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Monte Reel

Born: in Mattoon, Illinois
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: Reel was born in Mattoon. He currently lives in the Chicago area.

Biography: Monte Reel is a former South American foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. He also reported for the newspaper in Washington and Iraq. He currently writes for Bloomberg Businessweek as part of its Projects & Investigations staff. His first book, The Last of the Tribe, chronicles the story of the last surviving member of an indigenous tribe in the Amazon rainforest. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and other magazines. After spending seven years in Argentina, he moved to the Chicago area.


Awards:
  • """A Brotherhood of Spies"""
  • -- Starred Review, Publishers Weekly

Primary Literary Genre(s): Non-Fiction

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MonteReelAuthor
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3985340/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/montereel1?lang=en
Website: http://montereel.com
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Reel


Selected Titles

A brotherhood of spies :
ISBN: 0385540205 OCLC: 1015258913

"On May 1, 1960, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union just weeks before a peace summit between the two nations. The CIA concocted a cover story for President Eisenhower to deliver, assuring him that no one could have survived a fall from that altitude. And even if pilot Francis Gary Powers had survived, he had been supplied with a poison pin with which to commit suicide. But against all odds, Powers emerged from the wreckage and was seized by the KGB. He confessed to espionage, revealing to the world that Eisenhower had just lied to the American people--and to the Soviet Premier. Infuriated, Nikita Khrushchev slammed the door on a rare opening in Cold War relations. In A Brotherhood of Spies, award-winning journalist Monte Reel reveals how the U-2 spy program, principally devised by four men working in secret, upended the Cold War and carved out a new mission for the CIA. This secret fraternity, made up of Edwin Land, best known as the inventor of instant photography and the head of Polaroid Corporation; Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, a hard-charging taskmaster from Lockheed; Richard Bissell, the secretive and ambitious spymaster; and ace Air Force flyer Powers, set out to replace yesterday's fallible human spies with tomorrow's undetectable eye in the sky. Their groundbreaking clandestine successes and all-too-public failures make this brilliantly reported account a true-life thriller with the highest stakes and the most tragic repercussions."--Dust jacket.

Between man and beast :
ISBN: 9780385534222 OCLC: 843946205

Doubleday, New York : ©2013.

Documents the story of mid-19th-century explorer Paul Du Chaillu, who after three years in the equatorial wilderness of West Africa emerged with definitive proof of the existence of the mythical gorilla, only to be swept up by the heated debate about Darwin's theory of evolution.

The last of the tribe :
ISBN: 9781524722333 OCLC: 960331426

Throughout the centuries, the Amazon has yielded many of its secrets, but it still holds a few great mysteries. In 1996 experts got their first glimpse of one: a lone Indian, a tribe of one, hidden in the forests of southwestern Brazil. Previously uncontacted tribes are extremely rare, but a one-man tribe was unprecedented. And like all of the isolated tribes in the Amazonian frontier, he was in danger. Resentment of Indians can run high among settlers, and the consequences can be fatal. The discovery of the Indian prevented local ranchers from seizing his land, and led a small group of men who believed that he was the last of a murdered tribe to dedicate themselves to protecting him. These men worked for the government, overseeing indigenous interests in an odd job that was part Indiana Jones, part social worker, and were among the most experienced adventurers in the Amazon. They were a motley crew that included a rebel who spent more than a decade living with a tribe, a young man who left home to work in the forest at age fourteen, and an old-school sertanista with a collection of tall tales amassed over five decades of jungle exploration. Their quest would prove far more difficult than any of them could imagine. Over the course of a decade, the struggle to save the Indian and his land would pit them against businessmen, politicians, and even the Indian himself, a man resolved to keep the outside world at bay at any cost. It would take them into the furthest reaches of the forest and to the halls of Brazil's Congress, threatening their jobs and even their lives. Ensuring the future of the Indian and his land would lead straight to the heart of the conflict over the Amazon itself. A heart-pounding modern-day adventure set in one of the world's last truly wild places, The Last of the Tribe is a riveting, brilliantly told tale of encountering the unknown and the unfathomable, and the value of preserving it.

 

 

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