Matthew Brzezinski

Matthew Brzezinski began working as a journalist in the early 1990s in Warsaw, writing for publications including The New York Times, The Economist, and The Guardian (UK). He was a Wall Street Journal staff reporter in Moscow and Kiev in the late 1990s. Relocating to the US, he became a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, covering counterterrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. His work has also appeared in many other publications including The Washington Post Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Mother Jones. Brzezinski's fourth book, Isaac's Army (Random House, 2012) is set in World War II. Isaac's Army tells the story of a group of young Polish Jews and the Polish Jewish underground, from its earliest acts of defiance in 1939 to the survivors' exodus to Palestine in 1946. The book draws on interviews with surviving Resistance members and unpublished memoirs, as well as Polish-language sources and established academic works on the subject of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Brzezinski is the author of three previous nonfiction books. His first book, Casino Moscow (Free Press, 2001) is a first-person account of the "Wild East" atmosphere prevailing in Russia in the 1990s. His second book, Fortress America (Bantam, 2004) addresses the new technology, laws, tactics, and persistent vulnerabilities of the post-9/11 era. His third book, Red Moon Rising (Simon and Schuster, 2007) is a work of narrative nonfiction that tells the story of the race to space culminating in the Sputnik launch by the USSR on October 4, 1957, drawing on previously classified Soviet documents. Red Moon Rising won the 2009 Sir Arthur Clarke award. Of Polish heritage, Brzezinski was born in Canada. He is the nephew of former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and the cousin of television anchor Mika Brzezinski. He lives in Manchester-by-the-sea, Massachusetts with his wife and three children.