The Long March of H. Du B.: Memoirs of Hilaire du Berrier

Some lives are too large for fiction. Hilaire du Berrier lived one of them. Born the first white child of a frontier town his father carved out of the North Dakota prairie, du Berrier learned to speak Sioux before he learned the world was larger than the plains around him. Then he saw a flying machine, and everything changed. He became a barnstormer, a pilot for Emperor Haile Selassie in the Ethiopian war, a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War who faced a communist firing squad, an intelligence operative in occupied Shanghai running a critical Allied network against the Japanese. Captured.

Tortured. Bamboo driven beneath his fingernails. He never pronounced a single name. After the war, he became something rarer still: a journalist with sources no other Western reporter could touch. From Monaco, for half a century, he published the H. du B. Reports, a private intelligence bulletin read by congressmen, intelligence officers, and serious students of the long war against Western civilization. He saw the betrayals up close because he had stood in the rooms where they were planned.

The Long March of H. du B. is the long-awaited memoir of a man history nearly forgot. It reads like an adventure novel because it was an adventure. It reads like a warning because du Berrier lived to see what he had fought against arriving in our own country, wearing the uniforms of our own institutions. (2026ed, 242pp, pb)