in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia), an experience she credits with helping shape her opinions. Applebaum received her BA from Yale in 1986 summa cum laude in history and literature, and was the recipient of a two-year Marshall Scholarship at the London School of Economics, where she earned a master's degree in international relations (1987). She also studied at St Antony's College, Oxford, before becoming a correspondent for The Economist and moving to Warsaw, Poland, in 1988. In November 1989, Applebaum drove from Warsaw to Berlin to report on the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Career As foreign correspondent for The Economist and The Independent, she covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism. In 1991 she moved back to England to work for The Economist, and was later hired as the foreign and later deputy editor of The Spectator, and later the political editor of the Evening Standard. In 1994, she published her first book Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, a travelogue that described the rise of nationalism across the new states of the former Soviet Union. In 2001, she interviewed prime minister Tony Blair. She also undertook historical research for her book Gulag: A History (2003) on the Soviet prison camp system, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. It was also nominated for a National Book Award, for the Los Angeles Times book award and for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has been a member of The Washington Post editorial board. She was a columnist at The Washington Post for seventeen years. Applebaum was an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Her second history book, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–56, was published in 2012 by Doubleday in the US and Allen Lane in the UK; it was nominated for a National Book Award, shortlisted for the 2013 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award. From 2011 to 2016, she created and ran the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute, an international think tank and educational charity based in London. Among other projects, she ran a two-year program examining the relationship between democracy and growth in Brazil, India and South Africa, created the Future of Syria and Future of Iran projects on future institutional change in those two countries, and commissioned a series of papers on corruption in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Together with Foreign Policy magazine she created Democracy Lab, a website focusing on countries in transition to, or away from, democracy and which has since become Democracy Post at The Washington Post. She also ran Beyond Propaganda, a program examining 21st century propaganda and disinformation. Started in 2014, the program anticipated later debates about "fake news". In 2016, she left Legatum because of its stance on Brexit following the appointment of Euroskeptic Philippa Stroud as CEO and joined the London School of Economics as a Professor of Practice at the Institute for Global Affairs. At the LSE, she ran Arena, a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda. In the autumn of 2019 she moved the project to the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. In October 2017, she published her third history book, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, a history of the Holodomor. The book won the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize, making her the only author to ever win the Duff Cooper Prize twice. In November 2019, The Atlantic announced that Applebaum was joining the publication as a staff writer starting in January 2020. She was included in the 2020 Prospect list of the top-50 thinkers for the COVID-19 era. In July 2020, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism was published. Partly a memoir and partly political analysis, it was a Der Spiegel and New York Times bestseller. Also in July 2020, Applebaum was one of the 153 signers of the "Harper's Letter" (also known as "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate") that expressed concern that "the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted." In November 2022, Applebaum was one of 200 US citizens sanctioned by Russia for "promotion of the Russophobic campaign and support for the regime in Kyiv." Applebaum is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy and Renew Democracy Initiative. She was a member of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting's international board of directors. She was a Senior Adjunct Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) where she co-led a major initiative aimed at countering Russian disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). She was on the editorial board for The American Interest and the Journal of Democracy. Positions Soviet Union and Russia According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Applebaum has been active as a political commentator highly critical of Russia and Putin’s regime." Ivan Krastev asserts that the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall "was the point of departure of everything that Applebaum did in the following three decades...For her, the end of the Cold War was not a geopolitical story; it was a moral story, a verdict pronounced by history itself." Applebaum has been writing about the Soviet Union and Russia since the early 1990s. In 2000, she described the links between the then-new president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, with the former Soviet leader Yuri Andropov and the former KGB. In 20.... Discover the Anne Applebaum popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Anne Applebaum books.