Why am I passionate about this?

I have been fascinated by this topic ever since the first newspaper stories exposing American involvement in torture began to appear in the early years of the so-called War on Terror. This fascination has persisted up to the present, as it remains clear – given recent accounts of Ron DeSantis’ time at Guantanamo – that this story refuses to die. Equally fascinating to me have been accounts revealing the extent to which this story can be traced back to the origins of the Cold War, to the birth of the National Security State, and to the alliance between that state and the professions (psychology and behavioral science) that spawned “enhanced interrogation.”


I wrote

Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War

By Andreas Killen,

Book cover of Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War

What is my book about?

The 1950s were a revolutionary decade in the history of brain science. Researchers in neurosurgery, psychiatry, and psychology achieved dramatic…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Andreas Killen Why did I love this book?

Klein’s first chapter tells the disturbing story of Dr. Ewan Cameron, the eminent psychiatrist who ran the Allan Memorial Institute associated with McGill University, and whose experimental treatment, partly funded by the CIA, incorporated ECT, sensory deprivation, LSD into a research program designed to erase patients’ memories.

Especially intriguing for the way it links this story to a bold account of how efforts to reprogram people at a deep level were linked to the spread of new forms of capitalism in the late 20th century. This is history as told by an activist, in ways that academic historians are not always comfortable with.

By Naomi Klein,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The Shock Doctrine as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Impassioned, hugely informative, wonderfully controversial, and scary as hell' John le Carre

Around the world in Britain, the United States, Asia and the Middle East, there are people with power who are cashing in on chaos; exploiting bloodshed and catastrophe to brutally remake our world in their image. They are the shock doctors.

Exposing these global profiteers, Naomi Klein discovered information and connections that shocked even her about how comprehensively the shock doctors' beliefs now dominate our world - and how this domination has been achieved. Raking in billions out of the tsunami, plundering Russia, exploiting Iraq - this is…


Book cover of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences

Andreas Killen Why did I love this book?

In the wake of Senate hearings into CIA scandals in the mid-1970s, former State Department official turned investigative reporter Marks used an FOIA request to gain access to a trove of agency files that he used to uncover the full story of the American intelligence community’s decade-long dive into research on LSD, hypnosis, and sensory deprivation during the first decade of the Cold war.

A marvelous example of how to uncover “secret history.” I also love the connections he draws between Fifties’ era mind control research and Sixties' era consciousness expansion.

By John D. Marks,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Search for the Manchurian Candidate as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A 'Manchurian Candidate' is an unwitting assassin brainwashed and programmed to kill. In this book, former State Department officer John Marks tells the explosive story of the CIA's highly secret program of experiments in mind control. His curiosity first aroused by information on a puzzling suicide. Marks worked from thousands of pages of newly released documents as well as interviews and behavioral science studies, producing a book that 'accomplished what two Senate committees could not' (Senator Edward Kennedy).


Book cover of World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men

Andreas Killen Why did I love this book?

Harvard historian of science professor Lemov’s account of the history of behavioral science includes a chapter analyzing the work of three of the central figures in MKUltra, the CIA’s decade-long program of classified research into “mind control.”

Excellent on the scientific context out of which that research arose.

By Rebecca Lemov,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked World as Laboratory as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?



Deeply researched, World as Laboratory tells a secret history that’s not really a secret. The fruits of human engineering are all around us: advertising, polls, focus groups, the ubiquitous habit of “spin” practiced by marketers and politicians. What Rebecca Lemov cleverly traces for the first time is how the absurd, the practical, and the dangerous experiments of the human engineers of the first half of the twentieth century left their laboratories to become our day-to-day reality.


Book cover of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror

Andreas Killen Why did I love this book?

One of the first accounts to connect the dots between the torture scandal that arose out the war on terror and the beginnings of the Cold War, when the United States first devised the interrogation techniques that became codified in the CIA’s interrogation manual KUBARK (1963), which provided the playbook for the “enhanced interrogation” of detainees in Guantanamo and elsewhere.

By Alfred W McCoy,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Question of Torture as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"An indispensable and riveting account" of the CIA's development and use of torture, from the cold war to Abu Ghraib and beyond (Naomi Klein, The Nation)

In this revelatory account of the CIA's fifty-year effort to develop new forms of torture, historian Alfred W. McCoy locates the deep roots of recent scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo in a long-standing, covert program of interrogation. A Question of Torture investigates the CIA's practice of "sensory deprivation" and "self-inflicted pain," in which techniques including isolation, hooding, hours of standing, and manipulation of time assault the victim's senses and destroy the basis of…


Book cover of Torture and Democracy

Andreas Killen Why did I love this book?

In many ways the best account of the history of modern torture.

As Rejali shows, this has all too often been mis-remembered as the history of Soviet and Nazi torture. Torture, in his account, has been widely practiced by modern democracies.

He identifies the French (in the context of the Algerian War of Independence) as the real innovators in the field of modern “stealth” or invisible torture, ie. torture designed not to leave marks: waterboarding and electro-torture.

I particularly like this for the way it explodes many of the myths surrounding the history of modern torture.

By Darius Rejali,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Torture and Democracy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe. As Rejali traces the development and application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he…


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Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War

By Andreas Killen,

Book cover of Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War

What is my book about?

The 1950s were a revolutionary decade in the history of brain science. Researchers in neurosurgery, psychiatry, and psychology achieved dramatic breakthroughs in the treatment of illnesses like epilepsy and schizophrenia. These breakthroughs laid the foundations for the emergence of the field of neuroscience.

But the 1950s also marked the beginning of the Cold War and of the “paranoid style.” Mysterious new afflictions – none more mystifying than “brainwashing” – also appeared at this time. Researchers in the sciences of brain and behavior joined the effort to understand these afflictions. These stories are brought together by Killen in this chronicle of the brain’s mid-20th century emergence as both a new research frontier and an organ whose integrity and whose capacities were imagined as uniquely imperiled in the 1950s.  

Book cover of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Book cover of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences
Book cover of World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men

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Love and War in the Jewish Quarter

By Dora Levy Mossanen,

Book cover of Love and War in the Jewish Quarter

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Dora Levy Mossanen Author Of Love and War in the Jewish Quarter

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Why am I passionate about this?

I am a novelist, whose Persian family is comprised of a colorful cast of characters, who supply me with invaluable fodder for my historical novels. Years ago, my grandfather, Dr. Habib Levy, recounted how, when he was the dentist of Reza Shah Pahlavi, the King of Iran, the king commanded him to convert to Islam. Aware he might be uttering his last words, my grandfather had replied, Your Majesty, a man who turns his back to his faith is a traitor, and his Majesty will not want a traitor for a dentist. Now, after decades, this long past scene became the inspiration for my fifth historical novel, Love and War in the Jewish Quarter.

Dora's book list on captivating World War II love stories

What is my book about?

A breathtaking journey across Iran where war and superstition, jealousy and betrayal, and passion and loyalty rage behind the impenetrable walls of mansions and the crumbling houses of the Jewish Quarter.

Against the tumultuous background of World War II, Dr. Yaran will find himself caught in the thrall of the anti-Semitic Governor General, the most powerful man in the country. Dr. Yaran falls in love with the Governor General’s defiant wife, Velvet, upending not only the life of the doctor’s beloved daughter, but the entire community. In his quest to save everything and everyone he loves, Dr. Yaran will navigate…

Love and War in the Jewish Quarter

By Dora Levy Mossanen,

What is this book about?

A breathtaking journey across Iran where war and superstition, jealousy and betrayal, and passion and loyalty rage behind the impenetrable walls of mansions and the crumbling houses of the Jewish Quarter.

Against the tumultuous background of World War II, Dr. Yaran will find himself caught in the thrall of the anti-Semitic Governor General, the most powerful man in the country. Dr. Yaran falls in love with the Governor General’s defiant wife, Velvet, upending not only the life of the doctor’s beloved daughter, but the entire community. In his quest to save everything and everyone he loves, Dr. Yaran will navigate…


5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in torture, financial crises, and behavior modification?

Torture 41 books
Financial Crises 22 books